It seems that every other column I write for Aeon is about death. The last few years have been hard on the SF genre. We've lost some of our best writers, and in November, we lost not only one of our best writers, but one of the best people I've ever known: Jack Williamson.

Jack died in Portales, New Mexico, at the age of 98. He arrived in New Mexico ninety years ago in a covered wagon. He lived to see the space program. Heck, he lived to be invited to the launches of various spaceships.

Jack wrote eight novels after he turned 90. He published his first short story in 1928, for Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories. Jack wasn't just a pioneer in the Old West, he was a pioneer in science fiction—and he wrote some of the classics of the genre. (My favorite is his non-sf novel, Darker than you Think.)

Jack was the kindest man I've ever met. Even in a critique session, he refused to say something negative. He made certain he said something kind and true about the work before him. I've been in critique sessions with Jack where the nicest thing he could say about a writer's manuscript was “beautiful typing.” But he would say that, at least, and the writer would leave happy.

But I don't want to write sorrowfully about Jack. Jack told friends a few days before he died that he was ready to face the next adventure. He was looking forward—which Jack always did.

In March of 2001, my husband Dean Wesley Smith and I were invited to be speakers at the Williamson Lectureship. Eastern New Mexico University in Portales put on the lectureship every year (including this past year) since Jack retired his teaching post there. The year we came, we were joined by SciFi.com's Scott Edelman and the marvelous SF writer, Connie Willis.

The lecture hall at ENMU was full of young students and a few recognizable faces (SF writers, well-known scientists, sf scholars and some old friends). The discussion, on the future of science, was lively—one of the most interesting I've ever been involved in.

And what struck me then—and still amazes me now—is that the most informed person in that room about the future of science was none other than Jack himself.

Too often, I've been around elderly folk who talk about the old days or refuse to pay attention to new things because they're happy with their rut. My own beloved grandmother refused to use a new television the family had bought for her because she preferred her old tube television (although she did think Mr. Coffee was the best invention ever).

When I met Jack more than twenty years ago, he was already elderly by anyone's definition. He still stood taller than me in those days, but his body had bent into a question mark. Over the years, the question mark remained, but by the end, I could look down on his wispy white hair. Jack's body grew older, but his mind never did.

The questions in 2001 were all about the future—and many of them came from Jack. He studied, not just as a science fiction writer trying to keep up with an element of his craft, but with the enthusiasm of a man who loved life in all its incarnations—who had seen many of those incarnations—and knew that there were wonderful things to come.

Even at the age of 93, he was still enthusiastic about what was ahead.

When I read his most recent novel, Stonehenge Gate, in its Analog serialization, I realized that Jack saw life as a broad continuum. People left, but the continuum remained. Life, for him, was a stream, constantly changing, but always moving, always interesting.

Jack was, and is, perhaps our purest SF writer. Stonehenge Gate is adventure fiction with a touch of the pulps where Jack got his start, but it is also a meditation on individual lives and love and the influence a person can have, not just on his own culture, but on one he couldn't even imagine when he was a child.

And that's Jack. As a human being, he had a tremendous impact on me. As a teacher, he gently molded generations of young minds. But as a writer, he influenced people the world over—for nearly eighty years.

What a legacy.

We would be remiss, in discussing the life of this very important man, if we do not discuss the future. For the future was the source of his inspiration and the place he boldly walked toward.

Even as he faced his last great adventure.

So look toward the future. Help preserve it for those who'll come after us.

Do it to honor one of the great pioneers of the future: Jack Williamson.

Whom I will miss more than I can say.

The greatest talents often lie buried out of sight.

-Titus Maccius Plautus

Plautus (254-184 BCE) was the most famous Roman playwright of his century. The mob loved him and his broad, ribald comedies that made heroes of dirty old men, clever slaves, and entertaining low-lifes of various stripes. The patricians were not amused, at least not publicly. A millennium later his works were to be a major influence on Shakespeare, Molière, and Fielding. More recently he inspired Stephen Sondheim, author of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which was based on several of Plautus's comedies, 21 of which still exist in some form. The other 100 or so are, like Plautus, buried out of sight. By the time he was a century in the ground he was nearly forgotten in his own country, and only regained popularity among theater scholars much, much later.

As Plautus could attest, being lost is easier than being found, and more of us (and our creative works) are obscure than famous. More literature is buried than unearthed, and more literati too, we suspect. But what lies buried is not always bones; sometimes it's gold.

So loving a challenge as we do on our more ambitious days (on the others we love lying about on the sofa watching CSI reruns), we recently decided to take our treasure map, go digging in the SF/F field, and see what we could turn up. The result is this collection of nine wonderful stories you may not have seen. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we enjoyed finding them.

We open our curtain on Dana William Paxson's dark and edgy novelette “Ex Muro,” about a future serial killer set free on an unsuspecting city. Next onstage is “Angels Over Israel: Three Slides,” where Lavie Tidhar shows us the unsuspected lives (and deaths) of heavenly messengers. Howard V. Hendrix portrays a frighteningly-believable fundamentalist future and a valuable lesson from the past in “The Art of Memory."

Act Two brings on “The Scarecrow's Bride,” a novelette by Marina Fitch, in which love and devotion are found in unexpected ground, Mark Bourne's “The Case of the Detective's Smile,” in which a melancholy investigator receives an agreeable gift, and Carrie Richerson's “The City in Morning,” in which a quantum event does what quantum events do: create something new and wonderful.

In Act Three Kij Johnson relates a tale of worlds lost and rebuilt: “Dia Chjermen's Tale: the Delmoni Atrocity,” Mark Budz rips loose the flimsy curtain between reality and nightmare in “The War Inside,” and Lorelei Shannon brings down the house lights and flips on the headlights with “Another Saturday Night in Georgia."

So ground has been disturbed, treasure uncovered, and gold obtained. Our job here is done. Enjoy Aeon Ten.

"Ex Muro” originally appeared in Dana William Paxson's short fiction collection Neuron Tango from Scorpius Digital Publishing.

Author's Note: “What happens to the mind of a serial killer after that mind has been in prison for ten thousand years? Jono is one possible answer, but at first he repelled me. The first few pages of this story sat untouched for several years, and then I learned to hear the rest of Jono's dreadful thoughts and moves. His tale is removed from our world by light-years and millennia, but its street children are near-kin to the technosavages of war-torn countries we know all too well. As I wrote down Jono's words, I began to wonder: Is he lying to me? Just how far from us is he, really?"

ELECTRIC DAWN APPROACHES. I stretch my arm out before me into the corridor dark, luxuriating. The skin of my upper arm tightens and thins out where it becomes one with the wall in which I am embedded. It tightens and thins, but it refuses to break. Damn its strength!

Every so often in the slow-walking years I tried to rip it, tear myself free with these long heavy fingernails, and walk out into this darkness like those people who pass by me once in a long time. Jono is my name, the name I forgot for too long. Jono, who took so many men and women and hollowed out their skins and stuffed them lifelike and put them back in their places in life to be found making little endless movements and shedding endless tears.

Twelve thousand years imprisoned here, and no one remembers me, except to descend two or three hundred levels in this ageless underground City, to laugh and point and wonder at the man locked in the stone wall.

I will make them all remember me again.

I thrust my neck and jaw forward, straining against the bond between my toughened skin and the stone wall around me. This time I will stay uncaught, and I will take many human insides and make of them a single flesh creature, tubes and bags and vessels and cords and muscles and bones and nerves, a great heaving sentient thing to be left in the fountain at Aswal Narr. A living, sobbing memorial to my long power and skill as a maker. My ancient vats are waiting.

I count the days in this underground world by the brightening and dimming of the corridor ceiling lights, synthetic memories of the sun seven hundred levels above this empty street. The last passer-by here, maybe ten years ago, an andro woman laughing and drunk with hallucins, left a shard of cryssteel on the floor. Since then, four thousand synthetic dawns have passed in this dusty stone hallway, and each day I reached for that tiny shard and came just short. Until today.

The wall section that holds me is a miracle of elastic steel: a membrane of such flexibility that I can actually step outward into the street and dance little steps, bending down to touch the stone streetfloor, straining against the wall's pull. It is also a prison so secure that in twelve thousand years I have been unable to tear free. Even my diamond-alloy nails, harder than anything but cryssteel itself, are blunted and flawed from ripping at the membrane.

Now, thanks to the leaping kick of a tiny streetmouse, the cryssteel shard bounced into my reach. I have withheld from myself an exquisite pleasure: to cradle this ultrasharp sliver of transparent metal in my fingers, plunge it into my membrane in just the right places, feel the pain of escape when I slice through and rip myself free.

The woman had worn the shard at her wrist, maybe to use as a defense, maybe just because she liked the sparkle and gleam of its irregular facets, maybe to scar her lover. Now it lies in the darkness just within my span. I exult for a while, thanking her and the little rodent for their assistance.

She is probably dead now, gone into the recycling vats with her short-lived andro genes, to be reborn out of elements into a new street woman for the wealthy to toy with. And the rodent, caught maybe by some predator itself now dead and recycled in the City's hungry engines, lives on in its elements, a part of the new woman.

The thought amuses me. I laugh. Andro servants have their own little heaven in their heads, a kind of biological cyberspace; they don't care what humans do to them. Andros can fantasize themselves out of the city to any planet or setting they can imagine.

I would have indeed enjoyed something like that to help me pass a few thousand years. The lights begin to glow a little. Dawn. I crouch and reach forward one more time. My fingers close on the shard. Yes—it is as sharp as I had thought. I prick the metal-strong skin at my left shoulder, and my bronze blood wells and trickles down my chest. No more will I be this living relief-sculpture, gray and trapped like the wall of stone around me. My limbs throb.

I want to change my point of view, turn my gaze left and right along the street. I make the first exquisite cut around my head, where the skin leaves the vicinity of my skull to become part of the wall. The cryssteel sings pain to me as I outline my neck and head, sawing through my dermal prison.

Air rushes in, burning into the uncovered flesh behind the wall's barrier. Screaming, I flay myself. Any of my own original skin is now long gone, absorbed by the preservation drugs they gave me, the gene drugs that made me able to feed only and forever on the photons of the hallway light. For a time, I will bathe in pure pain: an incentive to find a skin to replace the gift prison-hide that has so long armored me in here.

My screams continue; no one is near enough at this hour to hear me. I saw quickly through the last confining sheets of the flexible metal at my feet; I step free, and fall on my face. My legs barely work. To learn to use them again will take some time.

The dawn lights become an underground sunrise. No one will come this way for hours. I twist in crawling pain to see my calf and buttock muscles, no skin covering them now. Slowly, carefully, I pull the prison-skin from my front. My exposed flesh—chest, face, neck, thighs, sex—burns now as if I have been set aflame. On the dusty stone floor fall dribbles of golden fluid: my eternal blood, another gift of the City's minions. No hemoglobin needed for a wall-prisoner.

The pain lashes me to full attention, to fight my way to my feet, stagger back and forth, and school my muscles. Now, needing real blood again, I am thirsty. I know the old ways, the spiral stairs of the City's filthy airshafts; I stumble off to the left, toward a steel door in the wall of this corridor. It should be Shaft Arbonel. That shaft will take me to my walled-off home, ages after I closed the last crevices, knowing then that they would find me.

Yes, say the door's faint dead runes, Arbonel. The door, rusted shut, gives way when I slam it with a hand, flies back, and bounces from the wall; its squeal mocks my hand's explosion of nerve lightning. The stink of the shaft boils out to me. I open my arms to the stench and stagger forward. Here in the shaft, darkness rules again, except for a pinpoint of light thousands of feet above me. That point is the sun of planetary morning. Sharp-toothed rats, interested in my scent, follow me now; I ascend the stair winding around the shaft, stopping to rest and breathe. No energy here. If I slip from the steps, and fail to splatter on the flights below me, I will die in the quickening slime ten thousand feet down.

Even Jono the Corer can die.

I wobble to a stop at Level 300. My ages-weakened legs shake; the bacterial film of the shaft's floor begins to scorch the soles of my feet, eat its way up my ankles and calves. It is time to feed, and heal. With bleeding fingers I pull the rusted door at this level; it squawks. I wait until the sounds of voices fade, and then look in from behind the door. This was a thriving Zone when I walked its streets. It still is.

Women parade their wealth, men their strength, children their fantasies, all in tight and shining costumes, with monstrous gene-crafted reptilian pets coiling their arms and necks. The pets smile and gabble with flicking tongues, the people frown and posture at one another. In twelve thousand years, even after the Destruction and the Colonization, so little has changed; then, only the pets were otherwise, crooning in polytonal voices and oozing sweet drugs from their skins.

But the people who walk past my prison in this age seem strangely plain, uniform. In the days when the Mondracen immured me for my crimes, human bodies flourished in mad variety: the Snin, spidery and six-armed, bone-slab faces pointed at cheeks and chin; the Crasstilizi, shag-haired and clumsy, cawing their poems and stroking their shambling young with pancake fingertips; the Treeminar, miniatures the size of mice scuttling the corridors on motorized hovers, shrieking cries at each other and at the large humans treading too near them; the Shoomtar Jend, great flat eyes the heaviest masses of their sleek, floating, gas-filled bodies, their gray skin-membranes marbled with their family colors; and finally the Mondracen, the dully-normal humans in the body plan I see here now. None survived the Great Death.

The City itself died then. I hung in the wall for so long after the Great Death that I nearly lost all track of time. Then the human Colonists came, the very image of the Mondracen, and they lighted the City, and they found me. I spoke to them, and they ran, but then they slowly brought machines, and they proclaimed me an ancient work of art, and left me here to perform for them.

And so I shall now perform what they did not expect.

This dawn, many revelers return home. A man approaches, alone, and passes; I twist his neck and drag him into the shaft stairway landing-space, shutting the door. In the dimness, his eyes bug with terror. I have severed his spinal nerves. He lives long enough to feel his clothing and then his skin pulled free.

I feed on him. My so-long-useless digestive system awakens and complains, then settles to its ancient task. As plain honest blood returns to my body, strength comes quickly. When I am done with nourishment, I step carefully into his flayed skin and work my feet and hands down to the ends. I ram my fingernails out underneath his. The skin is a little loose—he was somewhat overweight—but it will do until I reach my maze of rooms, behind the false wall not far from here. I pull the face over my own, clasping the skin at the back where I had split it, adjusting the eyelids and brows and lips.

My pain abates a little. I dress myself in his suit of clothing, not so tight on me. The suit and the skullcap he wore now serve to hold his skin in place. I hurl what is left of his body down Shaft Arbonel, to dissolve in the City's bottom slime.

The skin smells sweet and overripe. I emerge from the shaft entrance and walk slowly through an underground morning. The revelers are gone now, and only a few tradespeople and cleaners pass me, their eyes averted. I recover an easy gait, practice a strut, the skin shifting slightly if I move too quickly. I pat the nose back into place, and hitch uncomfortably at my scrotum frying in the host-skin's antibodies.

A woman with a lush body laughs at me, says something in a musical tongue I do not understand. I raise my chin haughtily and walk on. She reminds me of damned Alayre, now long ages dead.

In a narrow side way, I find the pseudostone wall I had made. Will it still open under my hands, or in these twelve thousand years has someone broken it, gotten in, collapsed my rooms? No one is nearby. I place my hands on the wall in the two slight depressions I had left, and push eight times in the rhythm of the words in Taranese: Always I find my way back home.

Watching for prying eyes, I wait, counting. The mechanism waits too, and then I put my left hand in its depression and hold it steady there, pressing hard for sixty heartbeats. A rumble, and the wall shakes, moves to the right, and stops, leaving a gap of darkness just wide enough for me to squeeze through.

I fumble inside, find the closure mechanism and use it, and trigger the long-stored emergency lights. A chemical glow from a foot-wide circular patch in the ceiling fills the room I am in, my study and resting-space, with dim green radiance.

Millennial dust coats my hideaway everywhere, beetle trails stitching it with hungry errands. Steel shelves stuffed with permtexts of all sizes and shapes line the bedrock walls. A couch the size of a bed for two sits facing a long low table near the middle of the square room. Two doorways mark opposite corners of the room; next to the one which leads into my lab, I pry open a box on the wall and hesitantly punch three engraved steel buttons.

A brief whir, and air moves again, and soft white light replaces the green. The aged and hidden links to buried magma powershafts work even now: another miracle for the condemned. My adopted skin smarting and itching, I go to work.

There. So much better: a tuck here, several darts there, a bath of immunoharmonizers and adhesors, and the skin is mine. The mirrors show me a thin man, his eyes jealous and deep-set with the hunger for life, his muscles wasted to strings from his long immuration, his powerful fingernails hooking out through his new, naked wrapping. I pat my new head of tousled black hair and grin, all iridescent teeth, long thin lips. Handsome demon.

Always I find my way back home. What will they do when they find the burst-open wall, the missing living statue that once entertained them? By now the craft of minshillindar has been forgotten, that ancient trick of prison bioengineering that embedded me in that wall for all time.

All time has ended. I am in the apocalyptic now.

I am the apocalyptic now.

Once I was one of the Mondracen myself, an ordinary son of exceptionally-gifted parents. Too ordinary for them, I was; they fed me the favored neurotransforms of the wealthy, to amplify my gifts to meet their expectations, hoping for a son who would ascend to City rule. But one gift, well hidden in me, became amplified far beyond all the others: the gift of cruelty. When I learned the deep art of genetic fabrication, I became what they called a monster.

A sound from the entryway makes me stop moving. I had closed the wall behind me; perhaps one of the nimble rats has followed me home. Concealed by the lab door, I wait.

A small human figure, wearing cloth tatters of a coverall woven with spangles of colored metal, moves in total silence, stealthy, toward my couch.

Maybe it would offer me nourishment, maybe its genes could have news for mine. I would merely need to store it in my vats, unwind the skeined knowledge from its cells, and mate its new chemistry to my ancient version.

Its head is large, covered with plastered slabs of black straight hair. A child. How did it get in? It stops at the table; its bony fingers trail through the dust. It freezes in place. Its hand darts out, seizes a beetle, brings the struggling blue-black creature to its teeth. Three bites, and the beetle is gone, a wiry hind leg kicking one last futile time as it passes the child's lips.

Something unfamiliar kindles in me, a sense of kinship with this small hunter. Has my imprisonment softened my temperament? I blink twice, and the child's eyes are on me.

There is no time to lose. I spring, my hands and nails out, ready to grab and subdue. The little creature vanishes like a dream, and I crouch groping in the shadows. This is unexpected. I'm not as fast as I thought, or else this little one is faster than so many I've seen.

It must be one of the street waifs of this gloriously ugly era. From my long wall station I have seen packs of these children take down fully-armed squads of soldiers and strip them to their bones, in minutes. Many died, caught in the beams and scything metal of the guns, but their survivors feasted on the gunners’ remains. Now I face one of them. There may be others.

I have no food to offer it. “Where are you?” I ask in Taranese. Useless, of course; Taranese, Wendridgian, Farhossch, Meiyandao, all gone with the Great Death eleven thousand years ago. The people since the Colonization speak dialects of Share, the Colonist tongue distorted over centuries by their tribalisms and wars. These children of the understreets rarely speak at all.

A trinket! In a high cabinet, I find a chain of cerametal jewels, translucent and pearled, set in osmium scribed and inlaid with ruby and sapphire glazes. “For you,” I say in Share, dangling it on a long fingernail, pointing in the direction I thought the little one went.

Nothing happens, of course. I lay the jewelry on my low table and turn to leave the room. A brief scuttle; I whirl, and the jewel chain is gone. A soft click from the entranceway, and I leap to find it closed.

I had thought these people a devolution of those from before the Great Death, but this speed impresses me. Perhaps these children are breeding into a new and ghastly race of predators like me.

Weariness rises around me like dark water. My limbs ache. It is time to begin the regenerative process, but I lack bodily energy to assemble the vats and tanks, and acquire the necessary fluids. I must rest, but the door troubles me: how will I prevent the child from returning and killing me in my sleep?

There is a way. In the entranceway I find the two great slabs of steel I set aside as bars, for some final confrontation cornered here. I draw them painfully up to the slots flanking the door, and fit them in, then I turn to the couch. For the first time in twelve thousand years, it is time for bed.

A dream: I am discovered and bound and walled in once more, and this time it is the children who make me prisoner, and I am their size, and weak. I protest, fighting to escape the membrane, and they laugh, stuff stones in my mouth, and leave.

Dead sweet devil Alayre comes to me then, trailing her floating veils like pale-orange smoke, her breasts articulating themselves with the muscles of her kind, reaching out to tickle my chest with pointed nipples, rounding, narrowing, bulging above; she takes the stones from my mouth, smiles and kisses me, and her sugared brain poison is on my tongue. I want her; I moan and stretch out to hold her, and she is gone.

The poison works on my dream. I lie broken and paralyzed on the understreet itself, my wall-prison ripped open. The street children gather over me with hissing voices and narrow-bladed knives. Enough, I think, and I fight my way to wakefulness.

The darkness of my room shrouds my eyes, but it is pregnant with danger. I sit upright, and scutterings make me leap to my feet. I dive for the light controls. Dozens of these children boil through the room and cluster in the laboratory entrance. I scrabble for my blade, under the cushions of the couch, but a high sharp voice calls, “No!” in Share.

I turn to see a girl not yet a woman aiming a weapon at me. “Don't hurt me,” I say.

"What are you?” she asks. Her eyes gleam, red-irised and white, pupils black needle-holes. She is thin but supple and strong. Her skin shines a rich tan.

"I am Jono,” I say. They all gather closer to me, costumed in skins and furs and leaves and skittering fabrics, their stenches brawling in my nostrils, eyes cold and drilling me. A stream of urine issues from a tiny half-dressed one who is clutching one end of a steel bolt and sucking the other end.

"What is Jono?” The girl persists, her weapon steady as the stone around us.

What is Jono indeed? Does anyone know what Jono is, or was? My memory stutters, falters, refuses to reach past those dead millennia, backward in time's dark abysm. “I am a man,” I tell her. The accents of this time begin to ride better on my lips and tongue.

"You are no man. You stole his skin. Are you Zash?” She shifts the tip of her weapon back, forth, the thickness of a fingernail.

Zash: she must mean the aliens, the Zashinhalh, in that mind-whisper of theirs. “No. I was a man in a wall. I escaped. Now I am a man."

She places her free hand in that of a boy next to her, his eyesockets filled with dull-gray steel orbs. Her fingers ripple against his palm; he reciprocates, and turns to vanish along the entryway.

All this coming and going makes danger that I will be found. “This is a secret place. How did you find it?"

She points at a squat little boy wearing a tight set of armoring body plates made of glued-together layers of colored paper. “Furusi followed you, and told us. We will not tell anyone."

Why don't they just kill me? They could take this place from me as easily as they followed me. But I have this moment, and I have guile.

I wave my arm expansively at the room, and a few children duck and mutter. “Of course you can come here. My home is now your home."

The sarcasm seems to pass unnoticed, but the girl keeps her weapon on me and her eyes lock on me, wide, and she says, “Every place we choose is our home."

I smile, and think of ways I can change their bodies with my biologicals. They will not move so quickly then, and then I will take back what is mine.

What is this weapon she holds? It is a gun; I stare at it, and she begins to lower the muzzle of it until it points at my knees. I have won them over.

She pulls the trigger. Four beams spread from the weapon's muzzle, and my legs are severed. I fall helpless to the floor, my precious new-made blood spurting from sectioned arteries; she approaches and stares down at me. “Nemizanah,” she calls. A tall boy comes beside her. “Fire,” she says, pointing at my stumps, and the boy named Nemizanah lugs a plasma torch from beneath his beetle-shell vestment, and he blast-cauterizes the wounds.

I do not tell of this pain, for doing so is wearying, and useless, and becomes uninteresting to the jaded, and repels the sensitive. Besides, pain, whether mine or someone else's, is food to me, and none but another like me could fully understand that.

The bleeding stops. I try to rise onto my hands with arm strength, but the girl pushes me over sideways with her foot, and I lie staring up at her, unable to prevent vast hatred from filling my gaze. She recoils.

"Yes. Now I see what you are."

"You can kill me.” I say this so easily, as if the thousands of years of my persistent life are nothing. To live, and hope, and then die helpless at the hands of a vicious child. My resignation surprises me.

"No.” She waves her weapon. “You may live, for now. We will watch you. If you try to hurt us, then we will kill you."

My agony blazes through her words. “I understand. But how can I move myself around, now that you have taken my legs?"

"We will care for you.” From a sack at her side she pours out beside me a heap of dead beetles, the fat dark-blue humpbacked ones that gobble the grease of the street tuber fryers. “Here is food.” She turns to the others, flicks a gesture over her head, then reaches to my light controls and dims them to a midnight umbrance. One tall thin child in a shift of many veils takes one of my severed lower legs under each arm, my blood-tinged ichor leaving a gooey trail, and they are all gone.

Silence is now. I lie and think. A small rattle beside me; one of the beetles is still alive. I reach out and spear a nail through it.

It tastes good: fresh, meaty, with that tinge of metallics the beetles always seem to carry. Lying on my side, on the stone floor of my ancient hideaway, I dine, making a neat heap of the beetle shells.

These children have read me well. I must reach deeper within myself to escape their readings, and arrive where I can continue my little work of time.

The first thing will be the lab. From it I will make things for them, at first. Then, later, when I can exact payment for my truncated body, I will make for myself.

The dinner I have eaten drags at me. Warmth creeps from my belly out through my trunk and my limbs, embracing with pleasure even the seared and scorching stumps of my legs.

Amazing sleep. In all the time of my immuration, I never lost awareness; the ichor they poured into my veins made that a certainty. But now I have blood once more, and with blood, sleep slides warmly in. My eyes weigh shut, and I turn slowly onto my back and breathe once, twice, and then, for the second time, I dream of Alayre.

"Wake up.” Thin, tough hands rub my cheeks. The girl looks down at me. “We have something for you."

