BOOKS TO LOOK FOR

The Seraphim Rising, by Elisabeth DeVos, Roc, 1997, $5.99.

One of this column's readers wrote to me recently to say, "In reading the current issue of FeSF, I noticed your comments about being tired of the same-old same-old. If it's something truly different that you seek, please permit me to suggest The Seraphim Rising." So I tried it. And our correspondent was right.

A touchstone to the theme behind the novel might be some of James Morrow's more recent work, such as Only Begotten Daughter [What if Jesus has a sister and she was born today?) and Towing Jehovah [What if there was a god, only he's dead and his two-mile long corpse has been found floating in the ocean?}, except where Morrow considers the questions satirically, DeVos approaches them matter-offactly, in the mode of a near-future thriller.

Quick backstory to The Seraphim Rising: Thirty years before the book opens, golden eggs dropped from space and landed in the ocean. Twenty years later, they opened and six angels arose from the eggs, kept aloft by their enormous wings. They claim to have come to open the gateway to paradise. We join the story as the angels identify the new messiah: Harry Chen, a drugged- out creator of VR programs, the most notable being Freak Follies. in which he rants against everything the angels stand for.

Our viewpoint character is Carson McCullough -- a personal liaison to the angel Ezekiel -- who happens to have grown up with Chen. Having fled the seminary in a crisis of faith, McCullough is now facing another. His angel charge keeps bolting, the men for whom McCullough works use what he believes is unnecessary force to bring Ezekiel back into the fold, and then there's Chen. One thing McCullough knows for sure: whatever else he might be, Harry Chen is no savior.

DeVos does a fine job in bringing to life her near-future world where the church and various governments all vie for control of these creatures that some accept as messengers from God, others as scouts for an imminent alien invasion. All of the different factions want a piece of the action, but Chen has his own ideas as to what the messiah's responsibilities should be and the situation quickly escalates out of everyone's control.

Once it starts rolling, the novel's momentum keeps to a rapid pace, and one doesn't notice so much that, except for McCullough, most of the cast are character types, rather than individuals. And happily, DeVos doesn't ignore the fascinating theological repercussions of the events she describes. Her take on these elements is different from Morrow's, as one would hope and expect, but no less thoughtprovoking.

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By CHARLES DE LINT

BOOKS TO LOOK FOR

A Dry Spell, by Susie Moloney, Doubleday, 1997, $23.95

"The next Bob Dylan." "In the tradition of Tolkien." It isn't fair, but we use touchstones all the time -- shortcut descriptions that convey the flavor of a work and are difficult to live up to. The one I've heard bandied about in regards to Susie Moloney's new novel is Stephen King.

Now pretty much everyone who's ever written a horror novel has probably had the King tag put on their work at some point or another, but in this case it's not far off the mark. I don't know if Moloney has King's staying power, and her work doesn't quite have the driving pulse of storytelling that underlies the best of King's novels, but there's a flavor in her clean prose and, especially, in the relaxed manner she's able to bring her characters to life that, if not exactly reminiscent of King, is certainly as accomplished. Even brief walk-on roles are infused with a judicious eye for just the right amount of telling detail.

The principal action centers around these four, the most powerful of whom rarely makes an onstage appearance:

Karen Grange is the bank manager of Goodlands' only bank. As the drought that's hit the town works its way through year four, it's her sorry task to foreclose on the mortgages held by her neighbors.

Mary O'Hare was murdered a hundred years ago. Since her death, she's harbored a bitter grudge that's come, over time, to include the whole town.

Vida Whalley, from the poor side of town, also harbors a grudge against the people of Goodlands, so she becomes the perfect host for O'Hare's spirit. It's through Whalley that we learn the little we know of O'Hare.

And then there's Tom Keatley, the rainmaker, a contemporary hobo, wandering the backroads of America who, when asked, "How do you make it rain?" inevitably replies, "I make it rain for fifty bucks."

Keatley's arrival is the catalyst that moves the dry hatred of O'Hare and Whalley from manifesting as a passive, if deadly, drought, to an escalating supernatural struggle that finally culminates in a classic confrontation between the four in the middle of a dust storm.

But, at least from this reader's point of view, the intricacies of the plot weren't nearly as fascinating as Moloney's characters. I was far more interested in how Moloney played out their personalities, from the flashbacks of Keatley's wandering days and the shame of what brought Grange to manage the Goodlands bank, to the everyday lives of the townsfolk as they tried to cope with the terrible drought. In other words, the people. Which, come to think about it, is what I like the best about King's books when he's on a roll.

Material to be considered for review in this column should be sent to Charles de Lint, P.O. Box 9480, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K 1G 3V2.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): "May I say, sir, what a pleasure it has been sniffing your butt?"

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By CHARLES DE LINT

BOOKS

The Man Who Walked to the Moon, by Howard McCord, McPherson & Company, $18.

Into the Forest, by Jean Hegland, Bantam, $21.95.

"Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?"

If all the world's a stage, then the literature of science fiction and fantasy must surely make its entrance as Barnum -- all flourishes and razzle dazzle, cheap glamour and mad gesticulations as it heralds the excitements to come: See the Dark Lord Defeated by Plucky Halflings! Gasp at the Woman-Man, Giving Birth in a World of Winter! Witness the Boy with an Accounting-Machine in His Head, Laying Waste to the Corporate Empires of the East! For good or ill, we are a genre of {excessive) excess. Excess is what we expect to find when we crack the spine of the latest offering of Kelvin J. Gatheringhood or M.R.R. (nee Misty) Hawkweed, and excess is what we reward. Prismatic description, global collapse, flamboyant characters (but not, hilas! characterization) and colorful earthy peoples, World Building and Subsequent Destruction...our genre is a crowded, noisy place, and thus usually eschewed by the literary mainstream -- unless they are slumming, in which case they want the noisiest experience available. White noise will do {think Don DeLillo or William Gibson) and so will mad-eyed raving {think Thomas Pynchon), as well as the more pedestrian fulminations of Thomas Clancy or David Brin.

This makes sense, when one considers that the longest shadow cast across the American literary landscape of the last twenty years is that of Raymond Carver. If science fiction and fantasy echo as thunderclap and sonic boom, mainstream fiction has long been a reactionary Shhhh. But in one of those odd reversals so beloved of our Victorian ancestors, the mainstream has of late seen its banks overflow with sesquipedal fabulists like A.S. Byatt and Arundhati Roy and David Foster Wallace. Meanwhile, the most striking genre books I've encountered this year have been distinctly understated: M. John Harrison's spare, heartwrenching Signs of Life and a pair of first novels, Howard McCord's The Man Who Walked to the Moon and Jean Hegland's Into the Forest.

Howard McCord is best-known as an essayist and poet. The Man Who Walked to the Moon is a novella, and a terse one at that. Its narrator is fifty-year-old William Gasper, a self-described assassin who lives a hermetic existence in the arid Steen Mountains of Nevada, a desert "as lovely as new skin." Gasper is a veteran of the Korean War, a Marine sharpshooter and sometime stringer for the CIA who understands guns the way other men understand women.

I was guilty of capital crimes in twenty-three countries, and so I could take my pick of punishments legally due: garrote, guillotine, poison gas, electricity, noose, firing squad, lethal injection or battering by steel bar as in Uganda under Amin.

William Gasper rents a packing crate behind a gas station for twelve dollars a month, and sleeps there when the weather is bad; but most of his days are spent walking The Moon, a mountain he knows and loves as keenly as his Swiss 9mm SIG P210 pistol. "It has become like no other mountain. Calm as I would wish to be, am. A shadow taken up substance..." On The Moon, Gasper sleeps sometimes within a stone hut he constructed, and other times under the stars. He eats insects, grasshoppers and roasted ants, and fortifies himself at sunset with a mouthful of brandy. "A tot of cognac and a can of pears can ease the consciousness of an Augustine brooding on imagined sins, or sate a womanless satyr." Occasionally he downs a grouse with a stone, and eats it raw; or shoots a deer.

I watched them silently and admired the utter simplicity of a deer's mind. It was a machine much like the one that hummed between my own ears, but tuned to a Euclidean shyness, a world of coherent forms, or regularity, and it lacked ambiguity to the extent that it was fundamentally alien to human consciousness, awash in the stuff.

William Gasper is a figure more familiar to us from the pages of the daily newspaper than a novel. He is the brilliant autodidact who becomes the Unabomber, the paid assassin whose gun reminds him of Rilke's panther; the late-century, murderous Odysseus who stalks Nell Young's "Ambulance Blues."

His existence is so utterly stripped down, so rawly in touch with the natural world, that it takes on an almost voluptuous sensuality. The character he most closely resembles is not the assassin of DeLillo's Libra, but the postulant heroine of Ron Hansen's gorgeous Mariette in Ecstasy, another novel that probes the outermost limits of transcendental experience. Hansen's adolescent Mariette achieves union with her Christ, but McCord raises the supernatural bar for his protagonist: he has Gasper communing with the Welsh deathgoddess Cerridwen, who first visits him in a fishing boat off the North Korean coast. She promises him that he'll see her again in this world, "as well as when you die." Hereafter she appears sporadically to Gasper; more often, she sends her murderous familiar in pursuit, a creature known as the Palug cat which, this time, manifests itself as a man with a British passport, a roll of Krugerrands, and a Remington BDL rifle. Gasper kills the Palug cat as neatly as those animals he slays when he grows tired of eating bugs; then strips the man of valuables and stuffs the body in a crevice atop The Moon. Later he carries out more killings {and a rescue} with as little fanfare, and finally retreats to a "Ranch on the River Sorrow, where I type these words on an old Royal 440."

The Man Who Walked to the Moon is an extraordinary book. It completely confounds one's expectations of the fantastic novel, but the mysteries at its heart -- death and survival, an almost primeval experience of the natural world -are transcendental mysteries. Reading this slender volume is like peering into the primal cauldron of Cerridwen herself, and glimpsing there the very acts of death and regeneration: ghastly, terrifying, and ultimately miraculous.

If this is a story, it is not a romance, unless Cerridwen's doting attention could be so construed. It is, as far as the teller knows, a veritable account of a lucid insanity of long duration, an oblique confession, an apologia pro viota sua, a fantasy spin in a cold winter, or out of night.

Jean Hegland's first book was The Life Within: Celebration of a Pregnancy, a slightly New Ageish but elegantly penned account of the warm fertile biosphere of parturition. Her first novel, Into the Forest, shares the earnestly gravid atmosphere of her non-fiction work. Readers of Mothering Magazine or parents of children educated at Waldorf schools will recognize the touchstones here: an extremely intelligent and artistic nature coupled with an ecosensitivity that can be grating, even to those of us who recycle religiously, give our children echinacea tincture in lieu of Robitussin and eschew disposable diapers.

Happily, Into the Forest is so thrillingly written that it becomes a page turner from its very start. Eva and Nell {and don't think the Dickensian-American Transcendentalist echo of those names is an accident, buster!) are teenage sisters orphaned in the dark forest and left to rely only upon their wits and each other. But theirs is not the tangled Victorian wilderness this premise might suggest. It is Northern California circa Now, with a deep background of global terrorism, eco-collapse, communications shutdown and rampant viruses. Said backdrop is cursorily [though believably] dispensed with in the opening pages. Distant warfare, killer bacteria: who's gonna argue? The two girls have been lovingly homeschooled by their mother, a former professional ballerina, and their father, a school principal-cum-handyman who has conveniently outfitted their house with a gas generator as well as 50,000 baud modems, CD players and all those other things as indispensable to modern life as chamber maids and cooks were to our Victorian ancestors. Nell has high SAT scores and aims for Harvard; Eva plans to follow in her mother's plies and join the San Francisco Ballet.

But then disaster strikes (cancer, chain saw accident) and the girls are marooned. What follows is a beautifully rendered exegesis of the tactics of survival, and the most realistic portrayal of a near-future disaster as I have read.

This doesn't mean that Into the Forest reads as non-fiction, though Hegland obviously adores the lavish details of frontier domesticity she recreates here: gathering wild foods, killing a fetal sow, making a cottage sensibility to this novel which outweighs the occasionally cumbersome plot elements. These can be melodramatic -- rape, pillage, wild beasts, childbirth, abandonment -- but Hegland's point is that life in its essence is melodramatic, once you flense it of the distractions of television and even Art. She stacks the deck, Swiss Family Robinson-style, by giving Eva and Nell a good deal of what they need to survive; but Hegland's writing is so lovely that I was willing to forgive her almost everything. Her heroines' literary predecessors are the two sisters in Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market," needing only each other for emotional and physical sustenance. Hegland one-ups those two by making her siblings nearly parthenogenic. A rape leaves Eva pregnant, but her baby is carried to term and delivered with as much aplomb as though he were conceived in vitro -- and when Eva's milk doesn't come in, Nell nurses the infant. The end of Into the Forest is its beginning: the two sisters and baby Burl forsake their childhood home, burning the house behind them and choosing to take their chances with the wilderness rather than with the marauding humans who've started sniffing around the place. There is hope of reunion with Nell's lover, and certainty that the forest will provide.

I don't buy Hegland's ultimate vision of humanity re-entering Eden, even in Northern California. In what reads like a revisionist take on George R. Stewart's Earth A bides [1949], brainy Nell lets her father's library bum along with the failing homestead, telling herself that "the life we were entering was one in which books would not matter. I thought of Eva waiting for me in the front yard, reminded myself that the encyclopedia had abandoned me during her labor, that no book had prepared me to save my father's life."

But in fact it is Nell's very bookish intelligence that enables her to survive, just as Eva's kinetic memory of ballet keeps her alive. For the two sisters to forsake the arts that nourished them seems slightly churlish, if not downright insane: Art sustains us as much as acorn flour. Maybe more so, when the barbarians are at our gates; when the barbarians are us. Still, Into the Forest is an exhilarating visionary novel, a fin-de-siecle fairy tale with that rarest of endings: the girls get each other, and a baby boy, and a bear, and everyone lives happily ever after, in the woods.

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By ELIZABETH HAND

EDITOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS

There was a time when science fiction book publishing was predominantly in paperback. Times change, economies shift, and nowadays it seems like hardcovers get the lion's share of attention. But there are plenty of books coming out now in mass-market format, and after bingeing on them this month I found lots worth reading.

Scott Westerfeld's Polymorph (Roc) features a title character born with the ability to change shape -or gender -- with a little mental exertion. Mostly s/he uses the ability for kicks eking out a living in near-future New York, but when love and another polymorph enter the picture, things get complicated. The plot never quite reached boiling temperature for me, but the ideas of this post-cyberpunk story are good and the future downtown club scene has some very nice touches.

Speaking of ideas, Howard V. Hendrix's debut Lightpaths (Ace) has lots of them -- about utopia, science, the future -- and never lacks for characters to expound them. This is a Novel of Big Ideas and won't satisfy readers looking for deep characterization, but there's enough provocative thought here to make the speechifying worthwhile.

Final Orbit by S. V. Date was shelved in the sf section because of its starscape cover and the title, but it's actually a thriller featuring a retired astronaut and murders linked to NASA. Had this book been written thirty years ago, it might have become an sf classic purely for its knowledgeable portrait of the space program. Nowadays, it's mimetic fiction, not speculative. I call that progress.

The New Hugo Winners Vol. IV edited by Gregory Benford (Baen) reliably assembles the '92-'94 winners, but you're mistaken if you think this is a collection of Connie Willis's short stories: only two of the nine tales have her byline. Janet Kagan, Geoffrey Landis, and Lucius Shepard contribute other memorable winners.

Last year's World Fantasy Award ballot pointed out a novel I'd missed otherwise, a funky alternate history set in the Wild West, Devil's Tower by Mark Sumner. Buffalo Bill Cody saddles up now for the sequel, Devil's Engine (Del Rey), and it's good fun with lots of resonance to the tale of magic -"talents" -- loose in the West.

From the West to the Far East: Black Mist and Other Japanese Futures (Daw), edited by Orson Scott Card and Keith Ferrell, is one of the better recent original anthologies. There are only five stories in the 300 pages here, so the writers [including Pat Cadigan and Richard A. Lupoff) don't have to cramp their styles. Four out of the five hit the mark for me.

Bodekker's Demons by Joe Clifford Faust (Bantam) is a scamp of a book, poking fun at the world of advertising by blending it with gangs of the future. Disregard the rumor claiming that the prequel, Ferman's Devils, detailed the doings of Mercury Press employees -- those same gangsters show up here and any coincidental resemblance to persons living or dead escaped me.

Michael Shea's The Mines of Behemoth {Baen) is the sort of fantasy adventure I rarely read nowadays -- perhaps because people rarely write them as well as does Shea. He's a joy to read.

Carlucci's Heart by Richard Paul Russo (Ace} has a good noir taste to it without feeling overdone. The story of a nasty virus in the future feels a bit too long, but it's well worth reading for the twists at the end.

Tricia Sullivan's Someone to Watch over Me (Bantam Spectra) is another long one, a cyberpunky inquiry into identity that rages across Eastern Europe. Sullivan writes with the fluid grace of a natural storyteller and is rapidly developing into a first-rate novelist.

And if you do venture into the realm of hardcovers, Pulp Art by Robert Lesser (Gramercy Books) features great reproductions of classic work by Frank R. Paul, Virgil Finlay, and a few others. Detective pulps, war stories, jungle adventures and sf all get their due -you're likely to find the aviation illustrations as interesting the sf pulp covers.

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By G.V.G

STRAIGHT CHANGES

There's classic anecdote about the great Satchel Paige pitching a game that was about to be called on account of darkness. (That's right--there were no stadium lights in the 1940s and '50s.) The umpire was persuaded to let the game go oen more innings, and Pagie then proceeded to strike out the other side on ten pitches. When a teammate chided him about needing ten pitches, Paige remarked "The ump misssed one."

Rick Wilber's father was catching in the big leagues back then (for the other St. Louis club), so it's no surprise that the spirit of an elder huzler should be the one to pass on an important lesson about sliders and fastball and things in this tale.

It is the top of the ninth, and the Worden Pirates hold a one-run lead. This is along the lines of a miracle. Johnny O., on the bench between innings, reminded the Pirates that they haven't won an opening game since, since, well, he can't remember. Certainly never in the ten years he's been catching.

Dan Carlow walks out to the mound, just shaking his head at the thought of it. Base hits, stolen bases, hit-and-runs, sacrifice flies -- the Pirates have somehow managed them all and built up a 4-3 lead. Now all Dan has to do is hang onto it. This is not, of course, an easy thing for a weekend pitcher, who by rights should be home typing up his column for tomorrow's Tribune, not out here pretending he can still pitch, even at this humble level, a semi-pro senior men's league.

Dan takes a warm-up pitch, his arm so tired he isn't sure, as he goes into the wind-up, if he can even get the ball over the plate.

He lets it go, and sure enough the ball hits in front of the plate and skips by Johnny O., who gets up from his crouch to walk back to the screen and get the ball. Watching him, Dan sees his dad in the stands, up in the top row behind home.

Of course it isn't Dad, can't be. It's just an old guy sitting there who looks a bit like him, that same old worn Cardinal cap, the same way he leans forward, elbows on knees, watching the game intently.

Dad died last summer, damn it, toward the end of the season. On a Sunday. The memories of that day come to Dan unbidden, like they always do, always there with him, ready to surface at any time. The car, the exhaust, the hose, the tape, the vomit in the lap -- the cessation, the surrender.

Dan shakes his head to try and clear the memory of it. He still sees his dad in too many places, thinks of him too often.

Frank Carlow was a solid minor leaguer in the Cardinals' chain back in the late nineteen-thirties and pre-war forties, a real prospect. He was called up to the big club in September of '41, was on his way.

And then came Pearl Harbor and the war, so Frank's career plans changed and he became a weather observer, flying in bombers over Italy and the Balkans, nearly got killed but got put back together, fell in love with an American nurse and wound up married and back in St. Louis, that shattered left leg ending his playing days but not his love for the game.

So he turned to coaching, was good at it, wound up being a career minor league manager, helping the young kids with that dream to make it to the big leagues.

Two or three times he was rumored to be in line for a big league managing job, and every now and then he came up to coach for the big club. He earned a reputation as one of the good ones, a laborer in the fields of professional ball. But Frank never won a pennant, not a single one, in Tidewater or Denver or Spokane, or anywhere else -- not a one.

And it ate at him, grew and enlarged over the years until it became the major frustration of his life. Until the cancer, that sure changed his perspective.

Dan stands on the mound, tired. He looks in toward the dugout and sees Jimmy, his son, in there arranging the bats in perfect order in the dirt, smallest to largest. Next to them, the helmets, set with the bills forward, are just so. Jimmy looks up, sees Dan, waves, yells something at him. Dan smiles. What a kid, what a terrific kid.

Dan takes another warm-up. The ball floats lazily in toward the plate, so fat it looks like slow-pitch softball. His arm feels dead. This is the first game of the season and he only planned to go four or five innings; but it turns out the Pirates only have nine players today and he's the only pitcher, so tired or not, he's on the mound.

What he needs, he thinks, is one of those mechanical arms the old pitching machines had, the ones where the metal arm just wound up tight on its spring and then let loose, flinging the ball in toward the plate.

Two days before, on a sultry Friday evening, Dan took Jimmy with him and drove away from Lakeland, taking the back roads north of I-4 past the strawberry fields and dairies and Florida scrub until he reached the east side of Tampa and the batting cages on Busch Boulevard.

It is tacky, touristy Florida there, a world away from the simpleminded complacency of Lakeland. Down the road a half mile is Busch Gardens and a park full of happy Ohioans and Michiganders looping the loop and buying trinkets and monorailing past the animals in their pocket Serengeti.

And there, just east of the thirty-nine dollar admission ticket that buys a day full of fun and a tour of the brewery, are the batting cages.

In the cages, for fifty cents, a machine pumps out ten fastballs and Dan can get into the groove, hit after hit, letting it all flow together. The zen of the swing. He has found some good, simple truths in those batting cages.

These machines are ancient, have been there for years, circling, stopping on their way to receive a ball from the basket and then whipping over the top to deliver the pitch, straight and hard, always at the same prescribed speed. Talk about your pitching mechanics, Dan thinks.

There is a primal fulfillment in those cages. No guessing, no waiting for the breaking ball, no doubts about life's little change-ups. Just straight balls, coming at you, and swing.

Dan likes the seventy-mile-an-hour machine best. It is fast enough to be a challenge but still hittable for him. The eighty is nearly impossible, and he can't imagine anyone hitting a ninety-mile-an-hour pitch.

It is good, as he loosens up to start the final inning, to think of those machines with their mechanical arms that never tire, never ache for the next four or five days.

Or never win a game either, he reminds himself. There are pluses to the pain. All it takes is a certain dedication, a certain commitment.

The batting cages were fun, Dan and Jimmy spending four or five dollars on the machines and then going out for pizza.

Jimmy, especially, had a wonderful time, swinging away at the slowest machine, now and then catching hold of one to rattle it around the enclosure. The kid flat-out loved it. Every time he hit one he did a little victory dance, almost getting plunked once or twice by the next pitch -Dan had to yell at him that the machines weren't going to wait for him to celebrate.

Flawed, wonderful Jimmy.

When Jimmy was born, twenty years ago, Dan was waiting outside the delivery room, the classic pacing father-to-be, when the doctor came out to "have a word with you about your son."

Down's syndrome, the doctor explained. Mentally retarded. "He'll never be normal, Mr. Carlow," the doctor said. "He'll always be slow."

The doctor recommended that they put the baby into an institution right away, said that would be best for everyone. But this was Dan's boy, his own first-born son, and so Dan said no, we'll keep him. Sally, in her hospital bed cuddling the baby, said she felt the same way.

A couple of years later she changed her mind. There was a lot of shouting, a lot of tears, a boyfriend. Dan got the house, the car, and Jimmy. Sally got her freedom.

Dan hears the echoes of those times as he watches the boy: He'll always be slow. And yeah, that is certainly the case, has been for these twenty years. But slow doesn't begin to explain Jimmy, or what he means to Dan.

The kid, you see, can see things clearly, see things honestly in this murky, gray old world. Dan loves the boy for that, for his innocence and honesty. He wishes he could find more of that essential goodness in himself, to tell the truth.

Just this morning Jimmy proved it again. He left a note for them, for Dan and his girlfriend Michelle. When Dan stumbled, groggy with sleep, into the kitchen and poured himself that first cup of coffee, Michelle was already up, reading the note, crying.

Dan wishes he loved Michelle. She is a terrific person, a caring lover, and seems to understand his limitations.

He ought to treat her better, be able to offer her more than he does. But marriage is certainly not on his list and doesn't seem to be on hers, either. She has her two past divorces, and he has Jimmy and the vicious scene he and the boy went through with Jimmy's mom when she screamed at the poor kid while Jimmy stood there, silent. She said she couldn't take it anymore, just couldn't damn handle it, and left. Even after all these years, Dan doesn't dare risk that again.

Last night, when Michelle made her little announcement, showed why.

The two of them were in the kitchen where Dan was rummaging around in a drawer looking for a corkscrew, when Michelle said "Danny?"

He didn't like the sound of that, and turned to look at her, saying nothing.

"Danny, I have to talk about something. About someone."

"Uh-oh," he said, and tried to smile. Damn. They both always knew that something like this might happen, had even talked about it over the years, about how their relationship was really fine, but, well, if the real thing came along for her ...

"Danny, I met this guy. He works over at the college, a professor."

"And?"

"And I like him. He's a good man. Divorced a few years back and looking to settle down. He's a little serious, maybe. But he's stable, and awfully nice."

"Awfully nice," Dan said.

"Yes," she said, firmly. "He's awfully nice. And he's a Christian. The real thing, born again and everything."

"You're joking, Michelle. Really?"

She laughed, "Well, yeah, he's a little odd about that, odd about a couple of things, actually."

"Odd?"

"But, Danny, I really like him. He's good to talk to, he doesn't just talk about sports all the time, he's..."

"Ouch," Dan said, and could only smile.

"But, yeah, he's a little odd. Like about sex. He really thinks we should wait, see how serious it gets, he says, before getting that involved. I think maybe he's thinking about marriage, and would want to wait for that, even." She shrugged. "It's a religious thing, you know?"

"I know," he said, picking up the wine and peeling back the metallic cap before starting in with the corkscrew. "Well, hell, Michelle, I think that's great. I'm happy for you. He's luckier than he knows. He's very, very lucky. You're a wonderful woman."

She blushed, walked over to him. "Thank you, Dan. I knew you'd understand."

He poured her a glass of the wine. Now what?

"Well," he said, "here's to you and your new friend," and he raised his glass to clink it with hers.

She sipped, smiled, sipped again.

"You know," she said, "this does sort of change the equation of things for us a little."

"A little?" All he seemed to be able to do was phrase short questions. Damn.

"Yes, Danny. But only a little, really. Look, I'm just starting to get to know this guy. I just wanted you to know that, that's all, really. So there wouldn't be any surprises later, you know?"

"Later?"

"Oh, Danny. He's a really fine man, but he's so, so, well, cautious all the time, you know what I mean?

He almost said "Cautious?" but held off, just looked at her instead.

"And I'm not quite ready for nothing but all that caution, Danny. Not quite ready, you understand? I mean, I want to keep dating him, see how it goes. But that doesn't mean..."

She walked over to him, leaned up and kissed him.

He understood.

They walked into the front living room. Michelle went over to the stack of CDs and picked a favorite, clicked it into the machine, turned to look at Dan.

He held out his arms so that she would come into them with a smile, and they started dancing to "Avalon," an old Roxy Music song.

As they danced Michelle slowly unbuckled his belt, pulled it from his pants, giggled as she threw it onto the couch. Then, slowly, while the song talked about seduction and momentary perfection, she undid his shirt buttons one by one, scratching his chest in between.

They made love for hours. Michelle wasn't on the pill, and didn't want to use the diaphragm and messy cream, so it was always up to Dan to hold back, and the lack of climax seemed to keep him going damn near right through the night.

And she flowed so well along with him, just languidly, timelessly, rolling and deeply laughing and nibbling here and there and cuddling and cupping and then slowly rolling again.

Her skin. Jesus God he liked skin that smooth. And her thighs, her strong, supple thighs: they just did not let go for what seemed like hours -- was hours. And the strange softness of her lips when she was half asleep. He leaned over her, kissed them, and then, finally, fell asleep.

Then, in the morning, she was up early, trying to get herself dressed and organized before Jimmy -- a late riser most days -- woke up and came wandering in to check on Dad. Dan, waking up, heard her in the bathroom, and then heard the footsteps heading downstairs, to the kitchen, he guessed, to make some coffee.

Downstairs, when he got there, the coffee maker was bubbling away and Michelle sat over by the table, reading that letter.

"Look at this," she said, and held up a piece of paper from Dan's computer printer, the perforated holes still attached to it.

"For My Dad" it read across the top of the paper.

"What is this?" Dan said, and took it from her.

"It's from Jimmy. He must have done it last night while we were out. Take a look."

Jimmy was prettygood with the computer. Played some of the games, seemed to know his way around in it all right. Dan didn't know his son was writing with it, though.

Dan read the sheet, and then just shook his head and smiled.

"This probably took him an hour to write. Hell, he's something, isn't he?"

Michelle had tears in her eyes. She nodded. "He is that, Danny, he is that. He's really something."

Dan put the sheet back on the table. "I'll leave it here for him. You coming to the game this afternoon?"

"I don't know yet, Dan. Maybe," Michelle said, pouring a cupful of coffee. "Can I take the coffee with me?"

"Sure. Gotta go right now?"

"I think so. Yes. I do, I have to go now."

She stood, leaned over to kiss him, smiled and left. He was sipping on his coffee, looking over the headlines on the front page of the Tribune, when he heard her car start up.

A few minutes later Jimmy came down, rubbing his eyes, grinning, ready for breakfast. Dan gave his son a good-morning hug and got started on the eggs and hash browns.

Jimmy, sipping on his own cup of coffee, said "Big day today, Dad, right? New season."

"Right, Jimmy. Pirates are going all the way this year. All the way. Championship. Betcha a hundred dollars."

"You on, Dad. Hundred dollars," Jimmy said. And then he laughed, getting the joke.

The letter went like this:

Jimmy Carlow

Lakeland Florida

This is: My letter to my dad

Hello my Dad,

I like you. This will be fun for me.

I like it typing, and I like writing like you, like my Dad. You are a good man. Your name is Dan Carlow. I am Jimmy. Your best son.

Grandpa says hello to you, My dad. I see him sometimes. Grandpa says I be proud of you, and of me, too!

I work hard at McDonald's. I clean it the lobby and I make buns and, sometimes, I make it the fries, too. I like it. A lot!

You work at it the newspaper. You write three lone, two, three) collums a weak. You are famous and a good pitcher too. I am proud of You, and You are Proud of me, two.

I be batboy for Worden Pirates! I keep it the bats just right. And the helmets. This is hard work, and I like it. A lot! My dad is pitcher for Pirates for many years. I be batboy for many years. We are a team. We have fun. We try hard.

I keep it my own room in our house. It is clean. I am cooking now too for my dad. Hot dogs and pot pies too.

My dad's girl friend is michelle. She is nice girl. I like her. a lot. We go for drives in her fast car on sometimes. She likes to smile. I like her. A lot!

This week, on Friday, I visit Group Home. people there say I could live in Group Home. I could to. I would love it there., And be an adult.

I love my Dad.

(I spell check this like my dad shows me. It works grate!l

Jimmy Carlow

Lakeland Florida

A few weeks ago Dan got a call from the local agency. They had a place lined up where Jimmy could go and live pretty much on his own, a group home they called it. The agency people thought Jimmy could actually handle that, could live in his own little apartment in this special complex, a place where he'd have someone to help out when he needed it -- a "coach" they called it. Otherwise, Jimmy would be expected to make it on his own.

Dan has his doubts.

Jimmy is such a kid in so many ways. Dan has spent twenty years watching this boy's halting growth, encouraging him, guiding him, protecting him. Dan doesn't know if he is ready to see Jimmy have to face this mean old world on his own.

At the batting cages, Jimmy really tagged the machine's last pitch, sending a line drive up the middle and banging it hard off the back of the cage. Jimmy laughed and danced around, yelling about home runs and world series and winning. Dan laughed with him and then, tired of knocking the balls around the screened-in cage, he talked Jimmy into quitting and they headed for CDB's and some pizza.

When Dan was a kid his dad took him to those same cages, and they weren't even screened in back in the sixties, they didn't have any limit on how far you could hit the ball. You could watch it soar into the night sky if you really caught hold of one, watch it land and roll out onto the golf driving range that used to be there.

The driving range is an apartment complex now, OakHaven Village, one of those stucco-walled complexes that cater to Tampa's wannabes -the ones who still believe in the entrepreneurial dreamland that Florida bills itself as.

His dad took him there once a week that one long glorious summer when Danny was ten. The two of them would swing away, twenty pitches for a dime, until they were good and tired. Then came Dairy Queen and root beer floats on the way home.

It was always a good time, getting away from Morn and her crazies and the fights she had with Dad and the screaming and even the shattering crash of the emptied glasses. Wonderful times. Poor Dad, putting up with that for all those years before Mom finally left and went West.

And now Dan is facing the forty mark and the batting cages are fenced in tight all the way around. And Dad is gone, and Morn is still crazy out in California somewhere, still puttering around with her sculpture and her poetry and drinking her carrot juice in the morning and her wine -"It's just wine, that's all, just a few glasses of wine" -- all night. He wonders when he might hear from her again, get another of those strange, rambling middle-of-the-night phone calls. It's been a long time.

It's time to get serious. Dan looks down at the first hitter of the inning, a chubby boy who doesn't have much power but got the bat on the ball last time up. John gives the signal, one finger down toward the dirt, fastball. Dan goes into his wind-up.

And it feels good, stride and release, machine-like for the moment, the ball dipping a bit at the end. A nice sinker, strike one as the boy watches it go by.

The balls in the batting cages, the ones from those pitching machines, never sink, never tire, never change. Dependable, trustworthy -- as long as the metal arm keeps whipping over the top and then lets it go, strike, strike, strike.

Dan lets another one go, a fastball sinker. The chubby kid swings and chops it into the dirt foul, strike two.

Dan takes a deep breath, feeling okay for the moment. He glances at the dugout, can see Jimmy in there, sitting over at the end of the bench, having one of those conversations with himself that he's been having lately, chatting up a storm, gesturing, laughing, talking to himself. Dan asked him about it the other day, about who he's talking to. Jimmy said it was Grandpa. Dan smiled, ruffled the boy's hair, gave him a hug.

Frank had loved the kid, doted on him, coached him in playing basketball and baseball, tried to help the boy with his pitching, just seeing if he could teach Jimmy to throw a strike, just one, all the way from the mound to home.

"That kid tries so damn hard," he told Dan once, shaking his head. "If I'd had a few more like him, trying that hard, I'd have won a dozen goddamn pennants."

Dan had laughed. Now, on the mound, Dan remembers how Frank had coached him, too, worked on his fastball, his slider, his straightchange, the one that looked like a fastball but came in so much slower.

That was the secret with the straight change, the way it looked like it was going to be one thing but turned out to be something else entirely. It worked because it was different. It always seemed risky to Dan, so fat as it floated up there.

But Frank loved it, he always said, because "It's a fooler, that changeup. You use it right, when they don't expect it, and you'll get some strikeouts with it, son. Guaranteed. You just have to know when's the right time for it."

On the other hand, Dad hated the sinker, Danny's favorite pitch. He cursed it for its unreliability.

"Son," he asked him once after a Pirates' game, "how can you like using any damn pitch that gets better as you get more tired? Hell, you can't trust the damn thing. Sometimes it sinks, sometimes it doesn't. You're lucky the hitters in this league are so terrible."

Dan remembers laughing at that. They lost that game by five or six runs, including a couple of sinkers that flattened out and turned into home runs. Oh, well. Hard to argue with the old guy sometimes.

Thing is, Dan likes the sinker, maybe because of its unpredictability. It's a little like a knuckle ball in that way. Could be great, could be awful. Like life.

He throws another sinker in and the chubby kid goes for it, swinging weakly but topping it so it trickles out toward the mound. Dan comes off the mound, grabs it cleanly with his bare right hand, and turns to throw it to Tommy at first. But his arm, his shoulder, can't handle this new movement, throwing from a different position, and the ball sails high on him, riding over Tommy's outstretched glove and out into the open field past the stands in short right.

Stevie, out in right, has to run like the devil to go get it and hold the runner to second.

Terrific, thinks Dan. Instead of an easy out I put the tying run in scoring position. Just super.

He tries to bear down, wants to concentrate. But the oppressive heat has taken a toll, certainly, and the truth of the matter is he's so tired that he feels sort of disconnected from the game. He walks the next guy on four pitches.

Dan stands on the mound, hands on his hips, glove folded back, and tries not to show how tired he is. Damn, any other team in the universe would have a reliever in by now, but this is the Worden Pirates, and there is no reliever, no bench. Just the nine of them today, and none of the others can pitch.

Hell. Dan walks back off the mound and tries to gather himself together. Just get the ball over the plate, he says to himself, and hope for the best. Don't worry about the arm, don't think about it. Just no more walks, at least be sure of that. No more walks, nothing for free.

He gets back onto the mound, kicks a little dirt into the hole in front of the rubber so he'll have a better footing, and then goes into the stretch. Jesus, his arm feels dead.

He lets the pitch go, a sinker right down the middle. Dan doesn't have much stuff on the ball, he is far too tired for that and the ball stays up flat and fat, never does sink. But the hitter, expecting a breaking ball, gets caught with the bat on his shoulder and watches the fat thing float by for strike one.

"Got away with that one, Danny. Got lucky," says a voice from behind the mound. Dan, taking the throw back from Johnny O., turns to see who said it but there is no one there. Weird.

"Look, you don't have enough stuff to make that sinker work anymore, Danny, and you know it."

Damn. Sounds like Dad, that raspy voice that almost whispered toward the end.

"Yeah, Danny, it's me, sure enough," says the voice.

By god, it is his dad. What the hell?

There is a chuckle. "I don't know. Beats me, too, son. But here I am."

Dan comes off the mound, confused, dizzy with the heat and this hallucination. A stroke? A fainting spell? Heat prostration?

"Nah, son, none of that," his dad says. "Just old Frank Carlow, back for a little game of ball with his son Danny, that's all. It's just me."

"Dad?"

"Oh, Christ, kid, don't say anything out loud like that. They'll think you're nuts," his dad says. "Look, just get back up there, get into the stretch, and let's get you out of this inning, okay? I'll explain everything later."

"Dad?" he says again. "What the hell?"

But the voice, the hallucination or whatever it is, is right. Best to just ignore it and get back on the mound. He could go see Doctor Pat tomorrow, get a check-up, see if it is some sort of heat thing. Pat is a friend, and will be honest with him. Christ. Voices. Just what he needs.

Dan goes into the stretch, takes a look at the runners at second and first, and then peers in for the sign from Johnny O. One finger stabs down at the dirt. Another fastball sinker.

"Won't work," his dad's voice says. "Shake it off, son. I'd try a slider, and keep it away from him. He'll chase it."

Oh, god. Dan backs off the rubber, stands still for a moment, tries to clear his head. He wipes his forehead with his sleeve, the sweat pouring off him, puts his cap back on. He looks in to see John, still calling for that sinker. Dan says no to that with a slight shake of the head.

Johnny tries again, two fingers, a curve. Dan shakes that off, too.

Johnny stands, calls time, and trots out to the mound. "What's the matter?"

"What's the matter?" Dan repeats. "Jesus, Johnny, I'm next to dead out here and you're calling for fastballs. I just don't have them in me."

"You want to bring Ricky in from right to pitch? He doesn't have much, but he can get it over."

Dan waves his glove at Johnny. "No, no. I'll manage, but let's try the slider on this guy. I think he might go for one low and away. All right?"

"Sure. No problem," Johnny says, and clanks back down to the plate, crouches behind it.

Dan goes into the stretch, takes a look at the two runners, and comes in with the slider. It's the first one he's thrown in a while, and, surprisingly, it feels good, is, in fact, damn near perfect, starting off waist high and down the middle and then breaking away, out of the strike zone wide and low.

And the batter goes for it, starting his swing, realizing his mistake and trying to stop it, but too late. Strike two.

"I'll be damned," Dan says aloud, "it worked. Hell, let's go for it one more time, okay?"

"No," says Dad's voice. "I got a better idea. This kid'll be protecting the plate now. With two strikes on him he'll be looking for that slider or your fastball. Let's try the straight change."

Dan just shakes his head. Of course, the change-up. But what the hell, at least it's easy to throw. He steps back onto the mound, shakes off the signs from John until he gets the change, and lets it go. The kid is way early on it, almost falling over trying to stop his swing, missing badly. Strike three. One out.

His dad's voice sounds pleased. "I knew it," he says, as the ball comes back to Dan.

Dan steps back down off the mound, tucks his glove under his arm and rubs the ball for a minute, stalling for a little rest time and hoping to get through whatever it is that brought on this damn voice.

"It's not the heat, Danny. Honest. It's me. Man, it's good to be here, good to talk to you. Jimmy's a great kid, but it's hard to hold a real conversation with him, you know."

And damned if Dan can't almost see the old man standing there behind the mound -- that battered old red Cardinal cap perched on his head, that crooked smile that rose more on the left side of his face, that potbelly gut.

No one else seems to notice, and the old man is barely there, even for Dan. It might be, Dan thinks, just a worsening of the heat prostration or something.

Dan looks to the stands to see if the guy he saw before is still there. The guy is gone.

The apparition shakes its head, says, "Face it, Danny. It's me, and you know it. Didn't Jimmy tell you about this? He said he would. Hell, I think that kid's the reason I'm back, Danny. He told me you guys needed me out here. So, let's get this next guy, all right?"

And they do, on four pitches, a fastball inside, two sliders low and away, and another change-up. Strikeout. There is an actual burst of applause from the stands, some encouraging yells. The locals aren't used to seeing this sort of thing, but they sure do like it.

"You know," says his dad, firming up a little with each pitch, getting clearer and clearer for Dan, "this is kind of fun, Danny. Maybe this is why I came back, to do a little coaching."

"I don't think so, Dad. I don't think you're back at all. But if you are, it isn't to tell me what kind of pitch to throw."

Fletch comes trotting in from third base, concerned perhaps about his pitcher talking to himself. "Jesus, it's hot," he says, wiping the sweat from his face. "You okay, Dan?"

Dan just smiles. "Fine, Fletch. Just fine. Let's end this thing, okay?"

And three pitches later, he does, following Dad's instructions he gets the next hitter to hit a one-hopper to Fletch, who steps on the bag at third to end the game.

Pirates win, 4-3. Amazing.

Dan walks slowly off the mound. He can hardly lift his arm to grasp Johnny O.'s hand as his catcher trots out to congratulate him, but it's a win, by god. For the Pirates.

There is a little knot of happy players who walk in together to the bench. None of them seem to notice the wispy image of his Dad still standing out on the mound, looking happily in toward the plate. Dan, looking back once or twice, doesn't know quite whether to laugh or cry.

Has this been real somehow? Will a cold cup of water make it all fade away?

He doesn't know, but Frank sure looks happy out there.