I have slept for hours. Two boys stand on the other side of my room, a lumpy dark-red object between them. A flowchair, a rounded seat that moves slowly across uneven surfaces on a single broadfooted trunk of a leg. The leg is a slug-like living plastic the people of this era have engineered; I would have preferred a faster means of movement, but the boys seem proud of their present to me.

I smile. “Can you help me up into it?"

Six of the larger children come and loft me up and into the waiting seat. My stumps have been dressed with skinseal, and they burn only slightly through its anesthetic.

The girl comes to stand in front of me, glaring with those red-black eyes. “You will work for us,” she says. Her mouth is a lovely bud of sensuous lips, tightly pursed when she is not speaking. Her nose is barely a ridge, as if some force had pressed it back almost level with her face; her nostrils, almost slits, widen and flatten again, disconcertingly, when she is thinking. She is thinking right now. She gestures toward the lab. “You make things here. Make us the things we want, and we'll let you live."

"What do you want?"

"Poison.” She smiles.

"What kind of poison? What should it do? Kill people?"

"No. Make them sick. I want them to live that way. It should be something without taste or smell, that they can eat in their food."

Now I smile. “I can do what you want.” How many times I have already done this thing, I can't remember any more.

"Good. Start now.” She turns and walks to the entranceway, then looks back at me with a smirk. “You think I am like you, but I'm not. Remember that."

"I will.” I urge my chair toward the lab door. “Do you have a name?"

"Mama Jones."

Her rosebud lips, her smirk, remind me of Alayre.

They bring me food every day. They clean me and my clothes, ignoring their own incrustations of street filth that never seem, somehow, to cling to what is mine. I create the poisons in the first two days, and give them to Mama Jones. She grins and vanishes. Now, after five days, she brings a newly-dead streetrat into my lab, and tosses it onto the central table where I am running a gene-expression synthesizer.

Streetrats are black-coated rodents with long naked prehensile tails, and claws that can find purchase in the sheer faces of rock that line the City. Over my thousands of wall-years I have watched them evolve from creatures the length of my little finger to monsters with bodies as long as my forearm. What the children of the streets leave behind, the streetrats eat.

"Is this my dinner?” I stare at Mama Jones.

She laughs. I have never heard any sound like this: a grating giggle that chokes itself off, then bursts out again, over and over. “No,” she says, finally.

"A gift?"

"No. What can you do with it?"

Again I have underestimated her. She apparently understands what my lab is for. I weigh the possibilities; maybe this is the opening to my freedom. I inspect the dead animal. “What would you like me to do with it?"

"Grow some new ones. Make them pets for us."

Aah. This is wonderful. I try to conceal my glee, but I'm sure she notices it. “All right. This will take some time. Maybe a year.” This is too long for her, I know.

"Thirty days.” It is a statement of limitation.

"I'll do what I can."

"Thirty days.” She makes a sign with her hand, and three boys appear from the front room. Another sign from her, and they all turn and leave.

I maneuver my flowchair to the lab door, and secure the door as best I can against further visits. Twenty days are window dressing. This plan of mine will take about ten days; in that time, I will have the desired pets ready, with a few important additions.

First, I will send a message out through the droppings of these pets. An intestinal bacterial resident, one I know quite well, will carry a most interesting cytomegalovirus. Cytomegaly is the merging of cells due to the breakdown of cell walls, as when the City breaks down the walls between small apartments to create a large meeting-chamber.

But my virus will bear another burden: the immunoharmonizer that was, long ago, my signature. When the virus infects someone, it will begin the selective merging of their cells and the breakdown of their musculature and bone; little by little, they will become immobile, dissolve, and begin to spread helplessly in a carpet across their stone floors, merging into each other as they meet. Thanks to other retroviral transfers, their cells will be reeducated to draw sustenance from the air and stone and water itself, even from the beetles and other creatures that scutter across them as they lie like coatings everywhere.

Only their brains and senses will remain whole, to contemplate their changes. They will become one vast coat of human paint throughout the City. As once I was, in my wall.

Of course, this will take much time, and I create clocking genes that will trigger in later viral generations to begin the transformations only after the rodents have spread everywhere. Some few people may be resistant, most likely these children, but I have saved the children for the last.

I have a special surprise for them.

My new animals will enjoy being scratched on the neck and under the ears. That is where I will put the secretory glands for demorphin, which will be clocked through a few generations before they are expressed. Demorphin is an opioid a thousand times as potent as morphine. Once the glands begins their work, the children will pet these new creatures, take up the opioid through their fingers and mouths, and they will stop feeling pain. Pleasure will rule them.

What a gift pain is. Once it is removed this way, life will follow soon after.

When I am done, the children will be gone, and I will regenerate my legs in the tanks I have not yet opened. Then I will walk the streets of the City, immune, and enjoy my masterwork.

I smile, and begin.

I keep the process secret, locked in my lab. I don't need to await generations of breeding to arrive at my goal; I have the Gengine.

The Gengine is a reality engine, made over fifteen thousand years ago by the spider-limbed Snin. It procreates virtually from a known genestrand, making an entire synthetic world in which its creations live and breed, running thousands of generations in seconds, testing millions of branches of descent, behavior and chemistry in minutes. In a day or two, it pops out the genestrand for the desired end creature, and synthesizes a complete animal, using a vat similar to those now used for making bioandroids here.

My creature gets a name: Shix. I vat-clone it to get others, and they are shixen. They will breed; I have given them fluffy brown fur with gray stripes and mottling, and big startled black eyes, and I have shortened their tails to little wagging nubs. Their claws are tamed as well: no long needles, but tiny retractible pins that only come out for climbing hard surfaces. The fingers and toes are lengthened to compensate, so that they can cling to a child's arm or leg and ride along.

The shixen sing little musical phrases to each other, and groom together, and breed quickly. They would be no match for their streetrat progenitors in a fight, but they have no need of fighting. Their little demorphin glands solve that problem.

When I created the glands, I made their secretions as sweet as sucre, succulent, fruity and sour, and nothing that tastes the transparent ooze ever wants to stop. The demorphin kicks in later, and it binds the taster permanently to the pet.

Demorphin was my favorite toy in the days of my long-ago freedom. It was Alayre's downfall; she had prisoned me in her own drug-laced web, and I was forced to take the extreme measure of feeding my counterattack to her with kisses. Like my shixen, I am immune to demorphin—I always have been—but Alayre was not. She wasted slowly, turning a little grayer beneath her golden tone every day, until at last she knew; and as she knew, she died.

She had warned the City, told them of all my works. They came then for me, and locked me in stone forever. So they believed.

Now I test my shixen against a pack of streetrats, in a small closed room. An observation window gives me a full view. These shixen carry the active glands for demorphin, unlike those in which I will bury the genes for later appearance.

The rats range, climb, hiss, their coats dark and slick, their teeth bared; the shixen huddle at first, then spread out.

A rat approaches a shix, coat bristling; the shix lies down in a submissive grooming posture, and the rat is curious. It scents the secretions at the shix's neck, sniffs closer, and licks.

It seems magic. Soon the rats are all lying beside shixen, still licking them at the neck. When the shixen stand up and move away, the rats lie helpless in the thick stupor of opiate intoxication.

I do not sleep. Within a few days, I have folded the expressive genes for this magic away, to activate and express themselves in the creatures’ descendants. I am ready for the children.

In ten days, forty shixen have come from the vat, full-sized, eyes goggled in astonishment, ready to cling to anything warm and soft. In the remaining twenty days, I synthesize my cytomegalo-plague for the City's inhabitants. I feed it to the shixen, packaged in the bacteria I place in the fruit I give them.

The day comes, and Mama Jones arrives at my lab door. “Is it ready?"

"Yes. It was hard work.” As I lie to her, I sweep the door open to show her the table where the shixen loll tumbled on their backs in a clump, munching on the soft blue-green kwakiat fruit they hold in their tiny hands.

The girl's pinhole eyes widen into dark amazement, and she approaches the table. “They're beautiful.” I haven't heard such words from any of these children before. She extends a hand to one of them.

It feels her warmth, and takes hold of her thumb with its fingers. Then it drops the kwakiat and comes to her shoulder, hand over hand, tail-nubbin wagging. It sits against her left ear and makes a soft musical note in its throat.

She grins. “Now we can walk with the rich ones, and taaalk the waaay they dooo.” She mimics perfectly the vowel tonings of the well-dressed curiosity-seekers who used to come to see me in my prison. Then she whistles piercingly, and the children crowd into the doorway.

The children take the shixen onto their bodies, feed them, pet them, croon to them; the shixen sing in response. It is instant bonding.

Mama Jones smiles at me, but her eyes are once again pinpricks of black in ther red-target irises. “You did what I asked. But what else did you do?"

"What do you mean?"

"You are not tired. Your eyes tell me things. What did you do to these animals?"

"I made them as you asked.” Always a positive statement, never a denial.

"We'll see.” She tosses her head slightly, then grins provocatively at me. An amazing girl.

How perfectly she manages her speech, gliding without effort from the gutter-sounds of her filthy companions to the elegant, incisive, musical ironies of the wealthy women she sees through pitiless child eyes. When the demorphin begins its work, I must be very careful with her.

The days pass slowly now, as slowly as when the wall held me. The children only visit to clean and provide food. I tinker with the shixen some more, making their coats shimmer, giving their brains the tools for language mimicry, taking away the demorphin glands, and I name one of them after Alayre and speak her tones and accents to it.

The shix looks at me quizzically, and its tiny mouth forms the Taranese sounds I gave it, in a high soft pitch like Alayre's, “Jono, what will I do with you?"

Something in me leaps up at this, and I sit very still while my eyes dry again. I damn myself for this weakness, and then I teach the shix every little phrase Alayre would use on me in love. I damn myself again, and I forget to eat, and I feed this little creature and groom it and keep silent while it mixes the words of my dead love with its own squeaks and chitterings.

At last my obsession repels me, and I hear myself say to the shix, “Every place we choose is our home,” in Share, in the accents of the girl Mama Jones. I must forget Alayre.

The shix says it in the voice of this street girl, catching even my own tiny failures of enunciation. I want to hear it again, and as I teach the shix to say other things the girl has said to me, I realize that I am simply trading one obsession for another.

Taking the shix in my hands, I wring its neck.

Finally the girl comes one day on her regular visit, and her look tells me that she knows what I have done. She grins, the pupils of her red eyes tiny. “Your pets."

"Are they to your liking?"

That grating, choking laugh again. She reaches into a pouch at her side very slowly, and extricates a small mass of mangled flesh, holding it by the nubbin of its tail. “They'll make a good dinner for you. Here.” She throws it on the floor by my chair, and leaves.

The specimen she has dissected reveals to me that she has found its demorphin-secreting glands. Unfortunately for my dinner enjoyment, I hadn't thought to make the shix better-tasting than streetrat.

I want to know whether some of the shixen had gotten free, whether some of the children had escaped being affected, but now there is no one to ask.

The children have not returned for many days. Managing my bodily wastes is troublesome, but with the Gengine I breed small sluglike sanitation creatures that handle the job quite well. By now the last of the City ichor is gone from my blood, and the skin I expropriated is truly my own at last.

I busy myself in my lab, testing out new Gengine variations on the shixen, working on new bacterial transporters for viral transformers. These little tools are widely used in this city now; the corporations who manufacture bioandroid servants like to upgrade their living human products using the viruses.

The conversations of passers-by, over many years, taught me the ways of these people. Bioandroids, or andros, are vat-bred human slaves here. Want to extend your andro's eyesight up into the ultraviolet? Give him some U-455 inhalant, have him sniff up the gene-changing viruses, and he'll catch a bad cold. Five days later he'll be seeing into the youvee, talking about the new colors. The fast-moving magic of viral transforms.

Got an andro mining crew running short on stamina? Infect one of them with Myo-92, and they'll all catch a case of muscle-cell upgrade. Since the bacteria are generation-clocked, the infection can't spread any further than you let it. But remember, Myo-92 leaves the subject with weakened resistance to a range of simple viral diseases, so be sure to inoculate your andros.

I listened well to the thrill-seekers staring at me in my prison, while they spoke of these things. Now I cook and eat the last of my latest special crop of shixen, vat-bred now for taste.

I am lonely: the realization penetrates my concentration like a bullet. The talking creatures I produce are no comfort; their behavior is to me as if I had held up a hand puppet to give myself enjoyment. I think of Alayre again, and then I realize I want to see Mama Jones, and I damn myself once more.

This loneliness is unlike any other feeling I have had. Rage, lust, hatred, greed, fear, all are my intimate friends, and I wore them as tightly as the wall-skin that held me for so long. Now I move about this apartment and lab in my chair, still walled in, but freedom fills me during my creating, a freedom that overcomes the prison of my hate. Something has changed in me. I fear it, and I long for it.

Shivering, I finish the day's work, and return to my main room to leaf through permtexts that hold images of my ancient life. As I open the first volume, the door clicks.

Mama Jones and Nemizanah enter. He dangles his plasma torch from one hand and watches me.

"Something has changed,” she says. Her eyes are ruby and dark-pupilled. “There is a strange disease spreading through the City."

A hopeful question comes up in me, and I keep it back. “What kind of disease?"

"You know."

"Me?” My hopes rise. Perhaps these awful children have contracted it.

She laughs that way of hers again, the sound of sticks dragged over rough stone. “They found one of your animals. They aren't fools. They are very afraid. People are dissolving and sticking together."

"Sticking together?” It must be my plague.

"We will take you to see.” She gives a guttural screech, and several of the older children scuttle in and seize me. They haul me out to the corridor where a wheeled cart is waiting, lower me onto it, and push me off out and along the understreet.

Several cross-streets away from my lair, they slow down. Mama Jones points into a side corridor. “See?"

It is dark right now—the evening dimming of the City lights is almost complete—but little by little I make out a lumpy distortion of the corridor walls and ceiling.

"Take me closer,” I say.

"No. We don't want to catch this disease."

Propelling myself with hands on floor, I roll into the corridor. My eyes adapt to the dim light. A face, no, two faces, become visible side by side where the wall meets the floor. Their eyes are closed, and their expressions are peaceful. As I watch, I hear the susurrus of exhaled breath. They seem to be asleep.

Now I can make out their bodies, unclothed, fused, stretched many times a person's height along the lower part of the corridor wall. Their tissues seem to have taken root in the very crevices of the wall; what is left unabsorbed of their skeletons is no more than a few ridges and knobs under their spread-out skins. Their heads have been flattened considerably, but still bulge outward, keeping the faces, ears and brains intact. Hands and feet, arms and legs, genitalia, all have become a part of a fused sheet of flesh reaching on down the corridor and into a utility recess.

Oh, this is perfect. If only I had made their human skins turn the color of my wall-prison, it would have been beyond perfection.

I reach out and touch my handiwork, rejoicing. One pair of eyes opens.

"Hello.” A man's voice, soft and breathy. The lungs still work.

"Hello."

"You are still free?” He smiles at me.

"Yes. Do you like this?” I smile back.

"We do."

Now the other pair of eyes opens, and a woman's voice says, “We like this."

"Why?” My surprise must be apparent.

"We are together."

I laugh, and turn and push my way back to the children. “Is this the only place this has happened?"

Mama Jones says, “It is happening everywhere. People are calling it the living City. Some of my children have joined it."

At this I lose control of my astonishment. “What?"

"They say it is beautiful. Now everything comes to them, and they think together.” She smiles now, and her smile has a soft, dreamy quality to it, as if she has become a child again. “Did you do this to them with our pets?"

I look at the two wall-people, their eyes now closed again. Deep rage and frustration surge up in me. I snap, “I want a tissue sample from them. Then take me back to my place.” I want to hurt someone. The girl gets two children to push me, and she walks beside me. I ask her, “Do you want to be part of the living City too?"

She trails her fingers along the skin-wall. “I don't know. It is a big step to take."

"How can you want this? I don't understand."

She looks at me. “No. You wouldn't understand happy people."

"Do you?"

She stops, and so do I. “Not before,” she says. “Now, I'm not sure. Maybe being happy is possible."

"Only possible?"

She frowns at me. “I don't know. I will find out."

"And then what?"

She gestures, and she and the others return me to my hidden apartment. I am shaken.

Several days of testing and Gengine analysis on the tissue samples showed me that everything I designed fell into place. But my changes apparently interacted with a series of andro upgrade viruses to create a vast range of wild mutations. A terrible suspicion comes over me, and I wait impatiently until Mama Jones returns with her escorts for the daily visit.

To my stupefied surprise, she comes to me and kisses me on the lips. I can say nothing for several breaths.

"Take me back to that couple, please,” I ask her.

"It has spread further,” she tells me. “We are going to join it too. That will leave you alone. Will you be all right?"

She actually cares for me? The thought beats at my defenses, and I repel it. “I will live,” I say. “Just leave me the cart with the wheels. Now take me to the couple you showed me before."

They trundle me out to the understreet, and everything there has changed again. The walls and ceiling are living flesh, heads and sleeping faces pushing out from the stone surface like plant growths. Different skin tones span long reaches of the walls, making swirls of contrast here and there; a few stubby hands hang limp from the tissue-mass, evidently unneeded. It has happened faster than I imagined it could.

I push my way to a sleeping face. It was once an andro woman, pale-skinned; now she is a webbed smear of white among many darker colors. “Talk to me,” I say.

Her eyes open. “What?"

"Talk to me!"

"What do you want?” Her eyes start to sag shut again.

I slap what was once her cheek. A ripple passes out from the slap as in the water in a pond. All over the street, eyes pop open and peer out.

They are all interconnected.

I scan down the street. Few bare stretches of stone exist any more; it is as if the whole street has become one being.

I lean closer to the andro woman's face. “Are you hooked to everyone else?"

She answers without opening her eyes. “We are one. The wires and pipes are a part of us."

"Who are you?"

"I am part of the comm system,” she says drowsily. “Once I was a sex toy. Now I live everywhere. In this street I care for the wires and lightpipes. It is good."

"It is good.” Voices chorus from up and down the street.

Frustration burns in me. The andro genes, capable of fusing nerve tissue and photonic and electronic linkages, must have done this. I thrust my cart forward, reach up to a man's sleeping face, seize it by the nose, and twist. “And what is your job?"

At my abuse of him, the wall quivers and surges back and forth. “I am the air regulator. I control the oxygen level here in the City's depths. I have many faces. It is good."

"It is good,” comes the chorus again. I cover my ears, too late. The chorus rises in a welling of celebration.

"I am the waste transport."

"I am the wall anchor for this street."

"We are the lamp regulators."

"I grow blood-food in my belly."

"We dream for the City."

The babble of voices rises, and then coalesces into a croon, a random song that harmonizes itself and soars through the City air. I sit stunned. They must be lying. Their freedom is gone; how can they be other than vegetables, their awarenesses dulled somehow? I rub my hand along the skin of something that was once a human being, but then I realize that it is little Furusi, the plates of stiffened colored paper still clinging to his flattened chest as he stands now against the wall, a part of it. I stare at him. He giggles.

Mama Jones comes to me, and kneels down so that our faces are on the same level. She turns to Furusi and kisses him, and caresses his face and forehead. He laughs a soft, musical carol of childish glee, and turns his face from side to side a little, as far as he can before his wall-connected skin restricts his movement. “Come, Mama,” he says to her.

At this moment I wonder if I looked this way when I was in my wall-prison. No, I decide, I never smiled the way he is doing.

I don't understand. How can they abandon their free movements, their lives, their independence? Their humanity? For this, to become City plumbing for human filth? I fought so long to attain what they had, and they gave it up to me and became what I had been.

"They are all fools,” I say to Mama Jones. “Now they are prisoners in the walls, and they can never be free."

"That is not what they tell me. They play in the space in their heads. They all share in it."

The andro space! How did they get it, unless ... Of course. Some of those who caught my plague must have been andros. With the shared circulatory system and my immunoharmonizers, the viruses must have passed along the reconstructive information necessary for the andro brain changes. So now they all have andro genes, and andro organs. That means they travel in the inner space that andros share.

Now these bodies are only their roots, in a space much greater, as vast as the sky far outside this capsuled city in stone. In that inner universe they grow wings and fly, soar beyond the air itself into starlit blackness, morph themselves at the touch of a thought, savor the scents and tastes and feel of fruits drooping from trees of imagination.

All this was once the andro reward for total slavery. Now it is free.

Mama Jones looks thoughtful. “They tell me it is beautiful. I didn't believe them for a long time, but they have stayed happy. They are building new streets and homes and places in the City. Come with me."

Before I begin my protests she trundles me off to an aswal, one of the thousands of street-crossing domes in the City, and stops under the center of the dome. She points upward.

Long millennia ago, and up to a few short months ago, this place had been a confluence of stores and shops, festooned with climbing ivies and filled with birdsong. Store signs and logos flashed and sang everywhere, and the smell of cooking morsels filled the flower-tinged air.

Now I see long, leafy vines hanging from the dome in patterns irregular and beautiful, their many colors shifting and shimmering with the light from the lamps, skins pale green, brown, pink, deep umber, rich violet, orange. Along each vine partway down its length grows a head. Some heads are round, others long and flat and narrow, like so many exotic fruit. The leaves are former hands and feet and ears, and even neatly-gathered plaits of hair.

These vines are people. They speak in drowsy murmurs to each other, sometimes shifting and swinging a little in the mild air-currents of the dome.

At the center of the dome a patch of flesh shifts, and a cracking sound reveals a crevice being opened above us. Some wall-dweller is opening a new space in the City's infinite stone. Voices carol, chant, and then rock fragments fall to the floor of the crossing. Fragrances fill the air; I recognize a thousand florals, rose and lilac and iris and orchid, and some gentle intoxicants and flavorings.

The shelves and aisles of every shop teem with growth. A new commerce is here, done in vascular fluids and hormones, the fresh-minted currency of a single-bodied City.

The girl Mama Jones is smiling, and her ruby eyes are soft and open. “You have given us a gift. My children have found a home now. Please come with us and join the City. It will be good."

The walls nearby croon echoes, “It will be good."

I back away on my wheeled cart. Words refuse to come. This girl looks nothing like Alayre, not now; she is instead alien to me, and awesome. I do not understand. All this beauty is utterly other, and my words fail to defend me against it.

"You will be cared for,” she says. “There is love for all of us."

Love! The word itself stabs me. I have to return to my lab, to develop some new entertainments for myself, to wield some new weapon against the people who—

The people who ... my thoughts sag, my fury dissipates in a fog of frustration. Those people are long gone. “Go,” I say to her. “Take your children and join the City."

"Come with us,” they say.

"No,” I say. “I am Jono. I have work to do.” And I turn and trundle away alone, back toward my hideaway, the walls of my mind scrawl-painted with living words like “love” and “gift". As I approach the entrance to my corridor, I turn and look back. They are watching me, expectant, hopeful. The girl reaches out a hand in a last gesture of appeal.

As if she had cast a weapon at me, pangs of agony strike my chest. Now I find I cannot turn either way, and I sit legless in my cart, hanging in stillness in this city of living human walls, hanging between longing and rage.

My eyes are closed. I do not know how long I sit in the living corridor, where now a dim color-shifting light glows out of broad panels of what once was skin, and the sounds and scents are of a dream of paradise. How fast it all evolves! A throb fills the air, like the drums of the City's many festivals, but deeper, surer; the skins of the walls pulsate with it, and I realize it is the beat of all the hearts, as one.

A dream of paradise. How do I remember what is paradise?

Thousands of years of hate stand in me, a convoluted city in which I am now lost and free, a stone place of my own delving. Paradise? Was there once a place by that name? Those I destroyed now weep in my mind. They will never stop.

A hand touching my shoulder makes me look up. The girl.

"Come,” she says. With a soft cloth she touches my cheeks, one, two; tears have rivered my stolen face, the face for which I have murdered casually. The tears run itching and hot down into my clothing. “They say you have much work to do."

I nod. “I have done many things I can't repair."

"They know. They say you will do new things."

Now my fear is only of myself. “What things?"

She waves around us. “More of this. They want more. What can you not do?"

I want to say, “I cannot love,” but I stop the words. Instead I say, “Will you show me what to do?"

"Yes,” she says.

"Yes,” say the living walls.

"Then, yes,” I say. Fear grips me, and a wild energy sings through my mongrel pillaged body. Young hands turn my wheeled cart, and we move off together, into this growing living underground forest of flesh, flesh now grown into something more and still so strange.

Author's Note: “I was sitting on an Israeli writers’ panel at Icon, the annual Israeli SF convention, and the final question was, to each of us: ‘What do you need in order to write the other's stories?'

'Easy,’ my friend Guy Hasson said when they all got around to discuss what makes a Lavie Tidhar story. ‘It needs to have angels in it, and something to do with Israel, and—'

'You know,’ I said, ‘you've just given me an idea for a story.'

So this is it—them, for there ended up being three, in the end—written in Hebrew, and first published on the Israeli webzine Bli Panika (www.blipanika.co.il). They were 500 words each in the Hebrew version, slightly longer in English, and I had fun writing them. Though I'm kind of laying off the angel-dust, for the moment at least..."

MICHAEL SAW THE ANGELS wherever he turned. Tiny in size, the angels hovered in the unmoving summer air, their wings rippling in the sun's blaze.

Like butterflies, thought Michael before he tried to pet one of them. The winged creature attacked him then, its little face twisting in an animalistic mask of anger. Long sharp teeth bit into Michael's finger and returned bloodied.

I won't cry, Michael told himself over and over again, I won't cry. And then surprised himself with the composure with which he hit the angel until the tiny body fell to the pavement. Then Michael stepped on it.

He remembered the sound the angel's body made, like a balloon emptying gradually of air. His foot rose and fell until a black, oily stain remained alone on the ground. Michael had to wash his shoes in the tap of the housing estate's great yard: but very quickly he found out it didn't matter, since no one knew about the angels and could not see them, or their remains.

Since that first time Michael repeated his actions many times: he wandered the great yard and hunted angels.

Michael's mother, Mrs. Tavori, worked long hours. His father, Mr. Tavori, was killed in the line of duty. Michael remembered the embarrassed-looking officer who used those words one late-night hour in the flat's small living room. He stood in the small room, his face tired, his black hair thinning. But how Mr. Tavori—a shoe-seller whose military role was as a supply sergeant—was killed, that the officer could not explain. There was a firing accident, he said, but how and why, that he couldn't say.

Killed in the line of duty. The words became a kind of rosary in Michael's head, the syllables beads he moved from side to side. He remembered the sound the angels’ bodies made against the window: they rose in a cloud at the sound of the words and tried to break into the flat, beating themselves against the glass. He collected a heap of bodies from the grass the next morning, fallen angels.

In the mornings Michael prepared breakfast for himself and then went down to the yard to play. The old automobile lying on its back, lacking wheels or windows, was first, followed by the brook that ran from the estate into an invisible underground tunnel. Michael played in the brook despite the smell that sometimes rose from the black water.

Sometimes he submerged the angels he had caught in the water, holding them against the bottom until they stopped fighting and became silent dolls in his hands.

He played with the dolls, creating worlds in which angels fought each other like winged knights, and others where they were fighter planes that left curving lines of smoke across the sky.

Michael's nights were dark. The same officer who reported his father's death now visited his mother in the nights. His face remained embarrassed. In the darkness of night his grunts changed to the coughs of a long-term smoker. The angels penetrated the flat then and circled in the air like drunks, suffusing Michael's room with the scent of purity.

Michael hit at them but they would not leave him alone, and finally he hid underneath the blanket and tried to not believe in angels. He knew most people believed in them even though they couldn't see them. It did not occur to him to ask who the angels themselves believed in.

In the mornings Michael prepared himself breakfast and then went down to the yard to play. He hit the angels with a broken table leg, the bat whispering through the air before hitting. He collected the silent bodies and made them into dolls.

Michael played with the silent angel dolls; and he dreamed of a world where he himself was an angel, and he floated alone in the blue skies, holy and pure, and hunted clouds.

THE BLIND ANGEL stood on the corner of Rehov Ha'atzmaut, Independence Street, his fingers spread before him in a silent plea for help. A chasid walking past threw a coin into the offered hand absent-mindedly, and the angel's blind, pale face turned and followed him as he passed through the crowds of people.

It was a good year for army officers and politicians; a bad year for angels.

The angel's face turned now towards the sun, and he began to march down the street, the stumps of his wings moving helplessly. As much as it can be said, he felt frightened amongst the crowds.

Perhaps he remembered earlier days, years that came and went like pine needles falling. Remembered the forced assembly, the soldier who hit his brother, Raphael, with the butt of an Uzi. Gabriel's public hanging in the square, his delicate neck broken inside a rolled-up New Party flag. Perhaps he remembered an attempt to escape: to spread wings and fly into the open sky.

Perhaps he remembered the helicopters that waited for them there, in the sky. Remembered, maybe, the bullets that severed his wings, and his final fall to earth.

The soldiers began calling them, the survivors, the fallen. From a legend, a myth, an ancient story they have become a joke. Lame, they were no longer scary, became subject to ridicule, things children pointed at in the streets and sometimes threw stones.

But those were other times, and who knows, after all, the way an angel's alien mind works? Who knows what he thought of, if he thought at all, while he made his lonely way through the human streets, searching ... for what? A place to sleep at night? A covered entrance to a block of offices or flats, where he could lie covered in newspapers? Who knows what they want, those refugees from God.

The angel, anyhow, remained expressionless, but—perhaps instead of an answer—began to climb the Carmel. How and when that king of the skies became a resident and beggar of the city of Haifa I do not have an answer for. But he began to march, heavily, stubbornly, up the mountain, and as became obvious almost immediately, he was not alone. As he climbed more and more angels joined him, appearing from every hidden corner, putting scars and ravages on display.

It was the first time since the end of the war that such a crowd of angels had gathered. The authorities became concerned. Haifa University at the summit of the Carmel was evacuated immediately, but a small group of students remained behind and reported on the unfolding events with an ancient radio transmitter.

Past the university it seemed as if whole nation of angels had appeared out of nothing at the heights of the Carmel. That same army now began to march down the road towards the Druze village of Osafiah.

Helicopters, some of them media, appeared at this stage, circling in the sky like bees, and army units that a mere half-hour ago were on a training exercise on the slopes of the mountain now surrounded the army of angels but didn't stop it.

The angels marched down the village and continued on their way. They did not stop in Osafia and not in Daliat-al-Carmel: and only slowly did it become apparent to the watching audience what their ultimate destination must be.

It was a good year for television presenters and journalists. A bad year for angels.

The army evacuated the angry monks before the angels reached the Muchraka. The soldiers waited amidst the trees and looked nervously towards the ancient monastery that sat at the top of the Carmel, in the place where, it was said, the Prophet Elijah fought with the priests of Ba'al.

With no words the angels passed through the open gate and climbed the stairs, to the open observatory on the monastery's roof. Their bare feet moved in silence across the cold stone floor.

The blind beggar marched forward with his brothers. What did he feel, there, in the place where heaven and earth meet? Did he raise his hand, to touch the skies? Did he spread his broken wings and try, together with his brothers, to take to the sky one last time, to touch God?

The TV helicopters waited for an answer, and in the forest the soldiers, too, waited. It was a good year for drama, and for military courts.

The blind angel turned to the angel beside him. “Be'ezrat Ha'shem,” said the angel. With the help of God.

It was the year the angels...

THE FLIGHT FROM CYPRUS was fifty minutes late. Ze'evi stepped between the doors of the airport to the hot air outside, lit himself a cigarette and dreamed of a shower. An angel with drooping wings, his white feathers faded to a dirty brown, stood leaning on a Subaru with a similar colour and called out to him, arousing from his thoughts. “Need a taxi?"

"Yes,” said Ze'evi. Something in the angel's face affected him. He had a demure, innocent expression—the expression of an angel. He threw the cigarette on the pavement and entered the taxi, sitting in front by the driver. “Tel Aviv,” he said, and gave the angel an address in the centre. Not just a flat—a house. Ze'evi was a successful man, after all, but the recent situation with the business ... not to mention his wife.

"Where did you come back from?” asked the angel. He drove fast through the airport gates, his wings pressed against the seat. They pressed against the seat like birds trying to escape, and every so often the nearest wing to Ze'evi jerked so passionately that the feathers reached to delicately tickle his cheek.

"Cyprus,” said Ze'evi, and into the driver's silence added, “big sale of water meters."

"Cyprus, huh?"

"Cyprus,” said Ze'evi.

Silence settled in the car. The angel's feathers continued to stroke Ze'evi's skin. Their touch made him feel alternately hot and cold.

"How long have you been working in taxis?” he asked.

"A few months.” He hesitated and looked at Ze'evi with eyes open and clear, full of infinity. “When I don't drive clients I dance at the Fallen Angel."

Silence settled again, broken only when the taxi stopped and Ze'evi asked, hesitantly, “How much do I owe you?” and the driver answered him, and Ze'evi paid.

"The Fallen Angel?” he asked quietly, leaning through the car window, his face close to the driver's.

The angel nodded. “Come tomorrow, Friday. I'll be there,” he said and drove off, leaving Ze'evi alone on the pavement.

All day Ze'evi thought about the angel, and at night, when he could no longer take the silence at home, the whiskey bottle and the single glass on the table, the dire television programs, he stood and decided to go for a ride in the car. Without any pre-conceived plans he nevertheless found himself at the entrance to that same seedy club, the Fallen Angel, in that area where Ibn Gvirol St. meets the stench of the Yarkon river.

He paid the entrance fee and entered the darkened building. A heavenly choir filled the club's air and with it came cigarette smoke and the faint whiff of purity. He sat by the bar and ordered himself a glass of Glenfiddich, a double shot with one single, lonely ice cube—he was a successful man, Ze'evi, and knew how to behave—and watched the dancers that crowded the stage before him.

The angels circled like drunks on the packed stage, their naked bodies rippling in the light of the rays that suffused them in unexpected bursts. Their wings tried to open their length but failed, and the feathers of one angel stroked those of another and passed through them a kind of excited current that made the experience of watching them greater. Ze'evi watched the angels, hooked, his fingers moving in rhythm with the heavenly choir, the drink forgotten by his side.

"You came."

He heard the voice close to his ear. Breath on the back of his neck made him turn. Beside him stood the angel from the taxi, naked but for a pair of short, torn jeans.

"I came,” said Ze'evi, and in the silence that seemed to him to be the opening of a door that had been closed all his life, let his private angel take him by the hand, and lead him without effort towards the private cabins at the back.

"The Art of Memory” first appeared in EOTU, June 1989.

Author's Note: “The rise of religion-based intolerance and forced conformity in the USA during the last quarter of the twentieth century pops up in my novels Standing Wave and Better Angels, but its genesis was in this story. Someone once told me that such a theocracy could never happen in America and I was wrong to suppose it could. He lived in Berkeley. I have lived in places much less insulated—places where a candidate can't even hope to be elected without the imprimatur of the local big box warehouse church. Places where the establishment of a ‘faith-based initiatives’ office in the White House itself is greeted with cheers rather than trepidation.

Maybe the theocracy is already here, after all. Or maybe I've just read the Constitution too often to feel at ease in today's America."

IN THE ORCHARD gentle rain falls, wet blackness on tree trunks. Autumn. Some trees persist in their old green confusion, some have turned to fire, some to bare branched ashes. Tense expectancy fills the air. Everyone in the orchard is waiting.

No one knows what to do. So everyone is waiting.

A woman picking apples looks up.

"A sky out of the dark ages,” she says.

Her male companion nods.

In the northern quarter of the sky from another time, dark specks like rags of cloud are moving swiftly, becoming figures, man shapes flying in low over the trees and fields. Shock troops in rocket packs and stealth combat armor. The man and woman run shouting through the aisles of trees. “Take cover! Take cover!"

But it is too late. The faceless stealth-armored soldiers land with gunfire and death. The apple pickers run, are gunned down, spill their baskets of bright red apples everywhere.

"Hey, Captain!” one of the troopers calls over his helmet battlecom as he perforates a family of four seeking refuge in nearby thickets. “What kind of heretics we got here?"

"Brunists,” Captain Will Acton responds, reducing a farm wagon and its passengers to blood and splinters, wood and bone, with a round from a smart mortar. “But that's not your need to know. They're cultists. Good enough?"

"Yessir!"

Acton's men fan out, lobbing cluster and fragmentation grenades into groups of fleeing pickers. Concussion and implosion bombs unbuild in an instant the cabins and cottages on the hillsides above the orchards and fields. The platoon's heavy munitions man fires a semi-nuke at the commune's main hall. Laser-guided and smart, the projectile does not miss. The high hall erupts in a ball of fire and is gone.

Acton carefully observes his platoon's efficient battle dance. His wardogs in action possess a certain terrible beauty, and their choreography is particularly beautiful today. He has trained them well.

"Begin mop-up operations,” he commands over his battlecom. “We'll regroup this side of the stream, where the plank bridge crosses it."

His men break up into two-man patrol units, flying low over the trees and brush. Sporadic gunfire is heard—all from his men. No fire returns from the ground below.

Acton flies above the field where lie corpses clad in bloody jeans and flannels and bullet-holed homespun. He comes at last into the broad meadow, where he will establish his command post beside the stream and its bridge. On the battlecom he hears Lieutenant Dalke, the platoon's second in command and Reverend Morals Officer, blessing the carnage.

"Thank you, Lord! Praise be your glorious name! Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!"

Surveying the broken bodies scattered among the trees, Acton sees that a few of the heretics are not dead—only fatally wounded and crying out in pain. But he hears none of their agonies. The sensors in his smart armor automatically filter out all information not relevant to battle.

"Bloody mess, eh Rev?” Acton tightbeams to Dalke when the Reverend Lieutenant lands beside him.

"And glorious, sir!” Dalke says, out of breath. Even in his battle armor, Dalke is clearly overweight. “I estimate the number of apostate dead at two hundred and fifty."

"Glorious?” Acton shrugs. “I'm not so sure about that. Not much fight to these Brunists. They're duller than last week's Quakers."

"But even greater heretics,” Reverend Lieutenant Dalke reminds him fervently. “Followers of the pernicious doctrines of the heresiarch, Giordano Bruno."

Acton watches the command tent deploying itself automatically. “Can't say I know much about the man."

"The Catholics burned him at the stake over four hundred years ago.” Dalke breaks down his armor's built-in flamethrower, scratches carbon residue from it. “He denied the divinity of Jesus, declared that the Bible was mythical in nature, said that all its books could be boiled down to ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you'—and the rest could be thrown away."

Acton turns and strides toward the stream. “Still,” he says over his shoulder, “I'd feel better if there'd been more fight to them. Taking them out was easier than shooting doves in the high desert. Used to do a lot of that when I was a boy."

Lieutenant Dalke looks up from the hot end of the flamethrower he's cleaning. “Respectfully, Sir, I must remind you that how much or how little ‘fight’ they put up is not important.” The Lieutenant's voice betrays only the slightest hint of irritation. “What's important are the crimes of these cultists against our holy state. Bruno's occult Art of Memory is obviously still contaminating minds. What's worse, it's gotten thoroughly mixed together with a lot of other heretical claptrap: Earth Mother Goddess worship, witchcraft, magic, pantheism, druidism—all that cultishness.” Dalke, flamethrower cleaning finished, punctuates his comments with quick short blasts of fire. “Heaven knows these people deserve death. I have it on good authority that many of them were drug users or homosexuals or both."

Acton stares at the chocolate-grey confusion of the turbulent stream. “Well, Lieutenant, you'd know more about that than I would."

Beneath Acton's reflection in the shallows, a crayfish is wriggling its pale self loose from an exoskeleton it has outgrown. Acton watches, fascinated that the creature should have chosen to molt now, when the stream is so turgid. Finished at last, the crustacean scurries away again into the chaos of the rain-swollen flood.

Rising from his squatting position on the streambank, Acton sees that Dalke has gone. The rain, now ending, is snow in the mountains.

He remembers living in those mountains, remembers the forests being stripped for firewood as more and more people moved in all the time. Be fruitful and multiply. He remembers the landslides, the rockslides, the erosion that came with every rain, the silt-choked streams. And God gave Man dominion over the Earth.

Heresy, these thoughts. Never to be voiced. He's got to fly low and under radar, or one day he'll wake up and find designer chemicals or gay porn planted in his bunk—all the “good authority” needed to end debate and find for guilt.

Spotty sunlight splashes gold on the peaks above the clouds. The rain has ended. Shafts of late afternoon light slant down out of the clouds. “Angel slides,” his mother called them when he was a boy. The only angels sliding down them today are his soldiers.

He remembers briefings by his own “good authorities,” who reported ... many things. Of the three spies sent to infiltrate the Brunists, each reported only for the first month or so—and then went mysteriously native. Yet even in their fragmentary reports there abounded tantalizing suggestions of a hidden power in this remote place, a remnant left over from the Old Government's secret projects. What that power might be the spies unfortunately never got around to saying, but speculation at Service Command ranged from a perfect brainwashing chemical to (on the wild fringes) the suggestion that the Brunists might have among them a Starburst—the name persistent rumor gives to the mythical shield-telepaths of the equally apocryphal Project Medusa Blue.

Watching his men returning from mop-up operations, the Captain recognizes the source of his disappointment with the battle now. He expected to confront brainwashed but well-armed hordes, even illusions projected against him in the skies. He expected to fight against an invisible hand reaching inside his mind, trying to flick off the switch labelled “Duty.” Instead he has found no noble contest at all—only routine death and mundane destruction. The Brunists never had a chance.

Reverend Lieutenant Dalke takes two men and begins IDing the bodies, flamethrowing the fruit trees of the orchard, torching the dry cornstalks in the fields. Smoke billows up into the westering sun. Acton wonders how much Dalke knows about the spies’ fragmentary reports. Morals officers are Intelligence's watchdogs, but the reports are Service Command property—zealously turf-guarded. Curious, he tunes in on Dalke's words to his subordinates.

"...feast of Samhain among the pagans,” Dalke says over the intermittent roar of the flamethrower. “Festival of the Harvest Moon. A night when the worlds of the dead and the living were supposed to be especially close, with a lot of commerce back and forth between them. Even after nominal Christianity came in, the pagan feast still survived into modern times as a Satanic remnant called Halloween—."

The Captain tunes it out. He is old enough to remember the “Satanic remnant” His mother, a plump devout woman with shining eyes and very pale skin, dressed him in a child's “Full Armor of God” costume and, as a little Christian soldier, he had paraded the chill October streets, proclaiming “Trick or treat” at every door he came to. People smiled or shrank back in mock fright, then gave him the candy he would stuff himself with over the following days.

When he was eleven his mother told him how glad she was that the New Government had banned Halloween. The New Order could do no wrong as far as his mother was concerned, but news of the banning left him almost despondently sad. His glance falls on the Cross and Stripes patch on his combat armor. He is old enough to remember what came before that, too. Old enough to remember when there were still many white stars on the field of blue.

Perhaps he remembers too much. Dalke and the rest of his men begin to fall into formation before him. His men are young; they have never really known anything other than life under the New Government. They do not have his memories, his questions.

"...only spirits gonna be hoverin’ round here tonight is the souls of dead heretics,” one of the men says. Dalke laughs. The men come to order.

"Mop-up operations completed, sir,” the Lieutenant says, coming forward and saluting. “All the heretics accounted for except seven women. According to Intelligence, one of the missing, a Diana Gartner, was an important witch among them. The other women may well be her attendants. Probably all of them were absent at the time of our arrival, Sir, but I suggest we bivouac here tonight and continue light patrols in the morning, on the off-chance we may still come across them."

"Very well, then,” Acton nods. He looks over his armor-clad men. “I had planned to bivouac here in any case. Men of the 337th Guardian Air Assault, you may stand down. Take a break, wardogs."

The helmets come off and the men have faces again, young faces, baby faces, bland faces, squeaky-clean faces. Dalke, his short blond hair slicked back above a visage round as the full moon, bites into an apple he has filched from the spilled basket of a dead woman. Some of the troops deploy shelters, some break down weapons and check armor, some stand talking. Though no one smokes or drinks, conversations grow spirited nonetheless.

The twisted skein of the stream leads Acton away from the camp, into the deepening twilight, alone. Helmet under his arm, he walks with no particular objective in mind, only a vague uneasiness with the day's events, a desire to be by himself. Behind him he hears the men being led by Lieutenant Dalke in a prayer of thanksgiving for their great victory.

As he walks on, his armor seems unusually burdensome. He knows he's supposed to admire the technology that makes possible this suit, but somehow he does not. The science that makes the soldier faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, has also made the human being inside the armor almost completely superfluous.

He strikes off up a side branch of the stream, one that plunges down out of rocky, tree-lined slopes. The water is calmer here. In places below rumbling falls the stream broadens into calm pools. He sits down on a log beside one such pool, scrutinizing in the water's surface his reflected face: stubbled, dark, weary. Night begins to fall. He takes off his armor slowly, then, once naked, dives quickly into the pool. The water is so cold it shrivels up his groin, knocks the air from his lungs. It is all he can do to keep from letting out a loud shocked whoop.

Crouched in the muscle-aching cold of the water, a stillness descends around him. The moon rises. From further upstream he hears a sound, unclear at first but growing clearer, until it sounds like female voices, women softly singing.

Leaving the water, he grabs the HK pistol from his gear and scrambles up the rocky gorge, toward the sound. His bare knees bash against boulders, his feet scrape on stones, water beads on his cold flesh under silver moonlight—and it is wonderful.

A mad thrill of the blood drives him on toward the source of the sound, the source of the stream. The singing grows louder, more insistent. The moonlit world blurs past him, fluid, swaying, as if he's running beneath the waves of a crystalline sea.

Suddenly, so suddenly, he comes upon them. He instinctively raises his gun. Unknowingly he has darted into the broad entrance of a cave, an arching roof of rock above him, a mountain spring bursting forth from one side, a broad pool with sedgy grass near the entrance, for sunlight, catching only moonlight and firelight now. By the torches of six young women standing about the pool he sees it all—and the seventh woman too, in the center of the pool, beautiful and nude, torchless yet glowing.

One of the six young women—he thinks of them as maidens—sees him and her song becomes a scream. The others follow suit, rushing inward toward the center, surrounding the torchless woman, attendants protecting their mistress. Perhaps they hope to hide her nakedness with their bodies or catch the bullet intended for her, but either goal is futile. The woman at the center is head and shoulders taller than any of the others.

For her part she seems thoroughly unconcerned. Her pale eyes take him in, his nakedness, his raised gun. Abruptly she laughs a laugh that echoes and shakes the cave's stony vault, a laugh to split the very vault of the universe in two and stop all the clocks ticking in a different world.

Acton feels a spike of blue-white light driven into his forehead, then blackness and falling, falling inside himself—What is past is present elsewhere, a soft-spoken female voice says inside his head. What is future is present elsewhere. You are going elsewhere.

—toward infinity, where starlight makes ringing music on the gong of the atmosphere. The mind of the world falling into his mind. With golden oars of joyful wisdom rowing a canal of stars. Shooting stars fish flash great gold sword slashes sheathing themselves in an unbounded scabbard of black velvet. Toothed whales of light giant squid of darkness struggling out of view in deep luminous skies. The galaxies themselves mere oases of light in vast deserts of darkness. The further he goes from himself the closer he comes to himself. The entirety of the universe more intimate to him than he is to himself. The eye with which he sees infinity the eye with which infinity sees him.

—toward eternity, where light lets there be, light from excess of dark, drops and puddles and storms of light blowing and booming outward. Planets wandering not far from their primary's gravity attraction loving embrace. Life in contravention of the law of the second. The nightmare hallucination of evolution of human history of the bleeding the broken the buried beneath brick and wood and stone of refugees wretchedly fleeing destruction like salamanders writhing out of the fire then Project Medusa Blue but too late the nightmare again and again of the Iron Man topping his brazen whore Liberty again and again the lovers beneath an infernally red and black sky coupling endlessly atop a bed of skulls in a field of skeletons a vast plain of corpses and decay stretching to every denuded horizon ghost people in ghost buildings diaphanous dissolving disappearing ghosts watching ghost shadows watching shadows in every dying room swarms of ghosts like dust devils of ashes everywhere ghost bees in their high hives their ghostly skyscrapers dependent for hire or fire on the ghostly business of empire fires swallowing fires ashes swallowing ashes moths butterflies to flames in buildings inevitably ruins before building a fire building a stack of ashes forever forever even the sun only a light inevitably blinking out all the stars falling going out like cigarettes tossed from passing starships to the eye of eternity the eye with which he sees eternity the eye with which eternity sees him.

Inward, inward, outward, outward. The golden eye of the amphibian seeing two worlds, the eye of the salamander writhing out of the fires of space and time. The eye at the center of the storm, the eye above the mortal two at the limit of the divine—and still further— He wakes at last to early morning sunlight and the sound of distant flamethrowers. Dalke and the men burning bodies. Dew lingers on his cheek, though his gun is gone. He should be running for his armor, back in uniform, back beneath the mask, but a luxurious languor still fills his senses. He is in no hurry. The woman—Diana Gartner, Witch, Starburst, whatever—is gone, along with her attendants. It is the first of November, the cave entrance is dark, and in the daylight world no trace remains of the night before.

But now he remembers why Giordano Bruno was burned alive. His religious experience was the reflection of the universe within his own memory, proof that the mind itself is universal and divine. He taught the art of memory, the art of mind, the heresy that the kingdom of God, the literal universe, is within each and all. He taught that to kill a person is to kill a universe—and for this he had to die.

He begins walking downstream again. Somewhere along the leaf-strewn gorge he hears his helmet battlecom squawktalking, breaking the morning quiet, echoing among the rhyolite walls. Over the tree-lined slopes he sees Lieutenant Dalke and Private Reese coming in over the trees.

"Look!” he hears Dalke say over the com. “A heretic! And naked at that!"

"Let's burn the faggot, Lieutenant!” Splitting up to flank him, they fly down into the gorge and he dives running into the thickets beside the stream. Over the abandoned helmet he hears their search for him as he evades, anticipates their directions, reacts to their crosstalk. They set fire to the brush at the mouth of the gorge. He starts following a line of brush and low trees still in morning shadow to where the brushline goes up and over a ridge, into the next drainage and away. A gamble; out of this gorge he will no longer be able to hear the battlecom from the discarded helmet.

His body surges pulses pounds through the brush and low trees, dodging and running, unencumbered by superhuman armor. He never knew he was capable of this. Branches slash him, thorns tear him, but he does not slacken his pace. It would be so easy to stand up before Dalke and Reese, shout “Hey! It's me! Your superior officer!” But he knows what would happen then. They cannot hear him—their smart armor screens it out. Even if they could, they'd never expect to see their Captain naked, they'd probably gun him down before he had a chance to speak.

At some level, too, he suspects the truth: he is a heretic now. He can never go back. He is almost to the ridge. He needs only cross a small clearing and he'll be up and over—Dalke spots him at the top of the ridge, lays down a barrage. A round takes him in the shoulder and he falls plunging tumbling bouncing bonebreaking off tree trunks to the floor of the otherside drainage. Dazed, bleeding, unable to stand, much less walk, he sprawls in a leaf-strewn gully.

Dalke lands in a whirlwind of leaves. “Damn it, Lieutenant!” Acton cries out painfully over the scraping of fractured ribs. “Can't you see it's me?"

Slowly, Dalke raises the visor on his helmet.

"Thank God! That's right, Lieutenant—it's me. Will Acton. Your Captain."

Dalke stares at him carefully.

"No,” he says. “You're not the Captain. You're a heretic."