Jimmy runs up to give his dad a hug. "You a winner, my dad. Nice job. Great pitching. I be very proud of you."

"Thanks, Jimbo," Dan says, and concentrates to bring his arm up, put it around the boy as they walk in toward the bench and some water. "We finally won one, didn't we?"

"And Dad," says Jimmy, "I not tell anyone about Grandpa, right? He told me to keep it a secret, except to tell you."

"What?"

Jimmy leans over to speak conspiratorially. "Grandpa says we keep this all a secret, right? Tell no one."

Dan just smiles. Right. Tell no one.

He gives the boy a hug. "That's right, Jimmy. It's a secret, it's our little secret, okay?"

"Okay, my dad. It is a secret."

Dan sits on the bench, reaches over with his left hand to push in the button on the cooler to get some cold water, and drinks a cupful down in gulps.

"You won?"

He turns. It's Michelle, smiling.

"I thought I'd stop by and commiserate after your weekly loss, maybe take you and Jimmy out for a bite to eat," she says. "And now I find out that you won. How in God's name did that happen?

"She looks terrific. She looks wonderful.

Dan stands, laughing. "Beats me," he says. "But eating sounds good, a little victory burger maybe, okay?"

And the three of them walk over to Michelle's Pathfinder, climb into it. Dan is glad that she's driving. Maybe, by the time they've eaten and she's brought them back here to pick up his car, his tired old arm will work well enough that he'll be able to shift gears and steer with it. Maybe.

She's backing out of her space when Jimmy, in the back, rolls down his window and leans out to wave back toward the diamond.

"What's he doing.?" Michelle asks.

Dan looks. There's nothing out there that he can see. But Jimmy, he thinks, is the one who sees things clearly.

"It is nothing, 'Shelley," Jimmy says. "Just nothing at all."

And then he leans over the back of the seat and whispers into his father's ear, "Grandpa says bye, my dad. We see him next week. We win them all this year, he says. We win the pennant."

And Michelle looks over at them with a quizzical smile, wondering what's going on.

"Later," Dan tells her, and chuckles. "I'll try and explain it all to you later."

"Explain about what?"

Good question. "About the game. About winning. About Jimmy," he says. And then he looks at her. She seems different somehow today. He can't quite put his finger on it, but she's, she's ...

He gives up, smiles, and adds, "And mostly, I guess, about straight changes."

~~~~~~~~

By Rick Wilber

HOME ON THE RANGE

Jacquelyn Hooper received a masters degree from Arizona State University and now lives in Cerritos, California. She attended the Clarion writers' workshop in 1993 and notes that this story grew out of an inquiry into the different ways in which fantasy and SF view the future. Just as many stories set in the far future occur on planets named for ancient gods, she thought, so too do we all individually need to understand our own pasts in order to make sense of the future. Witness Chris Havenport's case.

In the second hour of waiting in the rain for something to happen, Chris Havenport moved his leg.

"Be still," Paladin said.

Chris stared at him. Water dripped from Paladin's wide-brimmed hat, and ran down his arms. His hands were clasped around the trigger of the rocket net, ready to fire.

He stared straight ahead, through a break in the trees, at the clearing.

"I have to take a piss," Chris said.

"Hold it."

"Nothin's out there."

Paladin remained rigid. Chris carefully returned his leg to its previous position, cursing Paladin in his head. Waiting was not the worst part of extermination, but it was a close second. Paladin blackened his eye once for coughing in a still glen, but even then Chris did not see the point. They weren't after quail or hare.

There was no name yet for what they were after. Paladin called them hellion and butchers; Chris had liked the sound of natives. Either way, who knew if they could see them hiding in the bushes?

Paladin moved his head, alerting Chris to something to his right. Chris saw nothing but leaves, and the blinking red light of the atmostat in the clearing.

But he felt a shift in the weather. Thunder drummed above him, and the air, once filled with the sharp smell of leaves and his own musty wetness, was a river, flooding his nose and ears. He suppressed the urge to cough, because Paladin was not moving. He stood, seemingly rooted, his dark eyes piercing through the curtain of water before them.

In the clearing, a woman appeared. She was naked, her skin the color of teak. She spun around, a blissful expression on her wide face as the storm swirled with her. She slowed, and the rain seemed to slow.

Chris watched her dance, following the way her black hair roped and swung across her face and shoulders.

He did not know what possessed him, at that moment, to rise, to see better.

She reminded him of Rae, their custodian. They shared the same coffee shading, the same dark hair. He thought of Rae's smile as the woman halted her dance, her arms stretched to the sky, her body poised to leap across the clearing.

Her sudden stop startled Chris from his dreams. The woman turned her head, her ears pricked like a fox's. Her gold eyes found him in the clearing.

Her actions reminded Chris of a deer's. For all intents and purposes, she was one. What he thought was skin was fur. Her half raised leg tapered down to a hoof.

Chris wanted to turn from her wondering, almost inviting expression. He felt his heart slow.

A sigh behind him made him jump. Not until the woman turned her head did he realize Paladin had fired the net rocket.

"The stakes," Paladin said, rushing through the brush. The net had dropped on the woman, knocking her to the ground. Chris opened the tool box a few centimeters away. The iron stakes sat in their own tray, slick and rusty from the rain. He took them and a mallet, and ran into the clearing.

Paladin was sitting on the native. She appeared stunned, until she saw Chris. She tried to tear at the mesh netting with her hands. She hit and shoved at Paladin. Paladin punched her in the face.

"Switch," Paladin said, when Chris stopped next to him. "Now!"

He jumped, and Chris took his place. The woman straggled anew, and Chris held her arms down.

Paladin stepped on one of her outstretched wrists, and knelt down. He took one of the stakes, and with one swing hammered it through her hand, into the mud.

"Nye!" she screamed. Chris grabbed her other arm, and felt her kick and buck beneath him as Paladin circled around them. Chris worked by feel, by practice in pressing her down, keeping her still. He could not look at her face, not with the human ones. He wished he could shut out their noises as well.

"Josen, dis maen," she said, her voice a harsh whisper. "Etnis dole capo ... nye!"

"Last one," Paladin said. "Move."

"Help me."

Chris opened his eyes. Tears and rain streaked her face.

"Christopher, please."

"Move! Move!" Paladin shoved him aside. Chris lay on his side, stunned. Natives didn't speak anything anyone could understand. It was always gibberish, the sound of birds, cats, and shrieking metal singing together.

Never soft toned American. Never names.

She closed her eyes. "Please."

Paladin brought down the mallet on the final stake, over her heart. Her body twitched, then stilled.

"Call it in." He tossed the mallet in the grass in front of Chris. "Tell Rae it's red light."

"She--"

"It's dead." He wiped his hands on his jacket, turning the wet leather a richer brown.

Chris stood up, and walked toward the equipment. He hated this. He always had, always would.

As he called Rae, the sky darkened, and the rain turned to hail.

"Put it away careful," Paladin said, a half hour later. "It's mine, not New river's."

Chris rolled the net and slipped it into the mouth of the launcher. "Sorry."

Paladin removed his hat, shook water from the brim, and put it back on. "What's passin' your back?"

"She said my name." He removed the legs from the launcher.

"So what? You know how many people on this planet named Chris? Light a rocket and everyone's looking for the Second Coming." He approached Chris, and took the launcher legs from his hands. "I gave you rules. follow 'em before I put you with them other idiots in Exterminator's Row."

He glared at Paladin's back. Exterminator's row was a monument created by the New river Expedition Company dedicated to the exterminators who died on Cynataka since its colonization. Paladin had taken Chris there after buying him from the New Bethlehem orphanage. He wanted Chris to see his predecessors, all orphans sold to trade, all killed in the field less than two years after Paladin purchased them.

Chris wondered if they were the lucky ones. He had been stuck with Paladin's cold, brooding abuse for six years.

He would still be stuck, unless the Air Corps nabbed him. God, how he wanted to be a pilot. To fly across the river, to fly through space and time.

To fly the hell away from his current life.

He walked away from the clearing and toward their gear as Paladin prepared to turn the native to ash, negating its very existence. He did not care what Paladin said. Killing this one was not like killing the hare and antelope hybrids, or the things with lion's paws and eagle's wings. She called his name. Looking in her eyes, he felt as if he were under a spotlight. She wanted him to perform.

And he failed. Whatever she expected, he did not do. He could not shake the feeling he was wrong in not taking any sort of action.

Rae arrived as Chris sat near the gear, blowing on his hands to warm them. The New river Expedition Company was a maverick operation. When Cynataka had been discovered, New river capitalized on the chance to offer homestead packages, trouble free attempts at life on a real new frontier. They had moved in quickly on the Army's tail, using atmospheric sensors -- Rae nicknamed them atmostats -- to secure and define their claim even as the military destroyed the indigenous plant and animal life.

He and Paladin kept the territory clear, killing anything the army missed. Rae was their custodian; she cleaned up what the natives destroyed before the homesteaders arrived.

She also carried supplies and extra gear, even though Paladin never let him use most of it. Guns, rifles, knives and arrows did the job, Paladin said. The rest just got New river good copy.

Rae parked her bike alongside the extermination supplies, blowing hot air and slush around as the motors shut down. She was six feet tall, dressed in orange overalls and wet from speeding through the rain. She grabbed a coat from her bike and tossed it to Chris.

"What's the kill?" she asked.

"A woman. With fur." He stood up, and put on the jacket. It was her favorite, the black one with her old army squadron nickname, Anansi, and a spider on the back. "And hooves."

"Still there?"

Chris nodded. Rae opened a compartment on the bike, and pulled out a camera. She ran through the brush, sidestepping branches so quickly she made little noise. Chris followed, even as he heard the whine of Paladin's laser eradicator in action. His nose, tender from the rain, twitched at the scent of burning flesh and fur.

Rae moved through the trees, stomping through the mud. "He did it again!"

"He likes to get done."

"Forget done. He knew I wanted a picture."

"What for?"

"You never wondered what happens to the gods when they die?"

"They ain't gods." He tightened the coat around him "Anyway, who gives a damn? Picture's not gonna bring 'em back."

She lifted a strand of her hair from her face. "What's wrong with you?"

"Paladin." He kicked at the ground. "I'm sorry."

"So make it up to me." She brushed her camera free of water with her fingers. "How's your memory?"

"Too good."

"I want an image. Talk me through a drawing on the radio later, okay?"

"Rae!" It was Paladin. "Fix this box so we can get the hell out of here."

She looked at Chris. He smiled, and leaned against the nearest tree. He and Rae were raised in the same orphanage in New Bethlehem, seven hundred kilometers east and six years away from the wilds of the New river Territory.

Before Paladin had bought Chris, then sixteen, from New Bethlehem, Rae was his girl. running into her on this assignment, it had almost been as if they'd never been parted.

Or it would be, if they were ever allowed more than five seconds together. Stares and a few words were all Paladin would allow them.

"Rae!" Paladin yelled.

"Kleenex," she said, and turned around.

"What?" Chris asked.

"In the top pocket." Rae stomped toward the cycles. "Your nose is running."

"Circuit board malfunction," Rae said an hour later. She tightened the lid of the atmostat. "Like they had back at W Station. Native comes in, sticks a magnet under the box. Erases the program, shuts the shields down." She picked up her radio. "Sayles at x-ray station, code zero two zero two charlie. Activate."

The red light turned green. Moments later, the clearing was filled with the sound of crickets and cicadas, New River's way of verifying that the equipment was on, while maintaining an Earthlike feel.

Or it would be, Chris thought. If Cynataka had crickets and cicadas.

Paladin looked up from where he had set down their weapons for maintenance. "It didn't have a magnet."

"Maybe she was the magnet." The weapons sat in a row on a tarp. Rae walked over to them, and began examining the rifle. "Maybe she was one of those things Ev's always nagging about on the radio, those things that killed Harris and Teagarden --"

"Gremlins."

"Yeah." She raised the rifle, aimed it at a tree heavy with apples, and fired. Three apples exploded, raining pulp sized pieces to the ground. "But Havenport says this was a woman with fur."

"It don't matter what it was. It's dead." Paladin took his rifle, and handed her a shotgun.

"It could've been Melinda Cordisian," Rae said. She began to strip the gun. "Settlers reported her missing two days ago. Ev thinks she got Convert's Disease."

Chris had heard of Melinda Cordisian. She had been a scientist on the first strike team that landed on Cynataka. Paladin had known her from his army days on Earth. She was matter of fact, he'd said. A woman who knew her place in the world, not like most of them nowadays.

He wondered how she could have come down with Convert's Disease. It was said to hit colonists, mostly. People who went beyond the protection of New river into the uncontrolled regions of the planet. They breathed the unpurified air, tasted the untreated water, ate food they had grown in the alien soil. Not soon after, they became natives.

Melinda Cordisian had been among the first to discover the disease, and the natives, when the planet was first maintained by the military, so she was not stupid. But, like the others with Convert's, she made exterminating all the harder. Things were bad enough without having to hunt your own kind as well as the enemy.

"You've been personalizing the weaponry again," Rae said, staring at the pieces of the shotgun. She picked up the barrel, looked through it. "What the hell is in here?"

Paladin snatched it from her hands. "Clean the rest."

"That's New river equipment." She snapped a picture of it with her camera. "You've just bought that antique. Comes out of your pay."

"Fine." He gave her another barrel. "And prime it right, this time. Damn near tore my shoulder out in the recoil."

"Serves you right for using this old crap."

"But it don't hurt your aim any, does it?"

Paladin stared at her, his eyes narrowed to thin slits. Rae returned the stare. Her mouth was twisted into something not quite a smile, not quite a leer.

"I'm tired of your smart mouth." Paladin cradled his altered barrel under his arm, then walked through the trees. "I'm calling Ev."

"Like hell you are."

When he was sure Paladin had gone, Chris walked over to Rae. She was putting the shotgun back together with the new barrel. He watched her, standing as close to her as he could without getting in her way. She had a weirdly intoxicating smell, a combination of musk, electricity and gun oil.

She finished the gun, and turned toward him. "You know better."

"Do I?" He took the shotgun, and laid it against her workstand. He put his hands on her hips.

"He'll be right back. Ev lets him squeal, then reminds him of my service record." She moved close to him, blowing lightly in his ear. "That man hates that I know what I'm doing."

"You got a long record. That'll count for some time."

They kissed. Chris had always managed to move their relationship along, stealing the seconds they had together and making them count. It was painstaking work that required all his concentration to set up. Sleeping with Rae would not mean ending weeks of frustration on the New river Territory job.

It would be the end of years of frustration. Paladin had bought him as a virgin. To do the job right, he'd said, he had to stay that way. Natives ate up purity like you wouldn't believe.

The sound of crickets in the clearing became dead silence.

Chris and Rae parted from their embrace. Paladin was standing calmly next to the control box, drinking from a flask in one hand, and rubbing a chunk of magnetized metal over the atmostat with another.

Chris sighed. "I'm sorry. Next stop?"

"Maybe." She picked up the shotgun, aimed, and fired it above Paladin's head. Shot broke tree branches, bringing a rain of water and leaves down on Paladin and the control box.

"Are you out of your mind?" Paladin asked. He brushed himself free of rain and twigs.

"You're an asshole," she said, giving the shotgun to Chris. Then she left the clearing.

"The hellion want women," Paladin said. He put the flask in his pocket, lifted the shotgun. He aimed it at Chris, before aiming it toward the trees. "Tune to their emotions. Don't matter how much sniper and covert duty they pull."

Three days later, Chris lay hidden in a field of grain, dressed in gold and bone-colored fatigues. His skin itched from the grasses and mites that had gotten into his clothing. The air was hot and dry. He thought he would choke from the overpowering stench of wheat, and the chemically treated manure that kept it growing.

Paladin was a few meters away, or a few millimeters away. Chris didn't know. He had not heard him on his earplug in over an hour.

I'm moving, he thought, but remained still.

His chest itched the most. He thought about the scar there, from the heart surgeries he had as a child to repair defective valves. He used to wish he could scratch it away; the Air Corps would not accept anyone with heart defects. Without the scar, he could have been signed up, like Rae, out in space, out anywhere but here.

He was meant to fly. He knew it every time he woke in the morning, staring at the new sky.

And reminded himself of it, when he woke from nightmares where the sky was Paladin's face, and he stood over him, an atmostat-shaped stake and mallet in hand.

Son of a hitch, he thought, closing his eyes. He remembered the man's first reaction to Rae. Ev the dispatcher had finally given them a dream partnership. She was never late, always ready with the right equipment for the next stretch of the job. New river hired her the moment she was honorably discharged, and paid her as much as they paid Paladin, whose price was sky.

She did know her job. She knew Paladin's job. No matter what weapon she held, she never missed what she aimed at. She told him once how she planned to settle in the Aurora Borealis Territory, across New River's river, when the territory was cleared. She wanted to work there as ranger.

So if she knew her job, maybe he didn't hate her, Chris thought. Maybe he wanted her. He had never seen Paladin with a woman, though women approached him. They would whither away under his stare, like roses in the cross beam of a laser eradicator.

Rae did not whither. And Chris knew that Paladin was technically a widower. He had been a farmer on another Cynataka colony before natives massacred his family and carried off his wife, or she ran off, one or the other.

If he had married before, then he had liked women once. Who was to say he could not do it again?

Me, Chris thought. He touches her, I'll kill him.

"Corner of the sky, southwest," Paladin said. His voice was supposed to be a whisper, but it was a sonic boom in Chris's ear.

Chris adjusted the microphone bar under his chin so it was below his mouth. "What is it?"

"Coming in, three and three. Ready the rifle, stay low."

Chris glanced up at the light blue sky. The sun was alone: no clouds, no satellites, no ships. Virgin blue, the pilots called it. Like the surface of the ocean, there was nothing to see.

But the wind changed. Hot dust and grain shafts blew into Chris's face. He could hear the sound of shrieks. Metal twisting in the wind, the coming of a tornado, or dust storm.

These shrieks were harmonious, and coming from the direction Paladin had noted before, corner of the sky, southwest.

The natives had wings. Their bodies were covered with fine feathers, instead of hair. Tear-shaped eyes, dull and flat like pressed gold, scanned the grain for movement. reddish-blond hair was atop their heads. Their faces were dreamily beautiful, almost lethargic in expression and movement.

They landed in the field, five in all, squatting before standing semierect. Two stood next to the damaged atmostat post. Hands with sharp talons picked at the twisted wires.

One chirped to the other four. Two removed jagged strips of sheet metal from their backs. The other two removed large shoulder sacks. They began to harvest the grain.

Chris noted the metal, the sacks. They were cheap materials, the type used by homesteaders who did not know any better. The natives were hacking at the grain, chopping stalks and shafts. They had no idea what they were doing, either.

They just know we eat it, Chris thought. He wondered how they'd gotten the materials. Stolen, after some observation, most likely. Someone was going to have to pay the New river Territory Emporium too much money to get them replaced.

Except, as he watched, the natives got better. The experimental swings were building a rhythm. The shrieks were replaced with pure notes, singing along with the tempo of the cuts.

"Now," Paladin said.

Chris took the rifle in his hands, marked a target with the sight, put his finger on the trigger. He had used the rifle only when helping Rae test it after it had been cleaned. He had not liked the feel of it then. He hated the feel of it now.

It was not that he hated guns. He had bought himself a Portland Pocket Laser .64 with his first paycheck. Laser fire was quick, effortless. You did not have to think to use it.

The rifle required thought. Chris had worked with Paladin long enough to know what happened when you thought wrong. A native would be wounded, but it would not be dead. Once it healed, it would come back stronger, wiser.

Emphasis on wiser. The longer the attack, the quicker they learned, the more they knew about you, about New River. About everything.

Paladin's shotgun brought the sound of thunder to the field. Part of a native's' wing was torn clean away.

"Now!" Paladin said.

Chris pulled the trigger. The rifle had been aimed at the smallest of the natives. It turned its head as the bullet left the chamber. He watched the native's reaction as the bullet flew past its head.

It put a hand to its ear, and screamed. It turned in Chris's direction, its fiat eyes searching.

The one with the torn wing pulled the small one down into the field. The rest flew into the air, shedding feathers in their wake.

Paladin fired at the flock. He killed one with his first shot, the bullet going through its chest. It fell to the ground, disappearing in the sea of grain. He grazed another in the leg. It continued to fly.

"Chris," Paladin said, hissing into the earplug.

He raised the rifle, aimed. The sound of shifting grass made him pause. He lowered the rifle, and listened.

"Kill it."

"The other two," Chris asked. "Where are they?"

"Get the straggler!"

Chris did. He shot it clean in the chest. It lingered in the air, casting a tortured shadow across the grain field. It beat its wings once, then tumbled from the sky.

Chris stood when it hit the ground. There had always been a cold, hard feeling in his gut when he wounded natives. Everything for him went numb, and bitter in his mouth. He had never actually killed one, not the way Paladin did, though he tried.

A maddening desire overcame him to save it. Score the wound. Heal it.

A pair of gold eyes appeared from the grain in the midst of Chris's view. The smaller native was staring at him. It still held its hand to its ear, but now it was calm, its perfect mouth open in a small "o."

Chris heard the wind, the sound of flapping wings above him. The remaining natives were circling the field, watching like vultures.

Sweat ran down his neck and back. Something bit him. Another itch he could not scratch.

The native took its hand from its head. Blood stained the white feathers on its hand. It chirped once, a question.

Get down, he told himself. It was a trap. He did not see the other one, could not hear it. It was dead. Maybe.

"Stay put," Paladin said.

"The other one will get me!"

Paladin did not reply. The native beat its wings, stirring the grain around it. It touched its hand to its head, then held it out for Chris to see again.

What do you want me to do about it? he thought, his hands clenched tightly on the rifle.

There was movement in the grass to his right. Chris stepped back, watching the grain bend as something pushed it, ripped it from the ground. It moved toward Chris on a wave as loud as a real one.

The other native chirped.

There was still no answer from Paladin.

Chris raised the rifle, aimed, fired at the movement in the grass. The native quickened its speed, barreling toward Chris, its one wing making a break through the grain like a "v."

Then it swerved, hard right. It leaped from the grain, shrieking.

It leaped at Paladin. Chris saw his shotgun barrel go up and fire before the native landed on him.

A squeal erupted in Chris's ear, followed by the shouts of Paladin outside of the headpiece. Chris ran to his aid, aware all the while that the smaller native could come up behind him and finish him off. He used his peripheral vision to check it. It had not moved.

The native with one wing had Paladin pinned. Paladin held its wrists, to keep it from tearing out his eyes. It had already gouged his face, and slashed the side of his neck.

Chris grabbed it from behind. Blood and feathers smeared his face and clothes as he pulled the creature from Paladin. It beat its one wing, knocking Chris in the head. Chris felt his grasp on the creature loosen.

"Run!" it said. "I will protect you."

Chris's mind raced. The thing had chirped. But he understood it now.

"Come on," Paladin said. His hat had been knocked off his head. Black and gray hair flew wild as the wind picked up. He wobbled as he rose on his knees, then motioned at the native. "finish me off!"

The native glanced back at Chris. The look it gave him was almost tender and absolving in its intensity. "Go. You are free."

It turned back to Paladin, just as Paladin, now standing, removed a knife from his belt. The native did not have a chance. Chris saw it stiffen when the blade pierced its chest. All Chris could see of it after it fell into the grain was the tip of its remaining wing.

"I'll call it in," Paladin said. He bent down, picked up his hat, and put it on. "Get the other one."

"But..." Chris saw Paladin stalk through the grain, toward the top of the rise where their gear was stowed.

He was alone. for the first time, Paladin had left him alone with their prey.

Chris turned toward the small native. It was being scooped from the field by a pair of the others that had been hovering above them moments before. They were moving slowly across the horizon, heading toward the river that was the border between the New river Territory and the Aurora Borealis Territory.

An easy shot. So blessedly simple.

But the rifle jammed when he aimed and prepared to fire. And as he fixed the problem, the natives were out of range, white specks on the horizon that dipped below the tree line, returning the sky to virgin blue.

Numbness washed over Chris like a salve. But he could feel, in his mind, a storm of confusion growing. Something ravenous, an instinct that had threatened to burst out before he made his fate.

Is that what I did? he thought, turning back to Paladin. He was a silhouette against their gear, a tall, gaunt scarecrow kneeling down before the radio, barking commands into it that the wind carried freely south, for anyone to hear.

And, as Chris approached him, watching the sun change the lines of blood and age on Paladin's face into fissures and cracks, his superior seemed less an injured man, more a cornered animal.

"You can ask me if I care. Go ahead. Ask me."

"Do you care?" Chris asked.

Paladin took a drink from his flask. He looked across the campfire, back at Rae, who was talking to Ev about a new circuit board for the damaged atmostat.

He stared Chris in the eye. Firelight turned the bandages on his face orange-white.

"No. Buy up your contract, if you got the money."

Chris looked down at his hands. It was a hot, humid night. Rae had helped them move near the river. They were camped in a grotto for the night. They were too close to the wilderness to go all the way back to the main office for supplies and medicaid. Turning around now would have run them all into a wave of homesteaders.

They would have had questions. What were they doing on untouched soil? What had caused them so many injuries?

It was thoughts of the homesteaders, and what he had accomplished that day, which caused Chris to consider his future. Paladin owned him for six years service, unless he had the money, with interest, to buy his own freedom.

He almost had the money. But he had an application for the Air Corps. He could get in just in time for training on the jump runs, commuter flights between the New river Territory and the Aurora Borealis, when it was completed.

But nothing would happen, nothing could happen, until he had Rae. A sneaked glance at her across the fire told him she felt the same in regard to her future as a ranger.

And Paladin, unlike a few days before, seemed more resigned about the possibility. But then, he was almost amiable about everything when he was drunk.

"Bought you at discount, half price. Defective." Paladin took another swig from his flask. His fist knocked his hat back as he took a long, high drink. "figured save myself the money. Wouldn't survive the first year."

"Sorry to disappoint you."

He gave a mock bow. "Sorry to disappoint you. You want me dead, do it yourself."

"I don't want you dead."

"You want me dead. If you didn't, I would've killed you by now."

He grinned at Chris when he said it, the sort of nasty grin you expected from someone completely drunk. But Paladin never looked drunk when he was. He always looked sober.

And Chris, long accustomed to Paladin's scant description of the buying of his life, found that the anger he had always choked down had not risen inside of him.

And it scared him. The numbness again, the feeling that things were going worse where they had once just gone wrong.

That a battle he had lost was not quite over yet.

"Ev says stay tight," Rae said. "Also got a red light near the river bend."

"What's the status?" Paladin asked.

"Fog conditions. Breech in perimeter fencing. Satellite shot showed it was cut."

"Could be the ones from today," Chris said.

"You need hands to cut, and real tools, not claws and junk scrap," Rae said. "You need intelligence to know why to cut."

"Doesn't matter," Paladin said. "Kill them either way."

Rae removed the headpiece from her ear. "It's me and Havenport on extermination. You're to stay behind until the medicaid arrives."

"I got work to do."

"Not with your injuries."

Paladin stood up. He was sober now. If he was in any real pain from his wounds, it was hard to see. "I can do my job," he said.

"Or you'll do their job."

She meant Convert's Disease, Chris realized. That the native could have bitten Paladin had not occurred to him.

Paladin held his ground. He stared at Rae, the withering stare Chris knew would not work on her.

"Fifteen years I've done this," he said. "No one tells me when to do it. It doesn't end until I end it."

"It's an order from Ev." She threw the radio headset across the campsite, a perfect arc between herself and Chris. Chris caught it, startled. "Talk to him."

Chris held the headset out to Paladin. Paladin took it, along with his flask. He walked away from the campsite, toward the sound of the river. Chris started to rise, to bring him down, then stopped.

Cynataka's full moon was high, casting a bright yellow glow between the spaces in the trees. Paladin had light to guide by. He was not going to off himself, no matter how much Chris wished he would.

He and Rae were alone. Not for long, but long enough to talk, to touch.

He heard her rise from the other side of the campsite, the click of a gun or laser. When he turned to look at her, she was standing near the campfire, holding a gun toward the ground. The light sharped her features, gave her shadows a spider's frailness.

He thought of the native he'd helped kill days before. The one who called his name.

"I'm gonna go find him," she said, approaching him. Her kiss was eager, sloppy. "I'll turn on the perry. Get some sleep, 'kay?"

"Right," Chris said, as she slipped between the trees. He closed his eyes, and dreamed of flat gold eyes, and bloody hands.

At dawn, the world was gray. Chris awoke to find the trees, the sky, everything more than a meter away draped in fog. There was no sun to speak of, only a still dampness that clung to his skin like tape.

He sat up, and observed his surroundings. Rae's "perry," short for makeshift perimeter shield generator, hissed to show it operated. Her bedroll was bunched together, but empty.

Paladin's bedroll was as neat and ordered as always. The lack of toiletries around it suggested he had slept in it once, but not in the last hour or so.

Then where was he? Or they?

Chris walked over to the perimeter shield. He stared at it a moment, marveling at the pipes and belts that made it work. He could only guess which switch turned it off, and was lucky to find it on the first try.

He took the rifle from their gear. Chris decided the place to go was the river. It was where Paladin had headed last night. It was where he suspected Rae had gone after him. He took rushed steps through the unfamiliar territory. The stillness of the morning, and his suspicions, urged him on.

The ground was soft, and smelled of wet leaves, near the river's edge. Chris could barely see the water. The river itself was man made, added to the region by the New River Strike Team when Cynataka was first discovered and claimed. How far the river went, Chris didn't know. The source was the water table below the Territory; its flow controlled by a timer to ensure it rambled lazily, year round.

The river was deep where Chris had stopped. How deep, he could not tell. But floating on the surface were soap bubbles.

He followed the river upstream. More soap bubbles graced the river's surface, white clouds that would have been lighter but for the thick fog cover. Chris could not see the other side of the river, though he wanted to.

Maybe the natives from the day before were there. It stirred the numbness in his soul, which relieved him, a little. Nothing wrong with thinking about them. Nothing at all.

The soap trail started at Rae, who stood bathing in the river. The water went up to her waist. She was turned toward the opposite shore, humming as she lathered herself down.

"Morning," Chris said.

Rae stopped soaping herself. "Morning."

"Where's Paladin?"

"At camp."

"No, he's not."

"Then I don't know."

Rae rinsed herself off, the remaining soap drifting away downstream as she walked from the river.

"My towel," she said, walking past Chris toward a tree. She smelled of honey, of the morning.

She dried herself off as slowly as she had left the water. Chris listened for voices as he watched her. He listened for footsteps, for broken branches, for stray coughs. He could only hear the roll of the river.

She finished drying herself, and looked at Chris. He began to undress.

She wrapped her towel around her, and walked through the trees, through the fog. Chris followed, half in his shirt, still in his shorts. Rae had stopped at a small thicket. A blanket was stretched between two trees. Another blanket was on the ground.

"He was here last night," she said. "I followed him. He got drunk, then passed out. He was gone this morning. No native marks. Just his."

He nodded, and approached her, his clothes in his arms. He placed them on a corner of the ground blanket.

"Chris," she said. "We do this, everything changes. Tell me everything changes."

"Everything," he said, pulling her close. "Changes."

There was sunlight at the campsite, a faint yellowing of the fog that allowed Chris to see more of the surroundings than he had an hour before.

"Took an inventory of your supplies," Rae said, without looking up. "Shotgun's missing. Some shot, some rock salt. Your handgun and the stakes. A day's worth of food."

Chris picked up his bedroll, along with the two blankets from the copse. "When you think he took theme?"

"While we were away."

"We have to go after him," Chris said. "Call for backup."

"No. I don't need backup. I never need backup." She strangled her bedroll, pulling the cords around it so tight he could hear them hum. Then she hoisted it on her shoulder. "I'm going to get a few things from my bike."

Chris watched her stomp away, his eyes following the damp spot between her shoulder blades which showed through the fabric of her overalls. He cursed in his head, not at Rae, but at himself.

He felt the same. He had expected, after Paladin's blessing, after that morning with Rae, to feel ...

Normal, he supposed. Rae had cried, frustrated, in their last embrace. He felt the guilt he had felt before, looking into the eyes of the natives. They had cleaned up their bed at the river's edge, talking of the new lives they would have when New river was settled.

When New river was settled. Chris stared at his bedroll. Five natives that flew still at large. Unidentified natives at the border. Paladin missing, maybe even changed.

He wanted to laugh.

The last atmostat was gone. Wires cascaded from the post where it had been.

Rae nudged Chris, pointed to the mud around the atmostat. There were soft soled footprints, and hoofprints in sets of two.

"A man did this," Rae said. She nudged the atmostat post with the butt of her rifle.

"Paladin?" Chris asked.

She shook her head. "But he's been here. What would he do now?"

Chris paced, his feet sinking in the mud, the water from it leaking into his shoes. The atmostat had been next to the river, in an area that was part marsh, part forest. The trees were short and stubbly, the brush cloud shaped and dark green. Fog swirled in pools around his ankles. The river gurgled not far away. It sounded like it was going down for the third time.

What would Paladin do now? he thought. The area was clean, except for the footprints. The native prints topped the human ones, however. Say Paladin destroyed the atmostat himself. It would put the exterminator team and himself on his trail immediately.

It would draw natives into the open.

"A duck shoot," Chris said. He looked at Rae. "He's setting a trap."

"Prints go south. Looks like a clearing through those trees. I'll go right, you go left. We'll circle, hope we find them before they find us."

"Right." He took the rifle from his shoulder, checked it. "I'm holding you to the bunkhouse when we cross."

She kissed his cheek. "When we cross."

He stared at her. Tears brimmed from her eyes.

"See ya," she said.

"Don't do this! We still got a chance --"

Rae was gone, through the trees, her feet silent in the thick mud as she ran.

Chris went the other way, feeling strange, inhibited. Nothing in the last hour, the last days, the last weeks, was right. Rae was gone to him in a way he could never recover her from. Paladin had never been encouraging, never been bearable. But at least he had been there.

Now he was alone.

God, he thought. Get me through this.

He found his footing on more stable ground. Fog continued to drift around him. It left tree branches and shrubs slick with moisture. The river was not far. He could smell it now, the pure, freshwater smell, along with the scent of bank mud.

And horse. The thick, musty smell of horses and fur, when it was wet.

He released the rifle's safety. Shouldn't be horses here, he thought.

And as he made the thought, the shotgun went off.

It was unmistakable thunder in the dim morning air. Chris caught a bright spurt of light less than fifty meters away. He broke through the trees toward it. He heard another shot.

"Go! Go!"

The sound of hooves at full gallop overpowered the sound of the gun. Chris stopped by a tree not far from the action. He could see horses moving, running in a circle. Atop them were human torsos, men with long hair that streamed down their heads, their backs. They carried sticks and clubs, a bow and arrow.

Chris thought there were three in all. He did not see the fourth until it shot him with an arrow.

The blow knocked him backward. Chris stared at the arrow protruding from his upper arm.

Blood poured from the wound. He was faint, until he saw the native who had shot him. Average in size, as far as horses went. Its gold eyes were still and daunting.

"Who are you?"

Chris raised the rifle. It did not speak American, but it made sense. Not that it mattered any more. "Get away from me."

It scratched its head, confused now. "I know you."

Chris shot it. He expected it to fall over; instead, it crumpled, its legs collapsing beneath it. Blood ran slowly from the small hole in the front of its chest. Chris did not want to see its back.

Its expression was still confused. So was Chris's.

I know you, it said.

Another shotgun shot, this time closer to the place where Chris was. He balanced the rifle between his legs, and took the knife from his belt. He sawed gently into the arrow's shaft, and when he could not take the action of the sawing any longer, he broke the rest of the shaft in half with his free hand.

He turned in response to the pain. He found himself staring into the face of the dying native, who wore a similar expression, though its eyes were closed. Its breathing was ragged, loud.

"Havenport!"

Chris turned at the sound of his name. Paladin was shouting for him from the clearing ahead.

"To the right! To the right!"

He took his rifle and moved on, stilling his wounded arm as best he could. The sound of a rifle shot cracked the air. It had to be Rae.

There were two natives in a circle now. One was limping badly. The other was struggling with Paladin. Paladin's clothes were torn. His hat was still on his head, but cocked back in a way so it looked as if he was about to fail over backward.

Paladin and the natives were struggling over the shotgun. Clubs and sticks lay scattered to the side of the clearing.

"Kill him," Paladin said. He turned his head toward Chris. "Now. Shoot him now."

The native looked at Chris. Its expression was set, almost confident.

"Do it! You done it before."

"I can't. I've been hit."

The native stared at him, at his arm. Then it lowered its head.

"I did not know it was you. I am sorry," it said.

"It's all right," Chris answered, without thinking. "Not your fault."

"Not your fault," Paladin said. Then he yelled so loud it startled Chris and the native. Paladin yanked the gun from the native's hands.

"No! Don't!"

Paladin shot the native in the chest, in the head. He emptied the rifle, and stumbled away from the creature's remains. He began to dig in his coat pockets.

The other native stumbled into the brush. Chris turned his head to watch it, too tired and hurt to chase it down. Then he turned back to Paladin.

Paladin found what he was searching for, and aimed it at Chris. It was the hand gun.

"Should've known," Paladin said. "Dammit."

"What did I do?"

"Deviated from the pattern. Acted like something worth keeping, but you ain't no different, damn you!" He released the safety, pulled the trigger. "Should've treated you like the others. Should've bagged my haul, then made you pay just like the others."

Chris heard the bullet before it hit Paladin. It struck him in the heart; another struck him in the kidneys. He swayed for a moment before dropping to his knees, then face down, into the soil.

Rae emerged from the trees, the rifle sitting ready to fire in her hands. Chris stared at her, then at Paladin.

Then back at her. He pulled the gun from Paladin's hands. He aimed it at Rae.

"You're one of them," he said.

"So are you."

"No."

She approached him slowly. "Paladin knew."

"No."

"It's why he chose you from the orphanage. It's why he chose all of 'em from the orphanage, don't you get it? We're dropped there as children, to blend in. The human ones draw the other ones out. He figured that out."

He tightened his grip on the gun. His hands shook.

She was closer now.

"Ev put us together on purpose."

"Convert's Disease."

"A lie. To buy us time. To protect you."

Chris's throat was tight. His voice came out a whisper. "You killed Paladin."

"You never would."

She was squatting next to him now. Slowly, she lowered her rifle. Then she put a hand on Chris's hand, the one that held the handgun. She lowered his arm.

"It's our land first," she said. "It's always ours. Then the settlers arrive."

Chris nodded, numb to what she was saying. Where do the gods go when they die? she had asked him.

Nowhere was the answer. They never left.

He dropped the gun to the ground.

"You still gonna be a ranger?" he asked, after a moment. "In Aurora Borealis?"

"You still going to be a pilot?"

They looked at each other. The questions hung in the air, vibrant, full. The words on the tip of Chris's tongue were just as vibrant, just as potent.

But he could not say them. In his heart, he honestly did not know.

Rae stood up. She slung the rifle over her shoulder. Chris followed suit, holding the rifle in his good hand, letting his arm hang limply to his side.

"I'll call for help," she said. "Paladin got ambushed. We finished them off."

"We'll need help burning them, too."

She nodded, and went for their equipment.

Chris stood in the clearing, watching the dead. He half expected the injured native to return. He almost hoped it would. It would not live long without medical assistance. He could help it, maybe.

He could heal it, maybe.

Chris touched his arm. In his fingers was the spark of something. He could not put a name to it, but it frightened him more than anything else had that afternoon.

~~~~~~~~

By Jacquelyn Hooper

Section: FILMS

KEN AND BARBIE IN THE HOUSE OF BUGGIN'

The late science fiction master, Robert A. Heinlein, and the Dutch-born, big-budget Hollywood director, Paul Verhoeven, have at least one thing in common besides Starship Troopers, the recent $100 million dollar movie which Verhoeven directed from one of Heinlein's most popular novels. folks have always suspected that both men brought a political agenda to their creative work. And yet, there's never been much consensus on exactly what those agendas were.

Heinlein has been viewed as, among other things, a fascist, a libertarian, a social Darwinist, and, conversely, as a beloved guru of the progressive sixties youth rebellion. Verhoeven has been viewed as a homophobe, a sophisticated, sex-positive, social democrat, a war survivor horrified by barbarity, and an egotistical blood-junkie who gets off on violence. And both have been labeled admirers of independent women as well as sexist pigs.

Not surprisingly, judgment of their work is just as varied. Is Heinlein a hack or a literary lion? Is Verhoeven a hack or an auteur?

If I were making the call -- and since this is my film column, I guess I am -- I'd have to vote for all of the above. Strong, if somewhat self-contradictory, social attitudes seem to be present in the work of both men. And, although I recognize the high repute and influence of Heinlein's stories and novels, and (to a much lesser extent) Verhoeven's Dutch and Hollywood films, I can't say that I've ever been a fan of either.

Maybe testosterone is the missing link, here. I know that many men get quite sentimental about Starship Troopers, the novel. It is one of those bildungsromans that provide many young lads with an exciting blueprint for becoming manly men. But Heinlein's Hugo-winning paean to the warrior spirit left me vaguely offended and extremely bored. (And if I'd had to read the phrase "on the bounce" one more time, I would have bounced the bloody paperback off the wall.)

Yes, I know, in the Terran federation [and at certain sf conventions) I'd probably hang for such sedition. Still, even though I was no fan of Heinlein's novel about a young man named Johnnie who comes of age by training to fight a race of "bugs," I certainly recognized its cinematic potential. Starship Troopers is the kind of book that would allow a filmmaker to join the slick design of sf moviemaking and state-of-the-art "creature feature" FX with the more traditional (and, these days, seldom seen) conventions associated with film formulas like the western and the war movie.

Screenwriter Ed (Robocop) Neumeier was certainly aware of the rich possibilities when he first drafted an adaptation and brought it to producer Jon Davison. And the version that finally made it onto the big screen some six years later is, generally speaking, both true to his source material and to moviemaking tradition.

Oh, there is plenty for the Heinlein fanatic to grouse about in Starship Troopers, the movie. Less time is spent on Johnnie's training (Officer Candidates School is completely ignored) and more, much more, is spent on bug battles. Certain support characters are combined. Other minor characters who go off and die in the book -- notably Johnnie's high school pal, Carl (played in the film by Doogie Howser's Neil Patrick Harris) -- go off and come back with a higher rank and an important role to play, in the movie.

And then, there's the romance. Heinlein didn't have any. (His novel was, after all, written for the juvenile market.) Although Heinlein's Johnnie seems fond of his school chum turned pilot, Carmencita, he doesn't actively pursue her or any other passing female. Reading this book, you'd almost guess that Heinlein was interested in the mortification (corporal and capital punishment are both endorsed) of the flesh much more than its gratification.

But Neumeier evidently felt the need to spice up his screen concoction with lustful, longing glances as well as machine gun fire. He has fashioned a love quadrangle out of bits of Heinlein and too many hours spent watching the nighttime soaps. In the film, Johnnie (Casper Van Dien) is in love with his high school sweetheart, Carmen (Denise Richards). But Carmen is distracted by her military aspirations and by the hunky charms of another flyboy wannabe, Zander (Patrick Muldoon). This frustrates Johnnie no end, keeping him from recognizing the total devotion of Dizzy (Dina Meyer), a highly attractive quarterback turned crackerjack infantry-woman.

This particular subplot sounds like something out of an Aaron Spelling production. And well it might. The blandly pretty cast of unknowns --all the money that would have gone for star salaries was transferred into the FX budget, instead -- are veterans of shows like Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place, as well as daytime dramas. They make toothsome but plastic-looking Aryan warriors, which gives their little wartime space opera a kind of playtime sweetness. Will Ken grow up to become G.I. Joe? And what will happen to our living dolls when Ken, Barbie, Skipper, and Scott wander from their Malibu Dream House into a nightmarish House of Buggin'?

It's certainly fair to slam the movie for its romantic flourishes. But I don't think that it's appropriate to complain, as some have done, about the film's flat characters. Heinlein's characters are, if anything, even more cardboard than Neumeier's. They just use less hair gel. Even Johnnie is a bit of a cipher by the end of the book, because Heinlein's main interest wasn't character study, but rather the process of achieving manhood -- the crucible a boy must withstand to achieve full citizenship. Hence, we see Johnnie's tribulations, but learn little about who he is inside. He -and we -- are too busy listening to the diatribes of his "History and Moral Philosophy" teachers.

A few lines of these lectures are retained by the film, and delivered by another composite character, school-teacher-turned-platoon-leader, Jean Rasczak (played by veteran character Michael Ironside -- one of the few real-looking people in this movie). But since this is an action movie, philosophizing isn't done by words. It is done by deed. And by the shorthand of costume and production design.

But the look of the movie is one of the most disturbing elements. Rather than downplay the (perceived as) fascist elements of Heinlein's novel, director Verhoeven decides to play them up, bigtime. Ellen Mirojnick's costumes look like something from the Sixth Reich. Harris's uniform late in the movie is especially startling, since it looks just like that of an S.S. officer. Likewise the production design, by Allan Cameron, creates an eerie Earth life that mixes California chic with clean, gleaming futuristic fascism. (Don't miss the Swastika-like designs on the federation flags and insignia.)

Now, Starship Troopers is obviously not the first film to nazify the after ages. But few have done it with such an admiring, positive spin. (These are the heroes of the film in the nazi youth garb, you'll recall.) Some of Verhoeven's shots -- especially those in the federation news/commercial spots that pepper the film -- are taken right out of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. And he has admitted as much. While producer Davison notes in the presskit for the movie that "[w]e thought the idea of a fascistic utopia was new to recent film; it was both interesting and amusing."

Yeah, I'm still laughing merrily over that one.

Believe it or not, Verhoeven indicated in a recent interview that after the debacle that was Showgirls, he was happy to do a film with no "controversial elements." Guess again, Paulie.

Some might say that the fascism of Starship Troopers is meant as blistering satire. But I don't buy that. I got not a whiff of irony from the entire movie. And I swear that none of the mostly young, mostly male, audience I saw the film with did, either. They did appreciate the coed shower scene and the close-up of Dina Meyer's nice breasts. (A touch Mr. Heinlein probably would have appreciated, himself.) And they also seemed to get an erotic charge out of the scene in which the buff young hero is publicly flogged. (Hmmm, let's skip any speculation on what that means.)

But, mainly, the audience had a high old time, watching the marauding pseudo-arachnids of Klendathu perform the many decapitations, amputations, and varied dismemberments of the comely cast in the movie's repeated battle scenes.

Since the movie version of Starship Troopers is, above all, a creature feature with an overpopulation problem, let me take a moment to say something about the bugs. They're really swell. And scary. I mean that.

The ever-brilliant Phil Tippett and all the magicians he amassed to do Computer-Generated Imagery and full-scale mechanical critters outdid themselves on this one. They created a range of gruesome insects (tanker bugs, brain bugs, plasma bugs, hoppers, and the ever-popular warrior bugs) that truly had the power to keep you on the edge of your seat.

And maybe that's enough, today. Maybe it shouldn't matter that the performers seemed more concerned about hitting their marks than creating a believable performance. And who cares that battle-scene-to-battle-scene plot movement was driven by movieland cliches. (Of course, Mom and Dad "buy the farm" -- as Heinlein would have said -- while they are on the videophone with their son. And, of course, a cheerful, noble black grunt is going to have to blow himself up to save his white cohorts. And, of course, when the platoon leader kills one of his own who is injured and captured, and then says "I'd expect someone to do the same for me," we know that shortly thereafter the hero will have to do just that. Etc., etc.)

Let's not ponder why they send, in the high-tech future, ground troops to fight a pincer a mano battle with a race of dedicated "troopers" five to twenty times bigger than they are. (Isn't Dow Chemical still around to create a cross between raid and Napalm?) And let's not, for goodness sake, worry our heads about the politics of this action extravaganza.

Let's just enjoy the carnage. And wish Ken and Barbie well as they goose-step their way into the future.

~~~~~~~~

By KATHI MAIO

TALL ONE

K. D. Wentworth lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a large dog and numerous finches. She is often drawn to religious themes in her writing; last Christmas, you may recall, she gave us a decidedly different view of holy days in "'Tis the Season." Now she takes us to the stars with a more serious and rather luminous story of missionaries among an alien race.

Father Johannes knelt beside the grave, his cassock bunched to protect his knees. The cold, too-thin air of Sheah Four wheezed through his straining chest. He bowed his head in prayer, then hoisted the final rock to the top of the cairn. Sitting back on his heels, he ached for his native Alps, for stately old Luzem poised like a cut jewel on its shimmering blue ice-melt lake, the pristine swans that drifted across the mirrored surface like angels. When he closed his eyes, he could smell the water lapping against wet stone, see the boxes of red and pink and white flowers crowding every window.

He shuddered. When he qualified for the two-man missionary post here, he had thought the mountains rearing up into the violet-tinged sky would feel like home; he'd imagined small faces turned up to him, not human, of course, but recognizably innocent and trusting, waiting for the gifts of love and salvation he brought. Nothing in his training at the seminary had prepared him for a malevolent yellow-white sun that burned his fair skin a leathery walnut-brown, or dry, oxygen-poor air that made his chest ache all the time. And no one had really explained about the khe. He lurched heavily to his feet and saw one of the beasts sitting on its haunches behind him, its green eyes wide, neckfrill spread to catch the sun, a study in kheish patience. Its satiny black skin crawled with photobiotic green fire in the sunlight.

The young priest's hands trembled as he picked up the simple cross he had crafted from native wood. Just being near one of these heathen creatures still made him break out in a cold sweat. The blunt, lipless snout, the earless skull, the long sinuous body, every part of it screamed serpent.

He stared at it. At this time of day, it should be perched on a rock somewhere, soaking up the sun. What did it want? Surely not salvation. In the eight months since he and Father Gareth had arrived, he had realized at least that much. The khe were filthy beasts, barely sentient, uninterested in artifice or artifacts, having nothing in common with humanity. And yet, as Father Gareth had frequently reminded him, the Lord God had made them as surely as He had made everything else, and therefore how could Johannes not love them?

He wedged the cross into a crevice between the stones and anchored it with gravel. He coughed, then coughed again, a hard wracking spasm that could only be controlled, not cured. His throat was continually raw, his cells slowly starving, a condition that had weakened Father Gareth and ultimately killed him. "The oxygen content there is marginal," the Placement Office had said, "but man can survive."

But was mere survival the same as living? Johannes knew now it was not. Despite the rigorous selection process, they had sent the wrong man. Sheah Four brought out faults in him that he had never suspected; he was a weak vessel, even base. Without Father Gareth's experience and gentle guidance, he would never be able to carry on the Lord's work here.

Behind him, the khe's clawed fingers scritched over the rubble.

He steeled himself, then turned to meet the poisonous green eyes. The beast was full grown, its head reaching his shoulder as it sat on all fours. "What -- does one want?" he whistled in the stilted kheish grammar that knew nothing of personal names and permitted only the present tense.

The khe's muzzle wove from side to side, black tongue flickering like summer lightning. "Speak of one under rocks."

Johannes blanched. He wanted to say a funeral mass over the grave, speak the ancient words meant to give comfort to those left behind and find serenity in the familiar motions in this hellish place so far from home, but he knew what Father Gareth would have done. He closed his eyes, praying for guidance. He had tried to communicate with the primitives many times without success. These creatures had no word for God, no word for affection or love. How could he even begin to explain that Father Gareth had gone to his Maker?

"Tall one goes to live with its parent," he said in the barbarous whistlespeech.

"Not lives -- dies!" The khe scrabbled forward, snout raised, and curled three sinuous fingers around his wrist. Its flesh clung to his skin like warm plastic.

Johannes stiffened, his heart racing sickly. He could not bear these creatures to touch him. Gritting his teeth, he tried to think of some way to explain. "Tall one walks this earth no more, but -- walks in another place with -- parent." He tried to ease away from its grip, but it held on.

The slitted eyes were glittering wells of emerald. "Another place?"

Did it understand? "Yes."

The black tongue darted out-in. "Where?"

"Place where -- one goes when one dies." In spite of the chill, sweat beaded the priest's brow. He mopped his forehead with his sleeve.

The khe sidled closer until he could feel its breath on his face, hot and feathery, musky. "One who dies goes to mountain."

Johannes grimaced. The khe exposed their dead high up on the side of the mountain where predators and scavengers feasted on the remains, a heathenish, disgusting custom. "One's body goes to mountain, but one's --" He shuddered as it pressed closer. Its neckfrill was in his face now. The photobiotic iridescence was more noticeable there, green splotches and lines that separated, then ran together like a map of some distant place he'd never been. "One's -- "he tried again, then finally gave in and used the human term, even though it was just meaningless sounds to the khe. "One's spirit, what is inside, goes back to parent."

The khe whistled something shrill and incomprehensible and pushed him away, bathing him in a smoldering green gaze before it wandered into the surrounding purple-gray scrub. He stared after it, rubbing his wrist, then sank to his knees on the rocks before the crude wooden cross and gripped his hands in prayer until his knuckles shone white. The chill thin air dried the tears on his cheeks almost as fast as they fell.

He didn't return to the rectory until the yellow-white sun hung low in the sky, already half-obscured by the mountains. He limped along the mossy bluff overlooking the stream, his knees bruised and aching, passing khe after khe stretched out in the sun like sleek black plants, soaking up radiant energy. He had to hurry. When the sun sank behind the mountains, the khe would stir themselves and hunt until twilight deepened into darkness. He found their cheerful slaughter at that time of day even more disturbing than watching them like this.

Their photobiotic cells provided a large portion of their daily energy intake, perhaps as much as fifty percent, according to the exobiologists who had catalogued Sheah Four several decades ago, but for the rest of their energy needs, as well as trace elements and certain vital nutrients, the khe hunted small insects and animals, consuming them in a brief feeding frenzy during the hours when the light was no longer direct enough to fully stimulate their photobiotic cells, but darkness had not yet rendered them torpid.

He passed the rows of straggly peas and green beans in Father Gareth's tiny kitchen garden, remembering the tall, patient blond man. From the moment he had first set foot in this shimmering silver and violet valley, Father Gareth had loved the khe, ministering to them tenderly, anointing the soft-skinned, playful pups with holy water and baptizing them one and all in the name of the Lord. "It doesn't matter that they don't understand," he'd said. "In time they will, and the Lord wants them now."

Johannes couldn't repress a shudder. "They look like snakes."

Father Gareth's mild blue eyes narrowed. "Rather more like salamanders, I should think, if you must speak of Earth, but they are not of Earth. They are themselves, beautiful in their own right, holy in their perfection as God's creatures."

Holy.... Johannes shivered and entered the prefabricated one-room bungalow he had shared with the older priest.

After a miserable dinner of warmed-over beans and rice, he sat down before the tiny scribe's screen and tried to complete Father Gareth's reports. The ship would return with two replacements in eighteen months and they would expect to see figures -- so many baptized, so many converted, so much of the Bible translated and preached to the khe. If Father Gareth had lived, it might have all happened. As it was...

He crossed his arms on the keyboard and rested his forehead against them. They would find Father Gareth dead and his mission dead along with him, no converts, no church, no alliance with the khe. His eyelids drooped.

"Son, you can't give up," Father Gareth's voice whispered suddenly, but Johannes lacked the energy to look up. "You have to make them understand."

"But --" Johannes fought to open his leaden eyes. He seemed to feel warm fingers rest upon his head in benediction.

"Go out among them and minister. Feed my flock."

He started, sat up, blinking, heart pounding. He was alone, of course, the only light the screen's pale luminescence. Outside, the sun had dipped behind the mountains, casting the valley into darkness. The unceasing wind howled around the tiny building. Minister to the khe? He shook his head. They were the most self-sufficient creatures he had ever known, needing neither garments or housing, tools with which to cultivate or weapons to hunt. And as for their spiritual needs, as far as he and Father Gareth had been able to ascertain, they'd never conceived of God in any form, however primitive. What could Johannes offer them that they could possibly need?

He pulled on his heavy coat, pocketed the stunner and picked up the freshly charged cold-lantern. He had seldom gone out at night himself, but he knew that, after dark, the khe sought out small depressions of rock and huddled together in a half-conscious torpor caused by ebbing energy levels which made them vulnerable to nighttime attack.

He stepped out into a singing darkness that was more a shade of deep purple than black, his ears instantly numbed by the fierce wind. He pulled his hood up and switched on the lantern. Overhead, the stars continued ,their slow eternal dance, dazzling and indifferent. He shivered and picked his way through clumps of scrubby silver-sage toward the nearest rocky rise that had shown signs of khe habitation.

The lantern caught a mass of supple black bodies threaded with green fire that blazed under the intense white light. Hot liquid-jade eyes slitted open. Johannes's mouth moved, but he suddenly felt ridiculous. What could he say?

Minister to them. Father Gareth whispered inside his head.

He cleared his throat nervously. "Does -- one need anything?"

The black tangle quivered, then a khe separated itself and slunk toward him, belly pressed to the rock-strewn ground. "Light," it whistled. "Light-that-moves!" It touched its snout to his boots.

The others surged forward then and enclosed him in a warm press of lithe bodies, staring expectantly up at his face. He shifted his weight uncomfortably.

"Tall one comes back," a khe whistled softly, "from under rocks." He flinched. They were confusing him with Father Gareth, who had often come out in the night like this. "No," he answered, then squatted down, even though the touch of their satiny hides made him want to run. The breath shuddered in and out of his lungs as he set the cold-lantern on the ground. "But once many suns ago in this one's place--" He hesitated, trying to frame the familiar old story in the khe's restrictive present tense grammar. "Once one dies and comes back after three suns."

A khe gripped his leg, lightly, almost like a caress. "Tall one?"

"A tall one." He tried to meet the bottomless green eyes without looking away. "One comes and speaks of--" This was the point at which he always failed. He knew the kheish word for physical joining for the purpose of procreation, but had never found any word to express love or reverence. "Speaks of liking for parent, for sibling, for offspring." He hesitated, watching their attentive ebony faces. "One has a sound for this liking?"

The khe were statues focused on the light.

"One has this same liking for these, for all tall ones." He touched his chest, feeling the pounding of his heart within. Was he finally going to make them understand? "The one who comes back has this liking for all khe too."

"Where is this one?" The khe, still holding his leg, cocked its head. Johannes's chest ached. "Outside."

"Where?" The khe's digits tightened until its claws pierced the coarse fabric of his cassock.

"Outside sky, mountains, outside -- everything," he faltered.

The khe released him. Its eyes narrowed, baffled, unbelieving. Johannes sighed and picked up the lantern. They surged around him, snuffling, whining in the backs of their throats, plucking at the lantern with anxious digits.

"Light!" they whistled softly, then louder, more boldly. "Light-thatmoves!"

His skin crawling, Johannes shoved past them, tripping over their legs, bouncing off smooth sides, and fled back to the rectory, slamming the door behind him and throwing the bolt.

Late into the night, as he hunched on his cot in the dark and stared at the invisible ceiling, he heard the whisper of bodies against the door, the skritch of claws on the roof.

They were still there when he emerged the next morning, twenty or more, arrayed in a scattered semicircle, neckfrills already spread to catch the first slanting rays of the rising sun. He hesitated in the doorway, his fingers gripping the frame. Uncertain of their mood, he made himself cross the threshold.

A khe raised its muzzle. "Tall one comes back from rocks."

"No." Johannes swallowed hard. They were still confusing him with Father Gareth. "Tall one does not come back. Tall one is dead." He touched his own chest. "This one Father Johannes." Whistletalk did not permit true reproduction of human speech phonemes, but he used the rhythm of the syllables while assigning them tones.

The rows of khe stared at him in stony silence. He knew they didn't use personal names, and yet, why not? They understood the concept of nouns, and how could he explain about God and Jesus and the saints if he could never refer to them by name? Just because the khe had no names now didn't mean they couldn't learn. "Father Johannes," he whistled again, pointing at himself. "You make same sound."

The only movement was the nervous dance of paper-thin tongues, then, one by one, they turned their green eyes away and drifted into the feathery silver-sage. His hands clenched as he watched them glide away. Not now, not when he was so close! He could feel they were on the very edge of comprehension. Just a few minutes more and he might be able to at least begin to lead them to God.

"Wait!" he whistled and ran to block one's path. He touched his chest. "Make sound -- Father Johannes, Father Johannes!"

The khe hissed and drew back, its head weaving in confusion, its black tongue flickering. "Light," it said. "This one go light."

"One time!" Gasping in the too-thin air, Johannes stepped in front of it again as it tried to slither around him. "Make sound!"

The startled khe fastened needle-teeth in his upper arm and tossed him aside with one shake of its muscular neck. His head struck the rectory steps with a sharp burst of pain, and then a black nothingness swallowed him.

His head throbbed and sharp edges bit into his flesh, weighing him down, making it even more difficult to breathe than usual. His eyes opened, but he saw only a faint grayness.

Where was he? Panic surged through him. He couldn't breathe. He had to get up! He struggled to move his arms, his legs. Finally, with a grating rattle, his right leg moved a few inches and whatever was holding him down rolled away, partially freeing his right arm as well. He wriggled and squirmed and more weight slid away until he finally could sit up.

Rocks surrounded him, covering his torso and left leg, ranging in size from pebbles to fist-sized stones. He stared numbly. The khe must have thought he was dead and buried him in a shallow layer of rubble in the same way he had covered Father Gareth's grave yesterday.

He had a marble-sized knot on the back of his head and was scraped from head to toe. His left arm ached fiercely where the khe's bite had broken the skin. He bent forward and rested his throbbing forehead against his knees, seeking the strength to get up and go inside the rectory before the khe came back and finished the job.

He had been so stupid, losing control and frightening them. His cheeks burned as he remembered how Father Gareth had been the very soul of patience and understanding with these primitive creatures. Now they would never listen to him. He would never lead them to God.

At dusk, the khe gathered outside the rectory, whistling in a low chorus that harmonized in a minor key. His heart pounded as he cracked the door. Above the mountains, the gathering night was a deep purple contrasting with paler mauve in the west. A mass of black bodies waited, more than had come that morning, more than he had ever seen at the same time since he and Father Gareth had arrived, possibly the entire khe population of the valley.

A large beast stepped forward, its body alive with iridescent photobiotic fire, its simmering green eyes focused on his face. "One comes back from under rocks."

He pocketed the stunner before opening the door further and easing down the steps. The temperature had already dropped below freezing and his breath plumed white in the growing dimness. He smelled the dank muskiness of their bodies. "You cover one with rocks, but this one not dead."

"Tall one comes back!" it insisted shrilly.

Several khe filtered through the assembled ranks and dropped small gray lumps in the silvery moss at his feet. Without taking his eyes off the khe, he bent his knees and fumbled for one of the lumps. His fingers closed around a small furry beast, punctured by khe tooth-marks, still faintly writhing. Warm blood seeped over his hand.

He shuddered and held it out. "What is this for?"

The large khe nosed the animal in his hand. "Eat, then one makes light."

So they had brought him food, probably a good sign. He stroked the tiny rodent-like creature's silken fur, regretting its pain. Perhaps the khe were sorry too for hurting him earlier. Perhaps they did have the capacity for a conscience, a potential for recognizing and avoiding sin.

"Wait." He ducked back inside and laid the suffering creature on Father Gareth's cot. He put on his coat, then took the cold-lantern outside and set it on the ground, the white bulb cutting through the darkness like a beacon. The khe whistled softly and surged forward, neckfrills raised as though it were full daylight.

He sat on the rock-strewn ground beside the lantern, aching all over, especially in his wounded arm. His throat was dry. "This one does not come back." He pointed to himself. "But once one does."

A khe nosed the lantern. "One comes back, makes light?"

"No." Johannes rubbed his throbbing forehead and frowned. No matter how hard he tried, things always seemed to get mixed up. "This one different. This one --" He concentrated, trying to get the best approximation of the human phonemes in whistletalk. "This one Jesus."

The khe were creeping closer, curling themselves around the well of cool white light until sleek black bodies laced with iridescent green enclosed him on every side. Their watching eyes were hot pools of melted emeralds.

He resisted the claustrophobic urge to push them back. "Jesus dies, then comes back after three suns, has much liking for khe."

A smaller khe scrabbled up and over the backs of the ones blocking it from the light and plopped down in front. The others hissed at it, shifting their three-toed forelegs restlessly.

"This one, Jesus, says khe must like each one, each khe, and --" Another young beast climbed the black wall of bodies, slid down to the front and knocked the lantern over with its splayed claws. Johannes hastily shoved the beast back and righted the lantern. "And each khe must like this one, this Jesus."

One of the larger adults seized the young interloper by the ruff and, with a powerful twist of its neck, tossed it back into the crowd. A fight erupted as it landed halfway back and the khe became a whirling mass of bodies that clawed and bit. Some retreated, but others, jostled or struck by accident, leaped into the fray until it was a full-blown riot.

Appalled, Johannes scrambled to his feet as they rolled toward him. The khe had never once shown aggression toward each other in all the cultural studies done in the early survey. That was one of the primary reasons the Church had thought them promising enough to establish a mission here.

"Stop!" he whistled. "One must stop this now!"

The squirming, clawing creatures bowled into the lantern and knocked it over. This time the light flickered and failed. The fighting lasted a few more seconds, then sputtered out in the darkness. All sound died away except for the hiss of labored breathing.

Johannes fumbled for the lantern and hugged it to his chest. Blood thundered in his ears. Khe snuffled at his heels as he edged toward the rectory, one arm extended to find his way in the darkness.

"Light," it whistled mournfully.

Then another took up the chorus, "Light-that-moves!"

His groping hand found the door and keyed it open with his palmprint. It slid aside and a tall rectangle of yellow light spilled out onto the mossy ground outside. He looked back and saw green eyes staring at him hungrily.

The rodent-creature died twitching in his hands later in the night. Johannes wrapped the soft gray-furred body in one of Father Gareth's shirts. No doubt they hadn't meant to be cruel, any more than they had meant to hurt him, or each other. They were savages, unenlightened. They needed the Word more than any primitives he had ever worked with back on Earth.

But whistletalk was so limited. If only Father Gareth were with him. Kneeling beside the cot, he buried his face in his hands and prayed for guidance. All he wanted was to do good here, make their pathetic lives fuller, give them a possibility of salvation and grace. If only the Lord would show him the way.

At dawn, he fell into an exhausted sleep filled with angry khe that snapped and hissed, and Father's Gareth's craggy, disappointed face. There was something the older priest wanted him to do, something he couldn't quite grasp. It glittered above his head in purest blues and reds and yellows like the immense stained glass rose window he had seen once in Notre Dame, beautiful and utterly out of reach.

He awoke with a start, his head pillowed on his outstretched arms on his cot, his back stiff, a hot dryness behind his eyes. Something was scratching at the door, rhythmical and insistent. He glanced at his watch -- eight o'clock local time, well after dark. He rose to his feet unsteadily and picked up the stunner before he slivered the door open.

A scattering of stars glittered down from the purple-black sky. The valley's complement of khe sat on their haunches, waiting, little more than sleek black lumps in the faint glimmer of starlight. "Light," one whistled, then the rest took up the refrain. "Light-that-moves! Light!"

"No!" Johannes stepped outside and pulled the door closed to help his eyes adjust in the dimness. "No light! Go away!"

They quieted gradually, but did not move. Johannes shivered as the frigid night wind shrilled around the rectory. "Go now," he said. "One talks in sun."

"One comes back from under rocks," a front khe said. Four or five beasts surged forward, dragging something long and heavy between them, much larger than the rodent-creatures they had brought the night before.

He stared down at the dark shape, but could make nothing out. Finally, he slipped back into the rectory. The bulb in the cold-lantern was cracked from the night before so he changed it, then took it outside. The khe stood back from their offering as he squatted down to illuminate it.

Pallid white skin reflected the lantern light, bloodless lips drawn back over teeth, dull blond hair, sunken sightless eyes -- it was Father Gareth.

Johannes's mouth fell open in a soundless cry of shock.

A large khe nosed the body. "One comes back."

"Don't touch him!" Johannes shoved the beast back, then raised the stunner. "Go away!" He fired into the air. The charge crackled like lightning dissipating harmlessly above his head. The khe stirred, whistling among themselves, staring at the cold-lantern with hungry eyes.

Shaking he thumbed the setting to its lowest level which would only shock. Hot tears welled in his eyes as he fired at the nearest beast. It squealed as its muscles spasmed, then recovered and limped off into the darkness. Sobs wracked him as he fired again and again until the pack dispersed.

His head rang and the flat taste of ozone from the weapon's discharge filled the chili air. He knelt at Father Gareth's side and hesitantly crossed the battered arms over the corpse's chest, then sat back on his heels, hugging himself and rocking. All the sun-filled days in Switzerland amidst the polished wood and ancient stone of the seminary, all those hours of discussing the joy of bringing the lost to God, none of it had ever prepared him for this place and these disgusting creatures. And, worst of all was the knowledge that this obscene misunderstanding must be his fault; he had failed to tell the story in a way the khe could understand.

He didn't know what to do. If he buried Father Gareth again, they would undoubtedly just dig the corpse up and tote it back. Perhaps if he took the body up into the mountains and exposed it, then they would understand.... But no, he couldn't allow his mentor and brother priest to be treated like a piece of meat. There had to be another way, something cleaner, more dignified, something the khe could not undo.

Finally he decided on fire, not the Church's preferred method, but allowable and at least final. He took the cold-lantern down to the stream and searched for driftwood as the wind gusted and the night-hunters cried out in the surrounding hills. The breath wheezed through his chest in the chill, oxygen-poor night air. When he finally had enough wood for a pyre, he laid Father Gareth's body atop the crooked stack and lit a layer of silvermoss around the edges with a lighter.

The flames started slowly, almost reluctantly, but eventually gained strength until they roared and glowing sparks drifted up into the darkness. He kept watch through the night, adding more wood as needed.

Hot green eyes followed him everywhere, keeping pace when he left to search for wood, then returning, sitting just outside the circle of light, waiting, waiting for something. He was afraid to think about what.

By morning, the ashes still steamed and the scent of wood smoke hung low over the valley. The khe had slunk off to their favorite sunning rocks with the first rays of dawn. Church doctrine demanded the ashes be collected and interred together, but that would have to wait until later in the day when they had cooled. He made his way to the rectory on leaden feet and tumbled onto his cot, drawn down into a whirling, exhausted sleep.

He woke at dusk, his eyes swollen from tears shed in his sleep, his face wet and raw. He washed and changed his smoky cassock for a clean one, choked down a few bites of a nutrition concentrate, then found an empty equipment box and went outside to complete Father Gareth's last rites.

The khe surrounded the silvery ashes, solemn and silent. They closed in behind him as he pushed past their lithe black bodies, the stunner ready in his fist. His legs felt distant and clumsy, like lifeless stumps he had only borrowed. He placed the box on the ground and opened the lid. "Go away," he told the front row of khe.

"Tall one comes back," one of the beasts whistled. "Becomes light."

Johannes's eyes flicked toward the silver-black ashes. "No, tall one is dead."

"Tall one becomes light, fills darkness like sun!" The khe's green eyes were round and earnest. "This one sees."

The surrounding khe hissed in assent. Their satiny black muzzles wove from side to side. Their clawed toes curled.

Why did it always come down to light, he asked himself. Then he looked down at the khe with their neckfrills raised to catch the last rays of the setting sun. Light gave them life and movement, provided raw energy for their cells. Light was a pleasure as much as eating was to a starving human, the fulfilling of a basic physical need, the cessation of hunger. Pagan creatures that they were, they saw light as the source of life, not understanding that all light, as part of Creation, comes from God.

He sank to his knees and bowed his head, praying for forgiveness. Did not the Bible say, "God is light, and in him is no Darkness at all." He had been foolish and short-sighted, but perhaps there was a way to bring them the Word.

After he buried Father Gareth's ashes in the struggling garden, he ranged far downstream and gathered as much driftwood as he could find before dark. When the sun had fallen behind the purple-gray mountains, he brought out the cold-lantern and waited.

The khe appeared in groups of twos and threes, their tongues sampling the night air, their eyes questioning. He sat on the ground before the pile of wood with a Bible in his hands. When the sleek black backs surrounded him on every side and he could see expectant green eyes watching from far out in the darkness, he opened the Bible to the first page. "In the beginning, One makes the sky and the ground," he read, paraphrasing the verses into whistletalk. "And darkness is everywhere."

The khe shifted restlessly. A medium-sized adult at his feet said plaintively, "One comes back?"

"Darkness is everywhere," Johannes repeated and stared meaningfully up into the black night sky. "And One says let there be light and there is light." He pointed at the lantern.

The khe edged forward, raising its neckfrill, its eyes unblinking.

"This One makes light, this one God." He picked up the lantern. "You make sound -- God."

The restless khe nosed one another, clawed the silver-sage, snuffled softly.

He turned the lantern off and heard the uneasy shuffle of their bodies. "God makes light. You say God!"

"Light!" a khe whimpered. The others took up its refrain, echoing it far back into the darkness. "Light! Light-that-moves!"

"No!" Johannes lurched to his feet. "God! God makes light!" He held the dark lantern above his head. "Say God!"

The khe crawled through the darkness to touch their noses to his feet, pull at his upraised arm. He could feel their distress like a deepening pool around him, black as the night, twice as bitter. "Say God!"

"God," one whistled brokenly, and then another, and another.

He turned the lantern on and let the cool white light flood down as the khe sat back on their haunches and stared. "God likes khe, all khe," he said, his heart pounding with elation. "God makes light for khe."

They were solemn and unmoving as he set the lantern down and reached for the lighter in his pocket. He needed more light, something bigger that would really impress them. He held the lighter to a wad of silver-moss packed around the edge of the wood and watched the stringy strands curl into flame.

As the wood caught fire, the khe began to whistle an eerie chorus that, as far as he could tell, held no meaning, just sound. The fire reached high into the sky, eating into the darkness. Much later, when the khe finally finished their song, they pressed forward. He held his arms out to them, overcome with the emotion of the moment. They knew God's name now, had finally recognized Him as the Creator of all things, after all these unnumbered millennia. At last the khe could take their place at God's feet, singing His praises with the rest of the universe.

"Light," a front beast whistled. "Tall one is light!" It charged Johannes and butted him into the bonfire.

He sprawled on his back, his arms still outstretched in welcome. His clothing smoldered as he scrambled out into the dirt and rolled. His eyes smarted from the smoke and the seared flesh on his back burned. He hunched over, coughing.

The khe backed away, their eyes trained reverently on his face. The logs shifted and sparks rained outward as his heart sped into a new, feral rhythm that had nothing to do with Earth.

"Light!" The khe's muzzles wove back and forth as they crooned a new litany above the whip-crackle of the flames. "Tall one is light! God makes light! Tall one comes back!"

Johannes glanced back into the flames and seemed to see something, or rather someone, a body outlined in living fire, holding out a hand to him, its face, infinitely patient, topped by fiery hair and a firm mouth of red coals. His vision swam. "Father Gareth!" Waves of pain swept through his burned back and shoulders, and his tongue seemed three sizes too big. "What -- ?"

The apparition swept its hand toward the waiting khe, its eyes flaming holes into another universe. For now and all the rest of your days, you must tend these, God's children. Guard them well, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.

"But -- they don't understand!" Johannes sank to his knees. "And they never will. Their language is too primitive, their intelligence too different, too -- limited, and there is nothing I or anyone else can do."

You have brought them this far, Father Gareth said in a spray of fiery red sparks. God never sets your hand to a task beyond your strength. You must try harder. There is a way, and you must try until you find it.

Johannes sat on the edge of the bed, dabbing cool antibiotic cream on his bums. Feverish thoughts raced through his head; the khe only understood what they could see and feel and smell, what could be presented before their stubby black noses, so the main impediment to their conversion was that the story of Christ's sacrifice was rooted in the past, nonexistent as far as the khe's eternal now was concerned. The story had to be brought forward and invested with meaning in the present to make it accessible.

The cream soothed his burns. He drank a glass of tepid water and stretched out on his side, thinking.... What had men known of salvation and redemption before Christ had come to show them the way? What would they know even now if He had not given His life for their sins?

It was a troubling question that had no answer.

Over the next months, he fell into the pattern of sleeping most of the day and then walking the night, either carrying the cold lantern, or building a bonfire when he could find enough wood. Each evening, as he emerged from the rectory, the khe greeted him with the same joyful words, "Tall one comes back!"

And he answered, "Yes, tall one always comes back." They gathered around the light to hear him painstakingly paraphrase another page or two of the Bible, rendering the verses in terms they might understand. They listened, neckfrills spread to the light, immobile as a legion of black statues until dawn. Though his strength steadily waned and his oxygenstarved body was often ill, he used his meager supply of medicines to doctor their minor injuries and ignored his own needs.

His lungs burned constantly now so that breathing was an effort. He coughed up blood and often woke from his fitful daytime sleep, gasping for air, knowing his abused body, unsupervised by consciousness, had simply abandoned the overwhelming straggle needed to keep on breathing.

But his mind refused to give up. He had so much more to accomplish. The khe were poised on the very edge of comprehension and faith; he sensed it. They could repeat a few of the translated verses now, and sometimes asked for certain stories they liked, such as Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac to the flames. What they needed at this point to transport them into a state of grace was no more or less than man had needed himself --a miracle, and though he earnestly prayed, he was well aware that miracles were not available upon demand.

On a fine, clear night somewhere in the twenty-fifth month of his posting, too weak to hike, he sat on his heels on the cold rocky soil, tending his bonfire and studying the stars, scattered like a handful of diamonds across the deep-purple sky. The khe had arranged themselves in surrounding rows, their green eyes reflecting the flames.

A persistent fever had dried his mouth and worsened his breathing until the effort to move or speak was almost beyond him. He tucked his chilled hands under his armpits and huddled over the ever-present hollow ache within, remembering Father Gareth in this same condition at the end, admitting finally to himself that he wasn't going to survive the twenty days left until the supply ship returned with his replacements. He was going to die with this vital work left undone; then someone else would have to start all over again, would have to suffer the same failures and misunderstandings, perhaps never even succeed as far as he had himself. And all the time, there would be the khe, trapped outside the Kingdom of God, his responsibility and his failure, a final stain upon his soul.

He dragged himself to his feet and cast another armful of driftwood onto the fire. The effort send him into a coughing fit as the flames roared above his head, extravagant and wasteful. The khe whistled appreciatively at the size of the fire and edged closer. He turned and waited until the spasm had passed. "Tall one goes to its parent, to God."

"Goes?" a particularly large khe asked plaintively. "What parent? Where?"

Gravity seemed to shift ninety degrees. He fell to his knees and caught himself on his hands, his heart hammering as he threw all his will into the effort to draw another breath, and then another. "When tall one goes," he wheezed, fighting the terrible urge to cough, "the khe must remember the stories it has told of the other tall one who comes back."

The large khe blinked and tilted its head in what Johannes had come to recognize as a posture of uncertainty.

"Though this tall one must go," he said numbly, "the one who comes back never leaves. That tall one is always, always with the khe."

"Where?" The khe's head twisted. A whistle of distress rustled through the other beasts and they too craned their necks to see what wasn't there.

He sagged. It was not enough. Their minds were too literal, trapped in an ever-present now without the possibility of history or a future. They would never understand unless they saw the story played out before their very eyes. They had to experience Christ, had to touch the nail holes in his palms, see him die and then rise again as man had, but God had not seen fit to send His son to this forsaken place. Pain knifed through him and he felt a liquid bubbling deep within his lungs.

A smaller khe, barely half grown, broke from the ranks and scrambled up the rectory steps. "Tall one!" It scrabbled at the door. "One who makes light!"

Although khe could not recognize his face, it obviously still remembered when there had been more than one man here. Humans were interchangeable, faceless units only notable in their usefulness. He meant nothing to them as an individual, and the new priests on their way would mean no more....

He stiffened, arms braced around his chest against the pain. Through the red haze behind his eyes, he sensed the glimmering of an understanding that had eluded him for months. Khe could not tell one human from another, and so, no matter how many individual priests came here over the years, in a sense they would all be Father Gareth, the tall one who comes back, a host of Christs risen from the tomb.

At last, he knew what to do and staggered to his feet. "Tall one goes to its parent now, to God," he rasped, "but comes back in twenty suns." He ran his fingers over the satiny hide of the nearest beast. It was warm and smooth, like the skin of a woman or a young child. He was surprised now that he had ever found it hideous. "The khe must watch for this one and greet it upon its return," he said, then was doubled over by a terrible fit of coughing. He gritted his teeth and waited for it to end.

"Tall one always comes back," he forced out finally. The khe stared at him, waiting as always, his spiritual children, on the brink of understanding. He made the sign of the cross over his chest, then lurched headfirst into the bonfire before he could change his mind. For a second, the flames licked his clothing and boots and hair without effect. The khe's hot green eyes followed him.

It was all right, he told himself, as his cassock burst into ruddy flame. This was not suicide, but sacrifice, freely given in the oldest of ways, out of love. God understood. The stench of his burning flesh permeated the smoky air, then the burning wood collapsed under his weight, pitching him into the bed of red-hot coals.

"Light!" the khe chorused. "Tall one is light! Tall one comes back!" And he would -- in about twenty days, Johannes thought as a roaring crimson darkness swept him away. As long as men roamed the stars, tall one would always come back.

~~~~~~~~

By K.D. Wentworth

REVENGE

Michael Blumlein's last story to appear here was "Paul and Me" in our October issue. The following tale is a very different proposition entirely, a strange vision that draws upon Dr. Blumlein's work as a physician and puts a whole new spin on the notion of vengeance. Michael Blumlein lives in San Francisco and is currently working on his third novel (after X, Y and The Movement of Mountains.)

The burial took place at Our Lady of Tears in Colma, and Luis stayed until the others had gone, until the diminutive grave was filled and tamped with dirt and the gravediggers had shouldered their shovels and gone on to dig elsewhere. He stayed until he was alone, and so it was that he alone saw the child ascend. Barely a week old when she died, she looked slightly older now, a child of perhaps three months of age, driven by hunger and other primal urges and forced to look outside herself for help. Her eyes wandered this way and that, unfocused, it seemed, uncensoring, until at last they fixed on her father. She seemed to recognize him. Her face, which up to that moment had been a minor chaos of muscle contraction and relaxation, became still.

Luis was mesmerized. Emotion left him. He waited for her to speak.

She told him she had died too soon. She blamed the doctor. "The blood is on his hands, Father."

Luis believed the same. "What should I do?"

"Blood for blood," she said.

Luis nodded. This, too, he believed. "How?" he asked.

"Man to man. And do not wait too long. The sooner the better."

Luis, who had been floundering since her death, agreed. He was happy at last for a way to channel his grief, and with more hope than he had felt in many days, he rejoined his wife Rosa, who was being comforted by her family. At his arrival she took his hand, which was cold, and by that, and the look on his face, she knew immediately what was in his heart. Despairing, she beseeched him otherwise. She begged him, she kissed his hand, she pressed his palm to her heart. But Luis could not be moved. His hand stayed cold, and Rosa, foreseeing another tragedy, broke down in fresh tears. Dutifully, Luis took her in his arms. One of her sisters muttered a blessing. An aunt, wringing a tear-stained handkerchief, invoked the love of God. Someone keened.

A week later, Rosa tried to reason with her husband. "I have spoken with a lawyer," she told him after the boys were in bed. "He wants to meet with us."

"I have no interest in lawyers," replied Luis.

"He asks for no money. He just wants to talk."

"I have nothing to say."

"He wants to help us, Luis. He says there are grounds for a strong case."

"Grounds, he means, for him to get rich."

"He knows of another baby who died at this doctor's hands. We are not the first. The lawyer says the doctor could be charged with negligence."

"Rosa," said Luis. "Look at us. Who are we to accuse a doctor?"

"Not us. The lawyer. He would do the talking. He's a smart man, Luis. He asked questions that made me think. Questions, he said, they should have asked in the hospital. I trust him."

Luis was silent. He had no time for lawyers, no trust in anyone but himself. Man to man, she had said. An eye for an eye. It was his duty. On the other hand, he did not want to cause his wife unnecessary grief.

"Then go to him," he said.

"Talk to this lawyer." "Yes?"

"By all means. Please. We must do what is right."

Luis by nature was not a violent man. Before the death of his daughter, he was tender with his wife and gentle with his children. And even after, the violence he planned did not spill beyond its target. He didn't yell at the kids or bark at his wife, didn't lose his temper at work or with friends. If anything, he seemed more docile than usual, except to Rosa, who knew him best. She worried, but she also held out hope that with time his wounds would heal.

Luis owned a machete from his days as a field hand in Mexico. He had used it to cut wood, clear brush and on occasion kill a chicken for dinner. It had an ebony handle that he polished and a steel blade he kept sharp. Three weeks after his daughter's death, he left in the morning as usual, but instead of going to work, he drove to the medical building where Dr. Admonson had his obstetrics practice. He wore a white button-down shirt, pressed pants and cowboy boots. His hair was slicked down and parted, his mustache neatly trimmed. He carried the machete loosely in his left hand, drawing curious glances from passersby, none of whom took it upon himself to comment. At the medical building he rode the elevator to the third floor, where he exited with two youngish women and an elderly man. Dr. Admonson's office was at the end of the corridor on the left. The waiting room, whose pastel walls were hung with watercolors of flowers and idyllic landscapes, was full of women. Some were at term; some were just getting started; one or two suckled newborns. Luis was the only man in the room. He was also the only person carrying a machete.

He found an empty place on a couch next to a woman with a toddler in her lap and took a seat. A hush fell in the room as everyone took note of him. He stared at the floor. The toddler, drawn by the gleaming machete, squirmed away from her mother and went for the blade. Luis quickly blocked her way and shook his finger in remonstrance. An instant later, her mother snatched her back. A nurse in a starched white lab coat opened an interior door and called the name of a patient. The two of them disappeared inside, at which point Luis got up and tapped on the receptionist's frosted window. It slid open.

"May I help you?"

"I want to see the doctor."

The receptionist was a woman in her sixties with silver blue hair and glasses that magnified her eyes. She sat at a low desk from whose vantage point the machete was hidden.

"Are you here with someone?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"Do you have an appointment?"

"He delivered my baby. I want to talk to him."

She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and peered at Luis. "Pertaining to what?"