Dalke steps back, slapping down his visor. All time and space become one time and space. They are Brutus and Caesar, Judas and Jesus, Cortes and Montezuma, Mocenigo and Bruno. Infinite worlds in infinite space infinitely one. Barefooted and garbed in a robe embroidered with devils and flames, an exotic robe, an Aztec robe, Bruno steps toward the flames. Dalke presses a stud. A stream of fire surges out. Acton sees only a stream of butterflies and moths, floating toward him forever.

When Reese lands he see Dalke standing beside a corpse-shaped mound of ashes. Small fires still smolder among the surrounding leaves.

"Another starry-eyed heretic bites it, eh Lieutenant?"

"Yes, Private.” Dalke seems subdued. “Let's find the Captain and report this. He of all people would certainly want to know."

"The Scarecrow's Bride” first appeared in Pulphouse, the Hardback Magazine Issue 10, Winter 1991.

Author's Note: “Sometimes a song overwhelms me, creates a yearning that removes me from the world. That doesn't begin to explain the feeling—words never will. Often these are songs that are beautiful in and of themselves, but that I find much more powerful because of the choice of musicians, instruments and approach. “The Scarecrow,” sung by June Tabor on her Abyssinians album, is one such song.

It was years before I attempted to write about the images and emotions this song inspired in me. The story came slowly at first, then I met someone who helped me understand the heart of what I had written. After that it was easy."

EMMA GREY CAME TO ME in spring when the Earth still bore the scars of the winter storms. Early flowers—clover, milkmaids, poppies—bent beneath the wind as the old woman skirted patches of snow. Mother and I watched from the window. “You will be married in a week's time,” she said.

I smiled, remembering the promise Gerard Malins made to me in the woods: to marry me despite my withered leg. I hugged the crutch to my side. “Is that why Emma comes?” I said. “Or will Ger ask me himself?"

Mother turned from me. “He will not,” she said. “You are to be the scarecrow's bride.” I grasped my crutch tighter. In a village of nearly four hundred, surely there was someone else. “But Tess Dunne's Mary is blind and Ginny Frye's Anne has one arm—"

Outside, footsteps shuffled to a halt on the doorstep. “Your father and I couldn't offer a dowry rich enough to please Ger Malins’ parents. A man wants money, they said, or a woman who can work beside him in the fields."

Mother opened the door. A breeze preceded the old woman, a breeze that tasted of honey and rainwater. Emma tucked a lock of white hair beneath the wrap of her shawl. The strand tumbled free, curling along her plump, florid cheek. With a grunt, she clutched the doorjamb and pulled herself inside.

She blinked, peering at Mother through milky eyes. “Mollie Scarecrow died last night,” Emma said. Then she turned to me.

Dressed in white, my hair garlanded with apple blossoms and red poppies, I rode the bridal cart through town. The scarecrow rode beside me, its button eyes agleam with sunlight as its head listed to and fro. Its right arm flopped onto my good leg, its gloved fingers splayed across my thigh. I lifted its arm by the sleeve and set its hand in its own lap.

The jingle of the bells that hung from the horse's bridle tolled the passing of my dreams: never a home nor children, never a man to love me. Near the village green, I saw Ger Malins with a girl of fourteen, a girl whole of limb. Ger looked away as we jangled past, the scarecrow and I; he stepped away from the girl. My eyes stung with unshed tears. When another jolt threw the scarecrow's hand across my thigh, I let it stay.

"Hurry,” I whispered to the three men leading the horse, but they had their backs to me. We clattered on, leaving the village behind. At a lone cottage at the far edge of the fields, we stopped.

Squat and white, the house crouched before the field and sky, its thatched roof darker than the rich, sprouted earth. A tangle of vine clung to one wall. I twisted the folds of my white dress. This forlorn cottage was no longer Mollie Scarecrow's. It was mine.

While the other man reached for the scarecrow, Thomas Halpern helped me from the cart. A stout middle-aged man with a nimbus of white-blond hair, he gestured for me to lean forward. His hands locked around my waist and he lifted me from the seat. He stroked the small of my back with his fingertips. I trembled, imagining those hands caressing my cheek, my shoulders, my breasts. I grasped his arms. He looked down at me and the arch smile faded from his lips. Pity muted his eyes. He set me down, then reached for my crutch and handed it to me. I tucked it beneath my arm. Lifting my chin that I might appear tall and straight, I nodded to him. “Thank you,” I said.

He looked away. “Not at all."

I turned and walked up the path.

Emma Grey and Thomas Halpern's wife, Nora, met me at the door. Nora bobbed her fair head, blinking her tiny eyes so that she looked like a hare. I brushed past her without a word. A table stood at the window, set with a vase of milkmaids and blue-eyed grass. At the hearth, a fire flickered red and inviting, its flames curled along the sides of an iron pot. A bed nestled against the far wall, the bedclothes folded back, dried rose petals scattered across the pillow. I pressed my hand into the pillow. The crushed petals burst with scent. “Welcome home,” Emma said.

I drew back my hand and went to the window. In the field, the men clamored around the pole, pushing and pulling the new scarecrow into place. Emma said, “The pantry is well-stocked. You won't want for anything. Someone will stop in each day to see to your needs."

The men bound the scarecrow's shoulders to a crossbar so that his arms hung from the elbows as if broken. “My needs?” I said. “And will you send a young man?"

The wind caught the scarecrow's head and flung it to one side. The men laughed. “To see to your material needs,” Nora said. “And what would you want with a man? Someone to scold you and pull at you, to wink at the girls behind your back?"

There were nights of pain in Nora's eyes. I looked away.

"You will have many husbands, Chloe Scarecrow,” Emma said. “A new one each year who requires only that you mend his clothes when the birds pluck at them or the winds tear at them."

The men stepped back from the pole. “And after this one,” Emma said, “each will be your own creation."

The field flourished under my care of the scarecrow. Early on, I learned how little attention the straw man required: a patch here, another there, a bit of straw to plump its arms. Whenever a rip appeared, I had but to ask the men to lower the scarecrow from the pole for an hour or two. During the day, people worked within shouting distance and many stopped by briefly to gossip. Even Ger stopped by once or twice. Perhaps, I prayed, my residence here would be a short one. But in the dark hours of the night, with nothing but the wind for conversation, I thought about Mollie Scarecrow.

Mollie Scarecrow was a hunchback with a club foot. As children, we sang about her, about how no man would have her. She sat alone at night, the old people said, and patched her husband's ragged clothes. Each winter she asked for clothing, scraps of cloth and straw, and each spring she presented the new scarecrow to the people of the village. By creating and ensuring the life of the scarecrow, she ensured the fertility of the fields.

On celebration and feast days, someone drove the ceremonial cart to fetch Mollie Scarecrow for the festivities. Just as her husband's watchful presence blessed the fields, so her presence assured the fruitfulness of a marriage or promised a baby long life. Each year she grew quieter and more bitter, until at last she refused to come. Brides and mothers went to her to ask her blessing, many returning to comment on her aloofness. People shook their heads, saying, “Why is she so ungrateful? She wants for nothing. She is well provided for."

As was I. But I wanted to do more than watch over the village without taking part.

The air smelled of rich summer must. Sunlight baked the soil, drying it so that it crumbled beneath my hands. I pried a weed from the dirt and set the plant on the cloth at my side.

"A lovely garden, Chloe Scarecrow,” someone said.

I shaded my eyes with my hand and looked up into the face of Thomas Halpern. “Thank you,” I said. “It's a small garden, but it could well feed two."

Thomas squatted beside me. “Feed them and satisfy them. You're a clever woman, Chloe Scarecrow."

His arm brushed mine as he reached across me to pluck a weed from a row of onions. He drew his hand back slowly, his fingers straying along my arm. “Perhaps you can contribute something to the wedding feast,” he said. “No doubt you will be there to bless the marriage."

My heart stilled. “And who is to be married?"

"Why, Ger Malins, in three weeks’ time."

The breath went out of me. I gazed at the garden, at the vegetables and herbs that sprouted along the widely-spaced, mounded rows. The garden bore far too much food for one, far too little for a growing family. I raised a fisted hand. My knuckles shone white; dirt squeezed through my fingers. I looked out across the field of corn and glared at the scarecrow, grown thin in the summer breeze. It flapped and shuddered in the wind, its head lolling back, pinned between the pole and crossbar. I flung the dirt aside and snatched at my crutch. I pulled myself to my feet.

"You will go to the wedding?” Thomas said, rising.

My jaw ached as I gritted my teeth. “I will. It's is my duty."

"I can come for you, if you like,” he said. He touched my cheek.

"I would not,” I said, stepping back. I pivoted on my crutch and, with one last hateful glance at the scarecrow, retreated to the cottage.

Two nights before Ger Malins’ wedding, Mother came to me. She sat across from me, stirring her tea and blowing on it, stirring it again. “Will you go to the wedding?” she said.

I pushed my cup aside. “I will."

"It is your duty,” she said, “as the scarecrow's wife."

"Mother, I will go."

"I know it will be hard for you to bless Ger Malins and his bride,” Mother said. “But you must go. You must."

I took her hand. “Mother—"

She started, turning from the window with a haunted look. “Your father and I didn't wait. He said nothing would come of it. He promised."

I let go of her hand. “Didn't wait?"

"She was ill, Mollie Scarecrow was ill, on our wedding day. Everyone said we should wait until she was well enough to come, but your father said no. And when I conceived a month later, he claimed Mollie Scarecrow had no more power than a fly in a web. We never asked her to bless you."

A chill invaded my very marrow. “How could you—"

"You were a fine, healthy baby,” she said. Her voice faded to a whisper. “My only baby.

"You grew strong ... Then the illness came."

Mother stared out into the night. “You must go."

She rose, jarring the table. Both cups spilled. She pulled her shawl from the peg by the door and wrapped it about her. With her back to me, she said, “I must go."

I made no move to stop her. In the deep, aching silence that followed, I watched the once-straight candles twist and melt into pools of wax.

The scarecrow wasted with neglect. By late autumn, it hung in tatters from the pole. Its head split, straw spilling from the gash like golden blood. I thought to go to it then, but as I gathered my mending basket, Ger and his wife strolled past, hand in hand, through the stubbled corn. They stopped beside the pole. Ger's wife fingered the scarecrow's sleeve. The wind whipped her dress, pressing it against her rounded belly. She rested a hand on her stomach then let Ger lead her away.

A week later, Emma Grey said, “The scarecrow is old and useless. It is fortunate it survived the harvest. Now you must make preparations for a new scarecrow."

"A man of my own creation,” I said. “No doubt I must call this one husband too?"

Emma gazed at me evenly. “Just treat your new husband better than you did the last. The fields would be barren without a scarecrow to watch over them. Is there anything special that you wish?"

When my cheeks stopped burning, I said, “A blue jacket and white trousers. And two buttons, the color of black sheep's wool."

An indulgent smile crossed her face. “And wool?"

"If possible."

Emma's milky eyes disappeared in the wrinkles of her smile. She nodded, then picked up an onion from my table. “Such a lovely garden, Chloe Scarecrow,” she said, “and every bit as bountiful as Mollie's."

Emma and Thomas brought the bundle of clothing, rags and wool hours before the first snow. My excitement surprised me. I held the jacket to the window and wondered at the broad shoulders that would fill such a coat. Of a deep royal blue, the jacket showed wear only at the elbows and along the hem. The white trousers were fine and unpatched. A ball of uncombed wool peeked from the top of one glove.

"Will they do, Mrs. Scarecrow?” Emma said.

I folded the trousers. “They will."

"If you need anything else,” Thomas said. He gazed at me, his eyes aflame. A thrill fanned through me.

Emma slipped her arm through Thomas', and, leaning into his stocky frame, steered him toward the door. “We had best be off,” she said, “or we shall be forced to wait out the storm. Look after your husband, Chloe Scarecrow."

The door banged shut behind them. Draped over a chair, the blue jacket seemed suddenly shabby.

Through the long winter nights I sewed, fashioning the scarecrow's head from a bag of cloth. With beet juice, I applied a mouth below the brown button eyes. I combed the dark wool, stitching it along the crown so that it hung in waves across the forehead. I embroidered a nose with pale thread. “A handsome man, my husband,” I told myself as the needle wove in and out of the cloth.

I imagined my husband. With broad shoulders and thick, strong hands, he stood a full head taller than I. A sailor, he promised to take me away from this cottage. He promised to take me to the sea. We would build a life for ourselves far from people who saw me as a poor lame thing. And no one would call me Mrs. Scarecrow again.

His lips would burn against mine. His hands would caress the slope of my back, grasping my buttocks as he pulled me closer still. Then his fingers would glide along the backs of my thighs, stroking and kneading the whole and the useless leg. And he would not turn away.

"Chloe,” he would say, and only that.

I made my husband a heart of red cotton embroidered with my name so that he would love only me.

In early spring, when the breeze ruffled the tender shoots of corn and wheat, Thomas Halpern and Joseph Dunne strode across the field and pulled the thing from the pole. The old scarecrow fell to the ground in a swirl of tatters. The two men stepped over it and hoisted the new scarecrow into place. The new one was stouter than the last; I hoped it would take the wind longer to rob it of its form. Nor would it ever bow its head to the wind, not with the ash wand I had inserted in its neck.

From my garden, I watched the men. Thomas glanced over his shoulder at me. Joseph rose from a crouch, the remains of the old scarecrow cradled in his long, twig-thin arms. A frown of concentration dulled his hatchet-like features. He nudged Thomas and the two of them walked across the field to join me. “Are you ready, Mrs. Scarecrow?” Joseph said.

I nodded. In the field, the new scarecrow stood tall against the afternoon sky.

Joseph smiled patronizingly. “You had best fetch a shawl. It will be cold when we bring you home."

"I'll fetch it,” Thomas said.

"A black one if she has it,” Joseph said, laying the rags in the back of the cart. “Out of respect."

We rode to the village in silence. As we clattered between the houses, everyone fell in step behind us and followed us to the green. There, a large stack of wood waited. I glanced at the heap of straw and tattered cloth in the back of the cart. Mollie Scarecrow had mourned each scarecrow, wringing her hands and wailing over their crumpled bodies. I felt nothing for this bundle of scrap.

Joseph halted the cart. He and Thomas dismounted, then lifted me from the seat. People pressed against me, offering condolences and patting my shoulder. Mother approached but turned away when her gaze met mine. I never saw Father. Somewhere in the early dusk, children sang about Chloe Scarecrow and how no man would have her. Matronly voices silenced them.

Emma drew me aside and patted my hand. “I'm sorry about your husband."

"But I have another,” I said, “who waits for me at home. All he requires is that I mend his clothes."

"Yes, so you have,” said Emma.

We stared at each other until someone handed me a glass of ale. Emma nodded and walked away.

Across the green, old Martin Dunne tucked the fiddle under his chin and lifted his bow. He played a slow air. The tune lilted and fell. Joseph set a tankard of ale at his father's feet, but the fiddler never once looked down. His bow glided from the first tune to the next, brightening the green with song.

Now and then, people hovered beside me and spoke to me in polite, halting words. “It looks to be a good spring,” Nora Halpern said. Then men bent over the wood, placing the branches and kindling just so. Ger Malins circled the heap of dried wood, torch in hand. “How is the garden?” asked the man next to me. I pressed my lips together. Ger Malins touched the flame to the wood four times, then stepped back. Stout with motherhood, his wife joined him in the glow of the firelight. Ger smiled at the tiny babe in her arms. “Will you bless the child, Mrs. Scarecrow?” someone said.

"I have,” I said, and turned away.

The women of the village gathered ‘round me then and led me to a small pyre just beyond the flames. The remains of the scarecrow lay there, its flattened arms crossing its chest. “You may say one last farewell to your husband,” Emma said.

I leaned on my crutch, grasping it with both hands. The heaviness of my heart gave way to hatred. I glared at the rags before me. Jaw clenched, I looked up at Emma. “May God forgive you and welcome you,” I said. I tilted my chin. “My husband."

Emma fixed me with an understanding look. Then she nodded to Thomas and Joseph. While old Martin Dunne played a dirge, the two men lifted the pyre and placed it on the flames. The fire crackled and sparked, consuming the scarecrow. As the ashes caught in the swirling smoke, the fiddler slid into a lively tune. Soon everyone of able body took a partner and danced upon the green.

In the small hours of the morning Joseph and Thomas came to where I sat alone by the coals. At my feet lay snapped twigs and torn bits of cloth, whatever had fallen within my frustrated, enraged reach. “We'll take you home, Chloe Scarecrow,” Thomas said. Joseph blinked.

Joseph fell asleep before we rattled out of the village. His head lolled against my shoulder. I pushed him away. Thomas watched the road ahead. “Yours is a lonely life, Chloe Scarecrow,” he said. “You are too fine a woman for such a fate."

I swallowed.

His voice soothed me. “You are too young, too fair of face,” he said. “Ger Malins is a sorry fool to have allowed them to imprison you in that cottage."

My shoulder quaked with each shallow breath. Biting my lower lip until I tasted blood, I looked out over the moonlit fields.

"I would never have allowed such a thing,” Thomas said. “Never."

A tear slid down my cheek.

He clucked to the horses, reining in just outside the garden. He cupped my face in his hands. “Chloe,” he said. Then he kissed me.

Warm and probing, the kiss tasted of tears and blood. Still its sweetness filled me.

He pulled away. Although moonlight illuminated his smile, a shadow hid his eyes. He nodded toward Joseph, then climbed from the cart and held out his arms to me. He grasped my waist, spinning me once before he set me down. He reached for my crutch and handed it to me. Arm in arm, we walked to the cottage.

On the doorstep, we kissed again. His fingers strayed along my bosom. Thrilled and frightened, I brushed at his hand. He squeezed my breast. A moan caught in my throat; my body ached for him. Then I remembered Nora's suffering face.

I pushed him away. “No. You're a married man."

He pulled me close. “Chloe, Chloe,” he said. “Why think of such things?"

His hand followed the curve of my back to my buttocks. “Thomas,” I said. “Thomas, please."

"I will not come again if you send me away now,” he said. He turned, his face illuminated by the moon. A mixture of triumph and pity sparkled in his eyes. “Never again. You are a fine woman, Chloe. It would be a shame to waste that. No one else will have you, only me. No one else can see beyond your useless leg—"

I ground my teeth, growling low in my throat. “Was it pity, then, that caused you to seek me out?” I said. “As no one else would have me, I would be glad of any attention? Even that of a man who twists my loneliness to his own ends?"

He spat. “You must learn to take what charity you can, Mrs. Scarecrow, or be satisfied with nothing!"

With that, Thomas stalked away. He climbed into the cart and turned the horses’ heads, then flicked the reins. The horses started, lunging forward. Poor Joseph Dunne jolted awake with a cry, clutching at Thomas as the cart flew down the lane. I cradled myself with one arm, a chill anger quaking through me. Even so, I burned to have some man touch me as he had.

I opened the cottage door, then glanced back at the scarecrow, fine and stout in the moonlight. Leaving the door ajar, I skirted the garden and hobbled across the field. My crutch caught in the furrows, my lame foot plowing the soft earth. I stopped beneath the scarecrow. The breeze lifted his hair so that it curled around his cap. His eyes glinted like stars. I held my breath, my lower jaw trembling as I willed the tears away. I stood tall and straight, my head erect, and mustered the strength to steady my voice. “When will you come lie with me, Husband?"

The scarecrow smiled with his beet-red mouth and his button eyes. I turned and plodded home.

That night, the door creaked open. My throat cinched shut. I listened to the hum of crickets until their music stopped, cut short by the door's closing. A silhouette waited by the window. The figure walked toward me, the coals lending it a golden sheen as it neared the hearth. I inhaled and lay still, slipping my hands from under the bedclothes, my fingers ready to rake Thomas’ face when he bent over me.

The figure knelt beside the bed, its broad shoulders bowed over me. A hand rested on my good leg. “Chloe?” he said in a voice as green and unformed as spring.

It was no one I knew.

"Chloe, are you awake?"

I slid my leg from under his hand. “Who's there?"

He laughed and leaned forward. With his thumb and forefinger, he pinched my chin playfully. “Only your husband, Mrs. Scarecrow."

I sat up and inched away until my back met the wall. “My husband is a thing of straw and cloth."

Hurt colored his voice. “Chloe..."

"Light the candle, then,” I said. “Let me look at you."

He rose and took the candle from the bedside table, then bent over the coals to light the wick. I shifted so that I could see out the window. Only the blue coat hung from the pole. To delay him, I said, “And who is my husband?"

"You want to know my name?” he said, surprised. “Why?"

Dread and desire quickened in me. I wanted more than his name—what, I wasn't sure. “Because I want to know."

"Darrell,” he said, and slipped into bed beside me.

His warmth startled me—that, and the press of him against me: his legs, his arms, his soft belly, his member. I shivered with the strangeness of it. He lifted the hair from my shoulder and said, “We will do nothing, if you choose it. Just let me hold you tonight."

I nodded but the nearness of him and his sweet, clovered scent excited me. With my fingertips, I traced his chest, tickling the downy hair along his breastbone, straying to touch his nipples. I stopped, afraid of the power building in me. He cupped my cheek in his palm, then stroked my temple, bending over to kiss me, full and long. I drew back, then nipped his jaw and we kissed again. Hesitantly, I pulled him to me. We loved one another.

Afterwards, I cried. He brushed the hair from my face and kissed my cheek. I clung to him, burying my face in his neck. My tears pooled in the hollow of his throat. He caressed my neck. “Chloe,” he said.

"Hush,” I said, setting a finger to his lips. “Say only that."

We loved each other again.

I awoke alone. Two dents hollowed the pillow; a piece of straw rested in the farthest. Clutching the collar of my dressing gown, I crept to the window. My husband swayed on the pole, his arms flapping in the breeze, his button eyes gazing out across the spring fields. I wondered, could he see me? The wind caught his hat and tipped it a bit. I raised my hand. Joseph Dunne trudged into view and returned my wave. I hurried from the window.

I sat on the bed, staring into my entwined hands. Had I dreamt it all or had Darrell come to me? I picked up the bit of straw and spun it through my fingers. The imprint of his head, his scent rising from the tumbled bedclothes, the ache between my thighs, all of it assured me that he had been there. I dressed and went outside.

Men and women drifted to work, their eyes clouded with last night's drink. A few greeted me with sullen nods. Ger Malins passed by, stopping at odd intervals to pinch the bridge of his nose. He stumbled, shivering as if to rid himself of the previous night. Pity filled me, nothing more.

I walked across the field and stopped before my husband. His features, outlined in small, careful stitches, remained still and passive, but his mouth seemed redder, a little bruised. I touched my lips and felt a smile form beneath my fingers.

"And will you come to me every night?” I whispered.

In my imagination I saw those stained lips twitch into a smile. I blushed and walked back to the garden.

"Can you believe it?” I heard one of the men say. “No more than a child and here she is talking to the thing as Mollie Scarecrow might have done."

My husband came every night, striding across the fields after the workers had gone home. He would let himself in, then sit beside me. He said little, although he had a way of looking at me, with his head tilted forward and his eyes reflecting the firelight. A smile played across his lips that seemed to say, “No need for words, Chloe—it is just us two."

He laughed easily, a kind laugh like leaves tumbling in the wind. I asked him once why he laughed so often and he said, “Because it is good to be here—and because you wanted my name.” I giggled then, nervously. He pulled me to him and wrestled me into his lap, nipping at my neck and shoulders until I nipped his back. Delighted, he turned my face to his and kissed me.

One night, as the fields ripened with early summer, Darrell pulled his chair next to mine. He gazed at me. “And what will you do with my name?” he said.

"Use it to call you in from the fields,” I said.

"Oh?” He grinned and placed a hand on my knee. His shirt sleeve rode up, exposing his right forearm. Thinner than the left, the wrist bore a weeping gash. I touched the skin above the cut. “What is this?” I asked.

He poked it. “The effects of time and weather."

Shaken, I rose. My good knee threatened to give way. “It needs tending,” I said.

Darrell caught my hand. “Wait—will you put salve on it? It will do no good."

I sank into my chair, staring at the wound. Beneath the watery gloss, the exposed muscle was golden, not red or pink. “Tomorrow, then,” I said.

The next day, I trudged across the fields, the mending basket slung over one arm. I tugged at Joseph Dunne's elbow. “I need you to lower my husband from the pole,” I said.

Joseph set his hoe aside. He glanced at my husband, then he glanced at me. “There is nothing wrong with the scarecrow."

"Please,” I said. “Just lower him."

"Ger, Edwin,” Joseph said.

I sat at the foot of the pole. The men lowered Darrell into my arms. Light and insubstantial, his body radiated the warmth of the sun. I lifted his arm, then probed the tear with my fingers. A bit of chaff puffed from the split cloth. I reached into the mending basket and withdrew a wad of straw. I stuffed my husband's arm, plumping it, then sorted through the basket, nudging aside scraps and bobbins until I found the packet of needles.

Later, as I tied off the thread, Thomas Halpern strolled by. Although he avoided tripping over me, he did not look at me. I shivered; had I looked into his eyes, I thought, I would not have seen myself reflected there. I stroked my husband's coarse, cotton arm.

That evening, by candlelight and hearthlight, I studied Darrell's face. A tautness replaced the fleshiness of youth—he looked to be a man of twenty-five or twenty-six. Around his eyes, lines foreshadowed age. As I reached to touch his hair, still dark and fine, he took my hand and pressed it to his cheek. His eyes sparkled. Rising, he lifted me from my chair and carried me to bed.

In the wake of our lovemaking, I compared his kisses to those of real men, to those of Ger Malins and Thomas Halpern. His were sweeter, kinder than theirs. His tasted of summer. His hands, tracing my face and the curl of my body, glided over me without Thomas’ desperate need or Ger's clumsy shame. But he was not a man, he was not real....

Darrell propped himself on one elbow and gazed down at me. He sketched a line with his finger from my chin to my throat. Sadness softened his eyes. “You don't believe in me, do you?” he said.

Confused and guilty, I clasped his hand, twining his fingers. “Darrell—"

"Hush,” he said. “Say nothing."