"My baby," he repeated. "Maria Elena Hermosilla Rodriguez."

Dr. Admonson had a number of patients named Rodriguez, but the receptionist kept up with the mothers, not the babies. The name was not familiar to her. She looked at her appointment book.

"I have an opening tomorrow at two."

Luis stared at her blankly. He was not prepared to negotiate.

"Two tomorrow?" she repeated.

"Today," he said.

"We're very busy today."

This met with no reply, and the receptionist, a retired retail clerk with passing knowledge of the vagaries of human behavior, deemed it an inopportune time to persevere. She rechecked her book.

"All right. I'll try to squeeze you in. You'll have to wait though."

Luis nodded and returned to his seat. Several more patients were called by the nurse, while others entered the office to take their places. He was troubled. He loved women of all ages and types, but most of all, he loved women who were carrying new life. Pregnancy was a miracle and a sacrament to him, a time for women to be honored, protected and loved especially hard. How could he kill the doctor without creating panic among them? Even behind closed doors they would hear him hacking away, they would smell the blood and suffer. Then the burden of guilt would be on him.

The nurse appeared at her door and called his name. Slowly, he stood, machete in hand, hacking edge out, tip to the floor. He was caught between duty and love, between command and conscience. The nurse took a step toward him. He shrank back. She took another. She said his name.

He fled.

Two days later, at Mass, Maria Elena visited him again. She was dressed in Mary Janes and a pink crinoline skirt and wore a bow in her hair. She had some questions, chiefly why her father had not done what he had promised.

"I cannot kill a man like an animal," Luis replied with downcast eyes. "That would make me an animal too."

"An eye for an eye," said Maria Elena. "That was our agreement."

"I beg your forgiveness, little one, but I cannot."

She looked at him in such a way that he felt guilty of being less than a man. Then her expression changed.

"Another way perhaps."

Luis brightened. "Yes. Anything but cold-blooded murder."

"The doctors are smart. The doctors and the lawyers. Smart and powerful. We must be cunning. And patient. We must plan carefully."

This was a relief to Luis, who did not want a repeat of the debacle with the machete. The thought of what he had nearly inflicted on those innocent women filled him with shame.

"Do you have an idea?" he asked.

Maria Elena did, but she wasn't saying, not just yet. Instead, she gave him an enigmatic smile, and for a moment he got a glimpse of her as a young woman. She had an uncanny resemblance to someone he knew, and then it dawned on him that that someone was himself, that his daughter now looked just as he might have looked had he been born female. Long lashes, dark eyes, broad cheeks and lips. Hair the color of coal. Skin like clay. It was unsettling. The girl had something up her sleeve, and suddenly, he wasn't sure he wanted to know what.

He was sitting in a pew at the back of the church. From the pulpit the priest gave the call to prayer. Reflexively, Luis fell to his knees and clasped his hands together. Organ music filled the air, then the choir began to sing. Maria Elena joined in, her voice soulful and sweet. It eased her father's heart to hear her sing. Here especially, in the bosom of the Lord. What did he possibly have to fear?

A week later, he shaved his mustache and made an appointment to see the doctor. He gave his name as Luis Flores and neither the receptionist nor the nurse recognized him. He was ushered uneventfully into the doctor's office, and fifteen minutes later, Dr. Admonson swept in. He was a rangy man in his early fifties with silver hair, liquid blue eyes and a disarming smile. He shook Luis's hand, glanced at his chart, which was blank, then sat opposite him at his desk.

"What can I do for you, Mr. Flores?"

Luis had rehearsed what to say, but the sight of the doctor unnerved him. Suddenly, he was back at the hospital, with all the attendant feelings of helplessness, panic and despair. Rosa's bag of waters had broken six weeks ahead of time, in itself not a terrible tragedy, except that labor had not followed. The baby could have been delivered by Caesarcan section, but Dr. Admonson had said no, he wanted to give it as much time as possible to mature inside its mother, whom he put in the hospital at bedrest and visited daily, monitoring her for signs of infection or fetal distress. None occurred, and Rosa and Luis waited, a week, then two, then three. Their anxiety mounted, and repeatedly, they questioned the doctor about the wisdom of waiting so long. Repeatedly, he reassured them. And finally labor arrived, and the child was breech, and instead of doing a Caesarean section and bringing it out safely through Rosa's belly, Dr. Admonson, who decried unnecessary surgery, elected a vaginal delivery, during which the baby's head got stuck, so that forceps had to be used. Luis remembered the clink of metal as the blades were engaged, the beads of sweat on the doctor's forehead, his strained words behind the green surgical mask. And then the tugging of his daughter through the birth canal, the gentle but insistent pressure that had inadvertently broken her neck, so that instead of kicking and wailing at delivery, she had come out limp and blue. And then the bleeding on the brain that followed, and her being rushed to intensive care and put on a respirator and other machines to keep her alive. And how after a week -- when she couldn't survive on her own -- the machines were turned off, and she was allowed to die. And Rosa's tears, and from her breasts the rivers of warm milk. And his own tears, and his rage, and his vow of revenge.

Dr. Admonson bridged his fingers and awaited a reply to his question. It was rare but not unheard of that a man came to him alone, a husband without a wife, a beau without his belle, looking for advice. Often, like this man, they were shy. Usually this meant that the reason for coming involved questions of fertility. What they thought of as their manhood. He tried again.

"What brings you in today, Mr. Flores?"

"I need help," Luis muttered, which was manifestly true. It was also what Maria Elena had told him to say.

"In what way?" Admonson asked.

Luis stared into his hands. The plan, such as it was, had been to ask for help and then to receive it, in this way insinuating himself, however tangentially, into the doctor's life, thus buying time to plot his revenge. The plan's weakness was that, beyond this vague request for help, he had nothing more to say.

"Mr. Flores?"

Luis attempted to elaborate. "I need a doctor."

"Of course. But as you must be aware, I am an obstetrician. On occasion, a gynecologist. This means I take care of women. Is there a woman involved somehow in this? A problem at home? Elsewhere? I have no moral agenda, Mr. Flores, and frankly, there are few things that either surprise or offend me. But you have to help out. You have to speak your mind."

Luis shrunk from the doctor's ease of delivery, his fluid command of the situation. His purpose in coming, ill-defined to begin with, drained from him completely. He felt as he had as an immigrant boy fresh from the farm, when the English-speaking school teacher had upbraided him in a language he did not understand. His mind went blank. He picked at a piece of skin in his palm and at length muttered an apology and got up to go. He looked for his hat, but he had left it at home. What could he have been thinking, he wondered, to have come without his hat?

To his surprise, Maria Elena was not cross. She understood how lacking he was in cunning, how disinclined to subterfuge and deception. Patiently, she worked with him, built up his courage, rehearsed what to say. When in these practice sessions he faltered, she reminded him of the doctor's offense, appealing to his pride and sense of justice. For maximum effect, she sometimes appeared to him as she had at the moment of her birth, head grotesquely ballooned with blood, body limp as a rag. At other times she used a different tactic, coming to him as a girl, or a young woman, splendid in appearance, vivacious and full of promise. In this way she reminded him what had been cut short. The flower that had been denied its bloom. She was diligent in fanning the flames of his deprivation and discontent.

Two weeks later, wearing a bolo tie and white cowboy shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps, Luis returned to the doctor. He apologized for his previous behavior. He admitted it was not easy saying what he had come to say.

"And what is that?"

"I want you to be my doctor."

Admonson regarded him. "But why?"

Luis faltered.

Admonson became impatient. "I don't see how I can."

"By saying yes."

"And what will I do for you? What is it that you need?"

It was a difficult question, and Luis waited for Maria Elena's help, which she had promised. Moments later, she materialized, wearing a peasant blouse embroidered with finches and other colorful birds. Her hair was wound in a thick braid and her face painted with makeup. She slid behind him on the chair and eased him forward, until he was perched on the edge. She pushed his knees together in a feminine way and folded his hands demurely in his lap. She bowed his head ever so slightly, in deference to the doctor's position of superiority. She added a faint sibilance to his voice.

"I put myself in your hands, Doctor."

It didn't take a genius to get the message. Nor, once it registered, was it hard to understand why the man insisted on being so vague and indirect. Admonson chided himself. He took pride in his ability to read people, and it irked him when he couldn't. He had been misled by the man's attire, his cowboy boots and starched shirts. By his calloused hands and yes, his Mexican background. The only men posing as women he had ever seen, and these from a distance, were white and anything but shy. He asked if Luis had spoken with anyone else regarding this matter.

"No, Doctor."

"There are specialty clinics, you know. People with more experience than I have. To tell the truth, I have none at all. You would be my first, my only, patient."

Luis inclined his head to signify he took this as a compliment.

"I really shouldn't," said Admonson, who was, despite himself, intrigued. "Apart from a basic standard of care, it's a question of common sense. Simply put, you'd be better served by an expert in the field."

"Please, Doctor."

Admonson resisted. "I could give you a referral."

Flatter him, whispered Maria Elena. Appeal to his skill. His reputation.

"You know how to treat women," said Luis. "You're the best there is. Everyone says."

Admonson demurred.

Luis insisted. "I beg of you."

"I couldn't," said Admonson.

Tell him the truth, Maria Elena enjoined. That your fate is in his hands.

"My fate is in your hands," said Luis.

"I hardly believe that," replied Admonson, flattered nonetheless.

Luis inclined his head, gave a chesty sigh and slowly stood, striking a posture midway between disappointment and defeat. "I am sorry then. I should not have come. I should not have bothered you."

He turned to go and had his hand on the door, when Admonson called him back.

"If I consent to be your doctor in this, I'll need your full cooperation. You understand that."

"Yes, Doctor."

"And you're willing to accept the risks. Psychological, emotional, physical. Whatever. You'll sign a document to that effect."

"Yes."

Admonson weighed the situation one last time. Something didn't seem quite right, but he was not one to back down from a challenge. He could always change his mind later.

"All right. You're willing, I'm willing." He motioned to the chair Luis had recently vacated. "Have a seat. We might as well get started."

Thereafter, his questions became blunt and sexually explicit. Luis's cheeks burned with embarrassment, and he would have run from the room had Maria Elena not been there to help out. She did the talking: it was shocking some of the things she said. But she made no apology. It was necessary, she told her father. If he wanted his revenge, this was the way.

And so it was that Luis Flores, formerly Rodriguez, began his daily doses of estrogen, putting his trust in the hands of the man whose hands had caused his greatest grief. Maria Elena appeared frequently the first few months of his treatment to encourage him and insure he kept his appointments with Dr. Admonson for his monthly injections. She was with him when, at the doctor's insistence, he took the battery of psychological tests to determine his personality profile, his mental stability and adjustment potential. She helped him brave the furtive curiosity of the pharmacist who dispensed his medication, and she stayed with him through the bouts of nausea caused by the pills. She did not explain the specifics of her plan for revenge. She had, in fact, little at all to say about the future. When Luis asked, she was either vague or else told him to be patient, so that eventually he stopped asking. He gave himself up to the treatments and did what he could to ingratiate himself to Admonson. As time passed, Maria Elena came less often, until, at length, for reasons known only to herself, she stopped her visits altogether.

Not long after, Rosa came across his bottle of pills. She had done the laundry and was piling his underwear in the top drawer of the bureau when she felt something in the toe of one of his socks. Normally, she would not have given in to curiosity, but under the circumstances, which included an increasingly moody and uncommunicative husband and a marriage on the verge of collapse, she felt justified in investigating. The bottle, which had no label, was half full. The pills were small, oval and white, with a line down the center and a number embossed above the line. She recognized them as the same pills her mother had been taking ever since her ovaries and womb had been removed. This puzzled and alarmed her.

That night, after the children were in bed, she confronted her husband. She accused him of having an extra-marital affair, which the pills were somehow connected to. She lost her temper and screamed at him. This was most unusual.

Humiliated at being discovered and stung by her accusation of infidelity, Luis was speechless. He had not considered the effect of his clandestine behavior on his wife, had not thought of much else but his own wounds since his daughter's death. He had never intended to hurt anyone but the doctor. Certainly not Rosa. If anything, he had assumed that her suffering, like his, would be placated by revenge. Once the shock of her accusation passed, he vehemently denied having an affair. Lamely, he tried pretending the pills were for someone else. This only made matters worse, so that finally, he told his wife the truth. The pills were his. Then he told a lie.

"They're an aphrodisiac."

Rosa found this hard to believe.

"I want another child," he said.

She frowned. "You've hardly touched me since the tragedy. It's hard to make babies without touching."

His mind had been full of other things, he wanted to say, but he was afraid to tell her what. So he said nothing.

"You blame me for her death," said Rosa.

"No. I blame the doctor." He hesitated. "Forgive me, but sometimes I also blame God."

Rosa was not surprised. "I worry for you, Luis. In church I pray for your bitterness to end."

"I pray also," he said.

"For what do you pray?"

He looked down.

"I am your wife," Rosa reminded him. "Please, show me your face."

With an effort Luis lifted his head and met her eyes. They were dark and steady and inviting of trust. The eyes of a woman, he thought, the eyes of a mother. He wanted to be like her, worthy of trust. Like the women he had sat with in the doctor's waiting room. New mothers, expectant mothers, women inextricably bound to life.

"I pray for another chance," he said.

Rosa was touched, and her face softened. Then something came over her. Rarely the initiator in matters of sex for fear of offending her husband's manhood, she cast fear aside and reached out and touched Luis's cheek with her fingertips. She stroked his skin, the wings of his nose, his lips. He responded by kissing her palm, then embracing her. It was their first such contact in weeks, and the joy of it kept them from letting go, until finally Luis freed an arm to turn off the light. He was anxious to put his wife's mind at ease, eager to show his love further. Fleetingly, it crossed his mind that, hope beyond hope, they might even conceive a child.

High hope, deep despair. When the time came, he could not harden enough to enter Rosa, much less plant the seed. They tried one thing after another, they sweated and toiled, but success eluded them, and finally, they gave up. It was an embarrassment to both of them, an admission of troubles deeper than they imagined. It was a long time before they tried again.

In the months that followed other changes befell their relationship. As his breasts swelled, Luis took to dressing and undressing in private, so that Rosa would not see. Once or twice a week he took a pill he had gotten from the doctor to get rid of the excess water and feeling of bloatedness the hormones caused. On these days he was in and out of the bathroom so many times at work that his boss started to complain. Fearful for his job, Luis took to taking the pills at night, so that instead of missing time at work, he missed sleep. This made him cantankerous and moody. He became subject to fits of temper, and once, to the fear and amazement of his wife and children, he actually broke down in tears. When he recounted this embarrassing episode to Admonson, who was, ironically, the only person in this time of distress he felt capable of confiding in, the doctor explained that it was probably the medicine at work. Women were often temperamental when their hormones were surging.

"Am I a woman now?" asked Luis, displaying a naivete that worried Admonson.

"No," he replied. "You're a man on hormones. You're far from being a woman."

Luis wasn't so sure. If he were a man, he would have killed this socalled doctor long ago.

"Am I a homosexual?" he asked.

Admonson regarded him. "What do you think you are?"

"I'm following orders."

"Not mine," Admonson was quick to reply.

Luis would not meet his eyes.

"I'm getting a funny feeling here," Admonson said. "Like you're not sure about the way things are going. You're not happy. Maybe we should put things on hold for right now."

"On hold?"

"Stop the medicine. Re-think what we're doing here."

"I'm doing what I'm supposed to," replied Luis.

"You said you're following orders. Whose?"

Luis scolded himself for saying too much. This doctor was cagey. He made you think you could trust him, made you almost like him, then he turned the tables, killing your baby, betraying your trust. A person had to be careful.

"My orders," said Luis. "I'm doing this for myself."

"That's the way it has to be. It has to come from you. From inside. It has to be what you want. What you truly think you are."

Admonson was winging it. By rights he shouldn't have taken the case at all, but curiosity had pushed his hand and now vanity kept him from letting go. He had done some reading and talked to a few colleagues. As long as the treatment was merely a matter of prescribing hormones, it was reversible and relatively safe. He hadn't decided what he would do once they tackled the issue of surgery. As a physician he was as well-acquainted as anyone with the subtleties of the female form, but he had absolutely no experience at all in molding that form from one of the opposite sex. The knowledge of what he would have to cut was actually rather unsettling. He asked Luis if he had given any thought to the matter.

Crafty, thought Luis. Trying to scare me off. He sensed the doctor's trepidation, which made him glad.

"Sometimes I feel like I'm burning up," he said, thinking the news of this might worry the doctor further. "Like there's a fire in my skin. A fever."

"Hot flashes," said Admonson.

Luis frowned.

"The hormones," he explained. "I did warn you."

"I don't like it."

"What's to like? No one said it was easy becoming a woman. Maybe if you grew your hair long. Learned to use a little makeup. A little lipstick." He reached for a framed photograph that sat on the comer of his desk and held it out to Luis. "My wife. She spends half an hour every morning at the mirror. And again in the evening, if we're going out. It's work being a woman. It takes commitment." He paused, grinned. "But then if you're lucky, you get a man like me."

Luis felt simultaneously humiliated and confused. For want of a reply he looked at the photograph of Admonson's wife, a delicately boned, elegant-looking woman in her forties. He wondered what she did to stand up to her husband. And, conversely, what attracted her to him.

"I have no wish to get a man," he said quietly.

Admonson pondered this, shrugged. "No. Of course not. You're married." He took back the picture. "My wife and I have been together twenty-two years. She's a real trooper. A diamond in the rough. Don't know what I'd do without her." He glanced at Luis. "You haven't spoken of your own wife lately. What does she make of all this?"

Luis stiffened. The thought of Rosa made him defensive. "There are no arguments in our family. Whatever I am, I am still the head of the house."

"It's a man's world," agreed Admonson. "Are you sure you want to give it up?"

Luis had never considered it. True, his thirst for revenge had been hottest early on, before he had begun his treatments. He had changed, was changing, but whatever he ultimately became, he expected to be able to call back his former self on demand.

"I give up nothing," he said.

"Ah. A feminist."

Luis frowned. "Women are the salt of the earth. The ones who love. I don't understand you. How can a doctor of women not like women?"

"I have great respect for women," replied Admonson. "I'm not sure I could ever get through labor as they do. Or have children cling like little monkeys to my breast. Or suffer mood swings every month when I'm about to menstruate." He shook his head at the marvel of it all. "Women are amazing creations. They deserve all the credit in the world. They wake me at night, they get me going in the morning, I'm with them all day. My life revolves around women. How can I not like them?"

He returned his wife's photograph to its spot on his desk, then added, "And they pay the bills. What more could a man ask?"

Luis churned inside. He was no match for this doctor, who parried and twisted everything he said. Revenge, it was clear, would not come in the form of words. He stood up.

"I'll take my shot now."

"Of course." Admonson, ever the gentleman, left his chair and extended his hand. "It's been good chatting. And don't worry. We'll take this thing one step at a time. I'll see you in a month."

That night Luis had a dream. A nightmare rather, against which he fought and flailed, twisting the sheets, throwing off the pillow, straining the plastic buttons on his pajama top until, stretched to the breaking point, they popped off. When he woke, drenched in sweat, the overhead light in the bedroom was on, because Rosa, hearing him cry out, had feared that something was wrong. Upon seeing his naked torso, with the rounded breasts and pink nipples of a young woman, she knew that she was right. She had let things go on too long. Her husband had passed beyond help, at least beyond hers. She muttered a prayer, crossed herself and spent the remainder of the night on the living room couch. The following morning, children in tow, she moved out.

Luis was grief-stricken and full of remorse. He vowed to stop the treatments. But each time he tried, he failed. On three separate occasions he made a point of tossing the bottle of pills in the garbage only to find them back in his sock, or in his hand, a fresh tablet on his tongue, or tumbling down his throat to his stomach to work its magic. He called to cancel his monthly doctor's appointment, but when the receptionist came on, the line inexplicably went dead. He called again and did cancel, but when the day came, he went anyway. He was in the grip of something he couldn't control, and he suspected his daughter's hand in it, even though it had been months since she had bothered to pay a visit. He wondered where it was all leading. More than anything, he prayed that it would soon end.

Three days after leaving, Rosa returned to the apartment to pick up some clothes, expecting her husband to be at work. But, bereft at his family's departure, Luis had called in sick. The meeting between them was awkward in the extreme. Rosa tried to get in and out without talking, but, driven to the brink by her husband's relentless apologies and entreaties to return, she lost control, bursting out in a torrent of questions, none of which he was able to answer to her satisfaction. Was he sick? she asked. No, he replied, not sick. Crazy? No, not crazy either. He was afraid to tell her about Maria Elena, not because she wouldn't believe the child might visit but because she wouldn't believe she would be so cruel and ruthless as to orchestrate her own revenge. Rosa would assume he was either lying or possessed; so he said nothing.

Given so little to work with, Rosa had little choice. If Luis wasn't willing to trust her, she couldn't very well trust him. She needed to look out for herself and the children, and thus stood firm in her decision to separate. It was, she felt, her duty as a mother.

Luis was heartbroken, though he couldn't honestly blame her. He shared his wife's belief in motherhood as a sacred trust, and he made her promise to keep herself and the children safe. For his part he promised that all the trouble would soon be over. This made Rosa cry, and Luis hugged her. I love you, he murmured. She squeezed him. I love you too.

He insisted she and the children have the apartment. He would find something else, a room somewhere, a studio. When the dust settled a little, they would talk again.

He took a room in a cheap hotel and a week later moved to a flat occupied by a practical-minded widow from Guadalajara who shared a bedroom with her mother and disabled daughter and rented out two others to make ends meet. Luis got a clean room with a bureau, a wooden armchair, a throw rug and a window overlooking an alley. Across the hall from him was the other boarder, a laconic Salvadorean gentleman in his sixties, who liked to drink alone. Relationships in the household were cordial but circumscribed. Luis left early for work, returned late and kept to himself. He sent the bulk of his paycheck to Rosa. What little he had left went to the doctor, the medication and the occasional thrift-store shirt or sweater to accommodate his new shape. For fear of running into Rosa and the children he stopped going to church, although he continued to pray, sometimes feverishly, in his room. He had not seen Maria Elena for months and worried that she had forsaken him. He longed for her reassurance and sense of purpose. Her wits and determination. He prayed that she return, and at the same time he prayed for Rosa, whom he missed dearly, and for the children, whom he loved beyond measure. And he prayed for himself, because, of everyone, he needed it most of all.

As the anniversary of Maria Elena's death approached, he started to unravel. The rage and sorrow and despair he had kept inside seemed all to bubble up at once. He missed work. He holed up in his roon. When the date came for his monthly visit to the doctor, it was all he could do to struggle into some clothes and get out the door.

Admonson seemed pleased to see him. He asked if there was anything new to report.

"I'm being poisoned," said Luis.

Admonson became instantly alert. "What do you mean?"

"I'm suffering. She has left me. She must think I am worthless. Beneath contempt. Yet I do this for her."

"For whom?"

"My daughter. My beloved Maria Elena." He fingered the wooden cross he had taken to wearing around his neck.

Admonson did not conceal his alarm. "What daughter? What poison?"

Luis felt close to bursting. There was a letter opener on the doctor's desk. He could kill him now. Kill him, then kill himself. Be done with it.

A voice suggested he hold off a minute.

Luis almost wept with relief. It was Maria Elena, and though he couldn't see her, he knew she was close by. Leave the doctor, she said. Leave him now and come to me. The time has arrived. Come to me.

Luis trembled with joy. Without another word he fled the doctor's office, fled the waiting room full of mothers and infants, fled the medical building and headed for the streets. All that day and all the next the voice followed him. It called to him in the wind off the hills and the steam rising from sidewalk grates, in the electric buzz of trolley wires and the squeal of car brakes. It sang to him in the hiss of his shower and the flush of his toilet, in the fog and rain and rising sun. He listened in rapture, he who had been so forlorn. He begged to see her face.

But Maria Elena chose not to show herself. Instead, she kept repeating the same half-dozen words over and over, until Luis grabbed his ears and cried for her to stop. She did not, and this made him angry. He scolded her, father to daughter, occasioning his landlady, who happened to be nearby, to ask who he was talking to.

"Maria Elena," he replied.

She cocked an eye.

"My dead daughter," he explained.

The woman crossed herself and went away, but the next day, with apologies for the inconvenience, gave Luis his notice. Two days later he was out on the street and driven to distraction by his daughter's relentless chatter. Her words had ceased being words, and the drone had become impossible to bear. In desperation he made his way to his old apartment, arriving at the door just as Rosa was on the way out. She was dressed in black.

"I was wondering if you'd come," she said.

"Forgive me. I'm half crazy. I could think of nowhere else."

"Do you need a ride?"

"I need help."

This she could believe, and though her husband's urgent manner and disheveled appearance made her wary, she was not dead in the heart. She took his arm. "Come. We'll go together."

It was the anniversary of their daughter's death. Rosa drove to the cemetery, where they were joined by other members of the family, including their two sons, who came with an aunt. Luis wept to see them again, wept to see Rosa, wept anew when the prayer for Maria Elena was given. The girl stopped chattering long enough for him to hear. The force of her silence was overwhelming. He felt light as a cloud. When the prayer ended, she appeared to him for the last time.

She came as a mature woman and exuded a sense of contentment and imminent satisfaction. Luis could not understand why. Apart from a year of waiting, he had done nothing to avenge her death. At best, he had only marginally insinuated himself into the doctor's life, and to what effect? The doctor was not suffering. Far from it. He seemed to have the upper hand at every visit.

It was August, and a fog-driven wind cut through Luis's clothing. He hugged himself and blew into his hands, but the chill, like a tide, crept inward. Like something from the grave, it made him tremble. The feeling of weightlessness vanished. Suddenly, he was cold. And frightened. He thought his time had come to die.

Maria Elena hovered a foot or two above the grave. Her feet were planted in air, her legs slightly spread, her arms akimbo. Her expression was resolute, yet there was a certain playfulness in her eyes.

The wind picked up, tossing Luis's hair across his face. He heard laughter, then noticed that a bird now perched on Maria Elena's outstretched finger. A sparrow. In its beak it held a seed.

Maria Elena had hair the color of coal. Eyes that matched the polished ebony of her father's machete. Lips the flesh of saints. When she smiled, her face burst to life and the sparrow took flight, circling once in a halo around her head and once around the grave. Then, straight as an arrow, it headed for Luis.

Afterwards, he would remember a parting kiss. An inner quickening. A warmth. The bird vanished inside him, and moments later his precious daughter, his treasure, Maria Elena Hermosilla Rodriguez, was gone.

They named her Angelica. At her birth nine months later Dr. Admonson used a modified Caesarcan section. Perhaps this was because he had been chastened by past failures with natural childbirth. Perhaps because, despite an exhaustive search, he had failed to locate the mother's vagina. Whatever the reason, he exercised the physician's prerogative to usurp Mother Nature in favor of a surgical delivery. The Csection served another purpose as well: it allowed him to look inside Luis to see just what the hell was going on.

What he saw was not so different from what he always saw: a term infant attached by a cord and placenta to a source of nutrition, in this case the blood-engorged wall of Luis's lower intestine. After removing the baby and severing the cord, he took a sample of the attachment site for further study. He looked around for anything else out of the ordinary and finding nothing, sewed his patient up. Then he went to talk to the press.

Rosa, who was not present at the birth, met her husband and new daughter in the recovery room. Luis's impregnation, which to many had come as a shock and embarrassment, was to her a miracle, the answer, if slightly outlandish, to her prayers. She was as thrilled as any new parent. More, perhaps, because she had just landed a new job she would have hated to leave, even for a month or two. Now she wouldn't have to, and at the same time she could have the joy of a new face, a new spirit in the family. It was as close to Heaven in mortal flesh as she could imagine. She felt deeply blessed.

Luis was still recovering from the anesthetic when she entered the room. He didn't completely recognize her, but she kissed him anyway and held his hand while he slept. The baby was wrapped in a flannel receiving blanket and tucked in a bassinet next to his bed. When she started to cry, Rosa instinctively picked her up. She cradled her in her arms and held her to her chest, but the child's wailing only grew louder. Finally, Luis opened his eyes. He motioned to his wife.

"Give her to me," he said feebly.

Rosa complied. "She's hungry."

Luis pulled his gown aside and placed the child at his breast. She rooted a few moments before latching on. Luis felt an instant of pain, then the milk started to flow. It was an incredible sensation. He thought of all the things that might have happened, all the things that did. Who was he, he wondered, to deserve such a miracle? The Devil had been inside him. Now the Devil had turned to light.

He transferred the baby to his other breast, where she promptly fell asleep. Luis soon followed, and what he dreamed did not remember, and when he woke was ravenous, and ate a meal that was quite enough, said the astonished nurse, for two grown people, or even, God forbid, three.

~~~~~~~~

By Michael Blumlein

Section: A SCIENTIST'S NOTEBOOK

BOOM AND ZOOM

The world Wide Web is a mesh growing faster than exponentially. Where will it lead?

Consider computerized offices, which were supposed to give us "paper-free" work, but somehow have not. I suspect there's merely a lag effect operating, though. Paper prices jumped last year and over the long haul, as demand rises and supply does not, will continue to climb. There isn't very much land left for forest-farming. The United States already dominates the world market, and in fact the country is more forested now than it was half a century ago, despite doubling its population in that time. But even we are feeling the pinch.

I suspect that the urge to get hard copy, despite having everything on backed-up disks, will fade in time. The working office will attain a cleaner, swifter look. The slow trend toward working at home (where I'm writing this) rather than trudging to the office will accelerate.

But these are humdrum, predictable facets. What will it feel like to work in a completely computer-sifted world?

Of course, if you're doing manual labor or a skilled craft, not much can change. But for many of us, the future could be qualitatively different.

Envisioning this is not a matter for futurists, who typically express themselves in glossy generalities. Science fiction does it better than any other discourse. Making the reader live through a possible world is far better than dry theory.

So in thinking about this column, I decided to write a scenario to convey my speculations. To ground it I set the action where I live, in Orange County, California. Commonly thought to be conservative, in fact it is more libertarian in tone, with communities ranging from the button-down conservative Orange to the artistic Laguna Beach. The growing technological complex near my university, UC Irvine, is the biggest in the state after famous Silicon Valley, with a focus on both computers and biotech. How might this hotbed of progress develop?

Gingerly she climbed into her yawning work pod. It always reminded her of an immense, leering mouth.

The Colombian coffee was barely getting her going. A warning light winked: her Foe was already up and running. Another day at the orifice.

The pod wrapped itself around her as tabs and inserts slid into place. This was the latest gear, a top of the line simulation suit immersed in a data-pod of beguiling comfort.

Snug. Not a way to lounge, but to fly.

She closed her eyes and let the sim-suit do its stuff.

May 16, 2026. She liked to start in real-space. Less jarring.

Images played directly upon her retina. The entrance protocol lifted her out of her Huntington Beach apartment and in a second she was zooming over rooftops, skating down the beach. Combers broke in soft white bands and red-suited surfers caught them in passing marriage.

All piped down from a satellite view, of course, sharp and clear.

Get to work, Myung, her Foe called. Sightsee later.

"I'm running a deep search," she lied.

Sure.

"I'll spot you a hundred creds on the action," she shot back.

You're on. Big new market opening today. A hint of mockery?

"Where?" Today she was going to nail him, by God.

Right under our noses, the way I sniff it.

"In the county?"

Now, that would be telling.

Which meant he didn't know.

So: a hunt. Better than a day of shaving margins, at least.

She and her Foe were zoomers, ferrets who made markets more efficient. Evolved far beyond the primitivo commodity traders of the late TwenCen, they moved fast, high-flying for competitive edge.

They zoomed through spaces wholly insubstantial, but that was irrelevant. Economic pattern-spaces were as tricky as mountain crevasses. And even hard cash just stood for an idea.

Most people still dug coal and grew crops, ancient style grunt labor --but in Orange County you could easily forget that, gripped by the fever of the new.

Below her, the county was a sprawl, but a smart one. The wallto-mall fungus left over from the TwenCen days was gone. High-rises rose from lush parks. Some even had orange grove skirts, a chic nostalgia. Roofs were eco-virtue white. Blacktop streets had long ago added a sandy-colored coating whose mica sprinkles winked up at her. Even cars were in light shades. All this to reflect sunlight, public advertisements that everybody was doing something about global warming.

The car-rivers thronged streets and freeways {still free -- if you could get the license). When parked, cars were tucked underground. Still plenty of scurry-scurry, but most of it mental, not metal.

She sensed the county's incessant pulse, the throb of the Pacific Basin's hub, pivot point of the largest zonal economy on the planet.

Felt, not saw. Her chest was a map. Laguna Beach over her right nipple, Irvine over the left. Using neural plasticity, the primary sensory areas of her cortex "read" the county's electronic Mesh through her skin.

But this was not like antique, serial reading at all. No flat data here. No screens.

She relaxed. The trick was to merge, not just observe.

Far better for a chimpanzeelike species to take in the world through its evolved, body-wrapping neural bed.

More fun, too. She detected economic indicators on her augmented skin. A tiny shooting pain spoke of a leveraged buyout. Was that uneasy sensation natural to her, or a hint from her subsystems about a possible lowering of the prime rate?

Gotcha! the Foe sent.

Myung glanced at her running index. She was eleven hundred creds down!

So fast? How could -- ?

Then she felt it: dancing dataspikes in alarm-red, prickly on her left leg. The Foe had captured an early indicator. Which?

Myung had been coasting toward the Anaheim hills, watching the pulse of business trading quicken as slanting sunshine smartly profiled the fashionable, post-pyramidal corporate buildings. So she had missed the opening salvo of weather data update, the first trading opportunity.

The Foe already had an edge and was shifting investments. How?

Ahead of her in the simulated air she could see the Foe skating to the south. All this was visual metaphor, of course, symbology for the directed attention of the data-eating programs.

A stain came spreading from the east into Mission Viejo. Not real weather, but economic variables.

Deals flickered beneath the data-thunderheads like sheet lightning. Pixels of packet-information fell as soft rains on her long-term investments.

The Foe was buying extra electrical power from Oxnard. Selling it to users to offset the low yields seeping up from San Diego.

Small stuff. A screen for something subtle. Myung close-upped the digital stream and glimpsed the deeper details.

Every day more water flowed in the air over southern California than streamed down the Mississippi. Rainfall projections changed driving conditions, affected tournament golf scores, altered yields of solar power, fed into agri-prod.

Down her back slid pricklyfresh commodity info, an itch she should scratch. A hint from her sniffer-programs? She willed a virtual finger to rub the tingling.

-- and snapped back to realspace.

An ivory mist over Long Beach. Real, purpling water thunderclouds scooting into San Juan Cap from the south.

Ah -- virtual sports. The older the population got, the more leery of weather. They still wanted the zing of adventure, though. Through virtual feedback, creaky bodies could air-surf from twenty kilometers above the Grand Canyon. Or race alongside the few protected Great White sharks in the Catalina Preserve.

High-resolution Virtuality stimulated lacy filigrees of electrochem impulses throughout the cerebral cortex. Did it matter whether the induction carne from the real thing or from the slippery arts of electronics?

Time for a bit of business.

Her prognosticator programs told her that with 0.87 probability, such oldies would cocoon-up across six states. So indoor virtual sports use, with electro-stim to zing the aging muscles, would rise in the next day.

She swiftly exercised options on five virtual sites, pouring in some of her reserve computational capacity. But the Foe had already harvested the plums there. Not much margin left.

Myung killed her simulated velocity and saw the layers of deals the Foe was making, counting on the coming storm to shift the odds by fractions. Enough contracts-of the-moment processed, and profits added up. But you had to call the slant just right.

Trouble-sniffing subroutines pressed their electronic doubts upon her: a warning chill breeze across her brow. She waved it away.

Myung dove into the clouds of event-space. Her skin did the deals for her, working with software that verged on mammal-level intelligence itself. She wore her suits of artificial-intelligence...and in a real sense, they wore her.

She felt her creds -- not credits so much as credibilities, the operant currency in data-space -- washing like hot air currents over her body.

Losses were chilling. She got cold feet, quite literally, when the San Onofre nuke piped up with a gush of clean power. A new substation, coming on much earlier than SoCalEd had estimated.

That endangered her energy portfolio. A quick flick got her out of the electrical futures market altogether, before the world-wide Mesh caught on to the implications.

Up, away. Let the Foe pick up the last few percentage points. Myung flapped across the digital sky, capital taking wing.

She lofted to a ten-mile-high perspective. Global warming had already made the county's southfacing slopes into cactus and tough grasslands. Coastal sage still clung to the north-facing slopes, seeking cooler climes. All the coast was becoming a "fog desert" sustained by vapor from lukewarm ocean currents. Dikes held back the rising warm ocean from Newport to Long Beach.

Pretty, but no commodity possibilities there anymore.

Time to take the larger view.

She rose. Her tactile and visual maps expanded. She went to splitskin perception, with the real, matter-based landscape overlaid on the info-scape. Surreal, but heady.

From below she burst into the data-sphere of Investment, where people played upon the world's weather like a casino. Ever since rising global temperatures pumped more energy in, violent oscillations had grown.

Weather was now the hidden, wild-card lubricant of the world's economy. Tornado warnings were sent to street addresses, damage predictions shaded by the city block. Each neighborhood got its own rain forecast.

A sparrow's fall in Portugal could diddle the global fluid system so that, in principle, a thunderhead system would form over Fountain Valley a week later. Today, merging pressures from the south sent forking lightning over mid-California. That shut down the launch site of all local rocket-planes to the Orbital Hiltons. Hundreds of invest programs had that already covered.

So she looked on a still larger scale. Up, again.

This grand world Mesh was Ndimensional. And even the number N changed with time, as parameters shifted in and out of application.

There was only one way to make sense of this in the narrow human sensorium. Every second, a fresh dimension sheared in over an older dimension. Freeze-framed, each instant looked like a ridiculously complicated abstract sculpture running on drug-driven overdrive. Watch any one moment too hard and you got a lancing headache, motion sickness and zero comprehension.

Augmented feedback, so useful in keeping on the financial edge, could also be an unforgiving bitch.

The Foe wasn't up here, hovering over the whole continent. Good. Time to think. She watched the N-space as if it were an entertainment, and in time came an extended perception, integrated by the long suffering subconscious.

She bestrode the world. Total immersion.

She stamped and marched across the muddy field of chaotic economic interactions. Her boot heels left deep scars. These healed immediately: sub-programs at work, like cellular repair. She would pay a passage price for venturing here.

A landscape opened like the welcome of a mother's lap.

Her fractal tentacles spread through the networks with blinding speed, penetrating the planetary spiderweb. Orange County was a brooding, swollen orb at the PacBasin's center.

Smelled it yet? came the Foe's taunt from below.

"I'm following some ticklers," she lied.

I'm 'way ahead of you.

"Then how come you're gabbing? And tracking me?"

Friendly competition --

"Forget the friendly part." She was irked. Not by the Foe, but by failure. She needed something hot. Where?

'Fess up, you're smelling nothing.

"Just the stink of over-done expectations," she shot back wryly.

Nothing promising in the swirling weather-space, working with prickly light below her. Seen this way, the planet's thirteen billion lives were like a field of grass waving beneath fitful gusts they could barely glimpse.

Wrong blind alley! sent her Foe maliciously.

Myung shot a glance at her indices. Down nineteen hundred!

And she had spotted him a hundred. Damn.

She shifted through parameterspaces. There -- like a carnival, neon-bright on the horizon of a black, cool desert: the colossal market-space of Culture.

She strode across the tortured seethe of global Mesh data.

In the archaic economy of manufacturing, middle managers were long gone. No more "just in time" manufacturing in blocky factories. No more one-size-fits-all. That had fallen to "right on time" production out of tiny shops, prefabs, even garages.

Anybody who could make a gizmo cheaper could send you a bid. They would make your very own custom gizmo, by direct Mesh order.

Around the globe, robotic prodlines of canny intelligence stood ready in ill-lit shacks. Savvy software leaped into action at your Meshed demand, reconfiguring for your order like an obliging whore. Friction-free service. The mercantile millennium.

Seen from up here, friction-free marketism seemed the world's only workable ideology -- unless you counted New Islam, but who did? Under it, middle managers had decades ago vanished down the sucking drain of evolving necessity. "Production" got shortened to prod -and prodded the market.

Of course the people shed by frictionless prod ended up with dynamic, fulfilling careers in dogwashing: valets, luxury servants, touchy-feely insulators for the harried prod-folk. And their bosses.

But not all was manufacturing. Even dog-dressers needed Culture Prod. Especially dog-dressers.

"My sniffers are getting it," she said.

The Foe answered, You're on the scent -- but late.

Something new...

She walked through the data-vaults of the Culture City. As a glittering representation of unimaginable complexities, it loomed: Global, intricate, impossible to know fully for even a passing instant. And thus, an infinite resource.

She stamped through streets busy with commerce. Ferrets and deal-making programs scampered like rodents under heel. Towers of the giga-conglomerates raked the skies.

None of this Big Guy stuff for her. Not today, thanks.

To beat her Foe, she needed something born of Orange County, something to put on the table.

And only her own sniffer-programs could find it for her. The web of connections in even a single county was so criss-crossed that no mere human could find her way.

She snapped back into the real world. Think.

Lunch eased into her bloodstream, fed by the pod when it sensed her lowering blood sugar. Myung tapped for an extra Kaff to give her some zip. Her medical worrier hovered in air before her, clucked and frowned. She ignored it.

-- And back to Culture City.

Glassy ramparts led up into the citadels of the mega-Corps. Showers of speculation rained on their flanks. Rivulets gurgled off into gutters. Nothing new here, just the ceaseless hum of a market full of energy and no place to go.

Index check: sixteen hundred down!

The deals she had left running from the morning were pumping out the last of their dividends. No more help there.

Time's a-wastin', her Foe sent nastily. She could imagine his sneer and sardonic eyes.

Save your creds for the crunch, she retorted.

You're down thirteen hundred and falling.

He was right. The trouble with paired competition -- the very latest market-stimulating twist -- was that the outcome was starkly clear. No comforting self-delusions lasted long.

Irked, she leaped high and flew above the City. Go local, then. Orange County was the PacBasin's best fount of fresh ideas.

She caught vectors from the county drawing her down. Prickly hints sheeted across her belly, over her forearms. To the east -- there-a shimmer of possibility.

Her ferrets were her own, of course -- searcher programs tuned to her style, her way of perceiving quality and content. They were her, in a truncated sense.

Now they led her down a funnel, into --

A mall.

In real-space, no less. Tacky.

Hopelessly antique, of course. Dilapidated buildings leaning against each other, laid out in boring rectangular grids. Faded plastic and rusty chrome.

People still went there, of course; somewhere, she was sure, people still used wooden plows.

This must be in Kansas or the Siberian Free State or somewhere equally Out Of It. Why in the world had her sniffers taken her here?

She checked real-world location, preparing to lift out.

East Anaheim! Impossible...

But no -- there was something here. Her sniffer popped up an overlay and the soles of her feet itched with anticipation. Programs zoomed her in on a gray shambles that dominated the end of the cracked blacktop parking lot.

Was this a museum? No, but --

Art Attack came the signifier.

That sign... "An old K-Mart," she murmured. She barely remembered being in one as a girl. Rigid, old-style aisles of plastic prod. Positively cubic, as the teeners said. A cube, after all, was an infinite number of stacked squares.

But this K-Mart had been reshaped. Stucco-sculpted into an archly ironic lavender mosque, festooned with bright brand name items.

It hit her. "Of course!"

She zoomed up, above the Orange County jumble.

Here it was -- pay dirt. And she was on the ground first.

She popped her pod and sucked in the dry, flavorful air. Back in Huntington Beach. Her throat was dry, the aftermath of tension.

And just 16:47, too. Plenty of time for a swim.

The team that had done the mock-mosque K-Mart were like all artists: sophisticated along one axis, dunderheads along all economic vectors. They had thought it was a pure lark to fashion ancient relics of paleo-capitalism into bizarre abstract expressionist "statements." Mere fun effusions, they thought.

She loved working with people who were, deep in their souls, innocent of markets.

Within two hours she had locked up the idea and labeled it: "Post-Consumerism Dada from the fabled Age of Appetite."

She had marketed it through pre-view around the globe. Thailand and the Siberians [the last true culture virgins] had gobbled up the idea. Every rotting 'burb round the globe had plenty of derelict K-Marts; this gave them a new angle.

Then she had auctioned the idea in the Mesh. Cut in the artists for their majority interest. Sold shares. Franchised it in the Cutting Concept sub-Mesh. Divided shares twice, declared a dividend.

All in less time than it took to drive from Garden Grove to San Clemente.

"How'd you find that?" her Foe asked, climbing out of his pod.

"My sniffers are good, I told yOU."

He scowled. "And how'd you get there so fast?"

"You've got to take the larger view," she said mysteriously.

He grimaced. "You're up two thousand five creds."

"Lucky I didn't really trounce yOU."

"Culture City sure ate it up, tOO."

"Speaking of which, how about starting a steak? I'm starving."

He kissed her. This was perhaps the best part of the Foe-Team method. They spurred each other on, but didn't cut each other dead in the marketplace. No matter how appealing that seemed, sometimes.

Being married helped keep their rivalry on reasonable terms. Theirs was a standard five-year monogamous contract, already nearly half over. But she already knew they would sign up again. How could she not renew, with such a deliciously stimulating opponent?

Sure, dog-eat-dog markets sometimes worked better, but who wanted to dine on dog?

"We'll split the chores," he said.

"We need a servant."

He laughed. "Think we're rich? We just grease the gears of the great machine."

"Such a poet you are."

"And there are still the dishes to do from last night."

"Ugh. I'll race you to the beach first."

Any scenario leaves out much, focusing on a microcosm. I made that explicit here by depicting a workaday world seen from where I live.

The county has a wide range of people. There is the largest group of Vietnamese immigrants in the U.S.A., quickly rising to the top of the elite. My class in physics for biology and pre-med students at UC Irvine is a sea of Asian faces; they comprise about half our student body, the largest percentage in the country.

And there are odd little towns, like lovely Laguna Beach, the Orange of Tim Powers's novels, or Santa Ana, gang-ridden yet still atmospheric. Plenty of room for the inevitable boomers la term dating from the Oklahoma land rush a century ago, meaning people who move in, riding expectations) and the high-tech zoomers of this scenario.

Thus in this vision, I used a Vietnamese viewpoint character, who sweeps over the landscape in a fashion now impossible, but swiftly approaching. I deliberately mixed real and computerized images here, to underline my suspicion that they will increasingly overlap in our perceptions of the world, as they become harder to distinguish from each other.

The young Myung is the sort of woman who would become a savvy, cut-to-the-chase account broker in the present. She will use technology only when it's efficient and germane; she's no computer nerd. Indeed, the technology has faded into the background for her, as good tech always does.

So the notes of satire sounded in my scenario are deliberately general, despite using local place-names and details; we will always have economic ambition, hierarchies, losers and winners. It's in our species.

Science fiction focuses on how science and its descendant technologies affect us. It's important to remember that the eternal human themes --even of avarice and ambition -- still play out against the changing techno-backdrop. Our machines get better, but we remain much the same.

Comments and objections to this column are welcome. Please send them to Gregory Benford, Physics Department, Univ. Calif., Irvine, CA 92717. For e-mail: gbenford@uci.edu.