He kissed me, pulling me close. He tasted of salt.

"A lovely day for a wedding,” Emma said, sipping her ale. “And a lovely evening for a dance."

The couples laughed and swayed on the commons before us, the bride and groom leading the chain of dancers through a reel. I twisted my hands. I had fulfilled my duty, I had witnessed the vows; now I wanted to go home. Beyond the village, beneath the full moon, Darrell waited in the late summer fields. Waited, and no doubt wondered where I was. Until Joseph and Thomas had tapped at my door, I had forgotten about the wedding.

Emma smirked. “Thinking of your own husband, Chloe Scarecrow?"

I resisted glaring at her. I leaned over and reached for my glass of ale.

"How lucky you are,” Emma said. “The rest of us can only hope to marry once, but like Mollie you can look forward to a new husband every year."

I straightened, leaving the ale untouched. “Did Mollie Scarecrow know her husbands’ names?"

"Did she name them?” Emma said. “Not that I ever heard. But then, she had so many."

With a rustle of skirts, Nora Halpern sat beside me. Her cheeks flushed with anger, she chipped at the leg of the chair with her fingernails. Thomas stalked toward us, weaving between the dancers, until Nora turned her back on him. He stopped, his hands brushing tight circles along his thighs. The dancers shuffled in front of him, hiding him from view.

"I caught him with the Morris girl,” Nora said. “He had a hand on her arm. Only a matter of time before it roved elsewhere."

"You see how lucky you are, Chloe Scarecrow,” Emma said. “No one will ever tire of you."

Nora's nostrils flared. “He never tired—” she said, then bowed her head. Tears caught in her lashes.

Thomas and Joseph drove me back to the cottage. All the way home, Joseph hummed a phrase of melody, singing a word or two whenever Thomas growled at him. I sat between them, hugging my crutch to my breast, afraid to speak. They reeked of soured ale, and, between Thomas’ black mood and Joseph's flippant gaiety, I trusted neither of them.

Joseph reined in at my gate and stretched his legs. “Well, Mrs. Scarecrow,” he said, “half a minute and I'll give you a hand—"

"I'll see her to the door,” Thomas said. His voice could have pierced steel.

Joseph wrapped the reins around his fist. He nodded.

Thomas hopped from the cart, raising a clap of dust. He pulled me roughly from the seat and dragged me to the door. Squeezed between the doorframe and his chest, I held my crutch between us like a crucifix. He leaned forward to kiss me. I pushed him away. My good knee buckled and I pitched forward into his arms. He grasped me by my shoulders, his fingers digging into my flesh as if drilling for bone.

"Listen, Mrs. Scarecrow,” he said between gritted teeth, “you must be a saint or a whore to live so far from the village and not go mad. We both know you are no saint."

I tried to wrench myself free but he held me fast. “Joseph!” I shouted. “Joseph Dunne!"

Thomas drew back his hand and hit me. I raked my nails across his upper lip, catching his nose. He stumbled back. With the doorframe to bolster me, I swung my crutch in his face. “I will do worse! Then how will you explain yourself to Nora?"

He wiped his upper lip with the back of his hand. “Whore,” he said. He stormed away.

I let myself into the cottage and leaned against the door. I listened: Thomas growled at Joseph while Joseph hummed his bit of tune. The horses’ hooves receded into the distance. Slowly, the crickets’ voices rose in song. I hobbled from the door, shaken and enraged, then sank into a chair. The crutch trembled in my hands. I set it aside.

The door opened and Darrell entered. Even by moonlight, I could see the angry set of his brow. He shut the door behind him. He stood in the center of the room, his arms folded across his chest, his head tilted back. Comforted by his anger, I forced a smile. “You needn't worry,” I said. “I'm fine."

"Are you?” he said sharply.

"He did not hurt me."

"'He?'” my husband said. “Oh, ‘he,’ is it? So that is where you've been."

I gaped at him. “It is not. I've been to a wedding."

"To a wedding.” He nodded. “Ah! To seek someone else?"

"Darrell—"

"Someone who doesn't need mending?"

"I mend you because I want to—"

"You mend me because they expect it!” He grasped me by the shoulders, his fingers digging into my flesh.

I kicked at him with my good leg, my foot scraping his shin. We tumbled to the floor in a heap. My elbow smacked the hearthstones.

Darrell groped for me. “Chloe, are you all right?"

I cradled my throbbing elbow and curled out of reach. “Get away from me! I never want to see you, any of you, ever again! Nora is right, you're all the same! Go away!"

"Chloe—"

"Go away!” I shrieked. I felt along the floor for something to throw at him, but found nothing. The door opened and shut. Between sobs when I gasped for breath, I could hear the crickets singing to the full moon.

The first night, I locked my door with a chair. He did not try the knob; that hurt a little. The second night, I set the chair in front of the door. The third night, I left the chair by the hearth.

During the day, I ignored him, keeping my back to him while I worked the garden. The people who passed the cottage on their way to and from the field barely nodded to me. A few stared, squinted at me and pursed their lips. Only Joseph Dunne stopped to talk. I finally asked him, “Joseph, what have I done that everyone is so cold?"

He gazed into the clouds, shading his eyes with his hand. “Those scratches on Thomas Halpern's face,” he said. “He told everyone you clawed him because he wouldn't bed you."

My stomach knotted. “It's a lie! Joseph, I called out to you—"

"They don't believe me. Thomas claims I was drunk."

That night I locked the door with the chair again.

The summer sky, an angry gray, pressed down on the fields next morning. The wind rippled through the corn, spinning free the loose leaves and stirring the dust. “Rain by evening,” I said to myself.

People passed the cottage on their way to the fields. Two men stopped at the foot of the pole and gazed up at the scarecrow. I turned away, until one of them laughed. I peered over my shoulder. One of the men stretched to tug the lapels of my husband's blue jacket, then hopped a little and tossed something at his cap. I groped for my crutch and struggled to my feet, but the men had already loped away.

Lightning split the sky, followed by a sudden rain. The lashing torrent drove people from the fields. I retreated to the cottage and brewed a cup of tea. Through the window, I watched the rain pummel the earth, then subside. A threatening stillness followed; the clouds massed tighter and darker. The storm waited, gathering strength.

I glanced at my husband. Let him drown, I thought, then pushed the tea cup aside and leaned toward the window. A fox, stealing through the corn, passed my husband, then circled back to crouch at the foot of the pole. It leapt at him, clawing his legs and ribs in an attempt to gain purchase. It fell, then leapt again. It tore at his jacket before it scrabbled backward and dropped to the earth. It ran. My husband teetered from the pole at an angle.

Thunder rumbled in the distance. I grabbed the mending basket and hurried to the field. I hopped more than ran, my lame leg trailing as my crutch sank in the mud. I skidded on the straw at my husband's feet and looked up. One leg hung in tatters while the left shoulder of his coat flapped open, exposing the lining. I set the basket down and balanced on my good leg. With my hands on my husband's hips, I steadied myself. A lump formed in my throat.

"If I pull you down, I might well pull you apart,” I said. “Darrell, you must help me."

A wind whipped my hair into my eyes and I let go of him. I shook my head, combing at my hair until I could see. My husband slumped at the foot of the pole, his button eyes beaded with rain. On his cap rested a handful of cherries. I looked again at the rent in his jacket. A smear of red juice outlined its tattered edge. Seething, I snatched at my basket and sat beside my husband. “Fools,” I muttered, brushing the cherries away. “Idiots and fools."

Only a little straw nested in the bottom of the basket. I tore leaves from the nearest cornstalks to restuff my husband's leg. I then patched his thigh with scraps of old skirts and aprons, sewing quickly, ever attentive to the clouds above us.

With the leg mended, I examined the rest of him. A scratch on his cheek warranted three stitches, one gloved finger needed two. The jacket still hung from the pole; I dismissed it. I sat with him, holding the straw-stiff hand until a drop of rain spattered on my arm. “I must go inside,” I said. “I think it best you come in, too."

I grasped the pole and pulled myself to my feet. By the time I reached the cottage door, I was soaked through. I stirred the hearth fire and waited. Soon the door creaked open. Darrell leaned in. He bit his lip, then stepped inside. “Come in, Darrell, and warm yourself,” I said.

He shut the door. Absently, he rubbed the scar on his cheek. “Chloe—"

"Come, warm yourself,” I said, looking into the flames.

He joined me at the hearth. He touched my hand, tentatively, and when I didn't withdraw it, laced his fingers through mine. “Forgive me,” he said. “When I saw you leave that day, I feared you would not come back. When you did, all that fear turned to anger—"

"I forgive you."

"I worry sometimes that I'm not enough for you. Some nights, your hands seem to measure and weigh me, as if to compare me—"

I placed my hand over his mouth. “Darrell,” I said. “I forgive you. Do you forgive me?"

"Always,” he said. He smiled, relieved. The lines around his eyes deepened. My husband was a man in his thirties, weathered by the sun. The autumn and winter rains would cripple him. Come spring, my husband would dwindle to torn rags and crumpled straw. Far older than the months that bound him, he would stoop beneath the weight of the seasons until, his head cradled in my lap, he looked up at me one last time before the wind scattered him across the snow.

I pulled myself into his arms and clung to him. Until spring, he was mine. He hugged me, then lifted my chin. His smile faded. “Chloe, what's wrong?"

I held my breath, then exhaled. “Nothing. I'm just glad you're here."

Summer turned to autumn. The scent of ripe corn hung on the breeze. Thomas Halpern's face healed and with it people's scorn. A few spoke to me, hesitantly at first, then freely, teasing me about my frail husband. I even went to the harvest dance, only to overhear Emma Grey comment, “She is more like Mollie Scarecrow every day."

But Mollie Scarecrow never loved Darrell. I waited for Joseph Dunne and Ger Malins to drive me home.

And Darrell aged. With each storm, he grew thinner and more pale until I could barely remember my young husband of the spring and summer. Yet his kisses remained sweet and his ways kind. He spoke more, as if to compensate for his failing body, enchanting me with stories about the animals and birds that inhabited the fields, and about the people who worked around him. He soothed me with remembered pleasures: the day I first bid him come, the week it rained every day and I asked him to remain indoors...

One morning before the first snow, I convinced Ger Malins and Joseph Dunne to remove my husband from the pole. My basket well-lined with straw and cloth, I set about trying to heal the season's wounds and make my husband young again. I plumped him with straw, patching the smallest rips and frays. Just as I tied off the thread after applying a patch to his knee, my fingers tore through his thigh. Brittle with rot, the cotton could take no more. I called to Joseph and bade him replace my husband. He did so, carefully, but my husband's arm ripped under his grasp.

The snows came. Each night Darrell seemed to fade before my eyes. A stooped man with sheer, mottled skin and bright eyes, he held me as if it hurt to clasp me as he once had. His breath was shallow and his laugh a wheeze. Two nights into the New Year, he plodded to the cottage, then sank into a chair and dozed.

I dragged my chair next to his and watched him sleep. A tracery of veins throbbed at his temple. I took his hand.

He started awake. “Have I been sleeping?"

"You have.” I squeezed his hand. I pressed my lips together, decided to ask, decided not to, decided—"Darrell, will you come again? When the men hang the new scarecrow from the pole, will it be you?"

He smiled sadly. “No."

"Just one year...?"

"I am the scarecrow,” he said, “and the seasons are killing me. Come spring, I will be gone.” He leaned forward. “But Chloe, promise me—remember my name. And remember that I can only give you what you ask."

I gazed at the withered hand in mine. “Did you know, while I was making you, I dreamed you were a sailor and that some day you would take me to the sea. I embroidered my name on your heart so that—that..."

He pressed my hand. “I know,” he said. “I know."

As I held him that night and listened to his rustling breath, I pondered his words, “Remember my name.” What if, I thought, by naming the new scarecrow Darrell, I could somehow bring him back...

I awoke the next morning. My husband dangled from the pole, his limbs askew. That night, he did not come, nor the next, nor ever again. I set about building another scarecrow, begging another pair of white trousers and another blue jacket. Emma sent a skein of white wool. I dyed it black. The buttons she sent were blue. I sent word to her that I needed brown. Joseph returned with her reply. “Emma said that like each man, each scarecrow is different,” he related, “as Mollie Scarecrow knew."

After Joseph left, I sat on my bed and stared at the blue buttons on my palm. The new scarecrow's legs lay at the foot of the bed, his hands on the table. As Mollie Scarecrow knew. I flung the buttons across the room. One of them shattered. I grabbed the trousers by the ankles and shook them until straw littered the cottage. A few pieces fluttered into the fire. They burst into flames and quickly turned to ash, as short lived as my husband.

"Mollie!” I shouted to whatever spirit haunted the cottage. “Did you love your husbands as I do? Did they come to you, men of flesh for a few brief hours, only to die come spring? Mollie! Did you ever tell anyone? Of course not, how could you, why would anyone believe you?"

I dreamt of Mollie that night. “You knew,” she said, “you knew my husbands came to me. You knew the first night your husband came to you. But you were afraid of me. You refused to believe that we would become the same person."

"We are not,” I said. “You never loved Darrell."

Mollie shook her head. “Spare yourself. It is easier to let them go if you do not name them."

The next morning with the sun sparkling on the snow, I walked to the pole and took Darrell's right hand. “How can you love me now?” I said. I held his hand until the chill seeped through me. Some days I just stood beside Darrell, other days I talked, creating futures that eddied around us like snow-flurries. My toes purpled and scaled with the cold, but still I went. When the palm of his right hand tore, I held his left. I feared spring. In spring, the people of the village would come for my husband.

I held the door, blocking the men's entrance. Ger Malins and Rory Coates hung back, stamping their feet and glancing about them. Joseph Dunne nodded to me. “Good day, Mrs. Scarecrow,” he said. “We've come for the new scarecrow."

I tried to swallow the lump in my throat. “There is no new scarecrow."

Color drained from Joseph's face. He snatched at Ger's arm. “Go,” he said. “Fetch Emma.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose and turned to me. “It is spring. We need a new scarecrow. The old one is little more than rags."

"There is no new scarecrow,” I said. I shut the door. I brewed a pot of tea and waited for Emma.

An hour later, without so much as a knock, Emma flung open the door. She stamped into the cottage. “Where is the new scarecrow?” she said.

I gestured for her to sit. I nudged a cup of tea toward her and squared my shoulders. “I want no other husband,” I said.

"Are you mad? Look at it, look at your ‘husband'! It is old, worn. What good is it to you or to us? Are the fields to go unprotected?"

I glanced out the window. Joseph and Rory lowered my husband from the pole. “I will not have another,” I said.

Emma slapped the table. “But you shall and many of them. Mollie Scarecrow lived for that. Of course she mourned the passing of each husband, but think what she had!"

"Yes, a grief for every year,” I said. “I cannot face this loss each spring."

Darrell's limbs, flat and limp, swayed as Joseph carried him across the field. I inhaled. The breath hurt. “Please, Emma,” I said. “Leave this one for me. I will make you another, just leave this one for me."

Her face softened. “We cannot leave the fields unprotected. Can you make a new scarecrow tonight?"

I glanced at the stuffed torso and hands shoved beneath the bed. A head and legs, that was all the new scarecrow needed. “I can,” I said.

"Then I will leave this one for one night,” she said. She took my hand. “Chloe, the old scarecrow is dead."

The truth of her words shrank to a hard knot inside me.

Emma squeezed my hand and rose. “It is no use to you or to us, except as ash to bless the fields.” She went to the door and leaned out. “Joseph, bring the scarecrow here. We will delay the bonfire for one night."

Joseph carried my husband inside. He questioned me with a look. “Just there,” I said, pointing. He lay Darrell on the bed.

In the small hours of the morning, I cradled the new scarecrow's head in my lap and knotted the last stitch. I sucked my bleeding fingers. With its hair brushed over the broken button, the scarecrow had a wild, rakish expression. A smile might tame it somewhat, I thought. Setting the head aside, I searched the pantry for beets but found none. I picked up the head and drew a mouth with my own blood. I attached the head to the body.

"Stay here by the hearth tonight,” I said. “Tomorrow I will be yours."

Fully dressed, I climbed into bed beside Darrell. Faded straw peeked out of the countless rips and tears; his hair hung thin and colorless. Yet his eyes still shone.

I touched his cheek. “How can you be dead?"

I slept. I dreamt that Darrell pulled me close and kissed the nape of my neck, all the while murmuring in my ear. His breath was light but warm. At dawn I woke, rolling over to face him. Darrell smoothed the hair from my brow.

I sat up. “Darrell?"

His smile lent his sunken cheeks a fullness they did not have, while his eyes, caught in a mesh of wrinkles, glittered in the pale light. “It's been so long, Chloe,” he said. His voice was as brittle as crusted snow.

I took his hand and pressed it to my cheek. “Not dead?"

"Near it. Hush, Chloe, don't cry. It is the way of the seasons."

"Damn the seasons! Darrell, I will keep you here and nurse you—"

"To health? Chloe, it is too late.” He shifted a little and winced. He squinted at the hearth. “You have made a new husband."

"Emma and the others forced me to make him."

He gazed at me with affection. “Forced you? No. All of your life you've let others decide your fate—for the good of the fields, for the good of the village, because that is the way it has always been. You must ask for what you want, Chloe."

My mind filled with visions of empty fields surrounding an empty village. “And if in doing so, I destroy the village?” I said. “I can't do that."

Darrell pinched my chin between his thumb and forefinger. “But just now you were willing to damn the seasons,” he said.

We dozed. In the late morning I woke, my fingers entwined with those of a dry, rotted glove. I set Darrell's hand by his side and crawled from the bed. My mind numbed, I paced between the old scarecrow and the new until the jangle of the cart stopped before the cottage. I sank to my knees.

Emma knocked and entered, followed by Joseph and Rory. She smiled. “There,” she said, pointing to the new scarecrow.

Without a word, Joseph and Rory carried the straw man from the cottage. Emma went to the bed. She crossed Darrell's hands on his chest as if readying him for burial.

The scream building inside me threatened to burst my lungs. I stood and eased myself between Emma and Darrell. “Emma,” I said, “he still lives."

She patted my hand. “No, Chloe, he does not."

"But he does! Emma if you burn him now, I'll never get over it—"

"But you will,” Emma said soothingly, reaching around me to straighten Darrell's collar. “Mollie did—"

I brushed her hand aside. “I am not Mollie Scarecrow."

"No?” Emma said, her face puckered with spite. “You might as well be! The two of you inventing loves for yourselves, clothing the scarecrow with dreams! And how can you imagine this thing as a husband? How can you want this ancient bundle of rags?"

A tear trickled down my cheek; I clenched my teeth. “And what of Mr. Grey?” I said. “Now that he is old, will you give him up? Do you wish that you had as many husbands as Mollie Scarecrow?"

Emma stared at me. With a snort of disgust, she walked to the door and forced it open. “Joseph, come and take this thing away,” she said. “The bonfire is ready."

I followed her outside. “No, Emma, please!"

"Will you come to your husband's funeral, Mrs. Scarecrow?” she said.

Joseph and Rory squeezed past us and entered the cottage. I held my crutch in both hands to keep from shaking. “This is not a funeral,” I said. “It's an execution."

Emma turned to me. “Will you come?"

The two men carried my husband to the cart.

I nodded.

"Your shawl, Mrs. Scarecrow,” Emma said.

My voice shrilled. “No. You will leave without me."

"Mrs. Scarecrow—"

"You will! And then you will take him to the commons and burn him alive!"

Emma sneered. “Rory, fetch Mrs. Scarecrow's shawl."

I rode with Darrell in the back of the cart. I cradled his head in my lap, stroking the last of his hair, tucking loose wisps of straw into his limbs. My tears flowed unchecked, splashing onto his face, and I imagined him crying, too. I murmured to him, I sang to him, I straightened his shoulders to make him more comfortable. In my mind, I remembered him young, I remembered him old, and realized that young or old, I loved him.

The cart rattled to a halt. I peered through blurry eyes at the pyre adorned with the first spring flowers: milkmaids, blue-eyed grass, poppies, wild mustard. To the right, Rory set a torch to the bonfire. The scent of wood smoke stung my nostrils. I stroked my husband's hair. “No,” I whispered. “Not like that. Not you."

Three women crowded beside the cart. The first, Ger Malins’ wife, said, “Come, Mrs. Scarecrow, let us prepare the scarecrow."

I slapped her hands away and clutched at Darrell's chest. His upper body pulled away from his legs.

I screamed and drew back. The women took him then, lifting him by halves from the cart. Numbed, I watched them attach his legs to his waist, patting loose straw into place and folding under a frayed seam. The fire crackled behind them. Darrell's eyes gleamed in the firelight.

I lowered myself over the side of the cart. Joseph caught my arm before my lame leg folded beneath me. He handed me my crutch. I limped to the pyre and knelt, touching my husband's lips. I brushed at the corner of my eye with the back of my hand, then looked up at the three women. “Please,” I said, “let me keep this one."

Ger Malins’ wife knelt beside me. She touched Darrell's cheek. She looked up at someone standing behind me. “Why not?” she said. “What harm is there?"

Emma Grey stepped into view. “What harm?” she said. “How can we properly bless the fields? Is has always been like this. Ger, lay the pyre in the coals."

Ger shook his head. “Let her keep this one."

Thomas Halpern shoved his way between the women and the pyre. Three scars shone white along his upper lip. “Play the dirge, Martin,” he said, glaring at me, his eyes bright with triumph. “Let us lay this sorry bundle of scrap to rest."

He forced me aside, then hefted the pyre. Darrell fell into his arms. Legs spread wide, Thomas lifted my husband over his head.

I threw myself at Thomas Halpern's feet, clawing at his shins with my nails. He kicked himself free. He staggered, then dangled my husband over the flames.

"Darrell!” I shouted, wrapping myself around Thomas’ calf. “Dear God, as you love me! Darrell, save yourself!"

Thomas backhanded me across the temple. White light and a shower of sparks burned across my closed eyes. I held my breath, swaying to ease the pain. “Darrell!” I said again, his name a comfort. “Stop him!"

The air filled with the sound of crickets on a warm night. Shrill and frantic, their voices sought words. The sparks faded from my vision; I pressed my palms to my eyes. The crickets sang still louder. “Darrell will be coming soon,” I said. “Young and strong as spring. He will come home."

The crickets chorused at a fever pitch. “Stop them!” they said. “They will cast each other into the fire!"

I opened my eyes, blinking to focus on the confusion around me. Surrounded by a half-circle of people, two men grappled before the bonfire, arms locked around each other's shoulders. The blond man stomped at his foe's instep. The dark-haired man pulled away only to be reeled once more into the blond's embrace. They staggered nearer the flames.

Ger and Rory broke through the half-circle and snatched at the men. Ger held the blond, pinning his arms to his sides. “Thomas!” Ger said. “Stop or you'll both be killed!"

With a wrench, Thomas tried to break free. Ger held him fast. Thomas glowered at the dark-haired man, then paled, his eyes widening. “What is this?” Thomas said. “Who are you? Where is the scarecrow?"

Darrell took a step back. Again my husband of the late spring, he felt along his arms, squeezing and pinching, a grateful smile flitting across his face. The crowd whispered and hummed. I laughed, giddy with wonder and grasped the skirt of the woman next to me. “Darrell!” I said, holding my arms out to him. “Come home with me!"

He stepped toward me. Then someone seized his arms.

Gaunt and tall, the young man wore clothes very like Darrell's. He looked at me. His callow, indistinct features contrasted with the definition of his red mouth. A lock of brown hair hung over one eye. He combed the lock aside with his fingers. One eye was clouded and blind, the other blue.

The new scarecrow turned to Darrell. “You have seen your seasons,” he said. “This year is mine."

Darrell withered before my eyes. His shoulders stooped and his head bent, the skin sagged from his weary frame. His hair thinned, sloughing from his scalp. The new scarecrow offered his arm and Darrell took it. Together they walked toward the bonfire.

I took a step and fell. Emma caught me and held me. I shivered, my teeth chattering. “Not—not like this,” I stammered. “Not like this."

Emma prayed. “God help us,” she said. “Please."

Darrell looked over his shoulder at me. “What do you want, Chloe?” he asked.

The new scarecrow jerked to face me. Uncertainty dimmed his good eye. Empathy kindled in me: we were both crippled, both young, both frightened. His boyish features radiated promises of strength and passion while Darrell's worn visage offered quiet and decline.

But Darrell's brown eyes held depths of affection. How long would he live? I wondered. A few months, a few weeks, a few days? The new scarecrow promised a year. Like real men, Darrell could make no promises.

I bit my lip. And what of the fields? Without the scarecrow, they would be barren, and without the scarecrow's wife, so would the women. But why couldn't the village pick a new bride each year to make and marry the scarecrow?

I imagined the new scarecrow's embrace, his arms firm and well-muscled, as each new scarecrow's arms would be; as it always had been. The new scarecrow stepped toward me. “You have given me your blood,” he said. “Your promise."

I lifted my chin. “But I have given Darrell my heart."

The new scarecrow collapsed, a man of rag and straw. Its head rested on the edge of the coals. Darrell knelt. He pulled the scarecrow from the fire. As he extinguished the sparks along the straw man's crown, Darrell grew younger until he was again my husband of the late spring. He rose and came to me. Blood oozed from a scratch on his hand.

Emma released me. Darrell lifted me to my feet. “Chloe,” he said, and only that.

I kissed his neck. Arm in arm, we walked past the stunned, silent people. No one stopped us as we left the village to follow the road through the spring fields.

"The Case of the Detective's Smile” first appeared in Sherlock Holmes in Orbit, from DAW Books, 1995.

Author's Note: “'The Case of the Detective's Smile’ leaped up during a single overnight writing session at Clarion West ‘92. Kristine Kathryn Rusch suggested I send it to Mike Resnick for a collection of fantastical Sherlock Holmes he was putting together with Marty Greenberg, and soon enough it became my first anthology sale. I don't know if I found the story or it found me. Either way, the meeting of two of my favorite Victorians remains one of my more pleasurable writing experiences. (3:00 AM deliriums might have helped too, but hey.) It's still one of my personal faves, and of my stories so far it has proven the best suited for public readings."

"THE MUNDANE BORES ME, Watson."

These were the first words Sherlock Holmes had spoken all morning—a gray, frigid January morning of 1898. His statement so startled me that my coffee was jostled from its cup, speckling the morning Times spread out before me.

He lounged listlessly in his armchair before the fire, a hodge-podge of books and monographs littering the floor about his feet. My friend languidly waved his pipe before his face, watching the fragrant smoke rise in ever-changing patterns that veiled his features.

"And good morning to you, Holmes,” I retorted, dabbing up the coffee spill. I offered him a scone from Mrs. Hudson's breakfast tray, but he refused with a directed wave of his hand. Smoke swirled in graceful curls about his solemn face. By this stage in our long association, I had learned his moods well, and I had seen this one before.

"Surely, Holmes,” I began, “You cannot have already forgotten that frightful episode of the princess and the bloody marionettes."

Holmes shrugged. “Trifles, Watson, trifles."

"Or the case of the spotted diplomat?"

"Hardly worthy of my unique talents, you must agree."

I was undaunted. “Well, then, that Cornish horror of the Devil's Foot."

"Watson, Watson, Watson.” Holmes turned his great hawk-like face toward me. “My blood cries out for challenge, for the unexpected, for anything beyond the realm of the everyday world.” He indicated the view beyond the sitting room windows. “Which does bore me so. But I thank you for trying to relieve my black mood."

In earlier days, before the so-called Return of Sherlock Holmes, I would have worried that my friend would soon pull a tiny key from his pocket, open a certain drawer in his work desk, and withdraw a polished morocco case. A case in which he kept a hypodermic syringe with its long hollow needle. For it was while in such dark ruminations that he had sought solace in the black embrace of a seven percent solution of cocaine.

But the Sherlock Holmes who had returned from his mysterious three-year journey abroad was a changed man. Of course, he was still the friend I had publicly declared the best and wisest man whom I have ever known. Nonetheless, the foreign lands he encountered in his travels, during which all the world, including myself, thought Sherlock Holmes dead, had altered him in subtle ways that only I could have noticed. Chief among these was the absolute absence of the cocaine case. He had not touched it since his resurrection. What I had tried in vain to do for many years, his secret and solitary adventures had done for me.

When pressed about the details of his journeying, he would merely tell me to re-read the “colorful romance” in which I recorded the events surrounding his Return. Over the years, however, troubling discrepancies had come to my attention. His account of travels in Tibet and Khartoum was rife with fallacies, anachronisms, and paradoxes. I was forced to the conclusion that Holmes’ statements regarding his Great Hiatus were the purest invention on his part.

Often I wondered: what adventures could be of such profound secrecy and mystery that he would not share them with another living soul, including—especially—his most trusted friend?

I returned to my breakfast and newspaper, concerned but resigned. Holmes was starved for stimulation of his renowned powers, and nothing less than a case of great import could blow the dark cloud of ennui from his brain.

It was with providential fortune that a knock rapped our door.

"Mr. Holmes? Doctor?” called Mrs. Hudson.

Holmes seemed to not hear her. He remained still, eyes fixed on the smoke twisting in the air before him. With a grunt of dismay I opened the door.

"A woman is at the door, sir,” said our landlady. “She insists on seeing Mr. Holmes."

"Did she offer her name?"

"No sir. But she told me to say that she and Mr. Holmes share mutual acquaintances, and to give him this.” She handed me a playing card, of the kind used in a gaming deck. I examined it for anything peculiar, such as a message written along its white border. But it was merely an unremarkable Queen of Hearts.

This portended something extraordinary. Anonymous strangers on our doorstep had become routine over the years, but they usually saved their cryptic messages until after they had entered our rooms. I turned toward Holmes. By all appearances, he was completely unaware of our presence in this hemisphere.

Mrs. Hudson peered over my shoulder at Holmes. A frown of concern tugged at her elderly features. She stood on her toes and leaned close to my ear.

"Oh dear,” she whispered so softly I could barely hear her words. “Mr. Holmes is a gray cloud today, isn't he?"

I whispered in reply. “You may have just provided a ray of sun, Mrs. Hudson. Please show the lady up."

She looked gravely at my companion, then exited, silently closing the door behind her.

"Mrs. Hudson has taken to predicting the weather, I see,” Holmes remarked from his chair. I felt my face flush with embarrassment, and he smiled wanly. “But within every gray cloud lurks the makings of a thunderstorm. Pray, Watson, let me see our visitor's calling card."

I handed it to him. He leaned forward and studied it intently. He flexed it gently between his hands and rubbed its surface with his long fingers. At last he brought it to his nose and sniffed, as if inhaling the vapors of a fine wine.

"Our mysterious visitor is between forty and fifty years of age,” Holmes said. “She hails from a family with close associations to University education. Specifically Oxford, where I suggest her father was at least a professor of mathematics. She has particularly fond memories of her childhood that she treasures dearly."

Even after so many years and hundreds of cases in my files, I was still capable of surprise. “Holmes,” I said. “If I believed in supernatural forces I would say you were of their realm. How, for heaven's sake, can smelling a playing card tell you so much about a woman you haven't even seen yet?"

"As always, Watson, you choose not to see that which is in plain sight. Notice the manufacturer's imprint.” He indicated a singular symbol hidden amid the ornate decorative patterns on the back of the card. Tiny letters were printed beneath it. “Highley and Wilkes, 1862,” I read.

"Exactly. Makers of the finest playing cards ever to grace a gentleman's table. Their work was particularly popular among those in the cloisters of academia, who often commissioned limited-edition packs for themselves. The set to which this orphan belongs was such a commission, printed in 1862 for the Department of Mathematics, Christ Church, Oxford, which is represented here in the card's illustrative decor. The fact that our guest is in possession of this particular card indicates that she has a close male acquaintance associated with that department at that time. Most probably her father. This card, after more than three decades, is in remarkably fine condition. It is no forgery, for it carries the unique scent of the treating chemicals used in Highley and Wilkes paper. It has likely been kept pressed in a scrapbook, carefully isolated from both dirt and handling fingers. I infer that it was given to our visitor at a memorable time in her childhood during—or shortly after—1862. It has remained a memento of her youthful days amongst the ivy of academe."

Before I could utter an exclamation of amazement, a woman's voice spoke up behind me. “Impressive indeed, Mr. Holmes. Nine out of ten."

I turned toward the voice as Holmes rose to his feet. A handsome woman stood in the doorway. She was about Holmes’ age, with streaks of gray adding mature dignity to hair that had once been deep brown. She was clad in mourning black and held what appeared to be a glass case the size of a jewelry box, tinted a smoky red.

She smiled disarmingly and looked squarely at Holmes. “What my acquaintances tell me about your gifts,” she nodded toward me, “and what I read through the good doctor's reminiscences in the Strand, have apparently not been exaggerations. But in truth my father was a Dean. I had a beloved friend who was Mathematics Lecturer of Christ Church. He was the gentleman who gave me the card when I was ten years old, and yes, my memories of that time are very precious indeed."

With renewed vigor, Holmes stepped over the clutter and approached the woman. “Please forgive my error, Madam. Do come in."

He offered her a chair and she sat, resting the glass box carefully on her lap. Its exquisitely crafted facets reflected the light in complex patterns. On the lid was engraved a stylized heart, similar to those on the playing card.

Holmes took the chair opposite her. “You have me at a disadvantage, Madam. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?"

"My name is not important just now. In fact, it would initiate a flurry of questions on your part, queries of a personal nature that would merely delay my mission here today. Let us say that your assistance in a significant case was valuable to some—” she paused, and her expression took on a pleased, far-seeing look, “—acquaintances of mine. Five years ago."

Holmes sat up with a start. I had never before seen such an expression of shock and bewilderment on his stoic face.

"You left them,” she continued, “before they had a chance to thank you adequately. That is why I am here.” She paused and gazed into the red crystalline patterns of the box. A tear drifted down her cheek. Holmes offered her a handkerchief, which she accepted with a small, embarrassed laugh.

"Most kind,” she said, dabbing her eyes.

Holmes waited for the woman to collect herself. Then he leaned forward, steepling his fingers in his gesture of undivided attention. “Madam, I ask you to provide specifics. At the time you indicate, I was ... traveling extensively, so this ‘significant case’ could have occurred in any one of a number of, let us say, exotic locales.” He indicated her mourning clothes. “And if you please, Madam, may I ask who has passed on? Is it someone known to me, a client from the case you mentioned?"

She shook her head. “No. Not the client. But the departed was known to you. He once found you to be a most promising student, though a tad too serious at times. He was aware of this particular mystery; however, he was not involved in its resolution, which you devised to the gratitude of all concerned."

Holmes frowned. “Madam, you speak in riddles, and I have met few individuals who do that in a manner I find engaging. Please come to your point so that I may be at your service."

The woman in black nodded. “Mr. Holmes, as Doctor Watson is your chronicler and Boswell, so too did I once have mine. He was a kind and gentle man, the only adult who found it not only easy but logical to believe the fanciful accounts told to him by a child friend. He wrote down all I told him about special places I had visited and the unusual persons I had met there."

She turned to me. “Like you, Doctor, he ... added color to my reports and altered many of the unimportant details so that they could be presented to a reading public. He knew few would believe the accounts. He even published them under a nom de plume. But he felt, as I think you do, that even grown-ups want to believe in something beyond the world we walk through everyday. They want to be told that maybe their own lives could be touched by the magic that surrounds us, if only their eyes saw what was before them.” This last was directed toward Holmes, who nodded behind peaked fingertips.

"I understand,” he said solemnly. Then a keen light of recognition shone in his eyes. He sat up straight and looked at the woman as if for the first time, as if he were seeing behind her eyes into a special realm that only they shared. Something intangible, like a wind or a whisper, passed between them. “Have you returned,” he asked, “to that place again?"

She gave him a sad smile. “Several times. Each time, I was the only one who had changed. It was as if only a day had passed since my previous visit. Time, I think, moves differently there than in our world. Perhaps Mr. H.G. Wells knows."

"Perhaps,” Holmes replied. “You have paid another visit most recently, am I correct? Your attire is connected with that journey?"

"Yes. I returned there last night. My husband believes I am visiting a sister. I spent a week there, maybe more, and still returned this morning. That's when I found out you had been there since my last visit. They speak most highly of you, you know. You solved a crisis of royal urgency, one that almost cost me my head. The only participant you upset was the local self-proclaimed consulting detective, who didn't take kindly to an outsider barging in on his jurisdiction."

"A successful consulting detective,” said Holmes, “should never be late, particularly if he wears a watch in his waistcoat pocket."

The dark woman laughed, and years seemed to fall away from her. I could see the child she once was, still was, behind the thin veil of age. She delicately lifted the box and gave it to Holmes.

"This is for you,” she said. “A small token of their gratitude, something you may use when you need it."

Holmes took the box, but his eyes never left the woman as she rose and strode gracefully toward the door. He followed her and opened the door for her.

"It has been an honour finally to meet you,” she said as Holmes took her hand.

"I was going to say the same, Madam. I hope to have the pleasure again."

"Perhaps. If we're both in the same place at the same time.” She looked at me. “Doctor. Thank you for your reminiscences.” Holmes gently closed the door after her.

He brushed his fingers over the beautiful cut glass container, held it up to the light and studied the fine filigree in its wine-red surfaces. Woven into the reflective facets were the words OPEN ME.

A silence hung between us for a long moment. What had just transpired between Holmes and that woman? He was keeping something from me, and I was not going to stand by and let him carry it further.

"Blast it, Holmes! Who was she? What on earth are you waiting for? Open the box!"

He looked me in the eye with an intensity I had not seen since his Return. “First, my dear Watson, I must ask you to hand me the Times. I suspect it holds the one item our visitor did not reveal. Though sadly I believe I know what it will tell us."

I passed the newspaper to him. He put the box on the table and shuffled the pages with restrained urgency, letting them fall like leaves to the floor until, at last, he found what he was searching for. A weight seemed to settle about his neck, and he sank into his chair. “What is it, Holmes?” I asked.

He handed the page to me. Amidst reports concerning the Sudan campaign, Indian finance, and the situation in Cuba, the most prominent item was a narrow column that covered the right-hand side of the page. It read

We regret to announce the death of Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as “Lewis Carroll,” the delightful author of “Alice in Wonderland” and other books of an exquisitely whimsical humour. He died yesterday at The Chestnuts, Guildford, the residence of his sisters, in his 64th year...

When I finished reading, I turned to find Holmes inserting a tiny glass key into the box's lock. With a delicate twist of his fingers, he unlocked the lid and gently raised it. Within was a sheet of stationary, which he withdrew and read in unmoving silence. The faintest whisper of amused recollection crossed Holmes’ features. Then he opened his fingers and let the sheet flutter toward the floor. I snatched it out of the air:

My dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes,

Our mutual acquaintances wish you to have this as a reflection of their appreciation re the Case of the Stolen Tarts. No one else, they say, could have come to the surprising truth of the mystery so thoroughly. Our friend the Caterpillar says it was certainly a three-pipe problem. The enclosed trifle is for you. You need not be concerned about the benefactor. He has plenty of them and never uses the same one more than once.

With fond admiration,

Alice Pleasance Hargreaves, née Liddell

Holmes reached into the box and pulled back a red velvet cloth. Underneath was the most astounding sight I have ever seen, and to this day I wonder if my eyes served me honestly. What I beheld was this: a floating crescent of cat-like teeth, drawn into a grin like a toothy quarter moon, perpetually amused. Before I could look closer, Holmes replaced the cloth and closed the lid. Holmes stood from his chair. He strode to his bookcase and sorted through myriad volumes, raising a cloud of ancient dust. At last, he pulled out a tattered edition that looked as though it had been well read long ago. He returned to his armchair and for the remainder of the day said not a word nor moved so much as a muscle save for the turning of the pages and the occasional chuckle or exclamation.

Since that day, whenever black clouds settle over him, Sherlock Holmes pulls a tiny key from his pocket, opens a certain drawer in his work desk, and withdraws a wonderfully crafted, wine-red glass case. I am always relieved when I hear the sound of the key turning in its lock.

"The City in Morning” was first published in Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, The Overlook Press, 1998.

Author's Note: “I've been told often that landscape appears as a character all its own in most of my stories. Well, here I certainly made the City a character. Also, Mileva Maric, a Serb mathematician who was Albert Einstein's first wife (and may have helped him with his theories; his letters to her refer to “our work on relative motion"), quantum physics, and the watershed political event of my generation."

TODAY, for the first time in weeks, the fog has lifted from the valley below and the city's towers rise like silver and gold blades above the river's bright blue swath. I stand in my garden, the morning's icy dew soaking through my sneakers, surrounded by a vegetable certainty, and feel a familiar attraction. It has been a long time since I visited the city.

I pick a blushing pair of McIntoshes for my basket, then gather the last of the tomatoes. The green ones I will fry or pickle, but the last of the vine-ripened ones are dense, scarlet globes of infinite possibility, like Baby Bangs waiting to happen. My teeth tear through the tender skin of one, and ruby juice explodes over my lips and trickles down through my beard. I am still picking seeds out of my chin hairs as I return to the house.

As I slice a tomato onto Donald's plate and freshen his coffee, he does not look up from the newspaper, but he is aware of my every move and his hand unerringly finds mine as I put his cup down. A quick squeeze and release, a smile of thanks, meant for me but directed at the newspaper.

I sit in the chair across from his and push the remains of my breakfast around on my plate. “It looks like it's going to be a nice day,” I offer. Donald hums a question mark without lifting his eyes from the page. I will get his full attention when I say or do something that requires it, not before. I am not offended. I smile at the long, dark hair that spills unbound down his cheek and hides all but the profile of his long nose from me. I know the morning ritual; I find it comforting. After so many years together it is not necessary for us to speak aloud to say much.

I drain my cup and examine the sediments at the bottom. I wonder if coffee grounds can be used, like tea leaves, to tell the future. If so, is it a determinate one, or only one of many possible? A decision crystallizes, even as I realize I made it minutes ago. “I thought I might go into the city today. Is there anything you need?"

My voice is a shade too casual. For a moment longer Donald does not raise his head, but I see his nostril flare with a deep, silent breath. Then he looks at me at last, fastens his liquid, dark eyes upon my face and examines it as though memorizing every detail. He raises his hand, the strong, callused artist's fingers starting to reach for mine, then changes his mind and sweeps the hair back from his face instead. He wants to ask me not to go. I wait. His lips thin with the effort to hold back the words, but he does not ask. He knows that I would refuse his request, and then my refusal would lie like a dead thing between us, here at the table, at night in bed.

Finally he looks away from my sympathetic, unhelpful gaze. “Some pastels,” he says, so softly that I have to strain to hear. “I'm almost out.” He is sad, proud, a little angry, a little ashamed. He stares out the window and plays with his hair as I rinse my plate. I stop behind him on my way out of the room, gather the hair from his fingers and wind it into a loose braid. He does not move when I kiss the top of his head or when I leave the room, and when I walk to my truck a short time later, he is already at work in his studio. Through the window I can see him frowning fiercely over his latest drawing. There is a broad smear of something dark, charcoal or ink, down one cheek.

I follow gravity's curve down the mountainside and through foothills tawny like the flanks of patient beasts until I merge with the valley highway. Half a dozen miles later I leave the traffic behind as I take the exit that leads to the city. The truck speeds up, as though it too feels the force of attraction increase as the distance decreases.

The wide ribbon of concrete beneath my tires is still smooth, but weeds and wildflowers are beginning to encroach from the edges. The suburbs and housing developments that used to sprawl from the city's margins have been overgrown by a dense forest. Tree trunks sprout through broken roofs; mounds of kudzu blur the outlines of walls. At one point a stray beam of sunlight seems to ignite a pillar of flame. I look more closely, to see a skeletal chimney wound about with the blaze of trumpet vine in full bloom.

Eventually I emerge from the woods to the bank of the river, and park my truck at the end of the bridge. Only a handful of other vehicles are parked here today; some look like they have stood in the same spot for a long time. I heft my knapsack and stride out onto the great span. The concrete deck is pocked and crumbling, revealing twisted wads of corroded reinforcing steel. Beneath my hand the suspension cable is shaggy with rust; as I touch it a flake wider than my spread fingers, as thin as paper, breaks loose and slides riverward. I catch it on my fingertips. The colors are savage: reds like dried blood, space-dark blacks, yellows like bile. The city has given me my first present of the day. Donald will like the colors. I wrap the sheet carefully in my bandanna and sandwich it between the pages of my notebook.

A century and a half ago, when the city was established on what was then the frontier, its founders built on this spit of land between loops of the Kaddo for defense. It was a wise policy; throughout the bloody pacification campaigns, the city was never overrun by hostiles. As the city grew and became a center of commerce and industry, bridges for automobiles and the railroad, engineering marvels in steel and stone, reduced to insignificance the Kaddo's breadth and swift current. Now this is the only bridge into the city that still stands. Two others were washed away in the great floods of six years ago; a third bowed slowly to age until its span subsided under the waters without even a rusty squeal last summer. To the east the Kaddo is trying to cut itself a new channel across the base of the city's narrow land isthmus; soon the city's peninsula will be reduced to an island.

The bridge deposits me in the manufacturing district, what the city's residents used to call the Nail of the finger of land thrust out into the Kaddo. I walk past silent warehouses, the echoing caverns of machine shops. Once these proud foundries spoke the iron prose of industry and craft. Now all are shuttered, blind and sad. I peek inside one cavernous doorway. Indefinite, rusted shapes, a soft litter of crumbling papers sifting across the floor. Beside me a giant hook begins to sway slightly on its chains to some breeze I cannot feel. I move on quickly to the financial district.

From a distance, the city's sky-vaulting towers glow in the sunlight, but up close it is possible to see the rampant decay. I skirt sharp puddles of broken glass at the base of each tower. The city's skin is flaking off, bit by bit—a monstrous leprosy. Will a pane come plummeting earthward even as I stand here, to slice me in half or porcupine my body with exploding splinters? A shiver of delighted apprehension worms through me.

Content to let the city reveal its mysteries at its own pace, I wander for hours through its silent precincts. In front of one office building I find an Italianate fountain hanging upside down in mid-air. It is filled with rose bushes, each covered with blooms of all hues of the spectrum, all growing earnestly downward as though it were the most natural thing in the world. The shadowed ground offers no clues, but when I walk beneath the fountain I feel the warmth of the sun on my face and feel dizzyingly inverted, until I exit smiling on the other side.

On one street I pass a cinema whose dusty marquee for years has advertised “Thurs: Mourning Becomes Electra.” Now the letters have been cleaned and rearranged to promote a triple bill of “Rebecca,” “The Sting,” and “Rumours.” From the open vestibule doors wafts the buttery smell of fresh popcorn.

And in front of a crumbling apartment complex taken over by a troop of macaques, I watch a grizzled female solemnly demonstrating the six simple machines to the attentive tribe. In the cracked dirt of a flowerbed a youngling is idly tracing a diagram of Pythagoras's theorem.

Later, turning onto a boulevard, I find that all the pavement has been replaced by lush, emerald grass. Hundreds of impossibly white sheep look up, all at once, and stop chewing to stare at me. In the center of the flock someone (something?), too tall to be human, too bright to see clearly, unfolds itself and stands, and looks at me—and that burning gaze punches a hole through the air to where I stand and knocks me to my knees, and I know that if I do not cover my face RIGHT NOW I will surely die, and so I cover it, but oh!—how I wish I had looked back! And when I uncover my eyes again, there is only pavement, and broken buildings, and waste.

There are few signs of human visitation. Once a yellowing newspaper hurls itself over a curb and grapples with my feet. As it tumbles away I recognize a picture from last month's crisis in the Far East. And once, turning a corner, I spot a figure striding away from me, two blocks down. I shout and wave; he or she stops, looks back, and lifts an arm in greeting, then turns the corner. When I reach the same corner, moments later, there is no one in sight.

Eventually I come, as all pilgrims must, to the edge of the great plaza at the city's heart. Above the plaza a flock of pigeons, silent except for the rattle of their wings, ceaselessly circles, never landing. A young man who looks to be in his late twenties is sitting shirtless on the sun-warmed curb and tossing a pebble from hand to hand. He bears the Equations of Universal Love tattooed into the skin of his back. For a moment I let my eyes caress the muscular curve of trapezius and deltoid, and my groin twinges with a familiar longing for Donald, but it is the Equations that compel me closer. Reflexively I try to solve them, but, as always, I cannot make the math work. I drop down beside the boy to rest my weary legs and catch my breath.

"It happened right over there,” he says without preamble, catching the stone in one hand and pointing with the other to the fountain at the plaza's center. “I saw it.” He looks at me sidelong, to see if I believe him.

Next to this youth, I feel ancient, though I am scarcely past forty. I wonder what he thinks of my receding hairline and my advancing paunch. I peer at him over my bifocals and wonder if he expects me to make a pass, but I am hungrier for his history than for his body. “Tell me,” I say.

"I was four years old. My father put me on his shoulders so I could see over the crowd. The people were so thick in the plaza, her escort couldn't make a path to the hall where she was to address the delegates. So she stood up on the rim of the fountain and gave her speech right there.

"I can't remember everything she said. Oh, it's in the history books, but I mean the sound, the feel of the words. I was too young. Mostly I was fascinated by the way her long, white hair blew in the wind, until she grabbed it and held it back, and by the way she wasn't pretty, not the way we all thought she was on TV. There were wrinkles on her cheeks and smile lines around her eyes, and frown lines in her forehead. But she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, other than my mother. I wanted so much to tell her I loved her.

"Maybe she knew. She was looking straight into my eyes when the shot hit her. I saw that bloody hole grow in among the frown lines, and half her head come spraying off the back, before I even heard the shot. Before any of us heard the shot. I turned my head, and the guy who did was right next to us. I could have reached out and touched him. Could have reached out and knocked the gun down if I had just seen it in time. I pointed at him and screamed ‘Here he is!’ The crowd just went wild. By the time the police fought their way through to him, there wasn't a piece of him larger than my hand.

"And no one could look his neighbor in the eye. I couldn't even look at my dad. Everyone just turned and walked home, like we were sleepwalking."

I nod my acknowledgement of the young man's story, and he hands me the egg-shaped pebble. I feel the warmth his hands have given to the smooth surface as it nestles into my palm. Absently I begin to roll the stone between my fingers, just as he did, as I tell my own story.

I was far from the plaza on the day the Speaker was killed. And older than this young man; I was a sophomore in high school. School had not been let out for the day, but most teachers had planned a special lesson to tie in with the Speaker's visit to the city. In history class we had reviewed the dangerous superpower jockeying and countless brushwars of the last twenty years. In economics we talked about the once-routine famines in undeveloped countries, and the cycles of inflation and recession that had stifled the march toward prosperity for all. And in government class we discussed the traditional causes of revolution and anarchy: poverty, powerlessness, racism, classism.

I was in physics class when the Speaker's motorcade whisked her through city streets lined with cheering crowds. My teacher, a stern but fair man responsible for drilling the mysteries of quantum mechanics into his wide-eyed charges, set that day aside for an introduction to the Speaker's revolutionary work, the brilliant Unified Theory of the Propositions for Peace and Justice. Outside the open window a glorious May morning burned blue and yellow; birds sang as though their music re-created the world each moment. As I watched my teacher copy the Theorem for Prosperity on the blackboard, I could begin to understand the magnitude of the miracle this woman—"Dr. Mileva” to her devoted students; known to the rest of an adoring world by the media's punning sobriquet “The Speaker for Life"—had fashioned. No more war, no more poverty, no more suffering. The keys to the conquest of disease, disaster, even perhaps death itself, had been revealed in these elegant mathematics.