~~~~~~~~

By GREGORY BENFORD

MOTHER GRASSHOPPER

Michael Swanwick is probably best known for his five novels, which include the Nebula Award-winning Stations of the Tide and his latest, lack Faust. His short fiction has garnered such honors as a Sturgeon Award and a World Fantasy Award. When Tigereyes Press published his most recent collection, A Geography of Unknown Lands, in a small edition last year, we discovered this unusual tale lurking within and took it upon ourselves to bring it to you. We hope you'll agree it's a multifaceted gem.

In the year one, we came in an armada of a million spacecraft to settle upon, colonize, and claim for our homeland this giant grasshopper on which we now dwell.

We dared not land upon the wings for, though the cube-square rule held true and their most rapid motions would be imperceptible on an historic scale, random nerve firings resulted in pre-movement tremors measured at Richter 11. So we opted to build in the eyes, in the faceted mirrorlands that reflected infinities of flatness, a shimmering Iowa, the architecture of home.

It was an impossible project and one, perhaps, that was doomed from the start. But such things are obvious only in retrospect. We were a young and vigorous race then. Everything seemed possible.

Using shaped temporal fields, we force-grew trees which we cut down to build our cabins. We planted sod and wheat and buffalo. In one vivid and unforgettable night of technology we created a layer of limestone bedrock half a mile deep upon which to build our towns. And when our work was done, we held hoe-downs in a thousand county seats all across the eyelands.

We created new seasons, including Snow, after the patterns of those we had known in antiquity, but the night sky we left unaltered, for this was to be our home...now and forever. The unfamiliar constellations would grow their own legends over the ages; there would be time. Generations passed, and cities grew with whorls of suburbs like the arms of spiral galaxies around them, for we were lonely, as were the thousands and millions we decanted who grew like the trees of the cisocellar plains that were as thick as the ancient Black Forest.

I was a young man, newly bearded, hardly much more than a shirt-tail child, on that Harvest day when the stranger walked into town.

This was so unusual an event (and for you to whom a town of ten thousand necessarily means that there will be strangers, I despair of explaining} that children came out to shout and run at his heels, while we older citizens, conscious of our dignity, stood in the doorways of our shops, factories, and co-ops to gaze ponderously in his general direction. Not quite at him, you understand, but over his shoulder, into the flat, mesmeric plains and the infinite white skies beyond.

He claimed to have come all the way from the equatorial abdomen, where gravity is three times eye-normal, and this was easy enough to believe, for he was ungodly strong. With my own eyes I once saw him take a dollar coin between thumb and forefinger and bend it in half -- and a steel dollar at that! He also claimed to have walked the entire distance, which nobody believed, not even me.

"If you'd walked even half that far," I said, "I reckon you'd be the most remarkable man as ever lived."

He laughed at that and ruffled my hair. "Well, maybe I am," he said. "Maybe I am."

I flushed and took a step backward, hand on the bandersnatch-skin hilt of my fighting knife. I was as feisty as a bantam rooster in those days, and twice as quick to take offense. "Mister, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to step outside."

The stranger looked at me. Then he reached out and, without the slightest hint of fear or anger or even regret, touched my arm just below the shoulder. He did it with no particular speed and yet somehow I could not react fast enough to stop him. And that touch, light though it was, paralyzed my arm, leaving it withered and useless, even as it is today.

He put his drink down on the bar, and said, "Pick up my knapsack."

I did.

"Follow me."

So it was that without a word of farewell to my family or even a backward glance, I left New Auschwitz forever.

That night, over a campfire of eel grass and dried buffalo chips, we ate a dinner of refried beans and fatback bacon. It was a new and clumsy experience for me, eating one-handed. For a long time, neither one of us spoke. Finally I said, "Are you a magician?"

The stranger sighed. "Maybe so," he said. "Maybe I am."

You have a name?"

"No."

"What do we do now?"

"Business." He pushed his plate toward me. "I cooked. It's your turn to wash."

Our business entailed constant travel. We went to Brinkerton with cholera and to Roxborough with typhus. We passed through Denver and Venice and Saint Petersburg and left behind fleas, rats, and plague. In Upper Black Eddy, it was ebola. We never stayed long enough to see the results of our work, but I read the newspapers afterward, and it was about what you would expect.

Still, on the whole, humanity prospered. Where one city was decimated, another was expanding. The over spilling hospitals of one county created a market for the goods of a dozen others. The survivors had babies.

We walked to Tylersburg, Rutledge, and Uniontown and took wagons to Shoemakersville, Confluence, and South Gibson. Booked onto steam trains for Mount Lebanon, Mount Bethel, Mount Aetna, and Mount Nebo and diesel trains to McKeesport, Reinholds Station, and Broomall. Boarded buses to Carbondale, Feasterville, June Bug, and Lincoln Falls. Caught commuter flights to Paradise, Nickel Mines, Niantic, and Zion.

The time passed quickly.

Then one shocking day my magician announced that he was going home.

"Home?" I said. "What about your work?"

"Our work, Daniel," he said gently. "I expect you'll do as good a job as ever I did." He finished packing his few possessions into a carpetbag.

"You can't!" I cried.

With a wink and a sad smile, he slipped out the door.

For a time -- long or short, I don't know -- I sat motionless, unthinking, unseeing. Then I leaped to my feet, threw open the door, and looked up and down the empty street. Blocks away, toward the train station, was a scurrying black speck.

Leaving the door open behind me, I ran after it.

I just missed the afternoon express to Lackawanna. I asked the stationmaster when was the next train after it. He said tomorrow. Had he seen a tall man carrying a carpetbag, looking thus and so? Yes, he had. Where was he? On the train to Lackawanna. Nothing more heading that way today. Did he know where I could rent a car? Yes, he did. Place just down the road.

Maybe I'd've caught the magician if I hadn't gone back to the room to pick up my bags. Most likely not. At Lackawanna station I found he'd taken the bus to Johnstown. In Johnstown, he'd moved on to Erie and there the trail ran cold. It took me three days hard questioning to pick it up again.

For a week I pursued him thus, like a man possessed.

Then I awoke one morning and my panic was gone. I knew I wasn't going to catch my magician anytime soon. I took stock of my resources, counted up what little cash-money I had, and laid out a strategy. Then I went shopping. Finally, I hit the road. I'd have to be patient, dogged, wily, but I knew that, given enough time, I'd find him.

Find him, and kill him too.

The trail led me to Harper's Ferry, at the very edge of the oculus. Behind was civilization. Ahead was nothing but thousands of miles of empty chitin-lands.

People said he'd gone south, off the lens entirely.

Back at my boarding house, I was approached by one of the lodgers. He was a skinny man with a big mustache and sleeveless white T-shirt that hung from his skinny shoulders like wet laundry on a muggy Sunday.

"What you got in that bag?"

"Black death," I said, "infectious meningitis, tuberculosis. You name it."

He thought for a bit. "I got this gal," he said at last. "I don't suppose you could..."

"I'll take a look at her," I said, and hoisted the bag.

We went upstairs to his room.

She lay in the bed, eyes closed. There was an IV needle in her arm, hooked up to a drip feed. She looked young, but of course that meant nothing. Her hair, neatly brushed and combed, laid across the coverlet almost to her waist, was white -- white as snow, as death, as finest bone china.

"How long has she been like this?" I asked.

"Ohhhh..." He blew out his cheeks. "Forty-seven, maybe fifty years?"

"You her father?"

"Husband. Was, anyhow. Not sure how long the vows were meant to hold up under these conditions: can't say I've kept 'em any too well. You got something in that bag for her?" He said it as casual as he could, but his eyes were big and spooked-looking.

I made my decision. "Tell you what," I said. "I'll give you forty dollars for her."

"The sheriff wouldn't think much of what you just said," the man said low and quiet.

"No. But then, I suppose I'll be off of the eye-lands entirely before he knows a word of it."

I picked up my syringe.

"Well? Is it a deal or not?"

Her name was Victoria. We were a good three days march into the chitin before she came out of the trance state characteristic of the interim zombie stage of Recovery. I'd fitted her with a pack, walking shoes, and a good stout stick, and she strode along head up, eyes blank, speaking in the tongues of angels afloat between the stars.

"-- cisgalactic phase intercept," she said. "Do you read? Das Uberraumboot zuruckgegenerinnernte. Verstehen? Anadaemonic mesotechnological conflict strategizing. Drei tausenden Allen mit Laseren! Hello? Is anybody --"

Then she stumbled over a rock, cried out in pain, and said, "Where am I ?"

I stopped, spread a map on the ground, and got out my pocket gravitometer. It was a simple thing: a glass cylinder filled with aerogel and a bright orange ceramic bead. The casing was tin, with a compressor screw at the top, a calibrated scale along the side, and the words "Flynn & Co." at the bottom. I flipped it over, watched the bead slowly fall. I tightened the screw a notch, then two, then three, increasing the aerogel's density. At five, the bead stopped. I read the gauge, squinted up at the sun, and then jabbed a finger on an isobar to one edge of the map.

"Right here," I said. "Just off the lens. See?"

"I don't --" She was trembling with panic. Her dilated eyes shifted wildly from one part of the empty horizon to another. Then suddenly, sourcelessly, she burst into tears.

Embarrassed, I looked away. When she was done crying I patted the ground. "Sit." Sniffling, she obeyed. "How old are you, Victoria?"

"How old am...? Sixteen?" she said tentatively. "Seventeen?" Then, "Is that really my name?"

"It was. The woman you were grew tired of life, and injected herself with a drug that destroys the ego and with it all trace of personal history." I sighed. "So in one sense you're still Victoria, and in another sense you're not. What she did was illegal, though; you can never go back to the oculus. You'd be locked into jail for the rest of your life."

She looked at me through eyes newly young, almost childlike in their experience, and still wet with tears. I was prepared for hysteria, grief, rage. But all she said was, "Are you a magician?"

That rocked me back on my heels. "Well -- yes," I said. "I suppose I am."

She considered that silently for a moment. "So what happens to me now?"

"Your job is to carry that pack. We also go turn-on-turn with the dishes." I straightened, folding the map. "Come on. We've got a far way yet to go."

We commenced marching, in silence at first. But then, not many miles down the road and to my complete astonishment, Victoria began to sing!

We followed the faintest of paths -- less a trail than the memory of a dream of the idea of one -- across the chitin. Alongside it grew an occasional patch of grass. A lot of wind-blown loess had swept across the chitin-lands over the centuries. It caught in cracks in the carapace and gave purchase to fortuitous seeds. Once I even saw a rabbit. But before I could point it out to Victoria, I saw something else. Up ahead, in a place where the shell had powdered and a rare rainstorm had turned the powder briefly to mud, were two overlapping tire prints. A motorbike had been by here, and recently.

I stared at the tracks for a long time, clenching and unclenching my good hand.

The very next day we came upon a settlement.

It was a hardscrabble place. Just a windmill to run the pump that brought up a trickle of ichor from a miles-deep well, a refinery to process the stuff edible, and a handful of unpainted clapboard buildings and Quonset huts. Several battered old pickup trucks sat rusting under the limitless sky.

A gaunt man stood by the gate, waiting for us. His jaw was hard, his backbone straight and his hands empty. But I noted here and there a shiver of movement in a window or from the open door of a shed, and I made no mistake but that there were weapons trained upon us.

"Name's Rivera," the man said when we came up to him.

I swept off my bowler hat. "Daniel. This's Miss Victoria, my ward."

"Passing through?"

"Yessir, I am, and I see no reason I should ever pass this way again. If you have food for sale, I'll pay you market rates. But if not, why, with your permission, we'll just keep on moving on."

"Fair spoken." From somewhere Rivera produced a cup of water, and handed it to us. I drank half, handed the rest to Victoria. She shivered as it went down.

"Right good," I said. "And cold too."

"We have a heat pump," Rivera said with grudging pride. "C'mon inside. Let's see what the women have made us to eat."

Then the children came running out, whooping and hollering, too many to count, and the adult people behind them, whom I made out to be twenty in number. They made us welcome.

They were good people, if outlaws, and as hungry for news and gossip as anybody can be. I told them about a stump speech I had heard made by Tyler B. Morris, who was running for governor of the Northern Department, and they spent all of dinnertime discussing it. The food was good, too -- ham and biscuits with red-eye gravy, sweet yams with butter, and apple cobbler to boot. If I hadn't seen their chemical complex, I'd've never guessed it for synthetic. There were lace curtains in the window, brittleold but clean, and I noted how carefully the leftovers were stored away for later.

After we'd eaten, Rivera caught my eye and gestured with his chin. We went outside, and he led me to a shed out back. He unpadlocked the door and we stepped within. A line of ten people lay unmoving on plainbuilt beds. They were each catheterized to a drip-bag of processed ichor. Light from the door caught their hair, ten white haloes in the gloom.

"We brought them with us," Rivera said. "Thought we'd be doing well enough to make a go of it. Lately, though, I don't know, maybe it's the drought, but the blood's been running thin, and it's not like we have the money to have a new well drilled."

"I understand." Then, because it seemed a good time to ask, "There was a man came by this way probably less'n a week ago. Tall, riding a --"

"He wouldn't help," Harry said. "Said it wasn't his responsibility. Then, before he drove off, the sonofabitch tried to buy some of our food." He turned and spat. "He told us you and the woman would be coming along. We been waiting."

"Wait. He told you I'd have a woman with me?"

"It's not just us we have to think of!" he said with sudden vehemence. "There's the young fellers, too. They come along and all a man's stiffnecked talk about obligations and morality goes right out the window. Sometimes I think how I could come out here with a length of iron pipe and-- well." He shook his head and then, almost pleadingly, said, "Can't you do something?"

"I think so." A faint creaking noise made me turn then. Victoria stood frozen in the doorway. The light through her hair made of it a white flare. I closed my eyes, wishing she hadn't stumbled across this thing. In a neutral voice I said, "Get my bag."

Then Rivera and I set to haggling out a price.

We left the settlement with a goodly store of food and driving their third-best pickup truck. It was a pathetic old thing and the shocks were scarce more than a memory. We bumped and jolted toward the south.

For a long time Victoria did not speak. Then she turned to me and angrily blurted, "You killed them!"

"It was what they wanted."

"How can you say that?" She twisted in the seat and punched me in the shoulder. Hard. "How can you sit there and...say that?"

"Look," I said testily. "It's simple mathematics. You could make an equation out of it. They can only drill so much ichor. That ichor makes only so much food. Divide that by the number of mouths there are to feed and hold up the result against what it takes to keep one alive. So much food, so many people. If the one's smaller than the other, you starve. And the children wanted to live. The folks in the shed didn't."

"They could go back! Nobody has to live out in the middle of nowhere trying to scratch food out of nothing!"

"I counted one suicide for every two waking adults. Just how welcome do you think they'd be, back to the oculus, with so many suicides living among them? More than likely that's what drove them out here in the first place."

"Well...nobody would be starving if they didn't insist on having so many damn children."

"How can you stop people from having children?" I asked.

There was no possible answer to that and we both knew it. Victoria leaned her head against the cab window, eyes squeezed tight shut, as far from me as she could get. "You could have woken them up! But no, you had your bag of goodies and you wanted to play. I'm surprised you didn't kill me when you had the chance."

"Vickie..."

"Don't speak to me!"

She started to weep.

I wanted to hug her and comfort her, she was so miserable. But I was driving, and I only had the one good arm. So I didn't. Nor did I explain to her why it was that nobody chose to simply wake the suicides up.

That evening, as usual, I got out the hatchet and splintered enough chitin for a campfire. I was sitting by it, silent, when Victoria got out the jug of rough liquor the settlement folks had brewed from ichor. "You be careful with that stuff," I said. "It sneaks up on you. Don't forget, whatever experience you've had drinking got left behind in your first life."

"Then you drink!" she said, thrusting a cup at me. "I'll follow your lead. When you stop, I'll stop."

I swear I never suspected what she had in mind. And it had been a long while since I'd tasted alcohol. So, like a fool, I took her intent at face value. I had a drink. And then another.

Time passed.

We talked some, we laughed some. Maybe we sang a song or two.

Then, somehow, Victoria had shucked off her blouse and was dancing. She whirled around the campfire, her long skirts lifting up above her knees and occasionally flirting through the flames so that the hem browned and smoked but never quite caught fire.

This wildness seemed to come out of nowhere. I watched her, alarmed and aroused, too drunk to think clearly, too entranced even to move.

Finally she collapsed gracefully at my feet. The firelight was red on her naked back, shifting with each gasping breath she took. She looked up at me through her long, sweat-tangled hair, and her eyes were like amber, dark as cypress swamp water, brown and bottomless. Eyes a man could drown in.

I pulled her toward me. Laughing, she surged forward, collapsing upon me, tumbling me over backward, fumbling with my belt and then the fly of my jeans. Then she had my cock out and stiff and I'd pushed her skirt up above her waist so that it seemed she was wearing nothing but a thick red sash. And I rolled her over on her back and she was reaching down between her legs to guide me in and she was smiling and lovely.

I plunged deep, deep, deep into her, and oh god but it felt fine. Like that eye-opening shock you get when you plunge into a cold lake for the first time on a hot summer's day and the water wraps itself around you and feels so impossibly good. Only this was warm and slippery-slick and a thousand times better. Then I was telling her things, telling her I needed her, I wanted her, I loved her, over and over again.

I awoke the next morning with a raging hangover. Victoria was sitting in the cab of the pickup, brushing her long white hair in the rear-view mirror and humming to herself.

"Well," she said, amused. "Look what the cat dragged in. There's water in the jerrycans. Have yourself a drink. I expect we could also spare a cup for you to wash your face with."

"Look," I said. "I'm sorry about last night."

"No you're not."

"I maybe said some foolish things, but --"

Her eyes flashed storm-cloud dark. "You weren't speaking near so foolish then as you are now. You meant every damn word, and I'm holding you to them." Then she laughed. "You'd best get at that water. You look hideous."

So I dragged myself off.

Overnight, Victoria had changed. Her whole manner, the way she held herself, even the way she phrased her words, told me that she wasn't a child anymore. She was a woman.

The thing I'd been dreading had begun.

"Resistance is useless," Victoria read. "For mine is the might and power of the Cosmos Itself!" She'd found a comic book stuck back under the seat and gone through it three times, chuckling to herself, while the truck rattled down that near-nonexistent road. Now she put it down. "Tell me something," she said. "How do you know your magician came by this way?"

"I just know is all," I said curtly. I'd given myself a shot of B-complex vitamins, but my head and gut still felt pretty ragged. Nor was it particularly soothing having to drive this idiot truck one-armed. And, anyway, I couldn't say just how I knew. It was a feeling I had, a certainty.

"I had a dream last night. After we, ummmm, danced."

I didn't look at her.

"I was on a flat platform, like a railroad station, only enormous. It stretched halfway to infinity. There were stars all around me, thicker and more colorful than I'd ever imagined them. Bright enough to make your eyes ache. Enormous machines were everywhere, golden, spaceships I suppose. They were taking off and landing with delicate little puffs of air, like it was the easiest thing imaginable to do. My body was so light I felt like I was going to float up among them. You ever hear of a place like that?"

"No."

"There was a man waiting for me there. He had the saddest smile, but cold, cruel eyes. Hello, Victoria, he said, and How did you know my name, I asked. Oh, I keep a close eye on Daniel, he said, I'm grooming him for an important job. Then he showed me a syringe. Do you know what's in here? he asked me. The liquid in it was so blue it shone." She fell silent.

"What did you say?"

"I just shook my head. Mortality, he said. It's an improved version of the drug you shot yourself up with fifty years ago. Tell Daniel it'll be waiting for him at Sky Terminus, where the great ships come and go. That was all. You think it means anything?"

I shook my head.

She picked up the comic book, flipped it open again. "Well, anyway, it was a strange dream."

That night, after doing the dishes, I went and sat down on the pickup's sideboard and stared into the fire, thinking. Victoria came and sat down beside me. She put a hand on my leg. It was the lightest of touches, but it sent all my blood rushing to my cock.

She smiled at that and looked up into my eyes. "Resistance is useless," she said.

Afterward we lay together between blankets on the ground, looking up at the night sky. It came to me then that being taken away from normal life young as I had been, all my experience with love had come before the event and all my experience with sex after, and that I'd therefore never before known them both together. So that in this situation I was as naive and unprepared for what was happening to us as Victoria was.

Which was how I admitted to myself I loved Victoria. At the time it seemed the worst possible thing that could've happened to me.

We saw it for the first time that next afternoon. It began as a giddy feeling, like a mild case of vertigo, and a vague thickening at the center of the sky as if it were going dark from the inside out. This was accompanied by a bulging up of the horizon, as if God Himself had placed hands flat on either edge and leaned forward, bowing it upward.

Then my inner ear knew that the land which had been flat as flat for all these many miles was now slanting downhill all the way to the horizon. That was the gravitational influence of all that mass before us. Late into the day it just appeared. It was like a conjuring trick. One moment it wasn't there at all and then, with the slightest of perceptual shifts, it dominated the vision. It was so distant that it took on the milky backscatter color of the sky and it went up so high you literally couldn't see the top. It was -- I knew this now -- our destination:

The antenna.

Even driving the pickup truck, it took three days after first sighting to reach its base.

On the morning of one of those days, Victoria suddenly pushed aside her breakfast and ran for the far side of the truck. That being the only privacy to be had for hundreds of miles around.

I listened to her retching. Knowing there was only one thing it could be.

She came back, pale and shaken. I got a plastic collection cup out of my bag. "Pee into this," I told her. When she had, I ran a quick diagnostic. It came up positive.

"Victoria," I said. "I've got an admission to make. I haven't been exactly straight with you about the medical consequences of your...condition."

It was the only time I ever saw her afraid. "My God," she said, "What is it? Tell me! What's happening to me?"

"Well, to begin with, you're pregnant."

There were no roads to the terminus, for all that it was visible from miles off. It lay nestled at the base of the antenna, and to look at the empty and trackless plains about it, you'd think there was neither reason for its existence nor possibility of any significant traffic there.

Yet the closer we got, the more people we saw approaching it. They appeared out of the everywhere and nothingness like hydrogen atoms being pulled into existence in the stressed spaces between galaxies, or like shards of ice crystallizing at random in supercooled superpure water. You'd see one far to your left, maybe strolling along with a walking stick slung casually over one shoulder and a gait that just told you she was whistling. Then beyond her in the distance a puff of dust from what could only be a half-track. And to the right, a man in a wide-brimmed hat sitting ramrod-straight in the saddle of a native parasite larger than any elephant. With every hour a different configuration, and all converging.

Roads materialized underfoot. By the time we arrived at the terminus, they were thronged with people.

The terminal building itself was as large as a city, all gleaming white marble arches and colonnades and parapets and towers. Pennants snapped in the wind. Welcoming musicians played at the feet of the columns. An enormous holographic banner dopplering slowly through the rainbow from infrared to ultraviolet and back again, read:

BYZANTIUM PORT AUTHORITY MAGNETIC-LEVITATION MASS TRANSIT DIVISION GROUND TERMINUS

Somebody later told me it provided employment for a hundred thousand people, and I believed him.

Victoria and I parked the truck by the front steps. I opened the door for her and helped her gingerly out. Her belly was enormous by then, and her sense of balance was off. We started up the steps. Behind us, a uniformed lackey got in the pickup and drove it away.

The space within was grander than could have been supported had the terminus not been located at the cusp of antenna and forehead, where the proximate masses each canceled out much of the other's attraction. There were countless ticket windows, all of carved mahogany. I settled Victoria down on a bench -- her feet were tender -- and went to stand in line. When I got to the front, the ticket-taker glanced at a computer screen and said, "May I help you, sir?"

"Two tickets, first-class. Up."

He tapped at the keyboard and a little device spat out two crisp pasteboard tickets. He slid them across the polished brass counter, and I reached for my wallet. "How much?" I said.

He glanced at his computer and shook his head. "No charge for you, Mister Daniel. Professional courtesy."

"How did you know my name?"

"You're expected." Then, before I could ask any more questions, "That's all I can tell you, sir. I can neither speak nor understand your language. It is impossible for me to converse with you."

"Then what the hell," I said testily, "are we doing now?"

He flipped the screen around for me to see. On it was a verbatim transcript of our conversation. The last line was: I SIMPLY READ WHAT'S ON THE SCREEN, SIR.

Then he turned it back toward himself and said, "I simply read what's --"

"Yeah, yeah, I know," I said. And went back to Victoria.

Even at mag-lev speeds, it took two days to travel the full length of the antenna. To amuse myself, I periodically took out my gravitometer and made readings. You'd think the figures would diminish exponentially as we climbed out of the gravity well. But because the antennae swept backward, over the bulk of the grasshopper, rather than forward and away, the gravitational gradient of our journey was quite complex. It lessened rapidly at first, grew temporarily stronger, and then lessened again, in the complex and lovely flattening sine-wave known as a Sheffield curve. You could see it reflected in the size of the magnetic rings we flashed through, three per minute, how they grew skinnier then fatter and finally skinnier still as we flew upward.

On the second day, Victoria gave birth. It was a beautiful child, a boy. I wanted to name him Hector, after my father, but Victoria was set on Jonathan, and as usual I gave in to her.

Afterward, though, I studied her features. There were crow's-feet at the corners of her eyes, or maybe "laugh lines" was more appropriate, given Victoria's personality. The lines to either side of her mouth had deepened. Her whole face had a haggard cast to it. Looking at her, I felt a sadness so large and pervasive it seemed to fill the universe.

She was aging along her own exponential curve. The process was accelerating now, and I was not at all certain she would make it to Sky Terminus. It would be a close thing in either case.

I could see that Victoria knew it too. But she was happy as she hugged our child. "It's been a good life," she said. "I wish you could have grown with me -- don't pout, you're so solemn, Daniel! -- but other than that I have no complaints."

I looked out the window for a minute. I had known her for only -what? --a week, maybe. But in that brief time she had picked me up, shaken me off, and turned my life around. She had changed everything. When I looked back, I was crying.

"Death is the price we pay for children, isn't it?" she said. "Down below, they've made death illegal. But they're only fooling themselves. They think it's possible to live forever. They think there are no limits to growth. But everything dies -- people, stars, the universe. And once it's over, all lives are the same length."

"I guess I'm just not so philosophical as you. It's a damned hard thing to lose your wife."

"Well, at least you figured that one out."

"What one?

"That I'm your wife." She was silent a moment. Then she said, "I had another dream. About your magician. And he explained about the drug. The one he called mortality."

"Huh," I said. Not really caring.

"The drug I took, you wake up and you burn through your life in a matter of days. With the new version, you wake up with a normal human lifespan, the length people had before the immortality treatments. One hundred fifty, two hundred years -- that's not so immediate. The suicides are kept alive because their deaths come on so soon; it's too shocking to the survivors' sensibilities. The new version shows its effects too slowly to be stopped."

I stroked her long white hair. So fine. So very, very brittle. "Let's not talk about any of this."

Her eyes blazed "Let's do! Don't pretend to be a fool, Daniel. People multiply. There's only so much food, water, space. If nobody dies, there'll come a time when everybody dies." Then she smiled again, fondly, the way you might at a petulent but still promising child. "You know what's required of you, Daniel. And I'm proud of you for being worthy of it."

Sky Terminus was enormous, dazzling, beyond description. It was exactly like in Vickie's dream. I helped her out onto the platform. She could barely stand by then, but her eyes were bright and curious. Jonathan was asleep against my chest in a baby-sling.

Whatever held the atmosphere to the platform, it offered no resistance to the glittering, brilliantly articulated ships that rose and descended from all parts. Strange cargoes were unloaded by even stranger longshoremen.

"I'm not as excited by all this as I would've been when I was younger," Victoria murmured. "But somehow I find it more satisfying. Does that make sense to you?"

I began to say something. But then, abruptly, the light went out of her eyes. Stiffening, she stared straight ahead of herself into nothing that I could see. There was no emotion in her face whatsoever.

"Vickie?" I said.

Slowly, she tumbled to the ground.

It was then, while I stood stunned and unbelieving, that the magician came walking up to me.

In my imagination I'd run through this scene a thousand times: Leaving my bag behind, I stumbled off the train, toward him. He made no move to escape. I flipped open my jacket with a shrug of the shoulder, drew out the revolver with my good hand, and fired.

Now, though...

He looked sadly down at Victoria's body and put an arm around my shoulders.

"God," he said, "don't they just break your heart?"

I stayed on a month at the Sky Terminus to watch my son grow up. Jonathan died without offspring and was given an orbital burial. His coffin circled the grasshopper seven times before the orbit decayed and it scratched a bright meteoric line down into the night. The flare lasted about as long as would a struck sulfur match.

He'd been a good man, with a wicked sense of humor that never came from my side of the family.

So now I wander the world. Civilizations rise and fall about me. Only I remain unchanged. Where things haven't gotten too bad, I scatter mortality. Where they have I unleash disease.

I go where I go and I do my job. The generations rise up like wheat before me, and like a harvester I mow them down. Sometimes -- not often -- I go off by myself, to think and remember. Then I stare up into the night, into the colonized universe, until the tears rise up in my sight and drown the swarming stars.

I am Death and this is my story.

~~~~~~~~

By Michael Swanwick

WHITE MAGIC

In "The Familiar" last March, Albert Cowdrey showed us some of the uncanny doings transpiring on Azalea Place in New Orleans. You may recall a nosy neighbor by the name of Mrs. DeSaye and a four-foot-taIl marble Poo dog (part dog part lion) that was not all it seemed. Well, after a bit of rumination, Mr. Cowdrey felt he needed to return to the same locale in New Orleans (where he himself now resides) in order to investigate the question of how it was that old Mrs. DeSaye came by that title "Mrs." in the first place...

My disappearing, Mrs. DeSaye -- our block captain and neighborhood bane -- caused a sigh of relief to pass through the quiet homes and walled gardens of Azalea Place in uptown New Orleans. If the case had been left up to my neighbors, nobody would have investigated for fear of finding her.

But the cops had their duties to perform. I was still in a wheelchair from injuries officially attributed to a hit.and-run driver when a polite, pudgy black detective called upon me. I recognized him; he had visited Azalea Place once before, when a severed hand had been found next door. I answered his questions about Mrs. DeSaye as truthfully as anybody was likely to, under the circumstances.

Yes, I said, I was probably the last person to see her before she vanished. She had dropped in that afternoon at my invitation to drink coffee and eat biscotti and chat. No, we weren't friends, only neighbors; her talk had all been neighborhood gossip, nothing unusual about it.

I think my physical condition more than my answers deflected suspicion. Committing murder in a body cast would be a problem to baffle Houdini. In any case, twenty minutes were enough to satisfy the detective's curiosity. Then, just before he closed his notebook, he asked a surprising question.

"Sir, this lady have a boyfriend?"

" Boyfriend?"

"Yeah. Miz Toups you know? Bought the old Vidakovich place next door to Miz DeSaye? She turned in a report couple days ago, said there was a man prowling around the house. She said she thought he was, uh, nude at the time. We sent a car but they didn't find nothing.

"A naked prowler at the DeSaye place. Hmm.

"I'll see you to the gate," I said, starting the motor of my wheelchair.

The garden, now under the care of my neighbor Angela, was in glorious condition and the detective turned out to be a gardener and appreciative. He liked a purple wisteria vine sprawling along one of the high board fences, and smiled a little when he noted a coil of bright concertina wire concealed among its leaves.

"Keepin' 'em out, eh?" he asked, and I gave him a friendly, slightly goofy grin that has served me well during a long lifetime. The explanation that I was saving the burglars' lives by keeping them out would have raised entirely too many questions.

At the gate he paused to admire my marble Foo Dog, who goes by the name of Foo Manchu.

"Nice," he said appreciatively. "I like oriental stuff. My wife and me have dinner sometimes at the Forbidden City, you know the place? It's Chinese Cajun. They do a great Szechuan alligator. Well, if anything else comes to you, here's my card."

I locked the gate behind him and turned to chug on back to the house. Inevitably, my mind was running on Mrs. DeSaye's last visit -- the one I had described so truthfully, and with such vast omissions, to the detective.

I remembered how, when the coffee and biscotti were finished, she toyed with me in that roundabout way of hers. I was on her list, of course; we both knew it.

"I'm about to have a real event in my life," she said. "I do so hope you'll be around to see it."

"Actually, I'm not planning to go anywhere."

"Oh plans," she said. "They so seldom work out, do they? Now, I've had a plan in mind for many years, but it's only lately I learned how to carry it out. Well, I'm cooking something, so now I'll have to go," she added, rising, straightening her seams with the automatic gesture of a large lady whose clothes ride up when she sits.

I said something about catching my afternoon nap, and she turned her bulging blue eyes upon me and smilingly wished me pleasant dreams. Of course she knew -- being the cause of them -- that my dreams were nightmares, now approaching the point of hallucinations. She could hardly have guessed that those words, "Pleasant dreams," sealed her fate.

I started the motor in my chair and courteously allowed her to precede me into the garden. Then I slammed the door behind her and turned the deadbolt.

A few seconds passed before her face appeared at the window.

She shook the bars, shouted at me, then ran to the next window and the next. Oh, I knew what that was like, to be in a garden surrounded by high fences and bright wire, hearing the lion-dog move.

How she shook the bars, wig askew, her mouth now moving soundlessly. In her abject terror she couldn't scream aloud, but she could project her emotions, her hate, anger, fear -- as all her victims knew to their cost.

I felt her screaming in my brain and whirled my wheelchair around trying to escape the waves of terror and despair. A bad five minutes that was, while the creature tracked and killed her, she died not only in her own body but inside my head as well.

In my current battered state, just the memory was enough to set me trembling. I spent a while calming down, doing the Zen trick of exhaling completely and then letting nature do the inhaling for me. The garden helped, the butterflies, the rustle and chirp of sparrows, the whir of unseen wings.

After a time I chugged inside and called Angela to give her the latest news about the investigation. I was getting as bad as Mrs. DeSaye when it came to gossip -- and murder by exotic means.

Angela was becoming a presence around my house. She visited at least once a day, fixed me light meals, listened patiently to my anecdotes, and used my backscratcher to relieve itches under the cast that I couldn't quite reach.

When the doctors cut off my cast, she helped the therapist prod, haul and push me into something approaching normal movement again. It was a long way from passion, but a relationship was taking form. One evening when I was expecting nothing special to happen, she fixed me dinner, we drank a bottle of old wine, and she stayed the night.

For a week afterward I was downright silly with joy. We talked over our future. Each of us intended to keep our own house, at least for a while, but we called in workmen and had a gate cut in the fence so that we could come and go privately. Because the new gate stood open, we shared the guardian of the place, too.

Angela planted a cape jasmine beside Foo Manchu, and the thick smell of the blossoms and the dark glossy leaves made a beautiful setting for his purple-red marble body, his whirling mane, and his furious, staring eyes. Angela and I left the doors of our houses wide open whenever we pleased, enjoying a feeling of safety and freedom that most Americans have forgotten.

I was getting about with two stout canes when the lawyer who had been appointed by the court to manage Mrs. DeSaye's estate decided to rent her house -- I suppose to bring in money for its upkeep, until she could be declared legally dead. One of my first walks outside my garden since the accident took me there, with Angela holding tight to my left arm.

The reason was simple nosiness. We had called the rental agent and expressed interest on behalf of a mythical friend we said was moving to New Orleans. A pleasant, rather tense young woman named Deena, thin and chic as a fashion model, met us at the door. Together we entered the house like cats, looking from side to side and putting down our feet with caution. We talked in low voices, not wanting, I guess, to wake the dead.

"I feel like such a ghoul," whispered Angela.

"Don't worry, Mrs. DeSaye probably liked ghouls," I comforted her.

I must say the house was disappointing. Contrary to the reputation of witches, Mrs. DeSaye had been a demon housekeeper. Most of the rooms looked totally unlived in, like a decorator's exhibit. The fireplace featured clean gaslogs in a niche of spotless firebrick and a bright poker and tongs that had never known the touch of ashes. Driven by curiosity, I managed the stairs with help from Angela and Deena. On the second floor the only bedroom that had been in use was equally neat, with a smiling doll reposing against a neatly tucked bolster.

Mrs. DeSaye had actually lived in a large bright room at the back, where the windows gave an overview of Azalea Place. I was not surprised to see a big, old-fashioned pair of Zeiss binoculars standing on a table beside a camera with a telephoto lens. The room was a mess, with untidy leather furniture, coffee stains, decks of cards, two television sets and a VCR. Clutter everywhere. An old chaise longue was covered with dogeared romance novels. Stands held three or four identical blonde wigs, a closet was crammed with clothes, and a dressing table with a three-way mirror overflowed with an incredible array of cosmetic tubes and bottles.

Piled around the VCR were the sort of cheap videotapes that advertisers like to call classic, meaning old -- mainly featuring the Forties crowd, Gable and Garson and Cooper and Loy. Underlining Mrs. DeSaye's unsuspected love of the cinema was a yellowing print in a silver frame showing an actor I did not recognize -- some sort of matinee idol with a jutting chin and a mustache only three hairs wide. The inscription, signed I supposed by the thousand for a fan club, was "Ever Yours, Desmond."

"I thought this mess had been cleaned up," apologized Deena. "I promise you, the house will be perfect by the time a tenant moves in."

Personally, I was glad the cleaners hadn't done their job. Then I'd never have known how a bona fide witch lives. Briefly I stuck my head in the last small room of the house, a Victorian bathroom obviously long out of use, with a chain toilet and an immense tub. A cheap lamp connected by an extension cord to a socket in the other room held one 300-watt bulb staring down at the tub. There was an unpleasant smell about, as if a pot of soup had gone bad in there, and in the bottom of the tub I saw waxy remains like leavings of old soap. Shoved back against one wall was an immense old leather suitcase. The window of frosted glass threw a diffused glare upon the floor.

Outside again, Angela and I said goodbye to Deena and then paused to look back at la maison DeSaye before we started for home.

"What a boring life she had," remarked Angela.

No, I thought, not true. Actually Mrs. DeSaye had been passionately interested in her life, polishing her floors, spying on her neighbors, deciding who her next victim would be. But I didn't say anything. Angela, I thought, would have been bored by a witch's life, and I was glad of that.

After that visit we might have put Mrs. DeSaye on our mental shelves. We had other things to think about, such as adjusting to each other. Then Mrs. Toups intervened. I picked up a ringing phone a few days later to hear a strange hoarse voice say, "Hello and good mornin'."

I asked who she wanted, and she said, "You and your lady friend, Honey. For wine and cheese. I saw you at the DeSaye place, but you were gone before I could run out and intrude on you."

I liked the touch of humor in "intrude." Anyway, I remembered the detective's words about the prowler and decided I would like to hear the Toups version. The upshot was that Angela and I presented ourselves about six the next evening at the comfortable old pink house where Tom Vidakovitch had died of a hex and Mrs. V of urban violence.

La Toups turned out to be exactly what I had expected, a blowsy, shrewd woman with laugh wrinkles and an active tongue. Her husband was squat and somewhat toadlike, with little twinkling gray eyes and an amphibian's large lipless mouth. They owned a tiny toy dog, a Westy I think, which growled and made threats against my ankles until restrained.

"A guy, a broad, and a pooch," Angela summed up the household, while our hosts were in the kitchen assembling the edibles. Then we heard Bessie exclaim, "Whoa!"

Dashing back into the living room, she said, "There's that sonofabitch again. "In one smooth motion, she switched off the light and moved with speed and silence to a window. I followed.

There he was, a pale seemingly unclothed man in the gray dusk, climbing over the railing onto the back porch next door. Maybe we made a noise; anyway, he turned suddenly and opened the door, which I remembered was secured by a chain. He ducked under it, sliding through the opening in the magical way of a roach escaping a broom.

"How do you like that," asked Bessie.

No light went on next door. The prowler was evidently a nudist who liked sitting in the dark.

"Finished?" asked her husband, bringing in a tray that smelled promisingly of Stilton and red wine. Bessie flicked the light back on, and we settled down for munchies and gossip.

"Bessie gets a lot of fun out of that place," Adrian observed. "Keeps her out of trouble. When our last kid left home, I told her, Get yourself a dog. She did and named him Stopgap, but he wasn't enough."

Stopgap, perhaps energized by hearing his name, lifted his tiny leg and sprinkled a gateleg table. Having marked his territory, he growled and strutted around. It seemed ridiculous to have that much personality confined in ten pounds of dogmeat and a swatch of silky hair.

Bessie was avid to know more about Mrs. DeSaye, having already heard a lot from the neighbors.

"She thought she could cast spells," I explained cautiously.

"Well, could she?"

I shook my head solemnly and deliberately put a large cracker and a wedge of cheese into my mouth.

"I never liked her," Angela told Bessie, "nobody did. At first she seemed to be just silly, but --"

"Whoa!"

Off went the light again. I thought the guy next door must be blind if he didn't know he was being watched. Nevertheless, cane and all I was standing at the window with Bessie as sounds of things opening and closing came from the DeSaye place. The stranger was searching the house -- in the dark.

"It'll be like that all night," she whispered. "He's looking for something. Lord, I'd love to know what."

"Shouldn't we call the cops?" I asked.

She switched on the light again, making a face.

"Lotta good that does," she said. "They came the first time, didn't find nothing, and never answered my calls afterward. Hell with 'em, I'm not calling 'em anymore."

As we were leaving, I gave Bessie some good advice. I liked the Toupses, and the wine added to the humanitarian glow I felt.

"Watch out," I said. "Mrs. DeSaye was genuinely unpleasant. Her gentleman friend may be unpleasant, too."

As is my habit, I woke up at a little after four A.M. For a while I lay there in the dark, listening to Angela breathe. Then I got up and walked somewhat shakily downstairs, pulling on an old robe. I was sleeping much better of late, but this business of waking up in the dead pit of the predawn darkness hung on. I'd probably be wide awake until the first light, then fall asleep in a chair.

I stepped outside into a universe of bugs and tree frogs. The chorus fell silent around me as I crunched down the gravel path, then resumed behind me. Big cockroaches pattered like raindrops among the leaves of the banana trees. Something jumped: a toad, hunting roaches.

Foo Manchu wasn't in his usual place, and I felt a little thrill of fear, even though I knew that now he wasn't after me. I leaned against a tree, wishing I had brought my cane because my knees still felt so weak.

Then I saw a white something slide from right to left into view just outside the gate -- a supple white something whose limbs stretched and contracted as it moved. It rubbed itself against the bars like a cat, and began to squeeze between them, though the gap was no more than three inches wide.

I just stared; I've no idea what I would have done if the thing had come inside. But I didn't need to do anything. With a sudden rush and growl a great solid bulk burst out of the banana trees and crashed against the gate with a clang like a cell door closing. There was a thin shriek and the visitor was gone.

Foo Manchu's arrival had startled me almost as much as the visitor. I hadn't touched him in his mobile phase since the day when he had almost killed me. I approached him now, trembling a little, and put my hand on his coarse mane. For a moment he really was a dog -- or a lion --panting and giving a low, deep rumbling growl of sheer baffled fury. Then I felt his mane grow smooth and harden and become cool under my fingers. And there he sat once more, the marble Foo Dog guarding my gate.

By now a little pale light was spinning down from the sky in silky tendrils like spiderweb. I found my way back to the house, discovered I couldn't manage the stairs alone, collapsed on the living room couch and sank into profound and dreamless sleep.

Angela was upset when I told her about the visit. More upsetting news came later that day in a phone call from Deena.

"I had a prospect for the DeSaye house and discovered those damn housecleaners still hadn't come," she said. "Those people are absolutely untrustworthy. Well, I started to do some tidying up myself and I found some things I think you ought to see."

She was sitting in a wooden rocker on the front porch when I arrived. In her lap lay her purse and a pile of photographic prints. Seeing that I still had trouble climbing, she came down the steps and handed me the pictures.

The pictures documented Mrs. DeSaye's hobby of taking snapshots of her neighbors from the windows of her house. She'd wanted clear images of the face. So here was Angela's husband Joe in four murky versions and a clear one, from which the face had been cut out. Her former lover Jim Kennedy was present in half a dozen versions, all rejects, it would seem. (I never discovered where Mrs. DeSaye had finally gotten the picture she needed to help focus her destructive energy on poor Jim.]

There were other pictures of people I didn't know by sight, as well as myself in three unsatisfactory images and one with the face cut out.

"Who are they -- aside from you, I mean?" asked Deena.

"The two that I knew are dead. Was this all you found?"

"No, you haven't seen the piece de resistance yet."

Deena opened her small brown purse and took out a doll a few inches long and laid it in her hand. It was done with no special skill, just a generalized figure in white wax whose face was my own, cut from the photograph.

"This was in a box a wig had come in," said Deena. "I've heard some pretty weird stories about your late neighbor, but now I don't think they quite did her justice."

She added, "There's something funny about the wax. It doesn't smell like wax."

I thanked her and we chatted for a few minutes about the various hobbies of the late unlamented.

"Do you think she's gone for good?" Deena asked.

"Yes, I think so. I really don't believe in the dead coming back. It's the living who cause all the trouble in the world."

She sighed. "Well, I hope you're right. I still have to show this goddamn place. It's my job."

"Don't ever go in there at night," I told her. "There's been a prowler and what I've seen of him, he's pretty strange."

"Oh, Christ."

I walked home with my stick rapping the concrete and the photos and the wax man in my pocket. Angela was ready to move to Alaska when I showed the trophies to her.

"Why," she demanded rhetorically, "did I ever leave lovely Newark to live in this nut-house of a city?"

"It's got a warm climate. Look, I want you to take this doll and lock it up in your safe deposit box. Now, before the bank closes. I don't know whether I'd die if something happened to it, but I don't want to find out."

After my exercise I felt deeply, almost deliciously tired. When Angela had gone I lay down again on the couch and took a little nap, and during it something odd and encouraging happened. I began having deep warm dreams, of my mother, of sleeping at her breast, of hearing my father laugh. Then the old subconscious did a fast forward: I was twenty-five again, drinking red wine and eating goat cheese with olives and looking out from an Italian terrace over the blue Adriatic.

Maybe dreams have healing powers, I thought, or maybe healing expresses itself in dreams. I woke feeling much less stiff and when Angela returned we took a fairly long stroll -- to Audubon Park and back -leaving my cane at home. Angela commented on my relative boyishness.

"My bones are knitting," I said happily. "I can hear them snapping together."

"You are so full of it," she said, but in fact that night I was a more energetic bed partner than she'd been accustomed to.

Haunts or no haunts, men of wax, dead witches, whatever, nature was bringing me into that sweet state of recovery when every hour gives a sense of growing strength, of youth recaptured.

Next day I napped again while Angela was out shopping. I woke feeling even better. In the afternoon she put on her power-walking togs and I accompanied her partway around the track in the park before turning back for still more sleep and recovery.

Dinner was a feast. We went to Sbisa's and ate ourselves silly. The French Quarter after dark was everything I love and hate about New Orleans, sleaze and beauty, horrendous traffic and music bursting out of every crack in the old stuccoed walls. While a brief furious rain fell, we drank brandy at the Napoleon House and smiled at each other across a flickering candle.

"Did you know," she asked, "there was a witch in my family? My grandmother Nonna called her 'strega nostra,' our witch."

"Was she burned?"

"No, on the contrary, she lived to a hundred and three. She was a healer, and she must have been good at it, considering how long she lasted."

"This was in Newark?"

"No, in Cittavecchia. I don't think it's possible to live to a hundred and three in Newark. Or, for that matter, desirable."

I suppose I was feeling too good to see the implications of all this. Physical comfort makes you dense. Back at home, I made love like a young man and slept like a baby.

It was a good thing I did, for at two-twenty in the morning the telephone began tinkling away. With Angela simulating coma, I had to stumble across the room into the hall and pick it up.

"Hello and good morning," said Bessie's whiskey-and-cigarettes voice.

"Yeah," I muttered.

"Hell of a time to call you and Adrian didn't want to," she said, "but if you could just come over for a minute --"

I was pretty well awake by now. "What's happened?"

"Stopgap caught the guy next door coming in the window and tore off his big toe. Adrian thinks we should call a lawyer, but I said call you."

So there I was, getting dressed in the dark, putting buttons in the wrong holes and donning socks inside out. The Toups house was brightly lit, as I had expected. Bessie wore a flowered nightgown, Adrian was barefooted in pants, braces, and a tanktop. As usual, Stopgap had to be prevented from attacking my ankles and Bessie held him in her arms while we all solemnly viewed the object lying on their dining room table.

It was undoubtedly a big toe -- of a sort. It had no nail. It was dead white and yielded no blood, though a little pale fluid resembling lymph leaked out of the torn end. Made of wax? Perhaps, I thought, originally. But it had changed. Prodding the toe with a knife Bessie brought me, I thought the stuff it was made of had more tensile strength than wax and there was a faintly nasty organic smell about it.

"I heard somebody fumbling at the window and grabbed my .38 snub," explained Adrian. "Came in the dining room, and this character was working his way between the bars. Well, Stopgap came in with me and while I was still deciding if it was legal to shoot the bastard where he was or if I had to wait for him to come all the way in, the dog went at him."

"What did the burglar do?"

"Squeaked and run."

Bessie put Stopgap down and he rampaged around and peed on the furniture to let the next intruder know whose territory this was.

"Who is this guy, anyway?" Bessie demanded.

"I don't know," I told her. "But I'd like to."

I repeated this to Angela at breakfast, over coffee. Bessie had sealed the toe in a plastic sandwich bag that now reposed in my freezer next to the orange juice.

"All I can figure is he hasn't found what he's looking for in the DeSaye house, so he's beginning to roam the neighborhood."

"Oh, nice. A zombie's just what we need around here."

I tried to explain that he looked weak, clumsy, stupid, soft.

Angela wasn't paying attention.

"First a witch, now a fucking zombie," was her response. She rarely said the F-word, so I knew she was agitated.

Returning strength inclined me to do something about the intruder. I figured that if Stopgap could handle him, I could too. So I waited until Angela was out and then called Deena and set forth, carrying my heaviest stick.

Deena met me at the DeSaye house and asked if I really wanted to go in. I said yes.

"Well, I've got a job to do. Lock up when you leave."

She gave me the key and I stepped inside, closed the door behind me and was alone, or perhaps not quite.

Dust had sifted in, as it will into the best-kept house. The sense of emptiness remained but I knew the intruder had been here. The sun slanted under roller blinds and penetrated starched lace curtains and struck the floor at such an angle that I had no difficulty in seeing his smooth, unlined footprints in the dust.

I had long ago learned how to toss a room, as they say. I worked my way through the house fairly quickly, opening and shutting drawers, turning pictures, pulling out furniture, prodding sofas and chairs, and so forth. My cane was a nuisance, but I kept it close at hand throughout the process. I found nothing of interest downstairs.

Upstairs in the bedroom was a closet full of Mrs. DeSaye's husband's clothes, all neatly pressed. He had favored double-breasted white suits with lapels six inches wide, a collection of ties that could have been used as warning signals, and stiff white shirts with great wing collars. A fashion plate, circa 1948.

Then, on a shelf of apparently unread Great Books, I found a scrapbook. Fancy cover, brittle gray pages, brownish snapshots. A young Mrs. DeSaye wearing a long bob and shoulders. Her eyes bulged as they had later; she leaned toward the lens and did not smile; her gaze was so direct that the eyes seemed to follow me. A woman of power, even when young.

Then something that amazed me: snapshots showing her with the matinee idol whose pinup I'd seen earlier. They posed by a flashy Buick, by a large stucco house, by a gushing fountain. He held her hand, she demurely took his arm. "The Next Clark Gable?!" queried a page torn from a movie magazine of the time, with another picture of the familiar jutting-jawed face. The breathless text identified the coming star as Desmond DeSaye. "While bringing the romantic charm of old New Orleans to the silver screen, handsome young Desmond DeSaye sets a high moral tone in scandal-rocked Hollywood by his devotion to his lovely wife Sonia."

Following this quaint b.s. was a list of screen credits. Mentioned were all the VCR tapes in the sitting room. I suspected you'd have to look closely at any of the movies to spot him, for even the magazine admitted that he was "still awaiting his First Big Break."

The book also contained half a dozen obituary notices glued to the back pages. At first I couldn't see why -- just an array of accident cases and one or two suicides. Then I noticed that all the victims had been connected in one way or another with the movie industry. Mrs. DeSaye, I now felt certain, had been advancing her husband's career. Perhaps this was how she had started her own remarkable career -- with a little connubial killing.

Finally, there was Desmond DeSaye's own obit from the L.A. Times: a masterpiece of obfuscation which nevertheless hinted that a drug overdose might have had something to do with his death at twenty-eight. He had been cremated, and his ashes interred in a moving Christian service in a niche at Forest Lawn. At the conclusion of the sermon by a famous female evangelist, a white dove had been released, symbolizing the soul of the departed.

I closed the scrapbook in a thoughtful mood.

A few minutes after four I reached Mrs. DeSaye's sitting room. For a time I poked around aimlessly. It was noticeably neater-looking than before, but Deena's housework had consisted mainly in throwing everything into the already overfull closet and slamming the door. I began pulling things out and the musty smell of uncleaned cloth billowed around me, making me sneeze. I found nothing but the same old clutter; the wigs were just wigs; the novels held no secrets pressed between their pages. I didn't play the tapes.

That left Queen Victoria's bathroom. The diffused light still prevailed, the waxy leavings, the peculiar smell. I now had at least a general idea of what the tub had been used for, but very few things in the world are as empty as an empty bathtub, so I moved on with my researches. The toilet tank contained only the usual floats and valves, plus a garden of multicolored algae. Nothing remained except the big suitcase, which had been dragged along the wall and upended.

I set it flat on the floor. The product of a more opulent age of travel, it was nearly four feet long and a foot thick -- red leather carefully maintained with saddle soap. It wasn't very heavy, yet felt somehow full -- packed, you know. I have absolute contempt for suitcase locks; I went hunting through Mrs. DeSaye's cooking and eating utensils, found a fork, bent one tine, and proceeded to snap both locks open in two minutes flat.

Jackpot. The suitcase was full of packages wrapped in green satin, and each package contained one or more human bones.

The bones were white and polished, almost elegant. The pelvic angle indicated a male. The skull had been separated from the mandible and both were filled with clean white teeth, carefully capped. I felt pretty sure that the next Clark Gable lay before me -- the more lasting part of him, anyway.

I was wondering idly whose ashes now reposed in the Desmond DeSaye niche in the columbarium at Forest Lawn when a very soft sound caused me to turn. A pale, supple something glided into the room and came at me.

There's a time for thinking and a time for reflexes. I dropped the skull, seized my cane, took a batter's grip and made it whistle as I hit him across the middle. He squeaked and bent so far over the cane that he seemed to wrap around it, his upper parts fusing briefly to his lower body. I jerked it free and smacked him again across his face, which was featureless except for a shapeless sort of mouth. He shrank back, keening; I felt ashamed of myself, as if I'd been beating a cripple.

He started forward again, cringing from the blow he expected but coming on anyway. I stepped back and suddenly realized that I meant nothing to him. He sank down on the floor by the scattered bones and began to gather them up and thrust them one by one into his lank, pasty body.

It was fascinating to watch. He flowed around the bones, coating and then absorbing them as if they were falling into an oily, thick white stew. He seemed to know by instinct where they went, and so translucent was his waxy flesh that I could see their shadows move inside him. Twisting fluidly, like a snail climbing its own shell, he drove the twenty-six bones of the vertebral column into his back. He pressed the still articulated pelvis into his belly and it sank through him until it met the spine. He took up the long, elegant femurs and drove them into his thighs like a fakir inserting nails. He searched frantically through a clutter of little bones for the five metacarpals and fourteen phalanges of his left hand and his still pliant right inserted them as neatly as the pieces of a Chinese puzzle.

The last was the head; he first drove in the lower jaw and for a moment sat working it like someone just released by the dentist. Then he raised the skull, rattling with the tiny ossicles of the ears like a gourd full of pebbles and pressed it into his lump of a head, and the white stuff flowed around the bone and absorbed it and took shape from it.

He turned and looked at me, and I saw the limits of the magic that had remade him: he had no eyes, only a statue-like blankness in the sockets; he had no thin line of mustache, no beard, no hair. His nose and ears were formless.

Yet Desmond DeSaye was becoming recognizable. The bones gave him shape. He drew his lips back from the gleaming teeth in what might have been a grin or a snarl but was probably only a kind of exercise, feeling the new interconnection of flesh, bone and ivory. He put out a white tongue and licked his lips, spreading a little pale shiny fluid as he did. In the diffused glare of the window the absolute whiteness of him -- of everything about him, flesh, bone, blood, teeth, even his spit -- looked unutterably strange.

Yet he seemed perfectly harmless, now that he had found what he was looking for. I felt embarrassed by his nakedness, so I went into the bedroom closet and brought him one of his suits and helped him put it on. He was submissive but clumsy, as if the feel and very idea of cloth was strange to him. The fit was perfect.

By this time I thought I had figured him out, generically at least. He was not a human nor even a zombie, but a kind of golem. He seemed to have no will of his own, now that the commands embedded in his waxy flesh had been obeyed. Surely, I thought, he could only have been intended for a slave.

How confused he must have been when Mrs. DeSaye failed to come home that night, and he emerged from the tub where the ersatz flesh (or should I be more elegant and call it faux flesh?] had taken form. I imagined him venturing blindly into an incomprehensible world, knowing only that he had to find something to make him complete. A gelatinous man, probably able to compress himself into a corner under the house when the police were shining lights and tramping around, searching for a prowler.

I led him into the next room and sat him down on the battered chaise longue. Dressed in the ancient suit, he looked like a cheap department store dummy, white and bald and blind. He was carrying small objects in one hand, and now began to play with them. They were two tiny bones, the phalanges of his left big toe. Until I fetched the toe from my freezer, he would have no place to put them.

I left the house, carefully locking the door behind me. I didn't think he would have any reason to go prowling now, and with the hard bones inside him he would creep between no more bars. I had no feeling about him at all; fear was gone and he wasn't human enough to pity. I had absolutely no idea what to do with him, and I was arrogant enough to think that the question was up to me.

Angela was enthralled and horrified by my account of Mrs. DeSaye's invention.

"Talk about carrying the torch," she said. "All those years! Trucking the bones around, looking for a way to reanimate them."

"I doubt if romance had much to do with it," I objected.

"Romance had everything to do with it. Think of her novels, her tapes. All those cosmetics. The blonde wigs. The lady longed for love."

"With that?"

"Certainly. He'd look somewhat like the original. Anyway, when you've been married to an actor I imagine a goleta might be a pretty good substitute. No ego, no chatter, and no drugs."

It was true, I reflected, that the creature was anatomically complete. That didn't mean it was functional.

Tomorrow, I thought, I would call a friend of mine at Ochsner Foundation Hospital and turn over to him something that would be of interest to science. Perhaps it might even upset a few preconceived ideas. Maybe the boys in the labs could learn something useful.

I did not think the goleta would last long. It seemed to have no way to take nourishment and I thought it would gradually weaken and die, like one of those insects that are born without digestive systems. I told Angela this.

"Aren't things like that born just to mate?" she asked pointedly.

Next morning she trotted off to the bank to do some sort of business. I called my friend the M.D. and threw out enough vague but enticing hints to make him promise to drop by and see me between lunch and his usual golf date that afternoon.

I decided to bring the golem his toe, to have him complete for his first medical checkup. It was when I was taking the chilly plastic package out of the freezer, my mind running on the astonishing creative power it represented, that thoughts of my own rapid recovery suddenly set my brain in a whirl. All at once I was remembering Angela's talk of witches in her family during that happy night in the French Quarter.

Like danger, intuition demands action. I phoned the bank where she did her business and asked to speak to her.

"Mrs. Barberino is in the vault looking at her safe deposit box," I explained.

When she came on the line I said, "I'm glad it's working, Angela, and I don't care why."

"Then you shouldn't interrupt me," she said. "I've been giving this goddamn wax man an hour's treatment of healing thoughts a day and it's really kind of hypnotic. Staring at him I see you, isn't that weird? I can even smell you -- your sweat, that stuff you put on to try to keep your hair. Do you suppose it's something in the wax, or is it just me? It's like a hallucination, only it's not, it's real. Does that make any sense?."

"No," I said, "but keep at it, strega mia." And rang off.

I walked into the garden and saw magic everywhere. Birds were quarreling and their bright scattered voices were the sounds of the dappled sunlight quivering among the leaves. The mealy earth had the exact smell of a particular day in my childhood that suddenly returned to me with visionary clarity. Everything echoed everything else and the sky exhaled a damp soft breath over the earth.

I set out cheerfully for Mrs. DeSaye's, patting Foo Manchu as I passed and carefully locking the gate behind me. I started to whistle; then the sound died on my lips. A car I recognized was standing in front of the DeSaye place.

Damn, damn, damn, I thought, Deena's got another set of keys. Knowing what she would find, I broke into a run.

The front door stood open. I stepped inside and paused, panting, eyes too dazzled to see. I heard confused sounds, which alarmed me. Deena had always seemed a bit fragile under her brittle surface, and I expected to find her paralyzed with astonishment or fear. Perhaps in a faint.

I blinked and my eyes cleared and beheld a rape tableau.

Deena was bent backwards across an overstuffed chair, shoes lost and skirt torn, and the bald suited creature was leaning over her. He had one hand gripping her throat, silencing her, and the other was tearing roughly at her clothing.

Suddenly I had a vision of what Desmond DeSaye was like in life not a pretty boy of the silver screen, but a stallion bridled by a witch.

I snatched up the gleaming brass poker from the white fireplace and cracked him hard across the shoulderblades. That got his attention. Keeping his left hand on Deena's throat, he straightened and turned his head.

Lord, but he had changed overnight. His eyes now were dark spots under a waxy film, primordial eyes, light-sensitive spots that would become eyes in time. For the first time I realized that the bones were not there only to give him shape. They held a treasury of DNA, the perfect memory of what he had been. Desmond DeSaye was in process of being reinvented -- the fundamental beast, that is, minus everything he might have learned in his first life.

He stared, not seeing anything but the glare of the open door behind me. He was wondering where the sudden blow had come from. Then I moved and he instantly dropped Deena and spun around. Eyes still primitive, I thought; ears working well. Too well. Even the external ears had unfolded, whorled like opening leaves.

I brought out the icy plastic envelope with his toe in it and flung it at his face and he snatched it and began to tear the envelope apart. He sniffed the toe -- another sense he had working -- and then drew the little bones from his pocket and began pressing them into the flesh.

Meanwhile Deena slipped away, hands pressed to her throat over the harsh red marks of his fingers, her chic elegance reduced to a smear of tears. When she looked a question at me I gave her no more than a nod, unwilling to make a gesture that he might hear. In stocking feet she moved to a window and began to open it. Instantly DeSaye turned his head. When he did, she screamed.

He started up and I hit him again, bringing him swiveling back toward me. I spared Deena one more glance, saw her climbing through the window, saw beyond her the bulk of Adrian Toups emerging from his house with Bessie behind him. Minute but furious barking accompanied them. Reinforcements, I thought.

I'd need them. DeSaye shoved the toe into his pocket and came at me. He seemed powerful, smooth, and he moved so quick I think he might have grappled with me then, except that he stumbled -- he really needed that toe for balance.

I swung again and gave him a smart crack on the side of the head. It was a solid meeting of brass and bone and anything merely human would have folded under it. But the once and future Desmond DeSaye was governed by other laws.

He recovered himself -- I was halfway through the door by then-- and sprang after me with a hair-raising howl. He came so fast I didn't have room to swing again; I jabbed the poker into his face and he seized it and flung it aside. I turned and ran, and as I pounded through the gate I heard a metallic clang as the poker landed somewhere inside.

I ran gasping down the hot and sunny sidewalk of Azalea Place, where I had been accustomed to hobble, saunter, stroll. As I passed the Toups' place, I saw that Adrian had reached his front fence and that Bessie was hugging Deena. Through the corner of my eye I saw the fat man raise his .38 snub and a shot exploded behind me and set echoes careening off the housefronts.

I spared one more glance back and saw no damage to my pursuer whatever. Goddamn it, Adrian, I was thinking, why have a gun if you don't know how to shoot?

I made it up the drive as far as my own gate. Locked, of course. I was fumbling with the keys when DeSaye arrived and grabbed my shoulder in a crushing grip. I let his own impetus spin us around and gave him an elbow as deeply as I could into his belly. My elbow sank in and there was no feeling of recovery, no springiness in his body -- the elbow stayed in him until I jerked it out.

Yet he felt pain, I had seen that many times already, and I left him thrashing around beside the fence while I forced an unwilling key into the lock and threw the gate open. Then he was up and after me again.

Very good, I thought, and though my lungs were heaving and half my body seemed on fire, I held the gate open for him. Welcome, you sonofabitch, I thought. He came through howling, and I fell back against the bars, slamming the gate shut and holding it to keep myself upright.

Meanwhile DeSaye had discovered his mistake. Starting forward in a low rush like a charging lion, Foo Manchu seized him by one thigh and dragged him thrashing and squeaking with pain into the shadow of the cape jasmine. I would no more have interfered with what followed than I would have tried to stop a thunderstorm. Not that it was pleasant to watch. In spite of a tolerably rough life, I don't think I ever really understood the meaning of savagery until I watched the second death of Desmond DeSaye.

The lion-dog first pinned him to the earth, tore off his head, crushed it between massive jaws and swallowed it whole. Then he dismembered the inert body, swallowed the limbs, and consumed the torso after raking it apart with his claws. The sounds were industrial -- the grinding, crunching and snapping of one methodical machine breaking down another. Throughout, white flowers of honeyed sweetness rained down on slayer and slain.

By then the whole garden was sprayed with pale malodorous fluid and scattered with rags of cloth. For one heart-stopping moment my familiar turned on me with nostrils flaring, smelling his enemy's blood on me. Then he recognized me and retreated. He sat down in the shadow of the jasmine, and gradually froze into immobility again. Still I heard from his belly a dull borborygmus, like the work of miners underground, where the work of destruction continued.

At some point in the festivities Adrian arrived outside the gate, puffing, and I think asked me if I was all right. I have no idea what I answered. He couldn't see what was going on, but he must have heard the noises. What he thought about it all I've no idea, but he backed me up loyally a quarter of an hour later, when the police arrived in answer to a complaint about a shot being fired.

We claimed that a prowler attempting rape had been interrupted by my arrival, had pursued me but had been frightened away by Adrian's gun. I gave them a generic description, later endorsed by Deena. I said, and she agreed, that her assailant had been a bald white man in a double-breasted suit. That much was true.

Angela came home to find the neighborhood in an uproar. Then, when the excitement was seemingly over, I began to suffer from chest pains and had to be taken to the hospital for what was diagnosed as mild angina secondary to cardiac insufficiency. I was released next day with medical orders against smoking (which I have never done) and drinking (which I did not intend to stop).

In fact, a few days later Angela and I invited the Toupses and Deena over to help us drink a few bottles of old wine, in celebration of the final exorcism of Azalea Place. I remember very little of the party except that it was happy and somewhat silly. As our neighbors came through the gate, Stopgap began growling at Foo Manchu, and Adrian picked up his little dog and muttered, "Stay in your own league, fella."

Witchcraft was gone. Except, of course, for strega mia. During our time of troubles my witch had tried out powers she never knew she possessed, and when the troubles were over the consciousness of power remained.

Now when we quarrel (as we do from time to time; the honeymoon's over and we have become that common oddity of our times, the long-unmarried couple) she smilingly recalls to my memory the wax doll she keeps in her bank box. I know that I depend for my continued recovery and health on the treatments she gives me through it, as well as on the ordinary treatment embraced in what has become a warm and satisfactory relationship.

Hence I let her have her way in most things. Love is nice, I think, watching my Angela, but I have always respected power, too. Power is what the witches seek, and I'm glad it has come to rest at last in loving hands.

~~~~~~~~

By Albert E. Cowdrey

BOOKS TO LOOK FOR

The Barbed Coil, by J.V. Jones, Warner Books, 1997, $9.2.

Like anyone else, I have my biases when it comes to what I read. For instance, high fantasy -- those tales of derring-do set in a mock-medieval, secondary world -- isn't high on my list of must-reads. However, by agreeing to write this column, I feel it's only fair to give everything at least a cursory look, and tend to read the first couple of pages of most of the books that show up in my P.O. box.

Usually, my attention drifts, or I get irritated with the flimsy characterization, same-old, same-old plot, or the poor writing (too often, all three at once), and the book gets quickly set aside. But sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised. I'll look up to find that a half hour has gone by and I'm fifty pages or so into some book that, from the accompanying promotional material, I wasn't expecting to like.

J.V. Jones's The Barbed Coil is one of those. There's not a whole lot new in the idea of a struggle between an evil empire and the gentler nations on its borders, nor in the magical talisman that must be destroyed if the forces of good are to prevail. The cast includes a true heir to a throne who is unaware of his lineage, a rather dangerous rogue with a good heart, and of course, the innocent protagonist through whom the reader can vicariously explore the new world laid out on the novel's pages.

But Jones manages to keep events moving and the plot elements fresh all the same. Her heroine, Tessa McCamfrey, comes from our world, and suffers from tinnitus -- a ringing in the ears that can become so pronounced one is left physically incapacitated. So it makes sense that when Tessa arrives in another world and finds her tinnitus has vanished, she's rather happy to be there, never mind the dangers. Jones has also set up a fascinating magic system based upon intricately designed and painted patterns reminiscent of Celtic ribbonwork and illuminated manuscripts.

It's touches such as these, together with the clean writing and crisp dialogue, that carry one through her use of some of the more tired tropes of the genre. And also, happily, Jones begins and finishes her story in one volume without sacrificing either detail or scope.

~~~~~~~~

By CHARLES DE LINT

BOOKS TO LOOK FOR

Winter Tides, by James P. Blaylock, Ace Books, 1997, $21.95.

Fifteen years before the main action of the book takes place, Winter Tides opens with surfer Dave Quinn trying to rescue a pair of twelve-year-old twins caught in a sudden undertow in Huntington Beach. He manages to save Anne, but when he returns to the water for her sister Elinor, the undertow proves to be too strong and she's pulled from his grasp.

Fast forward to the present where Quinn, still carrying the guilt of the girl's death, is now working as a carpenter for an eccentric theater owner known as the Ear. When Quinn meets the new Canadian artist that the Earl has hired to work on the sets with him, it takes a little while for the artist Anne and Quinn to realize that they share a piece of history -- she's the surviving twin. But the tentative first steps toward a more romantic relationship that the two would like to explore quickly get complicated as the past rises up to interfere, entangling them in unfinished business.

They're both haunted by the ghost of Anne's sister Elinor, but for Anne, the haunting is literal. They're both also targeted by the Earl's miscreant son Edmund.

The enmity between Quinn and Edmund is longstanding, intensifying when Quinn discovers that Edmund is stealing from the Earl and harassing Anne. Edmund is caught up in a delusion that Anne is the personification of his artistic muse, the one person with whom he can share his penchant for filming sexual perversions and his growing fascination with violence. Teaming up with Elinor's ghost, his sociopathic tendencies soon overtake the thin veneer of civilized amiability he's hidden behind for years.

Blaylock had long been the master of the quirky character and a convoluted plot. The charm of his slightly skewed stories, and the whimsical people inhabiting them, has been his ability to utilize their improbability to reveal common truths, or at least views -- of the world, of our place in it -- that we might not otherwise have focused upon without his direction.

In Winter Tides these trademark elements can still be found, but they're subdued, taking a back seat to Blaylock's more serious exploration of darker characters such as Edmund and -- because, mostly, we only know her through Anne's memories -- to a lesser extent, Elinor. Blaylock's prose is different here as well: more approachable to those not quite so attuned to his earlier work; spare, at times, but also fluidly descriptive. There are moments in the text, particularly in how he brings to life both natural landscapes and the more decayed urban cityscapes, that are pure poetry.

In other words, Blaylock is proving to be a writer unafraid of change --one willing to explore beyond the stylistic terrain that he has already so ably claimed as his own in previous work. In some ways I miss the old voice -- but I can always go back and reread those earlier books. Mostly I'm delighted to follow his growth and look forward to seeing just where he'll take us next.

BOOKS TO LOOK FOR

Voodoo Child, by Michael Reaves, Tor Books, 1998, $24.95.

Readers with long memories might remember Dragonworld (1979), Street Magic (1991) and the more recent Night Hunter (1995) -all markedly different sorts of novels, yet penned by the same man: Michael Reaves. If we have Hollywood to blame that there aren't more of his novels (he spends most of his time writing screenplays), the ones we do get are worth the wait.

This time out he takes us to New Orleans for a novel that's part contemporary fantasy, part horror, part character study. The bare bones of the plot concern the struggle between two Haitian Voudoun houngan --Shane LaFitte, a priest dedicated to easing the hardship and poverty of the people of Veronique, and Jorge Arnez, later known as Mal Sangre, who becomes a New Orleans crimelord in his quest to delve deeper into the forbidden Voudoun otherworld than any man has dared to do before.

While the enmity between the two men certainly drives the novel, it's the rich cast of characters caught up in their struggle that make the novel so fascinating: a parole officer, an ex-hooker, a trumpeter in a jazz band, a doctor in the city's busiest ER, and others.

Reaves's scriptwriting background shows up in the quick cuts between points of view and the rather large cast. One might almost think the novel a treatment for an unproduced film except the characterization is richer, the background and history more fully realized, than one has come to expect from Hollywood. A film would concentrate on the struggle between LaFitte and Mal Sangre, with the other characters playing bit parts. Reaves's novel utilizes its cast to define that same conflict in terms that are more human than supernatural, tearing at the border between magic and mundane, and raising the everyday struggles we all face to dramatic proportions.

So while there's violence and dread in the pages of Voodoo Child, there is also compassion and understanding. Darkness exists, but here it exaggerates both its own shadows and the light that drives it back.

Material to be considered for review in this column should be sent to Charles de Lint, P.O. Box 9480, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1G 3V2.

MUSING ON BOOKS

The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell, Fawcett, 1997, $12.

Prince of Dogs, by Kate Elliott, DAW, 1998, $23.95.

Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett, HarperPrism, 1997, $22.

My editor has never handed me a book and told me I had to review it. This column, and its contents, are almost entirely a reflection of my tastes. Not long ago, however, a book came in the mail from the editor with a very short message attached: I think you'll find it interesting. As he'd never done this before, I was deeply curious, and I read the first page. One thing led to another.

That book was The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell.

He was right. I did, and do, find it interesting; I've been thinking about it -- as a novel, as a philosophical rumination, as a very affectionate exploration of human need -- non-stop since I turned the last page, which always marks a particular kind of good book for me.

First, let me say that this is a first novel. It was published by Villard in hardcover, and I missed it entirely in that incarnation; this is my introduction to Russell's work. Second, I would never in a million years have said that it was a first novel; even those things that I feel ambivalent about are things that have the distinct feel of authorial choice and not authorial floundering, of which most first authors --myself, sadly, included--are guilty. Third, it is without question science fiction, although in fact the future Earth of Russell's tale is given a spare glance; if there are political changes, social changes, technological upheavals, they exist in limbo, hinted at -- because, of course, in order to tell the story one must assume space travel that's energy efficient and fast -- but never brought to the fore. Russell cares about people; she does nothing to distract from them.

From the outset, we know almost every fact that we're going to know, stripped of intent and meaning, except for what we bring to them. Father Emilio Sandoz is a broken man with crippled hands and a body that's barely survived the solitary journey back from the planet Rakhat. Discovered in a brothel by the second party to make that journey, his first act is to kill a child -- the child, in fact, that led the humans to him.

We know this. We know that he is the sole survivor of the Jesuit/ gentile expedition to Rakhat. And we know that he is a broken man; that he is bitterly angry, that he is terribly afraid, and that he is unwilling to unman himself further by exposing the ugliness with which he wrestles.

This is his story.

Employing a parallel narrative line, Russell starts in the present and then switches tracks to the past, dancing between them, showing us Father Emilio Sandoz at his height and at the worst point in his life. There seems to be nothing at all in common between these two men, the one isolated in spite of the friendship and support he's offered, the other involved with people that I fell in love with almost immediately. Anne is a student of the brilliant linguist -- for that's what Emilio is; she brings him home one night, introduces him to her husband of many years, and makes a home for him. She's a mother/sister figure with a great deal of warmth and compassion, and probably the character in the book that I don't believe could be written by an author who didn't possess some measure of the same characteristics. When Emilio Sandoz returns to the ghettos of La Perla, which birthed him, and from which he was plucked and saved, he calls Anne and George to join him in a worthy endeavor, and in the end, they do. There they meet Jimmy, a young astronomer, and Sofia the vulture, whose job it is to learn everything that he does at work and then automate it all with an AI, thus effectively replacing him. Indentured for half of her life, she was also rescued from a post-wartime ghetto and educated, but not by the Jesuits, and this job just might mean her freedom.

Their lives are changed the night that Jimmy's SETI watch produces unearthly -- literally -- music; an alien symphony from a distant planet. He calls Anne, George, Emilio, and Sofia, brings them to the lab. It is the beginning of the journey to Rakhat.

At any point where revelation about the fate of a character might be too painful, we're exposed to the distant fact of it, the history, so that we can prepares the only exception is Sandoz himself; after all, it's his book. His damnation, his salvation, his belief in God.

Russell has as sure a grip of character as I've seen in a long while --and better, a deep affection for humanity, an understanding of its foibles and flaws, an unjudgmental, uncritical eye. She understands the awkward ways that some of us offer kindness, the ways that we break down our walls if we choose to accept such an offer, and the awkward way that some of us accept it. She is unstintingly gentle.

And yet, and of course, there's a strength beneath it all, because for Emilio Sandoz to become even a shadow of what he was before his incomprehensible tragedy, he has to finish the walk through fire, and he has to do it publicly; to confess, to be forgiven, to have done.

The only thing that diluted the effect of Russell's very powerful writing was the inclusion of the alien point of view. Everything about this book is human: the need for belief, the need for faith, the magic and mystery of it -- and the tragedy of its loss. The alien viewpoint, while serving a structural role in that the reader can begin to piece together how things went wrong before the confession itself is finally made, is otherwise too distancing; it explains the alien and the alien's decisions--but the book would have been as strong without that, in my opinion, and left the alien as unknowable--alien, in fact.

On the other hand, perhaps that's why Russell chose to expand that viewpoint; to make the only unknowable God's will, God's silence.

It doesn't matter. This is powerful, astonishing writing, but it's also clear as a bell; approachable, accessible, and heartfelt. If you are a reader who finds literary packaging daunting, ignore the packaging; this is a book that deserves to be read, and will more than reward the reading.

Most middle books in a series can be accused of flagging, or at least crumpling a bit in the middle -- they don't have a clear resolution, because they're essentially "middle chapters," and they don't really have as clear a beginning as a first novel. Kate Elliott has left herself open to no such accusations if anything, Prince of Dogs, the second novel in the Crown of Stars series, moves faster and with more furious action than the first novel, King's Dragon. Having set up a complex situation in the first novel, Elliott made everything accessible by carefully choosing the viewpoint characters, and she continues with those characters in this novel.

If you've read the first novel, you know exactly whom the title of the book refers to, and if you haven't read the first novel, you should probably stop reading this review right now, because it's almost impossible not to give spoilers for the ending of King's Dragon (which should be available in paperback if you missed the hardcover). Forewarned? Good.

Sanglant, of course, is alive, and struggling to stay that way. Born of human father -- a king who is almost destroyed at premature news of his son's "death" -Sanglant nonetheless is a bastard of non-human blood, whose birth -proof of his father's fertility, which is an important part of the right to rule -- has been called into question by many. But it's the blood, ultimately, that will decide his fate in Gent, the newest stronghold of Bloodheart of the Eika. The Eika themselves become more interesting as well; we see more of their culture, more of their birthing, more of their family unit and more of their religion, such as it is. They are distinctly not human, and it shows. One of the Eika --part of the ruling family, but not valued highly enough--is joined to Alain through his dreams, and it is through the auspices of the dreams that both Bloodheart and Alain's new father, Lavastine, prepare for war, for Lavastine -- desperate to provide the power necessary to legitimize his bastard progeny in such a way that his rule will never be questioned- is determined to take Gent back from the Eika.

Liath's story also continues, as she faces life as an Eagle -- an Eagle rather too close to the circle that Sapienta occupies. Sapienta isn't the problem; Hugh is. He is the father of the child that will prove Sapienta's fertility, and her fitness to rule. He is also determined to own Liath; in fact, certain that he already does. Liath herself seems to freeze like a rabbit in headlights whenever Hugh is around her; there's always the spider and the fly feel to their interaction.

But Liath's story, Sanglant's story, and Alain's story come together almost perfectly in Gent, and Alain begins to come into his own, but with typical Alain modesty, misses this fact. You can almost hear the political wheels grind to a start in the epilogue -- and you can probably begin to take bets as to who gets crushed by them.

The most impressive thing about Elliott's well-thought-out, well-structured, and well-crafted fantasy is its sense of historicity. There's a bone-deep reality to the world that informs its people in both the small details and the large. Elliott has a strong ability to create a sense of other that is nonetheless human and compelling; her writing is one of the best arguments for the value of multivolume works.

And that leaves us with the last of this month's books: Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett. If you've seen the cover, you know who's on the hot seat in this one. If you haven't, I won't tease: It's a white half-mask, much like the ones that have been in advertisements for at least six years now (Phantom aficionados can probably tell you exactly how many years it's been). I would have liked to see it against the full black background, but I imagine that would have been too misleading.

Pratchett takes the, ummm, plot of Phantom of the Opera and turns it on its head. There is the New Owner (a cheese maker, and a darned good businessman at that), the Opera House Ghost, the Reserved Box, the Mysterious letters with too much punctuation, the Murders, and the young ingenue Christine. There's also a rather large male lead, Henry Slugg (stage name: Enrico Basilica, although in Opera almost all of life seems to be a stage), a very irritated Diva and, well, a voice double.

Because, sadly, Christine can't sing.

That voice double is Perdita X Nitt, born Agnes Nitt, a girl who, well, has a really nice personality and good hair. She knows that Nanny Ogg has been looking at her a little too closely, and the truth of the matter is she doesn't want to be a witch, she wants to be a young woman for whom all choices are options. But with her particular looks and her particular start in life and her particular leanings, she's got witch makings, and Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax could certainly use a third witch.

The Watch put in a brief appearance (well, all right, Nobby Nobbs and Detritus do), which add to the pandemonium as the mystery gets solved.

I like the witches a great deal, but I like all of Discworld, so I suppose that's not saying much. Pratchett plays with the idea of masks, and this book is perhaps a little more cynical than some of the other Discworld novels, but it's still well worth plunking down the $22 and adding to the read-again library.