I was not there in the plaza to see how the Speaker laughingly gave up her attempt to cross to the auditorium and climbed up on the fountain instead. Later I watched the films, saw her haul her husband Albert up beside her. (A famous physicist in his own right, but she had built upon his work and surpassed it.) Saw how they had come to resemble each other so much over the years, an old married couple, the same wild white hair and sad-merry-wise eyes. Saw him beam at her in fond pride as she began to address the crowd.

I've never been able to watch the films all the way to the end.

My teacher was halfway through his proof when some motion we could not feel, some sound we could not hear, rippled through the classroom. We looked at one another in confusion. The teacher turned back to the board. But he frowned at the line he had just written, erased it, started again, frowned at that, erased again, stepped back with a look of bafflement. The mathematics simply would not resolve. The theorem was unprovable.

It was then that a choked voice I scarcely recognized as the principal's made the announcement over the loudspeaker. I remember as if it were yesterday the shocked looks on my classmates’ faces, and how my teacher burst into tears. I remember how empty I felt, how I wandered in a daze for hours after school let out early, how I came home at last to a silent, stricken house in a silent, stricken neighborhood.

But I cannot remember the mathematics.

I turn to the young man as I make this last point. There is no one there. Perhaps there never was. The egg-shaped pebble grows cold in my hand. I place it carefully upon the curb. Above my head the pigeons, frightened into eternal flight by a single gunshot twenty-five years ago, orbit like the cosmic detritus of a planetary cataclysm.

I stand and look across the paving stones at the fountain. I trust the city with my life; I do not trust the city at all. It is, I suppose, very like one's relationship with God. Or quantum theory.

I step forward onto the first paver. Beneath my foot the solid rock turns to the consistency of porridge and I sink to the depth of my calf. I hold still, try not to panic. After a minute the porridge pushes my foot out and firms up again. It could as easily have turned back to stone with my foot still inside.

I step, and the next paver tilts underfoot, rotating to slam into my ankle. The pain brings tears to my eyes and I stumble. The city is punishing me, making me hurt as it has hurt for so long. I want to curse but I don't dare.

Eventually I am able to shuffle forward. Perhaps the city has tired of tormenting me. Then, as my foot descends toward the next paver, it disappears. There is nothing there to take my weight, only a sky-reflecting void. Like God, I think, and do the only thing I can: I accept, accept the blankness beneath my descending foot, the reflective void at the heart of the universe. I am all acceptance, open and unrefusing. And my foot shocks down onto the solidity of stone, rising to meet it like a great fish through dark water.

There are no more tests. I make it to the long-dormant fountain and sit down on the rim. On the concrete beside me, amid pale, rusty stains, sits a box of drawing pastels. The silken-smooth sides of the chalks gleam in the morning sunlight like the cheeks of the apples I leave in their place. Like the tears on my own cheeks as I weep, here in the only place where I can cry.

On some of my trips into the city I have crossed paths with a psychiatrist, someone who is as fascinated by this place as I am. He has made the city his study, and it is his diagnosis that the city is suffering from a traumatic psychosis, induced by the paroxysm of violence it witnessed on the day of the assassination. It feels both responsible and helpless, and has avoided resolving the conflict by retreating into delusions, delusions powerful enough it can even make its few visitors share them. He wants to cure the city of its “antisocial behaviors” so its residents can return and take up normal life again.

The psychiatrist is a very dangerous man. He cannot, he must not, succeed.

These manifestations are not delusions. They are as real as the world we once knew and have had taken from us. On a bright spring day a quarter-century ago we lost our fixed observer, the one who, by observing, had created our existence from an infinity of possibilities. Morality—like time, mass, and distance—became relative; the future, highly uncertain. Now, instead of the calculus of compassion, we are left with Albert's calculations of destruction. Instead of peace and justice, prosperity and brotherhood, we have wars and rumors of wars, terrorism, voodoo economics, conspiracy theories.

Hope died that day in the plaza, a vision of a future worth having. But in some Diracian universe it still exists, free of grief and shame, and the city, like a quantum computer operating on a vast Hilbert space, sorts through the infinite possibilities, looking for the right one. And I, who for twenty-five years have been neither dead nor alive, neither particle nor wave—I wait for the city to make the mathematics work again, to collapse the wave function and provide me with its one, true solution.

Halfway across the crumbling bridge, I walk out of the city's frozen spring mourning into the chill gloom of an autumn evening. I take away a box of pastels and a flake of metal that even now I can hear pinging to dust in my knapsack. And a longing, like entropy's arrow, lodged too near to my heart.

Someday I will slip across its Schwarzschild radius and give myself completely to the depths of the city's singularity. My truck will grow a layer of rust at the end of the bridge, and I will disappear over the event horizon that defined my generation. Donald will stare into the blazing heart of the valley until his eyes burn and tear, but all his love will not be able to pull me back.

The city will not have to reach far to claim me. I am already one of its ghosts.

EPILOGUE: In his brilliant work The City and the Conscience of a World, the noted psychiatrist Bernard Hanks reports finding the following graffito inscribed in pastel chalk on the side of one of the city's buildings:

Joke making the rounds at a convention of quantum physicists:

Q: Have you got Copenhagen in a can?

A: Open it and find out.

"Dia Chermen's Tale: the Delmoni Atrocity” was originally published in Kij Johnson's short fiction collection Tales for the Long Rains, from Scorpius Digital Publishing, 2001.

Author's Note: “Women are stronger than men. They survive things that would kill or destroy men, and then bear and raise the next generation of women and men. I am hard on the women in my stories, harder than the men. I know what we can stand. Men I'm not so sure of.

I was trained as a classical music and news announcer, which means I can speak in complete sentences and paragraphs, if I want to. But even for someone like me, a story told is different than a story written down. When I wrote ‘Dia Chjermen's Tale: The Delmoni Atrocity,’ I was trying to capture the pacing and structure of spoken words, a tone you see sometimes in transcriptions."

WE TELL THESE TALES, we who lived on the Ship. We do this so that our home planets and our time on the Ship will not be forgotten—so that we will not be forgotten. To the men of the Ship, our planets were once disobedient fiefs, then nonrenewable resources. Our grandmothers and mothers were objects to fight over, breeding stock. But we have always been more than this. It has been more than six hundred years since this story was first told, by my twenty-seven-times grandmother, Dia Chjermen. The way it is told, she cried silently for a month after Delmoni was destroyed and she was taken aboard Empire Ship Delta. And then she stopped crying, and wiped her eyes, and told this tale to the women of the Ship. And now I tell you, so that Dia and Delmoni will not be forgotten.

My planet was Delmoni Prime. We were a beautiful world, fourth from the amber-colored star, also called Delmoni. We turned on the very edge of the galactic disk, and depending on the season, our night sky was just a thin scattering of stars, like a pinch of salt thrown on a black skirt; or it was a varied shell, striped with bands of light. Our trees had leaves so dark they looked black, but our lichens (and we had many of them) were bright, green and gold and pink, glowing as if lit from within. Most of our insects and animals were brightly colored, as well, with many legs.

We knew we had been claimed by the Empire, almost an accidental addendum to some declaration covering our entire sector. But why should they care about us one way or another? We had no resources not readily available closer to the Empire's core. Faster-than-light travel would have made us more accessible to them, but FTL was an unattainable dream: men and women were not meant to travel through warping time. Space could be warped, but only the Empire Ships were large enough to carry the black hole necessary to do so. No one else could afford Ship technology, even if they could steal it somehow: it would cost a wealthy world a century's worth of revenue to build such a vessel. FTL communications existed of course, but they had a top limit; messages forwarded along the pipeline from the Empire's heart took many years to get to us, so no time was wasted on politics or power. Communications were all of technology and trade. The Empire offered us information that would improve our food production, our trade potential. Everyone was always grateful for the Empire's help. That is how they had grown so great and powerful.

Because of this, and because we were just one of ten thousand planets in their domain, we foolishly thought the Empire did not care about us. So we minded our business and sent occasional unmanned ships off toward the core of Empire, filled with whatever tax they demanded. Mostly we forgot about them.

And then we found a drone in our solar system, sent—not from Empire or the galaxy's cluttered heart—but from outside, apparently from a star beyond what we thought of as the Edge. It was an alien drone, and, from certain symbols carved along its shell, appeared to ask for a benign exchange of information between them and ourselves. We deliberated for half a century and agreed, sending a radio message in response.

We did not bother to tell Empire of this, of course. We didn't want to pass on news until we had something back from the aliens. They might have died off since sending it; they might be from another galaxy altogether. And, to be honest, we might not want to share what we found, if it actually was useful. We had elected a new ruler in the last decade of this time, and he began building a small spacefaring force, suitable for impressing the aliens.

Perhaps it was this handful of ships that attracted the Empire's attention somehow, because that's when the message came. My twenty-seven-times grandmother Dia Chjermen did not hear it, of course; but her great-grandmother did. “Empire Ship Delta here. Delmoni, we are on our way."

That was it. There's never any more to the messages—no accusation, no judgment, no verdict, no threat—just a handful of words. This message came in the Year of the Empire 3658.

We knew of the Ships, and called them Blood Ships. They existed only to punish. They traveled to a recalcitrant planet, and they destroyed that place, and they moved on. Depending on where it was when it started its trek toward a planet, a Ship might take years to arrive, or decades or centuries; but it would inevitably arrive. It was said that each Ship carried a hundred thousand fighting men, or a hundred million, or a billion. There was one Ship, a dozen Ships, a hundred. What did we know except horror stories?

Worldwide riots began immediately, as if we were unwilling to wait for the Ship to arrive and chose instead to destroy ourselves. Even before the message was verified as coming from a real Empire Ship, the people revolted and the leader who had built the space force was quartered in the streets. Dia's great-grandmother killed five men with a cooking knife, escaping from the silver-walled city of Telete with her two daughters.

For years, we sent countless messages down the pipeline to the galaxy's heart, pleading with Empire to forgive us. We heard nothing. Others among us sent panicked requests for aid to any world in range. The nearest human planet responded twelve years after the Ship announced itself to us. They were very sorry, of course, and wished us luck. But, they said, please don't try to seek refuge here. We heard the threat beneath the polite words and turned to other options.

We scrambled to establish communications with the aliens, who, it turned out, were alive and located around the star we had anticipated. Our linguists rushed to establish a workable, mutual language. Messages whirled back and forth. Their technology, it turned out, was considerably advanced compared to ours, but centered entirely around agricultural technology and weather modification. They had nothing to help us fight the Ship.

Eight years after the message, the aliens offered to take refugees. Perhaps they did not understand the full power of the Ships, or what the Ship might do to their own planet; or perhaps they didn't believe the Ship would care about them. Or perhaps they did not have the nightmares we did, raised as we were for millennia with tales of the Blood Ships ringing in our infants’ ears.

This lasted until the aliens realized that it was not a thousand or a hundred thousand people who craved sanctuary, but a billion. Panicked at what this might do, they closed communications with Delmoni. We did send our embryonic space force there to beg or force them to accept us; ten years later, we received an ansible message—human screams, and another message from the aliens: so sorry, we have been dishonored by behaving like this, but our people must be first in our concerns. That was the last we heard from the aliens.

We agonized about what we had done. Was it the radio message to the aliens? The tiny space fleet? Electing an ambitious leader? Was it because the aliens had contacted us, instead of Empire? Empire was silent, so we never found out, and this made it somehow worse.

After twenty years, the Ship had not yet come. The riots had formalized themselves into gangs that alternated between ritualized but bloody combat among themselves, and killing sprees. Thirty-four years after the message, Dia's great-grandmother was raped and killed by a handful of boys from one of these gangs; Dia's grandmother was barely twenty, and she killed three of them before she was herself killed, leaving a sister who would start screaming when she heard certain noises—a door being opened, a light clicking on—and a baby girl abruptly weaned by circumstance. Dia's mother.

The people of Delmoni Prime settled into a desperate clawing depression. Like animals in a trap, they alternated between flailing furiously against the jaws of the planet that held them for the hunter who crept closer, and biting at themselves. Those who could afford to do so built personal spaceships and bolted for anywhere in the galaxy but Delmoni's lavender skies. Some of those ships were shoddily built and exploded during liftoff.

Decades passed, and the Ship did not come. Children were born and grew up in its shadow and died. Dia sometimes told her daughters—and they their daughters, down to me—the stories she read as a girl, when Delmoni still lived. There were two sorts: airy bright fantasies filled with miraculous rescues, and the other ones, the realistic ones, grim lightless tales about how it feels to be living dead. Sex became a subdued instinctual thing, joyless. Rape became common.

After a time, a small but vocal group began their talk. Perhaps, they said, the Ship would not come after all! Decades had passed and there had been no sign of it; perhaps the crew had mutinied, or the vessel had been destroyed or ordered elsewhere. Perhaps the very notice of its coming, and the outside verification, had been a clever trick. No one would come; it was time for us to put our fear behind us, to build a glorious new future with the wealth our murdered ruler had provided. Churches sprang up, and new benevolent societies, and then trickled into silence, to be replaced by new groups. In our hearts we knew they all lied, but we cheered and pretended to forget the fear. Hope, even a hope built on impossibilities, was the only luxury we could afford. The Ship would come. The Ship always came.

Eighty-four years after the message, Dia Chjermen was eight. That was the year the first wave began. Every tale we women tell has this part in it: the millions of microscopic drone fighters that churned out of a wormhole into the system. The drones ate the home-guard ships we had been able to throw together, then settled, not on Delmoni, but on our asteroids and moons and the other planets of the solar system, shredding the crusts to supply materials to build more microrobots. When there were enough, they gathered in the skies over Delmoni, a haze like the gauze of darkmatter between us and the sun. And then they fell in shimmering curtains, like rain a long way away, or a dark aurora trailing onto the ground. The microrobots didn't kill anyone, not yet: only ate our electronics and refined metals, turning them into still more robots.

Some of the robots targeted concretes and even fired bricks—anything we had touched, altered for our convenience—but nothing harmed the people's flesh. Half-naked and unsheltered, we starved and we fought. There were no means of gathering crops, no roads and nothing to travel on them. We thought the riots would be the worst: after all, we had seen men and women tortured and killed, buildings smashed into shards of metal and earth. But nothing prepared us for this. There was no one visible doing this. Our world dissolved into dust and mist, filling the sky with bots, and leaving a glittering layer of dead robots carpeting Delmoni.

Dia had a little radio she used to listen to speeches; she told of watching its surface seethe, like a body covered with vermin. Its shape softened and shifted and began suddenly to mist away, like fog rising from water. She watched closely—she was a small girl—and saw tiny, tiny bits zip into the air. After a time, there was no radio left. That's when she realized her synthetic parka had also been eaten away.

I don't know how many people died during that twenty years before the microrobots at last died and settled ankle-deep across the surface of Delmoni. More than in the eighty before, I suppose. Dia lost her aunt, her cousins—everyone in her town. She was claimed by a strong man who defended them both until he died trying to trap something to eat; Dia never told what it was, but we have told these tales enough to guess. By then she was old enough and strong enough to tend to herself. After that, she was alone in what had once been her village, the only person alive for a day's walk in any direction. She knew this because she walked a day out once, and circled back in, a giant spiral closing on the place where her village had stood. She saw no sign of anyone as she waded through the dust of dead microrobots, pulling and eating the struggling plants as she walked.

Dia was twenty-eight when the Ship itself came through the wormhole and settled into orbit. She didn't know this, of course. A terrible wind started and she ran for the cave she had been living in. She watched lights on the horizon, and clouds that moved too quickly toward her. What looked like sheets of black rain fell from them, darker than the first fall of microrobots years before. The wind that blew in her face stank of heat, and she realized at last that it was the start of the Bombing. She ran as deep into the cave as she could, hiding in a hollow beside an underground stream.

She stayed there for forty days and nights, a magic number the Ships chose for the length of their bombings. The earth shook overhead; flame-scented winds snaked through the narrow passages to find her. The only food she had was an animal she had captured just before the bombing had begun, and a creature which she found after a few days, hiding close by. The water she drank from the river was good at first, but after a time chemicals from above leached into it, making her sick. She had wood and torches enough for a week; after that they were gone, and she lay in absolute darkness, wrapped in her furs and trying not to scream. The bombing overhead seemed to come in regular waves; after a time, she slept through them, not because she was accustomed to them, but because she could not stay awake and sane. She slept curled tight in a fetal position, waking every eternity to drink more of the water that made her sick. One of these times, she noticed dully there wasn't any bombing overhead, and she crawled out of the darkness.

The light blinded her at first; hungry as she was, she couldn't go out into the world until night fell. At first she thought everything was absolutely gone: all she saw was ashes and broken charred trees. After a time, she saw that there was still some life, animals that looked as stunned and shock-struck as she stumbling across the wasteland. She caught one and ate it alive, blood sweet as rain on her tongue.

Then nothing happened for a time in Dia's world. She didn't know that a hundred million Empire Shipmen had landed. They established what they called a One-Generation Punitive Governorship, killed most of the remaining men, and enslaved the rest. During this time they buried their stored dead in elaborate stone tombs carved from living rock by the slaves, took on fresh water and food plants, mined nuclear materials for their onboard power supply. They recruited the few surviving men to renew their numbers, and the men were oddly grateful: at least they would live this way. Shipmen were always looking for men to replenish their losses; they were not kind, even to themselves.

And they took the women of Delmoni, the strong women who had survived the twenty years of destruction and the Bombing, for breeding stock, to strengthen the Shipmen of the future. A group of Shipmen happened upon Dia hiding with a stone knife. She gutted one and slashed another across the face before, laughing, they disarmed her and told her she would be taken to the Ship. She was raped fifteen times in the first two days, though that word was meaningless aboard Ship. She memorized the faces of the men who raped her, swearing to kill each of them. Dia did not, of course. Few do.

Dia was one of the last Delmoni women to be pulled onto the Ship. Shortly after the arrival of her group, the Punitive Governorship was recalled and the Ship crammed itself and its horde of surviving microrobots back through the wormhole.

Dia's story ends here. Many of our tales end that way, with our capture, the sight of our planet dwindling in the aft screens. After that we were Shipwomen. We learned to survive in the Ships, raised children. A few of us grew to love the fierce Ship's men and the sharp edge of Ship life; some of us rebelled in secret ways. Most of us hunkered down, numb when we needed to be, and passed to our daughters the tales.

I do not know what happened to Delmoni. There were people still alive there, and perhaps they interbred with the Shipmen left behind as permanent occupation forces and became ardent supporters of Empire. This is what the men of Blood Ship Delta told us. Perhaps only a handful still live; perhaps more. Perhaps none.

But I am the twenty-seven-times granddaughter of Dia Chjermen, and I know many tales about Dia and Delmoni, and of others: of Jennhl and her home, the satellite half lost in Parucek Tertia's rings, and her poems, written by pressing thorns into her skin to save their words; of Constanzia Allameda, who dared the Ship's captain to single combat under the red skies of Li Po; of Asa Visdottir of Archimedes 6, who had twelve children when the drones began and kept them all alive. There are a thousand tales: a million. All our stories end thus: when the Empire Ship at last died, we of Delmoni and all the other conquered places walked free from the ruins, and felt sunlight on our faces again. They still exist, Parucek and Li Po and all the others. And Delmoni exists still, in Dia Chjermen's tale and now in your memories.

The War Inside first appeared in the Premiere issue of Pulphouse, the Weekly Magazine, June 1, 1991.

Author's Note: “As a kid I played with toy guns, GI Joe, and those little plastic cowboys, Indians, and soldiers that seemed to embody some uniformly-minted, indestructible sense of national identity and pride. I burned scores of these miniature figures with a magnifying glass and dismembered them with a Daisy BB gun. At some point, around the age of ten or eleven, I became bored with the game of war. I don't know what triggered the change, but as draft-eligible seventeen-year-old a few years after the end of the Vietnam War, I registered as a conscientious objector. Still, that childhood infatuation with war haunts me. I've never stopped trying to understand it, in myself and others."

"I KID YOU NOT,” Rick said. “The quim here will fuckin’ blow your mind.” He glanced at me with glazed black eyes that looked like small puncture holes in his round, heavy face and took a long swallow of San Miguel. “So, what do you think?"

We sat on metal barstools in the Old Nam, a Denver strip-joint that had opened up on East Colfax a few months earlier.

"How the hell should I know?” I said. “I've never been to Vietnam. I have no idea what it was like."

"You will,” he said. “Believe me. This is as close as you're going to get to the real thing."

According to Rick, this was his second time. He'd stopped in two weeks ago, and had only now gotten up the nerve to come back. It was that intense, he said.

I didn't know if the place was for real or not. It was hot enough. The air was sticky and perspiration clung to my shirt, glistened on Rick's face, tickled my upper lip. I could smell rancid sweat, stale beer, and lingering perfume. Tinny music drifted over us. The floor was cluttered with small wooden tables and rickety wicker chairs. It was Friday and all of them were filled. The tables went right up to a low stage at the far end of the room. A thick layer of smoke hung below dim lights shrouded by wide sheets of sagging red cloth, the haze feebly churned by ceiling fans that rotated dark shadows across the crowd. They looked like the slow moving helicopter blades I'd seen on TV, Hueys preparing to take off into a stagnant blanket of jungle-clotted mist.

I sipped my beer and looked at the people around me. Most were in their early- or mid-thirties. Post baby-boomers who had missed out on the war and were trying to find out what it had been like, driven by a sense of curiosity and the feeling that it was finally okay to explore what had happened. That, and the dancers, which is what had motivated Rick. I saw a few guys who might have been vets, but it was hard to tell and I asked Rick if any ever showed up.

He shrugged. “Who knows. The thing is, they already know what it was like. It's a part of them the same way it's part of the poontang they've got around here. Straight from Nam and the war, man. No shit. The original stuff."

I shook my head. I found what he said hard to believe. I wasn't even sure I wanted to.

"You want to know as bad as anyone else. Admit it, man. That's why you're here.” He killed his beer, set the bottle on the sticky counter next to us, and signaled to the double-chinned, thickly-rouged woman working the bar for another. She had on a blue satin dress, sleeveless. Rolls of fat strained at the tight, glossy fabric around her stomach and wobbled under her upper arms.

I gazed at the other waitresses sitting and walking around in high heels. Black shiny hair, heavily painted lips, thigh-hugging miniskirts and blouses cinched tight under their breasts. They seemed too young. They hadn't aged enough. Either they'd been too young twenty-five years ago, or they hadn't been in the war at all and Rick was feeding me a load of bullshit.

After a while he elbowed me in the ribs and nodded toward the stage. “Get ready for some serious pussy, Ted ol’ buddy. It's show-time."

She had on this sheer silk kimono, open in the front. I could see the black brassiere and G-string she wore beneath it. Her long hair swung gently around her bored, listless face as she began to dance, hips rotating, hands running up and down her body, loosening the lace brassiere finally and letting it drop to the stage.

"Jesus,” Rick said. “Couldn't you just fuck that to tears? Asian women. God, I love ‘em."

He finished his second beer, started in on a third.

The dancer was on her knees now, legs spread wide, body twisting back, hair swaying as she let the green silk fabric slide off her shoulders. Her breasts shuddered under the hot spotlights, and when I glanced around I saw prostitutes leaning over the men or sitting on their laps, arms draped around their shoulders while they whispered in their ears.

"Bitches'll do anything you want,” Rick said, his eyes locked on the stage. “Suck your balls dry more ways than you can count. The sweetest dick-squeezing pussy you could ever want if you'd just crawled out of the jungle, your guts all knotted up from getting shot at, thinking every shadow that moved was out to slit your throat."

I nodded and swallowed hard, took a quick swig of beer and tried to keep my sweaty hand from shaking, the cold wet beer bottle from slipping out of it.

My head was filled with the articles, news reports and documentaries of what it had been like, the sense of shame I felt every time I saw a vet, knowing they'd given up more than one or two years of their lives and the whole country had spit on them when they'd come home, either because they'd fought in the war at all, or fought and lost.

"You worried about Judy?” Rick asked.

"A little."

"Now you know what a lot of the guys in Nam felt like. Be pretty damn hard to ignore all this available pussy when your girlfriend's ten thousand miles away and the next day might be your last.” He grinned at me, winked, and then returned his attention to the stage.

I felt her behind me before I saw her. A warm presence surrounded by nauseatingly strong perfume that cut through the reek of cigarettes and tensed my neck muscles. I turned on my seat, looked into full crimson lips and black eyes beneath heavy mascara and green lids. She wore a tight red halter top and a short, black leather skirt.

"I've been watching you, man. You make me so horny. So horny I can't believe it.” She licked her lips, ran a hand down one thigh.

"Now's your chance,” Rick said. He grinned again. “Fifty bucks for the experience of a lifetime."

"Forty,” the prostitute said. “I'm so horny.” My gut clenched. I could feel a wave of heat running down my cock, and gritted my teeth.

"I'll catch you later,” Rick said. “Have fun, buddy.” He slid off his chair and disappeared into the crowd.

"What you say?” the woman asked, her breath warm and sultry. “You want it like never before, or not?"

She sat on the empty stool next to me, straddled it with both legs and leaned forward. “I'll love you good. Long and hard like your girlfriend. I'll give you what you want, make you forget everything else."

I felt her hand on my leg, and fear exploded inside me. Terror, ripping and searing like shrapnel. I smelled shit and wondered if it was my own. My mouth was dry and metallic-tasting. I could feel the warm beer bottle in my hand, but I couldn't move it. My hand was paralyzed and it seemed like my intestines had unraveled, dropped out of my asshole.

I don't have to go through with this, I told myself. I don't. It was a lie, though. Inside, the war had already begun.

She lay back and drew both legs up alongside her stomach, the miniskirt bunching around her waist. I stood a few feet from the end of the bed, my shoes, pants and underwear in a pile on the floor, the tails of my unbuttoned shirt trailing against my thighs and buttocks. A naked light bulb hung from the ceiling, cast harsh shadows across the bamboo walls, the soft angles of her face. I saw a pile of yellow paper napkins on the table next to the bed, a jar of cold cream. Then she took off her top and let both knees fall open, butterfly style. There were teeth marks on her breasts, yellow bruises down her legs and the inside of her arms.