~~~~~~~~

By MICHELLE WEST

REMEMBER, CAESAR ...

Most of us have come to expect that when the byline "Ben Bova " appears on a work of fiction, that tale will feature clean prose and clear thought; most of his work also views current events in their place within the scope of human history. Such traits certainly appear in his recent novels like Mars and his latest two, Moonrise and Moonwar (the latter will be out soon if it hasn't hit the bookstores by the time you read this). They're evident too in this short look at modern politics and near-future technology.

We have never renounced the use of terror.

She was alone and she was scared.

Apara Jaheen held her breath as the two plainclothes security guards walked past her. They both held ugly, deadly black machine pistols casually in their hands as they made their rounds along the corridor.

They can't see you, Apara told herself. You're invisible.

Still, she held her breath.

She knew that her stealth suit shimmered ever so slightly in the glareless light from the fluorescents that lined the ceiling of the corridor. You had to be looking for that delicate little ripple in the air, actively seeking it, to detect it at all. And even then you would think it was merely a trick your eyes played on you, a flicker that was gone before it even registered consciously in your mind.

And yet Apara froze, motionless, not daring to breathe, until the two men -- smelling of cigarettes and after-shave lotion -- passed her and were well down the corridor. They were talking about the war, betting that it would be launched before the week was out.

Her stealth suit's surface was honeycombed with microscopic fiber optic vidcams and pixels that were only a couple of molecules thick. The suit hugged Apara's lithe body like a famished lover. Directed by the computer built into her helmet, the vidcams scanned her surroundings and projected the imagery onto the pixels.

It was the closest thing to true invisibility that the Cabal's technology had been able to come up with. So close that, except for the slight unavoidable glitter when the sequin-like pixels caught some stray light, Apara literally disappeared into the background.

Covering her from head to toe, the suit's thermal absorption layer kept her infrared profile vanishingly low and its insulation subskin held back the minuscule electromagnetic fields it generated. The only way they could detect her would be if she stepped into a scanning beam, but the wide-spectrum goggles she wore should reveal them to her in plenty of time to avoid them.

She hoped.

Getting into the president's mansion had been ridiculously easy. As instructed, she had waited until dark before leaving the Cabal's safe house in the miserable slums of the city. Her teammates drove her as close to the presidential mansion as they dared in a dilapidated, nondescript faded blue sedan that would draw no attention. They wished her success as she slipped out of the car, invisible in her stealth suit.

"For the Cause," Ahmed said, almost fiercely, to the empty air where he thought she was.

"For the Cause," Apara repeated, knowing that she might never see him again.

Tingling with apprehension, Apara hurried across the park that fronted the mansion, unseen by the evening strollers and beggars, then climbed onto the trunk of one of the endless stream of limousines that entered the grounds. She passed the perimeter guard posts unnoticed.

She rode on the limo all the way to the mansion's main entrance. While a pair of bemedaled generals got out of the limousine and walked crisply past the saluting uniformed guards, Apara melted back into the shadows, away from the lights of the entrance, and took stock of the situation.

The guards at the big, open double doors wore splendid uniforms and shouldered assault rifles. And were accompanied by dogs: two big German shepherds who sat on their haunches, tongues lolling, ears laid back.

Will they smell me if I try to go through the doors? Apara asked herself. Muldoon and his technicians claimed that the insulated stealth suit protected her even from giving off a scent. They were telling the truth, as they knew it, of course. But were they right?

If she were caught, she knew her life would be over. She would simply disappear, a prisoner of their security apparatus. They would use drugs to drain her of every scrap of information she possessed. They would not have to kill her afterward; her mind would be gone by then. Standing in the shadows, invisible yet frightened, she tongued the cyanide capsule lodged between her upper right wisdom tooth and cheek. This is a volunteer mission, Muldoon had told her. You've got to be willing to give your life for the Cause.

Apara was willing, yet the fear still rose in her throat, hot and burning.

Born in the slums of Beirut to a mother who abandoned her and a father she never knew, she had understood from childhood that her life was worthless. Even the name they had given her, Apara, meant literally "born to die."

It was during her teen years, when she had traded her body for life itself, for food and protection against the marauding street gangs who raped and murdered for the thrill of it, that she began to realize that life was pointless, existence was pain, the sooner death took her the sooner she would be safe from all fear.

Then Ahmed entered her life and showed her that there was more to living than waiting for death. Strike back! he told her. If you must give up your life, give it for something worthwhile. Even we who are lost and miserable can accomplish something with our lives. We can change the world!

Ahmed introduced her to the Cabal, and the Cabal became her family, her teacher, her purpose for breathing.

For the first time in her short life, Apara felt worthwhile. The Cabal flew her across the ocean, to the United States of America, where she met the pink-faced Irishman who called himself Muldoon and was entrusted with her mission to the White House. And decked in the stealth suit, a cloak of invisibility, just like the magic of old Baghdad in the time of Scheherazade and the Thousand and One Nights.

You can do it, she told herself as she clung to the shadows outside the White House's main entrance. They are all counting on you: Muldoon and his technicians and Ahmed, with his soulful eyes and tender dear hands.

When the next limousine disgorged its passengers, a trio of admirals, Apara sucked in a deep breath and walked in with them, past the guards and the dogs. One of the animals perked up its ears and whined softly as she marched in step behind the admirals, but other than that heart-stopping instant she had no trouble getting inside the White House. The guard shushed the animal, gruffly.

She followed the trio of admirals out to the west wing, and down the stairs to the basement level and a long, narrow corridor. At its end, Apara could see, was a security checkpoint with a metal detector like the kind used at airports, staffed by two women in uniform. Both of them were African-Americans.

She stopped and faded back against the wall as the admirals stepped through the metal detector, one by one. The guards were lax, expecting no trouble. After all, only the president's highest and most trusted advisors were allowed here.

Then the two plainclothes guards walked past her, openly displaying their machine pistols and talking about the impending war.

"You think they're really gonna do it?"

"Don't see why not. Hit 'em before they start some real trouble. Don't wait for the mess to get worse."

"Yeah, I guess so."

They walked down the corridor as far as the checkpoint, chatted briefly with the female guards, then came back, passing Apara again, still talking about the possibility of war.

Apara knew that she could not get through the metal detector without setting off its alarm. The archway-like device was sensitive not only to metals, but sniffed for explosives and x-rayed each person stepping through it. She was invisible to human eyes but the x-ray camera would see her clearly.

She waited, hardly breathing, until the next clutch of visitors arrived. Civilians, this time. Steeling herself, Apara followed them up to the checkpoint and waited as they stopped at the detector and handed their wristwatches, coins, and belts to the women on duty, then stepped through the detector, single-file.

Timing was important. As the last of the civilians started through, holding his briefcase in front of his chest, as instructed, Apara dropped flat on her stomach and slithered across the archway like a snake speeding after its prey. Carefully avoiding the man's feet, she got through the detector just before he did.

The x-rays did not reach the floor, she had been told. She hoped it was true.

The alarm buzzer sounded. Apara, on the far side of the detector now, sprang to her feet.

"Hold it, sir," said one of the uniformed guards. "The metal detector went off."

He looked annoyed. "I gave you everything. Don't tell me the damned machine picked up the hinges on my briefcase."

The woman shrugged. "Would you mind stepping through again, sir, please?"

With a huff, the man ducked back through the doorway, still clutching his briefcase, and then stepped through once more. No alarm.

"Satisfied?" he sneered.

"Yes, sir. Thank you," the guard said tonelessly.

"Happens now and then," said her partner as she handed the man back his watch, belt and change. "Beeps for no reason."

"Machines aren't perfect," the man muttered.

"I guess," said the guard.

"Too much iron in your blood, Marty," joked one of the other men.

Apara followed them down the corridor, feeling immensely relieved. As far as her information went, there were no further security checkpoints. Unless she bumped into someone, or her suit somehow failed, she was safe.

Until she tried to get out of the White House. But that wouldn't happen until she had fulfilled her mission. If they caught her then, she would simply bite on the cyanide capsule, knowing that she had struck her blow for the Cause.

She followed the civilians into a spacious conference room dominated by a long, polished mahogany table. Most of the high-backed leather chairs were already occupied, mainly by men in military uniforms. There were more stars around the table than in a desert sky, Apara thought. One bomb in here and the U.S. military establishment would be decapitated, along with most of the cabinet heads.

She pressed her back against the bare wall next to the door as the latest arrivals went around the table, shaking hands.

They chatted idly for several minutes, a dozen different conversations buzzing around the long table. Then the president entered from the far door and they all snapped to their feet.

"Sit down, gentlemen," said the president. "And ladies," she added, smiling at the three female cabinet members who sat together at one side of the table.

The president looked older in person than she did on television, Apara thought. She was not wearing so much makeup, of course. Still, the president looked vigorous and determined, her famous green eyes sweeping the table as she took her chair at its head. For an instant those eyes looked directly at Apara, and her heart stopped. But the moment passed. The president could not see Apara any more than the others could.

The president's famous smile was absent as she sat down. Looking directly at the chairman of the joint chiefs, she asked the general, "Well, are we ready?"

"In twenty-four hours," he replied crisply. "Troop deployment is complete, the naval task force is on station and our full complement of planes is on site, ready to go."

"Then why do we need twenty-four hours?" the president demanded.

The general's silver eyebrows rose a centimeter. "Logistics, ma'am. Getting ammunition and fuel to the front-line units, setting our communications codes. Strictly routine, but very important if we want the attack to come off without a hitch."

The president was not pleased. "Every hour we delay means more pressure from the U.N."

"And from the Europeans," said one of the civilians. Apara recognized him as the secretary of defense.

"The French are complaining again?"

"They've never stopped complaining, madam president. Now they've got the Russians joining the chores. They've asked for an emergency meeting of NATO."

"Not the general assembly?"

The secretary of defense almost smiled. "No, ma'am. Even the French realize that the U.N. can't stop us."

A murmur of suppressed laughter rippled along the table. Apara felt anger. These people used the United Nations when it suited them, and ignored the U.N. otherwise.

The secretary of state, sitting at her right hand, was a thickset older man with a heavy thatch of gray hair that flopped stubbornly over his forehead. He held up a blunt-fingered hand and the table fell silent.

"I must repeat, madam president," he said in a grave, dolorous voice, "that we have not yet exhausted all our diplomatic and economic options. Military force should be our last choice, after all other possibilities have been foreclosed, not our first choice."

"We don't have time for that," snapped the secretary of defense. "And those people don't respect anything but force, anyway."

"I disagree," said state. "Our U.N. ambassador tells me that they are willing to allow the United Nations to arbitrate our differences."

"The United Nations," the president muttered.

"As an honest broker--"

"Yeah, and we'll be the honest brokee," one of the admirals wisecracked. Everyone around the table laughed.

Then the president said, "Our U.N. ambassador is a well-known weak sister. Why do you think I put him there in New York, Carlos, instead of giving him your portfolio?"

The secretary of state was not deterred. "Invading a sovereign nation is a serious decision. American soldiers and aircrew will be killed."

The president glared at him. "All right, Carlos, you've made your point. Now let's get on with it."

One of the admirals said, "We're ready with the nuclear option, if and when it's needed."

"Good," snapped the president.

And on it went, for more than an hour. The fundamentalist regime of Iran was going to be toppled by American military power. Its infiltration of other Moslem nations would end, its support of international terrorism would be wiped out.

Terrorism, Apara growled silently. They speak of using nuclear weapons and they call the Iranians terrorists.

And what am I? she asked herself. What is the Cabal and the Cause we fight for? What other weapons do we have except terror? How can we straggle for a just world, a world free of domination, unless we use terror? We have no armies, no fleets of ships or planes. Despite the lies their media publish, we have no nuclear weapons and we would not use them if we did.

Apara felt sure of that. The guiding precept of the Cause was to strike at the leaders of oppression and aggression. Why kill harmless women and children? Why strike the innocent? Or even the soldiers who merely carry out the orders of their leaders?

Strike the leaders! Put terror in their hearts. That was the strategy of the Cabal, the goal of the Cause.

Brave talk, Apara thought. Tonight we will see if it works. Apara glided along the wall until she was standing behind the president. She looked down at the woman's auburn hair, so perfectly curled and tinted. The president's fingernails were perfect, too: shaped and colored beautifully. She's never chipped a nail by doing hard work, Apara thought.

I could kill her now and it would look to them as if she had been struck down by god.

But her orders were otherwise. Apara waited.

The meeting broke up at last with the president firmly deciding to launch the attack within twenty-four hours.

"Tell me the instant everything's ready to go," she said to the chairman of the joint chiefs.

"Yes, ma'am," he said. "We'll need your positive order at that point."

"You'll get it."

She rose from her chair and they all got to their feet. Like a ghost, Apara followed the president through the door into a little sitting room, where two more uniformed security guards snapped to attention.

They accompanied her down the corridor to the main section of the mansion and left her at the elevator that went up to the living quarters on the top floor. Apara climbed the stairs; the elevator was too small. She feared the president would sense her presence in its cramped confines.

Unseen, unsensed, Apara tiptoed through the broad upstairs hallway with its golden carpet and spacious windows at either end. There were surveillance cameras discreetly placed up by the ceiling, but otherwise no obvious security up at this level -- except the electronic sensors on the windows, of course.

The president lived alone here, except for her personal servants. Her husband had died years earlier, during her election campaign, in an airplane crash that won her a huge sympathy vote.

Apara loitered in the hallway, not daring to rest on one of the plush couches lining the walls, until a servant bearing a tray with a silver carafe and bottles of pills entered the president's bedroom. Apara slipped in behind her.

The black woman turned her head, frowning slightly, as if she heard a movement behind her or felt a breath on the back of her neck. Apara froze for a moment, then edged away as the woman reached for the door and closed it.

The president was showering, judging by the sounds coming from the bathroom. Legs aching from being on her feet for so many hours, Apara went to the far window and glanced out at the darkened garden, then turned back to watch the servant deposit the tray on the president's night table and leave the room, silent and almost as unnoticed as Apara herself.

There was one wooden chair in the bedroom and Apara sat on it gratefully, knowing that she would leave no telltale indentation on its hard surface. She felt very tired, sleepy. The adrenalin had drained out of her during the long meeting downstairs. She hoped the president would finish her shower and get into bed and go to sleep quickly.

It was not to be. The president came out of the bathroom soon enough, but she sat up in bed and read for almost another hour before finally putting down the paperback novel and reaching for the pills on the night table. One, two, three different pills she took, with sips of water or whatever was in the carafe the servant had left.

At last the president sank back on her pillows, snapped her fingers to turn off the lights, and closed her eyes. Apara waited the better part of another hour before stirring off the chair. She had to be certain that the president was truly, deeply asleep.

Slowly she walked to the side of the bed. She stared at the woman lying there, straining to hear the rhythm of her breathing through the insulated helmet.

Deep, slow breaths. She's really sleeping, Apara decided. If the thought of invading another country and killing thousands of people bothered her, she gave no indication of it. Maybe the pills she took helped her to sleep. She must have some qualms about what she was going to do.

Apara realized she was the one with the qualms. I can leave her here and get out of the mansion undetected, she told herself.

And the Cause, the purpose of her life, would evaporate like dew in the hot desert sun. Muldoon would be despairing, Ahmed so furious that he would never speak to her again. They would know she was unreliable, a risk to their own safety.

Strike! she told herself. They are all counting on you. Everything depends on you.

She struck.

By seven-fifteen the next morning the White House was surrounded by an armed cordon of U.S. Marines. No one was allowed onto the grounds, no one was allowed to leave the mansion.

Apara had already left; she simply walked out with the cleaning crew, a few minutes after five A.M.

The president summoned her secretary of state to the oval office at eight sharp. It was early for him, and he had to pass through the gauntlet of Marines as well as the regular guards and secret service agents. He stared in wonder as more Marines, in their colorful full-dress uniforms, stood in place of the usual servants.

"What's going on?" he asked the president when he was finally ushered into the oval office.

She looked ghastly: her face was gray, her eyes darting nervously. She clutched a thin scrap of paper in one hand.

"Never mind," the president said curtly. "Sit down."

The secretary of state sat in front of her desk. He himself felt blearyeyed and rumpled, this early in the morning.

Without preamble, the president asked, "Carlos, do you seriously think we can settle this crisis without a military strike?"

The secretary of state looked surprised, but he quickly regained his wits. "I've been trying to tell you that for the past six weeks, Alicia."

"You think diplomacy can get us what we want."

"Diplomacy and economic pressures, yes. We can even get the United Nations on our side, if we call off this military strike. It's not too late, you know."

The president leaned back in her chair, fiddling with that scrap of paper, trying to keep her hands from trembling. Unwilling to allow her secretary of state to see how upset she was, she swiveled around to look out the long windows at the springtime morning. Birds chirped happily among the flowers.

"All right," she said, her mind made up. "Tell Muldoon to ask for an emergency session of the Security Council. That's what he's been after all along."

A boyish grin broke across the secretary of state's normally dour face. "I'll phone him right now. He's still in New York."

"Do that," said the president. Then she added, "From your own office."

"Yes, ma'am!"

The secretary of state trotted off happily, leaving the president alone at her desk in the oval office. With the note still clutched in her shaking hand.

I'll put the entire White House staff through the wringer, she said to herself. Every damned one of them. Interrogate them until their brains are fried. I'll find out who's responsible for this...this...

She shuddered involuntarily.

They got into my bedroom. My own bedroom! Who did it? How many people in this house are plotting against me?

They could have killed me!

I'll turn the note over to the secret service. No, they screwed up. If they were doing their job right this would never have happened. The attorney general. Give it to the F.B.I. They'll find the culprit.

Her hands were shaking so badly she could hardly read the note.

Remember Caesar, thou art dust.

That's all the note said. Yet it struck terror into her heart. They could have killed me. This was just a warning. They could have killed me just as easily as leaving this warning on my pillow.

For the first time in her life, she felt afraid.

She looked around the oval office, at the familiar trappings of power, and felt afraid. It's like being haunted, she said to herself.

In his apartment in New York, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations nodded as he spoke to the president's security advisor.

"That's good news, Carlos!" said Herbert Muldoon, with a hint of Irish lilt in his voice. "Excellent news. I'm sure the president's made the right choice."

He cut the connection with Washington and immediately punched up the number of the U.N.'s secretary general, thinking as his fingers tapped on the keyboard:

It worked! Apara did the job. Now we'll have to send her to Tehran. And others, too, of course. The mullahs may be perfectly willing to send young assassins to their deaths, but I wonder how they'll react when they know they're the ones being targeted.

We'll find out soon.

~~~~~~~~

By Ben Bova

GENTLE HORSES

Ms. Seelhammer tells us she was infatuated with horses when she was young. At the age of eleven, she used her babysitting money to acquire a stubborn and ill-trained mare, which she boarded on a dairy farm next to the expensive stable on the outskirts of her Minnesota hometown. A few years have passed since then and she lives nowadays in the San Tan mountains of Arizona, but we don't know if she has horses there. Regardless, you'll find you're in for quite a ride when some new technology gets introduced into the stables.

Diane slowed the electric car and examined the calm yearlings grazing in the paddocks that bordered the drive leading to Equigenics stable. Most were bays or chestnuts, clean-lined and healthy looking if a little eerie in their stillness. She was impressed and a bit surprised to find that this relatively new genetic engineering operation included nearly a hundred acres of irrigated fields and pastures as well as the modern stable and arenas.

Her first job interview, by vidphone, had left her with the impression that Equigenics was little more than a start-up business, just a riding academy with maybe an old barn, a lab in the garage and a handful of horses. The director, Len Malcolm, had emphasized the need for someone willing to do "hands-on dirty work." He needed someone to run the stable and manage riding lessons, but he wanted someone who knew the science as well. It sounded exactly like what she needed: way too much work and responsibility, enough to absorb her completely and force her to forget everything else. And, better yet, it would be a return to the world of horses. It seemed that most of the recent wrong turns in her life had started when she left that world for university research. That turn in the road of life, like her marriage, had led to a dead end. So now, after three months of unemployment, Diane was determined to get this job.

She parked the car, stepped out onto the gravel lot and squinted in the sharp sunlight. She shaded her eyes and watched an impatient-looking woman urge two little girls wearing riding clothes into the back seat of an expensive propane sedan. The sight made her smile a little wryly, it was so familiar. How many hundreds of times had her mother shuttled her to riding lessons? For a time it had seemed as if she might follow her mother's example and be the one doing the shuttling. But not anymore.

As the sedan drove away, Diane followed it with her eyes, watching it disappear behind the low, rolling hills where the mad curved back toward the wealthier suburbs of the city. The green of the fenced fields and the tan of the distant hills calmed her. She took a deep breath and headed for the office.

Len Malcolm in person was as abrupt and no-nonsense as he had been on the vidphone. He was clean shaven and his dark hair was trimmed short. He wore very plain clothes. He shook her hand with precisely the appropriate amount of pressure; this was a man used to control. She felt her own emotions rise a notch in response and had to squelch the desire to say something outrageous. She doubted that this man had any sense of humor.

Len did not look at her when he spoke. Instead, he seemed to talk just past her head, never making eye contact. He acted as if he were irritated by her very presence. Diane tried to ignore it. After some brief, uncomfortable small talk came a tour of the facility. They would continue the interview when they returned to the office, Len said.

In the arena, two of the advanced students were practicing jumps. They rode grays with identical programming -- and it showed in the way the horses approached each jump. Diane recognized the physical type of the horses from some of the cataloguing she had done at the university: a common Irish hunter line. The source of the viral programming was not familiar to her. But then that was the specialty of Equigenics --tailoring programming of knowledge with viruses.

She and Len leaned against the arena rail and watched the grays canter, each hoof kicking up a puff of dust, the horses grunting when they jumped. One of the riders was less skilled than the other; when she sat too fast, she threw off the balance of her horse and there was a loud thunk as the left rear hoof knocked off the top rail.

On the walk back, Diane saw grooms distribute alfalfa cubes to the box stalls of the breeding stock. Three stalls were empty, the horses turned out into paddocks while their stalls were cleaned. The odors of the feed and manure brought back memories. It smelled like home.

Len narrated the tour in abrupt announcements of fact. He pointed out things that anyone who had spent any time at all in a stable would know. Diane nodded politely.

"Arion is the center of the current research," Len said as they turned the corner toward the most isolated of the box stalls. For the first time, his stony face showed some expression: a combination of pride and something else, something like lust. When he noticed her watching him, the expression vanished. But she had seen it and it reminded her of her exhusband when he used to speak about the mindgames he played on those who competed with him for research dollars.

Diane followed his gaze. The stall had reinforced bars and an industrial strength door. At first she could not see into the gloom behind the bars. Something moved in that dark, something breathed, but she could not make out a shape until her eyes adjusted.

The stallion was taller than was usual, at least eighteen hands. He stood in the far corner and watched them, crunching the hay cubes, his finely boned head tilted to one side so he could watch them with one too-intelligent eye, both sharp-pointed ears straining forward to catch Len's voice.

Arion was black. Very black. Not dark bay, not a coat that faded to gray or seal brown or that would fade in the sun, but so black that the light reflected from his coat looked blue; a fantasy color that immediately identified him as a designed horse. The horse snorted and took the few steps to the door, lifting his nose to the grate. Diane moved forward, pressing her palm on the other side and gently blew into the horse's nose, trading breath. The stallion snorted and backed up. Diane turned and looked at Len. "Nice."

Len narrowed his eyes. "You have no idea." He walked back toward the office.

Diane felt a stab of embarrassment, quickly squelched by anger. "So tell me," she said, walking fast to catch up with him. "I can't appreciate what I don't know."

"He is not just some pretty genetic package. He is programmed at championship level," Len said, slowing down slightly.

"Okay. So where's he competed?"

"He hasn't -- yet. I plan to start him in the fall. When I find the right rider." He stopped and turned toward her. "Listen, I think you've seen enough. I'll call you if I want to talk to you again."

Diane felt as if she had been dismissed. She stopped walking. "Wait just a minute," she said. "That's it? That's the interview?" She felt herself grow tense with rage. "What kind of a..."

A crash interrupted her, then a horse's scream. "Arion," Len shouted and ran back toward the stall, Diane one step behind him.

The stallion stood trembling at the back of the stall, one rear leg still in the air, ready to kick. There was a gouge in the wall from an earlier kick. He shook his head and bared his teeth, crashing both rear hooves at the stall wall, the impact so severe it shook the wall.

A groom ran to Len with a med kit and a palm-sized trank gun. Len shoved him out of the way, yanked open the big latch on the stall door and shouldered his way in. Arion paced in tight circles, pawing straw and striking the wall with rear hooves. Len slid the heavy door closed behind him.

Diane watched through the door's metal screen as Len whispered to the horse. The stallion was backed into a comer now, head high, nostrils flared, white foam of sweat along his arched neck and wide chest. The groom cursed in Spanish behind her. He called Arion a devil horse.

Whatever Len was doing seemed to be working; Arion lowered his head and calmed his breathing.

"Diane." Len spoke in the same calming tone, but he gestured slowly toward her without turning his head. She slid the door open enough to squeeze into the stall and walked up behind Len. Arion snorted and jerked his head up; she froze.

"Talk to him," Len said. "He's the most important part of this operation. He's going to be your responsibility, if you're good enough."

"I'm good enough," she said. "I have years of experience in training and stable management, and I just left a research position.... "Arion snorted again, rolled an eye, and began to shift his weight.

"Shut up," Len said in the same soothing voice he'd been using on the horse. "Just shut the fuck up and talk to the horse. Tell him what a beauty he is, what a technological wonder, how you will ride him, how he is going to make us all famous. He doesn't give a shit about your degrees or experience."

Diane felt herself blush, a heat that crawled up her neck to her face. She was about to turn and leave when Len added "...or aren't you good enough, after all."

She took another step forward and began to prattle in a calm tone, words from lullabies, sound that ran from her toward the stallion. She reached to touch the horse and he let her caress his neck. She felt something like electricity between them; it flowed up her arm and she knew she had the stallion's complete attention. He stretched his big head toward her and sniffed loudly. She blew into the wide nostrils. He was a beautiful animal and all her thoughts focused on his large, dark eyes. She forgot about Len except to notice he was no longer in the stall. She talked to the stallion until he was completely calm and his head leaned against her shoulder. By then it was dark outside.

That should show the bastard, she thought as she slipped out of the stall.

She moved into the empty apartment above the stable the next day. And she got the pay she asked for.

The next week, the night that the two new breeding mares arrived, Arion had another episode. The mares were in the box stalls as far from Arion as possible.

But that night the stallion could smell them, hear them nicker to him, feel their heat, sense their raised tails and winking vulvas. When he started to kick the walls, the crashing woke Diane. She ran out of her apartment in her night-clothes to find Len already at Arion's stall.

Len moved the mares one at a time to pens just outside the barn, disappearing into the night as soon as he stepped outside. Diane stood in the stall next to Arion's, talking soothing nonsense in the gloom, fingers hooked into the steel screening. The stallion's frustration came in waves, an invisible heat flashing across her skin. Then Len walked up behind her and she could sense him, just as Arion had sensed the mares. She heard the crisp sound of crushed new straw as he approached. Arion was suddenly still. She didn't turn toward Len, didn't even think; he put one hand over hers on the screen, the other around her waist. She felt his weight, heavy as the silence, and his breath on the tender skin between her collar and hairline. She pressed into Len, all of her back and hips curved against him. Len pushed his face to her neck, nipping her with soft lips. She turned toward him and lifted her arms. He held her and rocked gently back and forth. She twined a leg around him and he lowered her to the deep straw, lay beside her and lowered his head to her breasts. She ran her fingers through his hair in short, hard motions.

The rest of the horses were oblivious to their movements in the straw, but Arion breathed in harsh, nervous gasps. A small voice in Diane's mind objected, but she was so filled with longing that she only gasped, matching the sound of the stallion. She fumbled with the snaps of Len's shirt and felt him tense and pull away from her. He pushed himself to his feet and walked from the stall fast, his boots clicking on the flooring of the alley. Diane sat up and wondered what the hell had happened.

Her mother called too early that morning, awake and cheerful in another time zone. What had happened in the night with Len came back to Diane with a rush. He had all but run away from her.

"You sound tired," her mother said.

"It's four A.M.," Diane growled.

"Is it? I always forget how that works. Your father's in Rio with his latest 'friend.' He says hello and congratulations on your first real job, but he wishes you would have let him find you something better. He could have helped you get something permanent at the university, you know. How are things?"

"I don't know yet," Diane said, thinking how she would never again put up with the politics at the university, politics she had failed at. And she hoped she would never have to ask her father to pull strings for her. But what could she tell her mother about this place, or about Len? Not a thing.

"It's really busy here, Mom," she said. "Everyone wants foals born just after the first of the year, so all the mares are being implanted now. And we still have to run all the riding lessons."

"Are you sure this is the right kind of job? I know you feel you need to prove something after the trouble at school, but..."

"Mom. You promised."

"Well, I can't help it. You had every advantage here and you just .... Divorce is not the worst thing in the world, you know. And the loss of that research project was not your fault, you were just the one easiest to blame. None of that matters. But you sound sad. I can't believe you don't have a vidphone. What kind of place is that?"

Diane thought about what she could possibly say that would reassure her mother. "It's a start-up, Mom. My boss is...brilliant. But I don't really know him at all."

"What's his name?"

"Len Malcolm."

"Malcolm? I don't know any Malcolms. It's not like he owns the place, is it? Your father said it's a corporate operation."

"It's not corporate -- yet. This is just a little place with a couple of investors. But Len's got some corporation interested. He owns the stud that's going to be used as a source. He helped design him. If this new line makes it, he'll be able to have his own place. It's a big risk."

"Then he should be careful. I always told your father to be careful. He never listened to me though. If this Malcolm succeeds, he won't need you anymore, right? Maybe you can come home then, and settle down."

"I'm not moving back there, Mom. And if he succeeds, maybe I'll be part of the success." If I can stick it out, Diane thought. If I don't go crazy.

That night, after a long day of work with grooms and teaching staff and watching the progress of little girls in pigtails, Diane stopped in the office to look through the e-mail. She half hoped Len would stop by so they could talk, but he stayed in his lab, as usual. Later, on the way to her apartment, she was drawn to the stall of each of the motionless brood mares. She touched their velvet muzzles, the prickle of whiskers like the stubble of an unshaved lover. She pushed forelocks from deep brown eyes, scratched around ears, and whispered into the long, smooth necks, inhaling the smell of spring grasses, salt, and autumn straw.

Len found her with the mare nearest Arion. He stood behind Diane and reached over her shoulder to run his hand down the marc's smooth withers and across the intricate whorl of hair along a flank. With his other hand he stroked the back of Diane's head, the arch of her neck, and brushed salty fingers gently across her lips. She wondered, just faintly and for a fleeting moment, why she was doing this, why Len, why they had not spoken of it. Arion snorted and pawed with a forefoot, sharp punctuation to his ragged breathing. Then all her conscious thoughts vanished, replaced with longing, desire, need.

The next morning, except for the bruises on her hips and the fragment of straw in her hair, Diane would have thought she had dreamed it.

"While I'm gone, stick to the schedule."

Len was packing his briefcase for a shuttle to Dallas to judge a weeklong dressage competition. There was talk that one of the contenders was worth considering for sourcing. Len wanted to check him out and compare him to Arion. "Make no changes, got it? And keep an eye on that Cunningham kid."

Diane had been called into the office for this briefing. It was the first time they had talked face to face since the interview. He usually just left her e-mail and locked himself in his lab with orders not to be disturbed.

And when they met at night, there was no talk.

"That kid could be trouble," Len said. "She's on some kind of scholarship and the other students don't like her."

"I thought she was doing okay, that we had all the right horses and right programs for all the riders."

"She's riding fine, but keep her away from Arion. I caught her at his stall this morning when I went to exercise him. I told her to stay away, that he could be dangerous. He's not like the mares she rides."

"Maybe she's just curious."

Len looked up from the briefcase for a second, eyes a startling and angry flash of blue, then back down. He pushed a handful of folders into a side pocket. "I'm serious. I don't want her, or any of the others, near him. Only you."

"She's dropped off here really early and she stays all day. If the other students don't like her she probably gets bored. Why are you so touchy?"

Len shrugged. He zipped the briefcase shut.

Diane wanted to scream Why won't you look at me? Talk to me? Instead she took a deep breath and said softly: "Is it this trip? What's wrong?"

"No, this trip is important. The Texas breeders are important. It's the timing of it. Keeping everything constant is essential. You're sure you're ready for the vital transfers?"

"All I do is run the programs, right? It's not a big deal. Don't worry."

"I always worry," he said. "That's one of the secrets to success in this business."

Five horses walked nose to tail along the rail of the indoor arena, moving in and out of dusty pools of light cast by spots hidden in the high ceiling. Little girls, backs very straight, hands held low, sat atop them. The horses moved at a regular, patient gait, gazing straight ahead. Two were bays, one with a cropped mane; one gray; one chestnut with white pasterns and a blaze; and the last was spotted, a black-and-white paint. Except for the rhythmic motion of legs and bobbing heads, the horses and small riders could have been from an old-fashioned carousel, spinning in slow motion with no music.

Beginner classes require patience, Diane thought as she watched the students and their teacher. Not patience on the part of these pampered girls in their jewel- and pastel-colored clothes, sitting so high up the backs of such immense animals. The teacher, standing in the center of the ring, turning to watch the riders, needed the patience. There was no possibility of any unexpected action. The mares were walking wombs, nothing more: perfect practice mounts, so placid there was sometimes a risk that health problems would be overlooked. Making sure nothing was overlooked was part of Diane's job.

Diane's thoughts drifted. What did these students feel? Diane tried to remember from her early lessons but she realized it didn't compare.

Confident. That's how they would feel. Confident that they looked good and would soon learn enough to try one of the horses programmed with a more complex riding program. In a couple of years they would own their own top-of-the-line mounts, bring home ribbons and trophies enough to fill fireplace mantels, and fulfill parental expectations and financial investments. Then they would move on, train in dressage or jumping, or lose interest in riding and study etiquette or gymnastics, prepare for the cotillion, the grand tour, the next season's coming-out event.

The monied class was grasping at past symbols of privilege, staying "pure," as if doing so would stop change in the world. The families of these girls guarded them every bit as much as they did their homes with their interactive security systems and their walled, guarded communities. After these lessons, and other rites of passage, these girls would make the financially correct marriage, conceive the appropriate number of heirs, and nurture the next generation of monied little girls to take riding lessons. Diane realized that the girls might not be that different from the very gentle mares they were riding. After all, they were bred and programmed for one purpose, weren't they? Maybe that was unfair. The same thing could have been said about her.

The difference was that she had managed to escape and build her own life. Or at least she was trying to, even if it meant a false start or two.

Besides, her history was not quite the same as that of the little girls'. Yes, she came from the same class and background. But the horses Diane learned to ride hadn't been programmed at all. How had she felt when she rode? Excited. Knowing that the thousand-kilo animal she was learning to control had a mind of its own and could choose to obey or not, to throw her off and run away, or to execute the turn she was trying for, making her look as if she were the one in charge.

The teacher clapped her hands and the five horses stopped and stood still, not even an ear twitching. The girls dismounted, four from tiny English saddles, slithering off as if from a playground slide. The fifth, on the paint, swung her right leg over the back of the horse and dropped from a western saddle. She was much taller than the others and wore creamy buckskin chaps, a fringed shirt and bolero. The other four girls wore brilliant jodhpurs with silk tops, soft black knee-high boots and velvet-covered hard hats. Two carried riding crops.

Once they stood in the sand of the ring floor, these four began to chatter among themselves; they took the reins and led their horses out of the ring into the main part of the barn. Two of the girls were so small they could almost walk right underneath the horses. Their voices were chirps in the immense arena, distorted and lost in the soft sand and high, dark ceilings. The horses followed the girls with careful, patient steps.

Diane watched the four who rode English. The girl in the chaps trailed behind. She was Vita Cunningham, but Diane could never remember which of the other four girls was which. She thought of them by the horses they rode, using the mares' code names or file numbers from their lip tattoos. The horses' histories, bloodlines, tailoring and programming she knew in exact detail. They were the purest of traditional strains, no crossgenre or constructs here.

The two bays were Beta 8 and 9, genetically identical, a combination of the Dublin and Kodaka lines, considered state-of-the-art six years ago, now rumored to be susceptible to colic or founder toward end of term. Diane had notes to watch them closely when the time came. The gray Cosmo came from a knock-off Arabian splicer and she was old, but had a good record. The chestnut Gusto 24 was carrying her first foal and had no record, but others with similar combinations had good reports. The paint was Navajo, some kind of personal preference of Len's, Kodaka genes wrapped in Indian pony coloring. A horse from his northern Arizona ranch childhood or something. He never explained anything. All five were programmed for maximum stability, basic brood mare traits, and beginner riding lessons.

Diane followed the black-and-white paint down the immaculate alley and turned right, toward the box stalls, to do a visual check. One mare stood in a comer of its stall, chewing hay cubes from a feeder. The others hung their heads over the stall door into the alley, the flutter of eyelashes and breath from nostrils their only movement, eyes black and motionless. The girls groomed their beginner mares, each horse cross-tied in front of its stall. Diane stopped to watch the girls as they stretched and ducked, using soft brushes and hard currycombs to groom their horses.

"You have to finish intermediate, then you can ride a jumper," Diane heard the girl from the gray say. She was brushing a foreleg. "It took my sister two years."

"Some people go faster," Vita said. She stood near the paint's head, fiddling with the bit on the bridle. Her hair hung down to hide her face. Her hands were large, nails chewed short. "If you have the right program and the right horse, you can learn faster."

"That's stupid. You still have to learn all the levels. And as you advance, you change horses to one with more advanced programming."

"Yeah, and if you want to compete, you have to prove you did them all," said the girl from the chestnut.

"I heard that it used to be if you rode the same horse all the time, you got so good you could read each other's mind."

"That's stupid, too. If you rode the same horse all the time then both you and the horse would have to learn everything and it would take twice as long." She looked around at Diane. "Right, Ms. Newton?"

Diane thought about how she learned. "It used to take a long time," she said. "People lost interest, it took so long. It was dangerous too."

"But that's the way you learned." Vita tilted her head so her hair fell across one eye. "With just one horse."

"Yes. A thoroughbred gelding." She remembered the sense of victory when she'd finally gained control of him, making him do just what she wanted when she wanted.

"Could you read his mind?" There was longing in Vita's voice.

"No." Not really, no matter how much she had wished for it. "But when you ride well, it looks that way." Felt that way, too.

"Staying with one horse would be boring anyway," said the girl with the gray. Diane left them and went to Arion's stall.

The stallion was near the door, looking through his screen which was closed so he couldn't put his head out. Couldn't risk having some student getting bitten, after all. The barred window on the far wall painted a square of morning sunlight onto the golden straw and black lacquer of Arion's chest and forelegs.

When he saw Diane, the horse shook his head, black mane tumbling from one side of his long neck to the other, and took a step back out of the sunlight. For a second she felt a flash of fear. Any stallion was unpredictable. Arion stretched his neck toward the screen, nostrils wide, breathing with a huffing sound. She thought of Len, a quick stab of heat in her belly. She pressed her palm against the screen. "Hey, boy, it's okay, shhh." Arion's nose nearly touched her hand, a fine soft gray blending to black. There would be parties in Dallas, and trade shows with corporate breeders.

What would Len be doing tonight? Arion jerked his head back. He pawed the straw. Why did she care? Diane walked off toward the office.

That evening Diane spent a frustrating half-hour in her apartment trying to reason on the phone with the mother of one of the riding students, a woman who was convinced that her daughter was a genius and should progress faster than the others. The call had interrupted dinner. The stir-fry cooled and her appetite sank as her anger rose. When she hung up the phone, after agreeing to meet with the woman later in the week, she accidently kicked the saddle stand, tripped, and fell onto the couch. She pounded her fists on the couch cushion in frustration.

Crashing sounds from the stable interrupted her fit of temper. She raced down the stairs, headed straight for Arion. As she neared the stall, her heart pounding, the screen above the door flew open with the sound of shrieking metal. Arion continued to kick, using both back feet, making strangled noises of rage. Diane thought about using the intercom to call some of the grooms from their trailers. Someone would get hurt if she did, she knew it. She scuttled along the alley as far from Arion as possible and went to the lab for the trank gun.

Len woke her early in the morning, calling from Dallas, his voice lost in the noise of a party.

"How is everything?"

"What?" Dreams of flight still clouded her mind, images of deserts, skies the color of flame. Her legs tangled in the sheets. She had slept so soundly she had trouble waking.

"How is Arion acting?"

"Fine, everything is fine." She yawned and tried to remember what she had meant to tell him.

She heard laughter and shouting. Music blared loud and faded again. "...revolution," someone said. A woman's shrill voice said, "They'd pay millions!" Len said nothing.

"Where are you? It sounds like a party." Diane asked.

"It is, sort of. It's the investors. I have to go but I wanted to make sure everything was okay. We might have some important visitors when I get back."

"Everything's fine," Diane said. "Good luck."

The conversation ended. She realized as she hung up that he'd said nothing to her, not really. He'd just been checking in with the office.

At dawn, when she got up despite a foggy headache, she realized she had forgotten to tell him about Arion and the smashed stall door. She pulled on jeans and a soft, warm shirt, and walked down the stairs to the stable, through the tender sounds of the mares sleeping, their dreams as blank as their eyes.

In the lab she made a cup of very strong coffee and looked through the latest readouts. Test results showed an anomaly in the hormone levels of the two Beta bays. She checked the file cabinet for copies of their levels from last year, but she couldn't find them. She wondered if Len had them in his lab. As she headed in that direction she felt a stab of guilt. She ignored it. After all, he had never exactly ordered her not to go into the lab.

The place was smaller than she remembered from the brief tour. A computer console and a row of file cabinets lined one wall. The rest of the space was taken up by the thermo-cycler on a table in the center, the walk-in refrigerator and shelves of carefully labeled beakers, flasks and milk bottles. She headed for the file cabinet. All the drawers were locked.

She was about to leave when she noticed the row of bound printouts stacked next to the console screen. The comer of a file folder stuck out beside one of them. She slid it out and found it filled with clippings and hard copies about the stable.

She looked through the clips, reading things she already knew about the operation. Others were about Len Malcolm: his scholarships and research awards when he was young, his work with Kodaka on the Falk hunter. One clipping from a small town paper in Arizona described his graduate degrees. She read that with interest. One early thesis was titled Exploration of Recessive Nature of Sensitive Traits Among Highly Trained Performance Horses. Another was Field Observations of Stallion Dominance in Wild Mustang Herds. Another was Marketing Progressive Lessons Through the Use of Incremental Program Changes.

She closed the file and started to slide it back where she had found it. She paused and pulled open one of the bound printouts. Records of some experiments, she noted. Careful descriptions of the effect of various dosages on test subjects. The dates were recent and it looked as if a new subject had been added. She knew some horses required drugs to be made susceptible to programming with viruses. She could not tell which horses were the subjects of these tests; the names were in some kind of code.

Diane sighed, put the book back and left the lab. She made a note to herself to talk to Len about the mare's hormone levels and about these tests. If one of the brood mares was being dragged, she needed to know it.

Arion was quiet when Diane checked him, an hour before the beginner class. Vita was peering over the stall door at him, but she disappeared around a corner as soon as she saw Diane approach. The stallion stood in the center of his stall, legs braced outward and head hanging toward the straw. He reminded Diane of the brood mares. She ordered the door repaired and reduced his feed. That might help keep him calm.

Len returned with contracts secured for most of the unborn foals. He had arranged preliminary distribution rights with the new dressage source. He should have been jubilant, but he was distant. Diane had reports on fetal development and hormone levels waiting for him, but he didn't even look at them.

"How is Arion?" was his first question.

"He was almost unmanageable a couple times, but he's fine now. I changed his feed."

"What?" His face hardened and he stared at her with narrowed eyes.

"I reduced the calories. There's no need for him to be hyped up all the time now."

"I told you -- no changes while I was gone. Change it back. Kodaka is sending a team here to look at him. They're bringing a mare too. I want him like he was before I left, right on the edge, ready for breeding. This is important."

"Why?"

"Just do it."

The Kodaka mare arrived in the night; Len took care of settling her into a stall himself. This visit had to be kept very quiet, Len told Diane; too many students were around and information traveled way too fast. Diane never saw the people who brought the mare, but when they left, Len went with them.

That night Diane dreamed of roaring sounds, twisting motions, burning flames, and woke to find herself visiting the mares again. She'd been asleep but now she stood barefoot in the straw. She could hear Arion squealing. She longed for something, fought desire, felt waves of heat. She forced herself back to the stairs and up to her apartment. She sat on the floor, back against the door, knees curled to her chest, waiting for daylight. She could not define the turmoil she felt, did not know what she needed. She suffered passion soaring and falling. But there was fear most of all.

At dawn Diane dressed slowly, her hands shaking as she pulled on her boots. She went down the stairs to the stallion's stall, her steps loud in the quiet.

Vita stood in front of the stall door, on tiptoes, fingers curled into the screen. Arion faced her, making low, rough sounds. The girl did not move.

There was a sound from the stall across from Arion and Diane saw the new mare, black as cinders, circling, rubbing up against the door and screen of her stall. No placid brood mare, she snorted and struck out, turning fast. Vita turned too, first to one side, then the other, pressing herself against the stall door. The mare pawed the straw. Vita moaned.

Diane felt the heat from all the nights, frustration and longing filling her mind, stretching into her soul. She took a step forward. The stallion rumbled. The mare squealed. Vita echoed the sound, thin and sharp.

No, no, this is wrong, Diane thought. I am in control, you obey me. She remembered the gelding she first learned to ride, his sly movements, testing her. She remembered the feel of Len pressed against her, the feel of the sharp blades of straw against her back. The mare squealed again, turning to kick at the stall door. Vita cried out.

Diane realized she was panting. She wrapped her hands around the handle of the nearest stall door, her nails digging into the wood.

Len had done this. This was the secret, the horse to replace all the programmed steps, the horse that would change the industry. One horse, not just programmed, but linked to its rider. So closely linked that when Arion was tranquilized, she had felt tranquilized too. But who would be in control? He had experimented on her, testing Arion's abilities, observing them just like he'd watched the wild mustangs, noting dominance and control. She took deep breaths, focused on her anger. Arion whirled in his stall, facing her. The window glowed behind him, soft light silhouetting his head and neck. He shouted a challenge, head up, leaping a stiff step forward.

She felt her anger grow, her legs relax. She sidled past the stalls, step by step, headed for the lab. The trank gun was there, and the other things she would need. She would be in control.

Arion shrieked another challenge behind her. She felt her anger grow and used it to fire her determination. She began to count loudly inside her mind, blocking out all emotion. One, two, three... She carried the gun back to the mare, pushing Vita aside as she did so. The girl stumbled and fell.

Diane set the gun to the highest level, aimed through the grill, and shot the mare three time. She kept counting in her mind, four, five, six... The mare grunted, then grew still, and collapsed like a string puppet into the straw. Diane felt the tension fall, as if a window had closed. Then she sensed fear from Arion, then rage.

There was a choking sound from Vita. The girl was scrambling to her feet, growling in fury, seven, eight, nine... Diane set the gun to its lowest level and shot Vita, the dart hitting the girl in the front of her thigh. Vita stumbled, leaned against the stall door and slid to the floor, ten, eleven, twelve...

Diane stood and looked at the stallion. He was so enraged that he shuddered as he stood. This was no horse, this was a mind-controlling evil. This animal had no right to exist, to dominate the minds of people around it. He was the pinnacle of Len's research, but he was wrong, all wrong. All the breeding and programming, it was a mistake. It had to be ended.

She tucked the trank gun into the oversized pocket of her jacket. But still, all that programming, all the pain she had been through... Would it all be wasted.? No. She headed for the tack room to collect bridle and saddle. Before Arion was destroyed, she would ride him.

She grew calm with the certainty. She visualized herself saddling a calm horse and concentrated on the image. She carried the tack toward the now silent stall where the stallion stood waiting for her.

She opened the stall door and left it open, stepping into the straw. She avoided looking at the horse's head. I have no emotions but calm, she thought as she mechanically lifted the saddle onto the stallion's back. He flinched, but did not step away. I have no emotions, just steady progress, she thought to herself and began to again count in her mind, one, two, three... She reached under his belly for the cinch and pulled it tight in one swift movement, four, five, six... Then she took the bridle from her shoulder and, without making eye contact, slid the bit into Arion's mouth and the leather over his ears, buckling the strap under his jaw, seven, eight, nine...

She put her hands onto his withers and with one jump, she was on her stomach across his back, ten, eleven, twelve... She swung her right leg over and searched for the stirrups with her feet as she ducked her head and directed the horse out of the stall. She felt Arion tremble beneath her, sensed his confusion. She visualized the paddock in front of the stable. She concentrated hard and turned the horse toward the door, one, two, three...

The door opened and Len stepped inside. Arion stopped dead. Diane forgot what number came next.

"What the hell are you doing?" Len shouted.

Arion began to tremble violently. He tried to turn his head but Diane corrected him with a jerk of the rein.

"Get out of my way," Diane said, suddenly more angry than afraid, feeling her emotion begin to mix with that of Arion.

Len ran a few steps toward them. The horse took a fast step back and hopped to the side. Len grabbed for the rein, but the horse shied away.

"Get off! Right now, get off!" He grabbed again for the rein, but Arion took two fast steps backwards. Diane had sensed the move and was able to keep her balance. She felt the horse as if he were an extension of her own body.

For a second she imagined herself with Len, at night in the stall. She viewed the scene, and herself, from above and behind.

She sensed the control that Len had used on her, feeding his lust to the stallion. And hadn't she been full of desire? But it had not been real. It had not been her choice. She looked down at Len, red-faced and shouting as he again reached for the rein.

Still watching from above, she saw herself shift her weight and she felt the strength of the stallion as he reared. She sensed the feel of the kick, the stretch of the full extension as the horse lashed out at Len, hitting him full in the chest and knocking him back against the wall. She felt the perfection of the controlled spin as the horse pirouetted 180 degrees, then bucked, hitting Len again with both back hooves. She watched herself and the horse sidestep, then two more strikes with the forefeet, before a leap toward the door. She did not turn to look at the crumpled and bloody body as she lunged into the dawn.

As she galloped onto the gravel she felt herself expand, to move higher, to watch from farther above. She sensed a fury from the stallion, a desire to flee, to escape the fight. It matched her own emotions. She loosened her control, both physical and emotional. She focused her thoughts on the trank gun tucked in her pants, and the horse slowed, hesitating for a fraction of a second before extending his stride and racing faster. She could feel his heart pumping, hear the rush of his breathing. Her mind was filled with the steady motion of the horse, the feel of the wind. Arion surged forward, stretching to a faster gallop, down the road and toward the dusty hills.