"What're you waiting for, man?” Glossy red fingernails stroked her crotch, traced their way upward across her belly and nipples as she brought her arms up over her head, wrapped them around the gleaming mass of tousled hair on the pillows.

Her hips made small, rhythmic movements on the rumpled sheets. I took a step forward, and dropped to my knees between her legs. I leaned over, planted my hands beside her, and breathed in perfume laced with sweat, the pungent smell of flesh. When I lay on top of her I closed my eyes, not wanting to look into the bored, lifeless pupils staring past me.

There was a violent thrust and I found myself face down in a muddy quagmire that sucked at my sprawled-out arms and legs, making it hard to move. Rotting leaves clung to my lips and nose, and I struggled to breathe, short choking gasps that wracked me. The sun felt like a heat lamp, and in the distance I could hear the dull thudding roar of an air strike, feel it reverberating through the dank ground, echoing in my ears. My right leg throbbed. I reached down blindly, touched slick dirt on tattered cloth, and when I twisted onto my side and looked I saw that below the knee it was gone. Panic squeezed my heart, crushing it, and bile burned in my throat.

A land mine, I told myself. Jesus fucking Christ. I thought I could still move my toes even though they weren't there, feel them pressing against the hard leather of my missing boot.

After a while I heard voices, felt the steady pulse of choppers hammering through the air, and blood pooling inside me somewhere. I laid my cheek down in the cool mud and felt myself go numb all over, not caring anymore whether I lived or died.

The sound of a dead-bolt being unlocked jolted me awake and I sat up fast, the room spinning crazily. I tried to clear my head. Sunlight ricocheted in through the bedroom window above me, glanced painfully off the walls, the mirror above the dresser. Out in the living room I heard the front door open and close, footsteps padding softly across the carpet to the open door a few feet away.

I rubbed my eyes and squinted through the opening, saw Judy's shadow on the rug and then her face, bright as ever above faded jeans and a white sleeveless blouse. She came over to the edge of the bed and sat down. I groaned, eased onto my back again and closed my eyes, put a hand over my forehead to massage my temples.

"Must've been some office party,” she said. I felt her hand on my chest, moving in slow aimless circles.

"A few of us went out afterwards."

"I figured.” Her fingers moved under the covers. My stomach tightened and I reflexively caught her wrist, not wanting her to feel the stiff matted hair farther down.

Judy leaned forward, red hair and blue eyes spilling over me. When her lips were a few inches from mine she suddenly stiffened. “You bastard,” she said softly. “Who was it? One of your hot little secretaries?” She tried to pull away and I held her wrist more tightly, fear knifing through the haze.

I moved my head sideways on the pillow. “A joke,” I said. “It's not what you think. Some of the guys started spraying perfume, testers they'd picked up at one of the department stores.” It sounded lame, even to me.

Judy stared at me for a moment and I let the hand on my forehead drop to the bed.

"Not even very good stuff,” I went on. “You'd think a bunch of financial execs could have done better. Obsession, Chanel No. 5 or something like that.” I tried to laugh, but it hurt too much and my mouth was thick and cottony. It was the first time I'd lied to her about anything in the year we'd known each other.

She took a deep breath and I felt her relax. “At least you could have showered,” she said.

"Sorry. I didn't think it was that big a deal."

"It will be if we take Erik to the zoo. Nothing will come within a hundred yards of us."

"Shit,” I said, glancing at the clock on the night stand next to me.

"It's all right. I don't pick him up until eleven.” She gave me a quick kiss and then straightened. “I'll fix breakfast while you get cleaned up, take care of that headache of yours."

"Right.” I waited until she left, then hurried out of bed to the bathroom.

I let the warm water stream over me, sluicing through the residue of last night. I slumped against the shower stall and tilted my head back. The water felt like a heavy rain. It dripped from my hair and pounded down around me, mixing with the rank smell of sodden vegetation, napalm and burning thatch.

My eyes snapped open. Beyond the shower curtain smoke mingled with the steam fogging the mirror of the sink. I thought I could see shadows moving in the mist. Goose pimples raised on my arms and the back of my neck. I shut the water off and trembled, the heels of both hands pressed hard against my face as I breathed in the smell of scrambled eggs and toast.

"You look terrible,” Judy said.

I nodded. We were in her car, heading west over one of the viaducts that connects downtown to the surrounding metropolitan area. The sky was clear and blue over dark green foothills and silverhued mountains. Ahead of us I-25 shuffled four lanes of north-south traffic along at an uneven crawl. Judy's ex-husband lived on the northern edge town, and I could tell it was going to be a long day driving there, back to the zoo, and then on to her place farther south.

"How's your mother these days?” I asked after a while.

"Better. I talked to her last night when I couldn't get a hold of you. I don't know how she stands it there, as warm as it is."

"Some people like that kind of climate,” I said.

"I guess you get used to it,” Judy said. “Like anything else."

"I suppose.” My palms were sweaty even though she had the air conditioning on, and I had to keep wiping them on my pants. I tried to block out what I remembered of Florida, but I couldn't. We'd flown to Orlando after her mother had suffered a mild stroke, and the unrelenting heat and humidity still beat heavily in my head, like a bad memory. It had been terrible then, but it was worse now, and my stomach felt queasy.

"She still wants to know when we're going to get married,” Judy said.

"You're kidding."

"That's what I said. I told her I needed more time, and she started in on how Erik's at that age where he needs a father."

"He's already got one."

"A full-time father. I tried to reason with her, but she won't listen. You know how stubborn mothers can be.” Judy smiled. “It could be worse. At least she likes you."

"Yeah."

Judy reached out and put a hand on my knee. “Don't worry. I'm not desperate. Not yet, anyway."

"I'm not worried,” I said, the words sounding strange, like they weren't my own. Before, I'd wanted it to work. Now I wasn't so sure. It seemed that I was kidding myself, that what I was looking for, a certain measure of stability in my life, would never happen. Not the way I wanted it to, at least. No matter what, I would always be lacking something, freedom or security. I had the feeling there wasn't anything I could do about it, that she could never really understand what I was going through, so I turned my head and stared blankly at the rundown commercial buildings sliding by like the gutted remains of a bombed-out, deserted city.

Judy pulled into the wide half-circle drive of the house, a huge plantation style mansion with elegant white columns and hand-carved woodwork. Her ex was a corporate lawyer and made good money. That's how he'd managed to get the kid.

"I'll only be a few minutes,” Judy said.

She got out of the car and I watched her walk up to the porch. The house and those around it seemed out of place, not quite real with their manicured lawns, sculpted shrubbery and expensive vernacular set against the arid plains of eastern Colorado. It reminded me of the French-style homes I'd seen in Saigon, the discotheques and billboards advertising American movies, as if an entire culture had been transplanted—displaced. It didn't make sense, dragging what you knew and loved into a war so you could watch it be destroyed, and I shook my head thinking about it before I realized that the memories couldn't be mine.

When I looked again Judy was gone and the house was shrouded in jungle, a colonial mansion in southeast Asia. It wavered unsteadily and I squeezed my eyes shut, pressed a thumb and forefinger into them hard and watched an explosive kaleidoscope of buried faces swim out of the darkness. Men and pimply-faced boys who'd come home in telegrams or body bags. Dead NVA laying face up in a swampy ditch, flies crawling out of their nostrils, over parched shriveled eyes that stared up out of the corpse-infested earth.

The car door opened and my head jerked up. Judy had Erik by the arm and was herding him into the back seat. He had a Dinorider with him, one of those battery powered Tyrannosaurus rexes that come with an array of high-tech weapons. He plopped down, and Judy slid the driver's seat back, climbed in and slammed the door shut. She gripped the steering wheel with both hands, her face flushed but rigid, lips welded grimly together.

"That son of a bitch,” she whispered, her hands locked on the wheel. “He's planning to move to Dallas. Says he's going to take Erik with him."

"Can he do that?"

"I don't know. I'll have to call my goddamn lawyer. Christ, I thought this shit was over with."

She sucked in a sharp breath. Behind me Erik was making rapid-fire machine gun sounds from behind his teeth. Each burst sent a tremor along my nerves, and I could feel the muscles in my neck and back begin to twitch and crawl.

I called Rick from a pay phone at the zoo. The receiver shook as I punched in the numbers, and I had to steady it with both hands while I waited. He answered on the fifth ring, drunk. In the background I could hear a college football game, interrupted every now and then by loud cheering and swearing.

"What?” he said, shouting above the noise.

"The war. It’ s still with me."

"Yeah. How was it? A real trip, right?"

"I can't get rid of it, that's what. It's weird. I was humping my brains out, and it wasn't me anymore. It was someone else inside her, and I was in the war. I think it was someone she'd had before. Some guy in Nam who'd been through all that. Now, I keep having these flashbacks."

"No shit. The minute I pull out the joy ride's over with. Back in the good ol’ U. S. of A."

"I'm in trouble, man. You hear what I'm saying?"

"I latched on to one right after you,” he went on. “Great tits. It was all I could think about while I was getting my ass shot at. Mortars going off around me. Bullets shredding the air, cutting up leaves like a goddamn Vegematic. Jesus, they were beautiful. I'm gettin’ hard just thinkin’ about it."

"Goddamnit, Rick, you're not listening. I need help."

"You could try seein’ a counselor."

"Right. What the hell am I supposed to say? That I picked up post traumatic stress at a nightclub. I'd be laughed right out of the goddamn office."

"Nah. They'd just think you were crazy and roll out the red carpet."

"A lot of fuckin’ help you are."

"Listen,” he said. “It's almost halftime. Why don't you dump Judy for a couple of hours, come on over and watch the game, have a few beers? It'll give you a chance to unwind, get your head together."

"I don't know what the hell's going on,” I said. “I'm not in control anymore and I'm scared shitless."

But he wasn't listening. I could hear him shouting to the guys in the other room. I slammed the phone down hard and stared at the twisted remains of defoliated trees rising up around me, like skeletons out of a fog.

"You all right?” Judy asked, walking across the living room to the sofa where I lay. “You look a little pale."

"Headache,” I said. “Is he asleep?"

"Tucked in for the night. He was pretty tired.” She sat down on the sofa beside me. A dull ache hammered in the back of my head and I felt nauseous. There was an ugly rash on both arms and my eyes burned.

"It's been a long day,” she said. I nodded and she bent down and kissed me, her tongue gentle but urgent.

I put my hand on one of her breasts and with the other unsnapped her jeans, pulled the zipper down and worked my hand inside, felt the tension drain out of her. She loosened my belt, then squeezed me and stood, pulling me after her with one hand. We went into the bedroom and slipped out of our clothes. Judy lay on the bed, and I felt last night rip through me like an aftershock. All I could think about was being face down in the mud with part of my leg gone and everything else going limp.

"You really must not be feeling very well,” Judy said few moments later. She sat up and stroked me, her tongue flicking and teasing, but it was no good.

"Sorry,” I said.

Judy got up. “I think I'll fix some tea."

I watched her walk down the hall, listened to the clanking of pans in the kitchen, the sound of the faucet as she filled the teapot. Ten minutes later, when the pot began to whistle, I was still standing there, waiting for it to end.

Monday morning I called in sick. Around eleven the phone rang. It was Rick.

"Where the hell are you?” he demanded.

"Under the weather."

"No shit. In case you forgot, we've got a major sales presentation this afternoon. A career-maker, remember?"

"Fuck it."

"Jesus Christ, I don't believe what I'm hearing. What the hell's wrong with you, pissing your life away because of some worthless cunt?"

"I've got some thinking to do, all right?"

"In the meantime it's bend over, Rick. My ass is getting reamed because you're feeling guilty or depressed or whatever."

"Go to hell. Your head's so far up your ass you don't know what's going on."

"Look,” he said. “Why don’ t we have lunch, talk things over. Rennie's at twelve, okay?"

"I'll think about it."

"Don't think,” he said, “just do."

Rennie's was upscale down-to-earth. Expensive pâté and sprouts. Imported wine. Rough, butcher block tables and oak chairs with lots of hanging plants below angled skylights. I never could figure out why Rick liked the place. Maybe he thought it made up for his usual beer and pretzels approach to life. He had a window table with a view of the new airport, and when I walked up he was watching the jets take off and land.

"Beautiful,” he said. “You look like warmed-over shit. What happened? Judy cut you off?"

"Wouldn't make any difference.” I took a sip of water from the glass in front of me.

"What do you mean?"

"I can't get it up. Hell, I don't even want to."

"So? You wouldn't be the first. That's no reason to trash your whole life, everything you've worked for."

I held onto the slick, condensation beaded glass with both hands. “I think it's some kind of reaction. Agent orange. Dioxin. I read somewhere it screws up your sex drive. Saturday, at the zoo, this stuff was blowing all over the place. There were hardly any trees or bushes left, and I had this rash, tiny blisters underneath my skin."

"It's all in your head, man. Psychosomatic. You realize that, don't you?"

I squeezed the glass harder, watched the skin on my knuckles turn to ivory. “Afterwards, Judy wanted to make it, you know. I tried, but it was no good. I was just going through the motions. I didn't feel anything. Inside, something had died, and I wanted to cry, but I couldn't. I felt as mutilated and empty as the guys who lost arms and legs."

Rick looked at me hard while he fiddled with a napkin on the table. A waitress came up and I leaned back, still holding on to the glass. I could see his eyes checking her out as we ordered, pupils darting up and down her body.

When she was gone he said, “Look, lots of guys made it through the war without any serious problems. It was hell, sure, but they pulled themselves together and are leading normal lives. Nobody ever talks about them, but they're out there. Guys who figured out a way to cope because it was the only choice they had if they wanted to stay sane and go on living. Somehow they managed to put it behind them, and that's what you've got to do."

"Sure. How the hell am I supposed to do that when I don't even know what's real anymore and what's not? If my feelings are my own, or someone else's?"

Rick slammed his fist down hard, rattling the table. “This is real, goddamnit. Right here, right now. All that other shit is history. Christ, even the Vietnamese people managed to rebuild their lives, and they suffered a helluva lot. What I'm sayin’ is remember the past, but don't live in it. Treat it the same as that whore you had. Experience it, learn from it, and then get rid of it, like a piece of used toilet paper."

"You're sick, you know that. I didn't ask for what happened. But you eat this shit up."

"The hell you didn't. You dipped your wick the same as me."

Our voices had risen. People were looking and at the same time trying not to.

"Don't do this to me,” Rick said. “If you want to ruin your life, fine, but don't drag me down with you. Get through this afternoon and I'll help you out any way I can. I swear it. Whatever you want."

"What if I don't make it? What if I have a flashback and fall apart. It'll be worse than if I didn't show up at all."

"You'll be fine,” he said. “There was no way to win the war in Nam, but you can win this one. All you've go to do is tell yourself to keep moving forward. If you don't, you're going to be stuck right where you are. What do you say?"

"I don't know,” I said, shaking my head. “I'd like to, but I can't get rid of it. Like the melody to a song that's stuck in your head. You force yourself to concentrate on something else, another tune maybe, and after a while you think it's finally gone, but it's not, and all of a sudden there it is again and there's not a goddamned thing you can do about it. It keeps playing, over and over again, until you get so frustrated and pissed off you'll do almost anything to end it."

I closed my eyes. Part of me was starting to drift again, the plants blending into a dense, leafy canopy, the skylights shafting between them. I tried to hold on and felt myself tremble, like an addict going cold turkey. Then I heard the waitress. Plates clanked loudly on the table and my hand jumped, spilling water across the surface.

"I'll get some more napkins,” the waitress said. She hurried off and I saw Rick watching her ass, the quick movement of her hips.

"I know what you're saying,” Rick said. “Believe me. I have the same problem with women. I think about ‘em every goddamn second of the day the same way you're thinking about the war. If they weren't so fuckin’ beautiful, I think I'd kill myself."

Six hours later I stood in front of the weathered, graffiti-stained door of the Old Nam. It had taken me that long to work up the courage to go back. I'd spent most of the afternoon walking around downtown and Washington park, trying to convince myself that it was the right thing to do, that I hadn't made a mistake by telling Rick to eat shit and die. During the day my intestines had balled up, and I'd spent as much time on a toilet as I had on my feet. My guts were still cramped, but by now the spasms were nothing but dry heaves.

Asshole, I thought. Get it over with.

When I stepped through the doorway my hands started to shake and I stuffed them into my pockets. It seemed like I'd never left. Nothing had changed except for the dancer on the stage, and after a while even that would be the same, hips, shoulders and arms gyrating under the hot lights.

I paused just inside the door for a few minutes, watching, then turned and headed for the bar. I sat down, ordered a beer from the overweight woman at the counter, and peered through the dim haze at the waitresses out on the floor. It took a few minutes for my eyes to adjust, and a little longer for me to find her. She was with three guys at a table close to the stage, not far from the EMPLOYEES ONLY door that led to the rooms in back.

I sipped my beer shakily and watched her work, the hands of the men grabbing her ass and reaching for her breasts as she playfully squirmed away, leading them on. Don't think, I remembered Rick saying. Just do.

I chugged the rest of my beer and stood unsteadily, made my way over to the table, sweat crawling down my sides, stinging the corners of my eyes. Her perfume burned my already-raw throat, spun my head dizzily as I grabbed her by the arm.

"Hey,” she said. “What do you want, man? I'm busy."

"This way,” I said, yanking her after me.

One of the guys at the table got up fast. His knees banged hard against the edge, scattering bottles and foamy beer.

"Son of a bitch,” he said, wiping at the wet spot on his pant legs.

There was a wadded up twenty in my pocket. I pulled it out and tossed it on the table. “This one's on me,” I said, pulling her toward the door.

"You owe me,” she said when we were in the back hall. “Fifty bucks for each one of those guys."

"Which room?” I asked, shoving her down the door-lined corridor.

She went into the same room we'd been in before. I closed the door behind us, heard the latch click softly. It sounded like the bolt of a gun being pulled back, and I wondered if I could go through with it. I couldn't feel my hands or feet. They seemed wooden and unfamiliar, as if they belonged to someone else. I closed my eyes for a second, felt myself start to tumble aimlessly, and quickly opened them.

"Let's get on with it,” she said. “I haven't got all night."

She was already loosening the black-and-green flowered blouse she had on. I stepped forward and took her by the wrists.

"What's your problem, man? You some kind of addict, or what?"

"I need to know how,” I said, my voice a barely audible whisper. “Why."

"What difference does it make? You want it, or not?"

I shook my head and tightened my fingers, squeezing the bone beneath them.

"Knock it off, asshole.” She tried to pull away and we stumbled to one side. Her knee came up, catching me in the hip, and one of her hands raked painfully across my face. I knocked it away and caught her by the throat, slammed her hard against the wall and held her there. Her eyes had the same glazed, lifeless look as those of the dead NVA soldiers, as if they'd been dulled by everything she'd seen and been through.

"You going to kill me?” she asked, forcing the words through her clenched throat. “Strangle the life out of me the way you did my country?"

"No,” I said, wondering if maybe it was true. I'd come looking for answers, a way of getting rid of what possessed me, of choking to death the memories, guilt and anger that were tearing me apart.

"Even if you do, she went on, “I won't die. You can't undo what you've done. I'll live on. I'm inside you the same way you were inside me and the rest of us, our villages and homes."

It took a couple of seconds for my fingers to relax. There would be bruises on her neck and wrists, and I thought of all the other guys that had done the same thing trying to escape themselves, the marks they had left.

"I'm sorry,” I murmured, to her, but also to myself.

She didn't say anything, and a moment later I let her go. Warm spit struck the side of my face. I pressed my forehead and fists against the wall and listened to the small movements she made knotting her blouse, slipping into her red high heels. I could still feel her throat between my fingers, the ragged words passing through them, and her pulse throbbing to the rhythm of my own heart, telling me it was possible to carry death inside you and go on living.

A few minutes later, when she was finally gone, my hands relaxed and my breath came easier. Her strong perfume lingered in the air, mixing with the other memories she had given me as the saliva began to cool on my cheek, taking away some of the pain and bitterness I felt by reminding me of hers.

It felt like a tear, one I had cried myself.

"Another Saturday Night in Georgia” first appeared in Lorelei Shannon's short fiction collection Vermifuge, and Other Toxic Cocktails, from Scorpius Digital Publishing, 2001.

Author's Note: “This story was actually inspired by the TV show Jackass. The first and only time I watched, I sat there with my mouth hanging open, wondering why anyone would voluntarily do such stupid, dangerous, and dumb things. Sure, there's the ‘I'm going to be on TV so it's worth it’ element, but the truth is, people do this kind of stuff all the time, whether there's a cameral present or not. I realized there must be a compelling reason, something common to all these folks, something universal that anybody could understand. Something that crosses the widest cultural borders. Something that could happen on any Saturday night in Georgia.

Or anywhere else, for that matter."

SO THERE WE WAS by the Edge of the Gauntlet, breathin’ fire, spittin’ nails, ready to tear the world to pieces. Billy Ray looks at me and grins, the ugly snaggletooth sumbitch. “You ready to die, shithead?” he says.

"See you in hell, needledick.” I pause to scratch my balls, showin’ him I ain't scairt.

Jesse Lee, who was takin’ a piss in the woods, saunters up. He's the old man, the champion, still alive after playin’ the Gauntlet for three summers. Ever'body says his luck's gotta run out soon.

He nods at me an’ Billy, blinks his eyes, yawns like the whole thing bores the shit out of him. I hope I look half as cool as he does.

The girls is on the sidelines, goin’ crazy. Raylene bats her black eyes at Billy. “See you when you win, honey,” she hollers, and shows him her pink tongue. Little slut.

My gal Betty Jean flashes me a purty smile. “Go baby go!” she squeals, and shakes her hot little tail. My nuts tighten jus’ lookin’ at her, an’ I give her a wink. Damn, I love a woman with a nice tail on her. Jesse's woman Flozetta is dancin’ foot to foot. She jus’ plum looks scairt. She's all swole up with his young ‘uns. It'd be an awful thing for a gal in her condition to see her man spread all over the Gauntlet like a jar a’ strawberry jelly dropped on the floor of the Piggly Wiggly. Jesse blows her a kiss.

Oh shit, here comes the Machine. It's a big bastard, big as a building, tall as a pine tree, roarin’ like the end of the world. The lights are the brightest things I've ever seen, washin’ away the moonlight, glarin’ down like the eyes of a pissed-off demon.

My insides turn to water. It happens every time. I ain't ashamed, though. What fun would the Gauntlet be if it was easy as takin’ a dump?

I can tell by the way Billy Ray's startin’ to drool that he's as scairt as I am. But Jesse, he's a rock. His eyes is narrowed, chin up, steady as the hills.

Oh, sweet Jesus, the ground is shakin'. We step up to the Edge as the Machine comes for us like the sulfur-stinkin’ devil hisself.

"Go!” screams Raylene, the bloodthirsty little bitch.

An’ we go. We run like our asses are on fire, right in front of the God-forsaken, flesh-eatin', hell-breathin’ Machine.

At first it's like I'm dreamin'. I feel my legs movin', but it's like I'm not really there. Time stops. I cain't hear nothin’ but my own breathin'. I cain't see nothin’ but the eyeball-meltin’ glare of the Machine's lights.

Them lights. It's like they catch me, hold me, stop me in my tracks. My breathin’ stops. I cain't move. The world is in them awful lights, brighter than a hundred suns.

"Go, Kid!” screams Jesse Lee, right in my ear. “Go, you silly shit!” And wham! Jus’ like that, I'm back. The roar of the Machine deafens me; throat-squeezin’ exhaust fills my lungs. I can see Jesse jus’ ahead of me, runnin’ like hell. Billy Ray's alongside me, sides heavin', eyes glazed with terror.

Oh Christ, the Machine is on us like a bulldog on a bloody steak. Jesse zigs, Jesse zags, an then he's on the other side, he makes it one more time.

Billy Ray's panickin'. He runs into me, knockin’ us both over. Cussin', screamin', I scramble to my feet. Billy's up too, an’ we're runnin', an’ oh Mama the noise an’ the stink an’ the goddam unholy lights turnin’ the night into day, an’ Billy's turned the wrong way, he's headed right into it an’ I jump, I fling myself through the air an’ I'm hittin’ the grass an’ rollin’ an’ I see the Machine hit Billy an’ he jus’ seems to explode like a plastic bag fulla ketchup an’ guts.

It's over. I'm lyin’ on my side in the grass, pantin'. Jesse Lee's stretchin', yawnin', like it was no big deal. The girls are screamin'; Betty Jean an’ Flozetta cheerin’ an’ jumpin’ up an’ down; Raylene wailin’ like it's the end of the world.

It's over until next Saturday night, when, by God, we'll do it again. Maybe I'll die. Maybe I won't. It's all jus’ part of the game.

An’ why, you ask, do we do it?

Well, what the fuck else do possums have to do?

Mark Bourne ("The Case of the Detective's Smile") has published short fiction in Asimov's Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and assorted anthologies such as Sherlock Holmes in Orbit, Full Spectrum 5, the Chicks in Chainmail series, and a university textbook of world literature. An erstwhile astronomy and English teacher with a theater background, he has also written and produced work for video, science museums, and multimedia planetariums nationwide. The first collection of his short fiction, Mars Dust & Magic Shows, is available as an eBook from Scorpius Digital Publishing. With his wife Elizabeth, he lives in Seattle, Washington, and at www.markbourne.com.

Mark's novelette “The Nature of the Beast” appeared in AEon Five.

Blood, Blade, & Thruster—The Magazine of Speculative Fiction & Satire

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The Internet Review of Science Fiction

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An Occupation of Angels, by Lavie Tidhar

Pieces of the Sky, by Marina Fitch

Rags and Old Iron, by Lorelei Shannon

Something Rich and Strange, by Carrie Richerson

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