~~~~~~~~

By Cynthia Seelhammer

REFLECTION AND INSIGHT

Question: Who has graced these pages fifteen times since 1981 and plans to drop in again before too long?

Answer: He may not be the fairest of them all, but the wizard Kedrigern is always welcome in these parts, particularly when he has one of those enchanted mirrors causing a stir.

WITH SPOT'S HELP, KEDRIGERN wrestled the large awkward bundle carefully into the cottage as Princess looked on with anxious interest. It was wrapped in heavy cloths, tied securely, and from the amount of grunting the wizard was doing, it was of considerable weight.

"Is it very heavy?" she asked.

"Very," he said, putting it down gingerly and taking a deep breath.

"You're lucky you had Spot to help you."

He rubbed his lower back and groaned. "Even with Spot's help, I was tempted to use a levitation. I should have. My back will ache for a week."

"What is it?"

He smiled and began to untie the cord that encircled the bundle like the strands of a great web. That done, he turned back the folds of thick cloth, pausing with his hand on the last one. "You're going to love this. A pity it's promised to a client, Sigert of the Nine Shallow Ponds. But I'm looking for another, for us."

"What is it?" she repeated, her interest increasing.

He flung back the last cloth and spread his arms in a gesture of revelation, beaming at her all the while.

"A mirror?" she said.

"That's right, my dear. You've often said that you'd like to have one by the door."

"Only a little one, so I can check to see that my coronet is on straight, and my wings aren't all bunched up under my cloak. This one is...it's sort of elaborate, isn't it?"

"This is no ordinary mirror, my dear."

"I can see that. It's very nice, really," said Princess, leaning closer to the surface and studying her reflection. "No warps or wiggly places in the glass."

"It's a magic mirror."

She took two steps back and looked at him sharply. "I've had one bad experience with a magic mirror, and I don't want another. Don't bother getting one for us, please."

"Moggropple's was a unique problem. And it involved five mirrors. This is only a single mirror, and all it does is talk."

"I don't care. I don't want a tricky mirror around the house."

Crestfallen, Kedrigern said, "I thought that something like this might be nice for those times when I'm away on business and you have no one to talk to but Spot."

"I appreciate the thought, but no." She took his hand, smiled to soothe his feelings, and said, "Anyway, talking mirrors must be very rare. And terribly expensive."

Kedrigern gestured airily. "I got this one for a song. An incantation, actually. Against pains in the joints."

"Well, you won't find another on such terms, I'm sure. Besides, I'd sooner talk to Spot when you're away than to a mirror," said Princess.

"Whatever you say, my dear. But as long as it's here, why don't you take a look."

She smoothed down her dark blue gown, straightened her coronet, and stepped before the mirror. She half turned, fluttered her wings, then rose from the floor and did a slow pirouette.

"It's a very nice mirror," she said.

"Say something to it."

She frowned. "What does one say to a mirror?"

"How about 'Here's looking at you'?"

Princess gave him a pained glance. She pursed her lips thoughtfully, and after a time said, "Mirror, how do I look?"

The surface of the mirror shimmered like a pool in a gentle breeze. Colors flashed and flickered across it, then slowly faded. A silvery voice said, "How do you look? Very good, for a woman your age."

Princess's hand shot up, snatched the cloth, and flung it over the face of the mirror. "That will be quite enough out of you," she snapped in a voice cold enough to frost the glass. Turning to Kedrigern, she said, "A hand mirror will suffice. A silent one," and fluttered from the room.

"As you wish, my dear," he called after her.

He was relieved by her decision. An attractive and serviceable hand mirror was easily obtained. Talking mirrors were hard to come by and very nearly priceless, even when the seeker was well-known and much respected, with extensive contacts in the magical community. He could not expect to be lucky twice.

After receiving Sigert's plea for assistance, it was months before Kedrigern even got wind of a faint rumor of a magic mirror, and many more before he actually traced it down, ascertained its provenance, and satisfied himself of its authenticity. Haggling over the price dragged on for two more months, and might have taken longer if the owner, an aging seneschal, had not been stricken with a painful bout of rheumatism. Transporting the mirror intact to his cottage took Kedrigern another full month. The whole operation consumed so much time, in fact, that there was none left for the usual full-scale safety check. The mirror was to be a surprise birthday present for Sigert's queen, and only if he departed for the Kingdom of the Nine Shallow Ponds the very next morning and encountered no obstacles along the way could Kedrigern hope to deliver the mirror on Brissault's birthday.

With the help of Spot and a very small levitation spell he stowed the mirror safely in a wagon, surrounding it with padding and protective spells. Princess chose not to accompany him on the journey. "In the first place," she explained, "I am a princess, not a freight-handler. And in the second place, from what you've told me, the Kingdom of the Nine Shallow Ponds is not a happy place. I don't want to take along, slow, uncomfortable journey just to be surrounded by gloom."

"I intend to dispel the gloom, my dear."

But she had decided, and was adamant. After a brief but tender farewell, he set out just before dawn, aching and yawning, comforted only by the thought of a generous fee and a chance to save a marriage.

The weather was benign and his journey was uneventful. Kedrigern had ample time to ponder the misfortunes of the royal couple. Having won the confidence of both king and queen, he had been made privy to all the details.

Sometime in their third decade together, no one could say exactly when, things began to go wrong between King Sigert and Queen Brissault. Petty quarrels swelled into full-blown arguments. Familiar mannerisms became irritants. Casual phrases elicited barbed responses. Angry silences sometimes lasted for days, and only a state occasion would have Sigert and Brissault speaking to one another again, albeit coolly and formally.

Sigert, who still loved his wife deeply, tried to figure out where things had gone wrong. He could not. He consulted his counselors and advisors and the wisest men in the kingdom, and while they were able to suggest a number of causes, they could not agree on a solution. They were in accord on war, taxes, and ceremonials, but not on domestic relations. Some said that women required flattery; others prescribed extravagant gifts, separate palaces, or beheading. In the end, they were no help.

Unknown to the king, Brissault, who loved her husband every bit as much as he loved her, was following the same course, except that she was consulting with wise women. But they were no more help than the wise men. A venerable nun told her that men at any age were still small boys in many ways -- a fact she well knew. One learned woman suggested aloofness, another submission, a third poison. No one offered advice that she found acceptable.

A year passed, and then another, and the domestic tension remained unresolved. One winter morning, after particularly sharp words over breakfast, Sigert wandered through the palace deep in gloomy thought. Muttering under his breath, he trudged aimlessly up flights of stairs and paced down corridors long unvisited. Eventually he found himself standing before a familiar door. Lost in his brooding, he had come to his old nursery. Memory bade him enter. The chamber faced the east, and the early sunlight gave it a cheerful air. The bright pictures on the walls, the toys that lay scattered at random, and the old story books aroused a pleasant nostalgia.

He picked up a dusty book of tales that lay nearby and settled in the window seat where he had spent so many happy childhood hours. Leafing through the book, he came upon the story of the magic mirror. It had been one of his favorites, and he read it once again, hoping to recapture some of the innocent wonder of those days. He paused after completing it, cried out in gratitude, and immediately reread it. After the second reading, he hugged the book to his breast and laughed aloud. Here was the solution. He would give Brissault a mirror as a birthday present, a magic mirror that would make her appear forever young and beautiful. Such a rare and encouraging gift would demonstrate the feelings he could not seem to express otherwise. She would be happy again. Their quarreling would end and they would be reconciled forever.

Having no knowledge of magic himself, he summoned Kedrigern, who had worked effective and timely spells for his father, and for himself in his youth, and entrusted the work of finding and acquiring the mirror to him. While at the castle, Kedrigern had picked up another assignment. He was pleased to be wrapping both up with a single journey.

As time ran on, Sigert grew uneasy. When Kedrigern presented himself at the castle on the very morning of Brissault's birthday to announce that the mirror awaited their majesties' pleasure, the king was elated.

"Where is it?" he asked.

"I've had it placed in the queen's bedchamber, Your Majesty," said the wizard.

"Her Majesty is in the great hall right now, accepting a present from the Goldsmiths' guild. The Saddlers are arriving after them, and then the Fishmongers. Her Majesty always bathes and changes her clothes after a meeting with the Fishmongers." Sigert paused to do some mental calculation. "We've got about an hour. Let's go and inspect this mirror," he said, rising.

The mirror stood in the center of the queen's bedchamber. It was very tall, rising from a massive silver base inlaid with precious stones. It was covered with a richly embroidered cloth.

"Remove the cloth. We want to see the mirror," said the king.

Kedrigern dismissed the servants, then removed the heavy cloth himself. It took a bit of effort.

"Why didn't you have the servants do that?" Sigert asked.

"Just a precaution, Your Majesty. I don't want them looking into the mirror until I've had a chance to test it out."

Sigert took a step back, away from the mirror. "Have you brought a dangerous object into this palace without testing it?"

"I've checked it for curses and trick spells, Your Majesty. I can assure you that it's perfectly safe."

Sigert looked relieved. "That's better. What else do you have to do before we can use it?"

"Well, I know it talks. I have to determine whether it has other powers, and if it does, which ones we want to utilize. The man who sold me the mirror didn't know much about it. He wasn't even certain that it was magic, but I could tell right away."

The king looked less relieved. "Could it be dangerous?"

"Not dangerous, Your Majesty. At worst it might be...." Kedrigern paused to search for a less alarming term and at last said, "Unpredictable. Tricky. Surprising."

"We do not like surprises in our palace," said Sigert, frowning. "We want nothing untoward to happen to Her Majesty."

"There is no danger, I assure you, Your Majesty."

The king pondered. Over the years, besides putting on weight, Sigert had become pompous and self-important, but he was no more so than other kings, and less so than many. He really did love Brissault, and wanted to make her happy once again. He lacked not good will, but comprehension. He simply could not understand how a woman married to him and reigning at his side could be unhappy.

He studied the mirror, extending a hand to touch the frame but stopping short of actual contact. He concealed his hesitation under a spacious gesture and said, "It's nicely made. We like all those little cherubs and ribbons and bands of flowers."

"Exquisite, isn't it? You don't often get that kind of workmanship in a magic mirror. People seem to think that if it's magic, it doesn't have to look good, "Kedrigern said, frowning at the thought of such an unprofessional attitude.

Sigert ventured a quick peek into the mirror. He turned to the wizard, frowning. "The glass is foggy. Are you sure you got a good mirror?"

"Oh, it's perfectly fine, Your Majesty. There's a small spell on it, to discourage the idle and the curious."

"Well, get it off, so Her Majesty can use the thing."

Kedrigern murmured a few words and moved his hands in an intricate gesture. The glass cleared. King and wizard saw their reflections. "Looks good to us. What powers do you think it has?"

"First and foremost, it's a speaking mirror." Raising his hands and gesturing, purely for dramatic effect, Kedrigern said to the mirror, "Speak to me, mirror."

A shimmer ran over the reflections. The thin silvery voice said, "Speak to you?"

"Yes, speak. You're a talking mirror."

"A talking mirror," the mirror said.

"Tell us a story," said the king.

"A story?" repeated the mirror.

"Yes, do that."

"I'll do that."

"And don't repeat everything we say," said the king.

The mirror was silent for a time, as if rehearsing. Then, with another shimmer over the reflected figures, it began to speak. "Once there were three bears, Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear, and they lived in a house in the woods. A little girl named Goldilocks was --"

"Is that the best you can do?" the king interrupted.

"Best I can do," said the mirror.

"You're repeating again," Kedrigern said.

After a pause, the mirror said, with manifest effort, "I am a mirror. That's what I'm supposed to do."

"We find it annoying. Stop it this minute," said the king. "Do you hear? That is a royal command. Stop repeating. Be original."

Their images wavered and dissolved. For a moment, the glass was entirely empty; then new images appeared. Sigert screamed, staggered back, and covered his eyes. Kedrigern blanked the mirror with a quick emergency spell and steadied himself against a chair. He took a few deep breaths to calm his nausea. The king peeked out at him from between his fingers, then pointed to the mirror. "What were those things in there?" he said in a strained whisper. "Can they get out?"

"No danger of that, Your Majesty. They're imaginary."

"What kind of imagination could conjure up monstrosities like those?" said the king, shuddering.

"The mirror's. It was obeying your command."

"Our command?" the king cried, going pale.

"Your Majesty told it to be original."

"We did not command it to terrify us. If it tries anything like that ever again, we will have it smashed to smithereens. Does it understand?"

Kedrigern observed the tremulous patterns on the darkened face of the mirror. "It does, Your Majesty."

Sigert stood arms akimbo, looking hard at the mirror. "We begin to doubt that this was a good idea," he said. "It might be best to smash the thing anyway. Magic mirrors are too tricky for our liking."

"Trickiness is their nature, Your Majesty."

"And yet it is a unique object, and we do not wish to give it up."

"Not many of these around, Your Majesty. This may be the only one in existence. It would be a shame to have to destroy it."

The mirror was by this time displaying a dazzling pattern of swirls and zigzags, and the frame could be seen to tremble ever so slightly. In a subdued voice, it said, "I will obey Your Majesty to the best of my ability. Please do not smash me."

King and wizard exchanged a glance. The king said, "No more fits of creativity. Is that understood?"

"Understood, Your Majesty."

"Shall I clear it now?" Kedrigern asked.

Sigert nodded in assent, and Kedrigern removed the spell. Their reflections appeared.

"Very well, mirror. What else can you do?" Sigert said.

"Aside from what you saw, I can only speak and reflect."

The king looked disappointed. "Can't you make our wife look young and beautiful? We thought you magic mirrors did things like that."

"A common misconception. We cannot, Your Majesty."

The king sighed. "A pity. Her Majesty has been unhappy of late, and we believe that we know the cause. She has always been the fairest in the land, but lately she's been hearing talk of beautiful young princesses in the neighboring kingdoms, and we think that is upsetting her. Making her feel old. Women don't like that. They want to look young and beautiful all their lives," said the king, confidently repeating what several wise men had told him. "A magic mirror that attests to her unfading beauty would do a lot to cheer her up."

"Her Majesty is still a beautiful woman," said Kedrigern.

"Unfortunately, she's excessively self-critical. Always finding little things wrong with her hair or her dress. Wrinkles around the eyes. That sort of thing. We try to be helpful, but we don't seem to do much good. Can't you touch up her image somehow, mirror?"

"I am only a talking mirror. Transformation is not within my power, Your Majesty."

The king sighed again. The mirror was silent. Abruptly, Kedrigern laughed aloud and began to rub his hands together energetically. "No need to worry. I've got the solution," he said.

"You have?" king and mirror asked with one astonished voice.

"I have. Can you memorize a few lines very quickly, mirror?"

"Exact replication is my forte."

"Good. Her Majesty will be here soon. No time to waste."

The wizard rushed to the queen's dressing table, where he copied something onto a scrap of parchment. He then scribbled something else on another scrap, which he tucked into his sleeve. With a conspiratorial grin for the king, he read the first piece to the mirror. They rehearsed for a few minutes, until Brissault was heard entering the bedchamber.

The queen seemed in a good humor. Seeing Sigert and the wizard and the mirror, she gave a little exclamation of surprise and delight. "A birthday present! For me! Oh, what a lovely mirror! Such an exquisite frame! Sigert, you're a dear, generous man!" she cried.

"This is no ordinary mirror," said the king.

"It's a magic mirror! Isn't it a magic mirror? Just what I've always wanted! Oh, that's so sweet of you!" she said, kissing Sigert on the cheek.

"We're glad you like it," he said.

They hugged, and she kissed him again. "You can be so thoughtful when you really try. But it's all cloudy. I can't see myself in it."

"If Your Majesty will simply repeat this phrase while standing before the mirror," said Kedrigern, handing her the slip of parchment which he had concealed in his sleeve.

She took the parchment, studied it, and said, "Mirror, mirror, standing there, tell me truly: am I fair?"

Lights flickered deep within the mirror. Colors blazed and swooped and curled in diminishing loops, spiraling toward the center, growing ever fainter until finally they cleared and only the queen's reflection showed. From within the glass a deep voice said, "Happily I do my duty: hail to thee, world's reigning beauty!"

"World's reigning beauty? Does that mean that I'm the fairest of them all?" Brissault cried.

"What you see is clearly true: no one's half as fair as you," said the mirror.

Delighted, the queen turned to the king. "Is it really so?" she asked.

He shrugged and said, "We have never known a mirror to lie."

She embraced him, kissed him, and withdrew to her dressing room. At the doorway she turned and said, "Wizard, I would have you stay to instruct me in the properties of this wonderful gift."

Sigert looked smugly at Kedrigern and at their images in the mirror. When the door had closed behind Brissault, and he was certain that she was out of earshot, the king said, "We think we handled that rather well."

"Let's see what the mirror thinks." Turning to the mirror, Kedrigern said, "Tell us, mirror: are we clever?"

In reverent tones, the mirror said, "King and wizard, are you ever! Brilliant king and brilliant mage, keenest thinkers of the age!"

The king winked at the wizard, who returned the wink. Sigert cocked his crown at a jaunty angle and swaggered from the queen's bedchamber looking very pleased with himself.

In a little while Brissault reentered the room. She looked around to make absolutely certain that she and the wizard were alone, locked the door, and went to the mirror. She folded her arms, and in a stem no-nonsense voice said, "All right, mirror, let's have the truth."

"The truth?"

"Your Majesty--" Kedrigern cried in alarm, but she cut him short with a gesture and said, "Stay out of this. Come on, mirror. Cut the flattery."

"Flattery?"

"And stop repeating everything I say. Come on, out with it."

The mirror ran through a rainbow of color, then cleared. "The truth. Very well. Your Majesty is twenty-two pounds overweight and badly needs a new hairdresser. And that gown... I wouldn't wrap a dead dog in that to bury it."

The queen stood silent, tapping her foot. She turned to Kedrigern, who shrugged helplessly. "Mirrors can't lie, Your Majesty."

"Oh, can't they? What was all that about 'world's reigning beauty'?"

"Your Majesty is a very beautiful --"

"I've seen my best years, Kedrigern. I'm holding up well, but I'm no longer the world's great beauty. So why did the mirror say so?"

Looking sheepish, Kedrigern said, "Poetic license. As long as it spoke in rhyme. . . ."

"Very ingenious. But remember, you're working for me as well as for Sigert."

Brissault studied her image. After a long and thoughtful pause, she said, "You're right about the gown, mirror. Sigert picked it out, and he has no sense of color. And I've never been completely satisfied with the Royal Hairdresser. But twenty-two pounds?!"

"Your Majesty would look trim if she lost fifteen. But she would look svelte if she lost twenty-two. Trust me."

"Svelte is unnecessary. Trim will do. But I am in no hurry. His Majesty thinks I wish to look like a sixteen-year-old princess. His Majesty is wrong." The mirror shimmered discreetly and said nothing. Brissault went on, "I will have my favorite dresses brought out, and you will tell me frankly how I look in them. I will also try a few new hairdos that I have seen in recent months. And I will cut out pastries at breakfast and have only light sauces with dinner. You will inform me when I am trim."

"As Your Majesty commands," said the mirror.

"And if His Majesty should ask, tell him I'm delighted to know that I am the fairest in the land. And tell him that he's the kindest and most thoughtful of kings. He'll expect to hear that," said the queen.

"Yes, Your Majesty."

"And now you can go to sleep, or do whatever you magic things do when you're not doing magic things," said Brissault. "Kedrigern, you did well. I think this mirror can help solve our problems. Now cover it over. We have private business." When the mirror was obscured, she said, "Did you get the ring?"

From inside his tunic Kedrigern drew forth a small black box. He unlocked and opened it, and placed it in her hands. She looked wistfully on the glittering quincunx of two rubies, two emeralds, and a single diamond, identically cut.

"It would have made such a lovely anniversary present," she said with a sigh.

"The decision is up to you, Your Majesty. I took it on approval."

She gazed on the ring for a long time, then shook her head. "No. It won't do. Sigert is a good man and means well, but he doesn't understand women and probably never will."

She took up the ring, turning it, watching the light that flashed from its facets and glowed in its heart. It was a beautiful piece of work, but its value lay not in beauty alone.

"Perhaps the Ring of Insight will change him," Kedrigern suggested. "It confers perception on the wearer."

"Too much perception. With this ring on his finger, Sigert could not be deceived. Isn't that so?"

"That is the virtue of the ring Your Majesty."

Brissault sighed again, a deeper, sadder sigh. When she learned of the Ring of Insight some years ago it had seemed the perfect gift, an expression of faith and trust that would make her feelings clear to Sigert as words could not, and restore their old relationship. When Kedrigern had informed her that the ring might be available, she had instructed him to acquire it whatever the cost. Now she saw that it was simply not possible to give Sigert the ring. Someday, perhaps, but not yet.

"Sigert will be better off with a present of a nice new set of robes. Something warm and comfortable, with his favorite motif of forget-me-not and dragon worked in gold on the pockets. And a nice pair of matching slippers to wear around the palace in the evening."

"Thoughtful gifts, Your Majesty. And very useful."

"Take back the ring, Kedrigern."

"Have you no wish to wear it yourself?"

"Never. And if you're sensible, you'll not slip it on your finger."

Kedrigern smiled. "I don't plan to, Your Majesty."

"Very wise of you. Sigert's a good man at heart, and we love one another. We have our little differences, but all things considered, he's been a decent husband." She paused, then added, "And our chances of happiness together will be much improved if we both retain the ability to be deceived now and then."

~~~~~~~~

By John Morressy

FORGOTTEN TREASURES

HERE WE ARE, back for another look at some of our field's forgotten treasures. The standard recitation of this column's purpose: every one of these books had one or more paperback editions, and should be available for a pittance or two in your local paperback resale shop or the dealer's room of any science fiction convention.

The art of the parody is all but lost in these serious-minded days. So perhaps I should tell you about one of the finest parodies ever to appear in the field, Harry Harrison's hilarious Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers. We're not looking at subtlety here, gang -- this is a turkey shoot, taking aim at every plot device and nuance of E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman and Skylark books in particular, and at old-fashioned space opera in general.

Chuck and Jerry, a pair of college students, find that they can exceed the speed of light by powering the football team's airplane with "cheddite"-- an electrified piece of cheddar cheese-- and off they go to right all the galactic wrongs. Of course they're accompanied by pert, pretty, perky Sally.

I know people love Harry's Stainless Steel Rat and Bill the Galactic Hero books, and so do I, but take my word for it: this is his funniest.

There is a literary form, all but forgotten these days, formally known as the vignette and more familiarly as the short-short. Basically, it's a story of less than 1,000 words, and one man made it his private domain: the late Frederic Brown. I suppose at one time or another, we've all written a cute one-punch story of 700 words or so, but only Brown was able to do it month in and month out. And these were not "Feghoots," three pages setting up a terrible pun. No, indeed -- they were honest-to-ghod science fiction stories.

The best of them were collected in Nightmares and Geezenstacks. I counted thirty-seven stories in the first sixty pages, after which I stopped counting and just concentrated on re-reading old favorites. (He also included a few normal-length stories, just to prove he could do it.)

Brown was actually better known for his mysteries than his science fiction, but to this day, no one has ever come close to de-throning him as the King of the Short-Short. This book will show you why.

Readers of this column know that the late C. L. Moore is one of my favorite writers. Her Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry stories are classics of their type, and she was also able to produce truly brilliant works of art such as "Vintage Season."

I'd like to tell you about one of her less well-known books. It's called Judgment Night, and it's sort of a transition between her early days as a Weird Tales fantasy specialist and her later career, in collaboration with her husband Henry Kuttner, as a creator of highly polished, fast-paced science fiction.

Every pulp writer referred to "pleasure planets" -- but only Catherine Moore created one that was worthy of the title: "Cyrille, where beauty and terror were blended for the delectation of those who loved nightmares." It's the world where much of Judgment Night takes place.

And, in an era when girls in science fiction stories were just lumpy boys, fit only for holding the equivalent of the hero's horse, Moore created yet another powerful, competent woman, fully the equal of Jirel -- the memorable Juille, who rebels against a rebellion.

Time to recommend a matched pair of books, since they're by the same author and about the same subject: the People.

The author is Zenna Henderson, and the two books are Pilgrimage: The Book of the People and The People: No Different Flesh.

The People are aliens, refugees with psi powers who have been hiding in the Southwest for more than half a century. Like Clifford Simak and James White, Henderson believes in the decency of all sentient beings, and her worldview seems to place her foursquare on the side of gentleness.

There are strong Christian and Biblical themes in the People stories, but they're never intrusive, and the stories differ from most "feel-good" tales in that they deal with some serious problems and make some serious statements.

There was a pretty dreadful TV movie about the People some years back. If you saw it, then you probably (and understandably) avoided the books. Trust me, the books are a few levels of magnitude superior to the film. They are classics of their type, and it's a type that appears all too infrequently these days.

The ultimate hard science fiction novel? I think most people would say it was Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity, and that book is certainly a fine example of the form, but my vote goes to Poul Anderson's Tau Zero.

Poul is equally at home with all facets of imaginative literature science fiction, fantasy, myth-but to me, Tau Zero is his masterpiece.

A spaceship has an accident: its braking system won't work. Simple as that. Well, not that simple, as Einstein's equations make clear: as its speed approaches that of light (no, it never quite equals it), subjective time slows down to a crawl, and at the same time the ship becomes more and more massive. (Remember? As your speed approaches that of light, your mass approaches infinity.) Entire galaxies are crossed in what seems, subjectively, to be fractions of a second. The ship grows more massive than a neutron star. The crew is alive billions of years after their loved ones have turned to dust. And still they can't slow down.

A few decades ago, when 2001: A Space Odyssey first came out, there was a point in the movie -the so-called "light show"--where all the kids land the science fiction readers) left their seats and walked up to sit on the floor, as close to the screen as they could get.

This book will produce the same mind-boggling effects with words instead of celluloid pictures.

Not all post-holocaust novels have to be about barbarism, nor need they be bitter reflections on what might have been. Unquestionably the most beautiful of them all is George Stewart's Earth Abides.

A plague has killed off most of humanity. The focus is on one of the few survivors, Isherwood Williams, who wanders the empty landscape, observing the ghost towns, befriending a dog, finally finding another survivor and taking her for a wife.

They have children, and while he tries to teach his offspring about the glory that was Earth, they are more interested in learning survival skills to help them live on what Earth has become. Eventually, as an old man, he is almost worshipped by all those who came after the plague, but none of them understand the past that he constantly babbles about. He finally comes to the realization that his tribe of children and grandchildren have formed a hunter-gatherer tribe not unlike the American Indians of pre-plague days, and that the planet has come full cycle--that "men go and come, but Earth abides."

A beautiful book, one that should never be allowed to go out of print.

Sanford Kvass is a science fiction writer, preparing to go to Worldcon. Three aliens pay him a visit and offer him a challenge: if he can pass their test, they'll decide Men are a competent and gritty little race and leave us alone; if he fails, they'll tear the planet down and build a highway in its place.

The test: there will be an alien in disguise -- at the Worldcon. All Kvass has to do is identify him.

This is the premise of Gather in the Hall of the Planets, one of the funniest and most caustic novels of the past thirty years. It was originally part of an Ace Double, and the author's name is listed as K. M. O'Donnell, but it's none other than Barry Malzberg, doubtless writing the book as therapy after the shock of attending his first Worldcon.

The problem, of course, is not how to spot an alien at a gathering of science fiction writers and fans, but rather how to spot a normal human being. In the process, Barry, with devastating skill, created a properly crazed cast of characters and caricatures, each drawn from a real science fiction writer or fan, that had everyone in the field guessing who was who for months after the book's first appearance.

I've heard Malzberg referred to as morbid. To which I reply -- and this book will prove -- there is a huge difference between morbid and mordant.

If Alfred Bester and Ray Bradbury were the field's most influential short story writers in the 1950s, a case can he made that their closest competitor was Cyril M. Kornbluth, who turned out one well-crafted and cynical story after another.

Some of his best were collected in The Marching Morons and other famous science fiction stories, and though they were written four decades ago, most of them hold up splendidly. The title story, one of Kornbluth's two most famous -the other, not in this collection, is "The Little Black Bag" -- seems to have more meaning today, rather than less. In this day and age, when test scores have fallen at every grade level, when only one out of seven American students can even identify his home state on a map, when the average American spends more time watching television than eating or even sleeping, when millions of people doubt that the Holocaust actually happened and millions more don't believe Neil Armstrong really walked on the Moon...well, "The Marching Morons" doesn't seem all that far-fetched.

The premise is that, as society grows dumber and dumber, the few competent men and women will be forced to work around the clock just to feed and care for the "marching morons." Not as unlikely as it once was, is it?

The other stories, while less famous, are equally hard-hitting. Kornbluth was not a writer who was concerned with making his audience feel comfortable about things.

There are a few writers who are so unique that they have no standard reference points. R. A. Lafferty is one, if you like his writing, go buy more of his books, because he's not remotely like anyone else.

Another such writer is the late Italo Calvino. His first work of science fiction, Cosmicomics, is brilliant, funny, thought-provoking, and [I guarantee] not like anything else you are ever likely to read.

Cosmicomics is a loosely connected series of stories narrated by Qfwfq, who relates the origin of the universe, the creation of life, the death of the dinosaurs, what Cleopatra was really like, and what it was like to fall through trillions of miles of space in the sensual company of Ursula H'x.

Weird. Delightful. Strange. Hilarious. And above all, unique.

An author who was forgotten too quickly was the late James Schmitz, who wrote two very popular series, the tales of the Hub and the stories of Telzey Amberdon, an adolescent girl who happens to be a telepath.

His best book, though -- and surely his most famous -- doesn't involve either of his two ongoing series. It is The Witches of Karres, and it concerns the absolutely charming adventures of a normal human being, Captain Pausert, and three young girls who possess psi powers. (Yes, the book originally appeared in John Campbell's Astounding, back when he was urging everyone to write psi stories, an obsession that might have worked out better if they all could have written like Schmitz.)

The witches themselves -- Goth, Maleen, and the Leewit -- are among the most delightful teenagers ever created in science fiction. Enjoy.

The late Manly Wade Well man began his career as a pulp hack and ended it as an acknowledged artist. What made the difference?

John did. John, also known as John the Balladeer or Silver John. The focus of Wellman's very best work, a series of fantasy stories -regional folk tales, really -- set in the Appalachians, Who Fears the Devil? follows Silver John as he makes his way through the mountain country, confronting supernatural evil.

Wellman knew the dialog, knew the myths and beliefs of the area, knew how to create exactly the kind of flavor these yarns needed. A more recent paperback, John the Balladeer, contains all the stories that were in the original, pius six more Wellman wrote toward the end of his life.

The Silver John stories are simple but never simplistic, evocative of an era and a way of life that no longer exists, and display a contagious love for their characters.

That's it for this issue. Good luck treasure hunting.

~~~~~~~~

By MIKE RESNICK

THE LAST OF THE GLASS MENAGERIES

In his youth, Tennessee Williams was something of a science fiction fan-Astounding published a letter he sent to the editor while he was a teen. So the notion of blending Williams's work with Cyril Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons" isn't as absurd as it might initially seem. Indeed, as the following grim story testifies, this hybrid can be rather poignant.

Stefano Donati lives in Bennington, Vermont, and notes that his literary hero is Ellison...but he does not say whether he means Harlan or Ralph. Perhaps there's another literary cross-breed in the offing?

THAT NIGHT, HE TRIED TO tell his sister she was dying. He sat her on the Peanuts bedspread she'd favored ever since leaving school, and he fetched the tattered polar bear from her dresser. "Esther, you know how you're going to have a baby, right?"

"Oh, yes." She nodded happily, over and over, spilling drool onto her sweater. With a Kleenex he wiped it off. A reflex gesture, as instinctive as his anguish whenever some smart teenager flung names at her.

"And do you know what that means?"

"It means I'll be a mommy." Her voice stretched so exuberantly on that last word, he almost feared her vocal chords would snap.

"Dennis." A sweet whisper from behind him. He gazed up and found his wife Delia, hair golden and perfect. She motioned him toward the door. "No sense making her all terrified; let's wait until she starts getting weaker."

Dennis shuddered at the memory of Esther's words from that October morning: "Me and Petey did more than kiss last night. Did better." Spoken with such joy, she'd missed the horror on his and Delia's faces.

He tried now not to picture her death growing ever nearer. Sexdeath, pouncing on her happy innocence, burrowing inside her.

"Need toys for baby," Esther said.

More drool. Out came the Kleenex, and he went to her. "The baby won't get here right away, though, honey." Dennis stroked his sister's hair. You won't be dying right away.

Suddenly afraid for her, afraid of tears, he rushed into the other bedroom. Delia followed him, leaving Esther babbling merrily to Frosty the polar bear.

"Esther and Petey," he said. "I envy them. It's crazy."

"No. It's normal." Delia stood away from him, as if struggling to squelch her own desire. Could it possibly be as intense as his? "Maybe we should cut off all our hair. Get fat, take bad-breath pills. That's what the Bonsers did for each other. Mary told me they haven't aroused each other in months."

"It wouldn't work. You could weigh two hundred, and I'd feel the same." He saw her flattered blush, and his throat freed the next words. "Delia, there's something I've never told you."

"Keeping secrets, huh?" Her eyes sparkled. "For shame."

"Sometimes, when I can't stop thinking what it would be like to make love with you..."

"...You wish you'd never met me."

"Yes. Sometimes."

"Well, I feel the same way about you. I want to make love, too, you know." She slid her palm beneath his, dangerously. The touch aroused him, frightened him. He could almost see Sexdeath as a thinking captor, mocking all these yearnings, daring him and Delia to dig themselves an early grave through just one night of passion.

But he knew a thinking captor would forgive one lapse. Just one. Especially a lapse by Esther.

"Delia, why did you ever consent to date me? Half the people on campus swore off love completely."

"Finders, keepers."

Humming from the other room. Esther, soothing her beloved Frosty.

"Pop-Pius orchestrated everything," he said. "I'm sure of it. That dance at the lodge: they must have guided Esther and Petey inside that washroom." He saw his rage reflected in Delia's eyes as, wordlessly, helplessly, she nodded. Somebody had to have body sex, after all; somebody had to produce the world's children. And lacking restless martyrs, one could always persuade people like Esther and Petey.

Obscene.

Bitterly, Dennis thought about his students, how more and more of them had to labor over even the simplest of multiplication problems.

Saving the future, birth by birth.

Remember: retarded people can have bright children.

Clever Pop-Pius mottos, he conceded, but the cold, hard math ran through his brain. A scant few bright children for every twenty dim ones.

Foot soldiers, he thought. Esther, and Petey, and everybody like them. Exploited foot soldiers in the fight to keep humanity alive.

BRIDGEPORT FATHER, 30, IS THE LATEST TO BE DECLARED A MIRACLE

Dennis dared not hope. But he scrolled down the headline:

Two years ago, Allen and Miranda Simmons of Bridgeport defied the Sexdeath virus. They bravely made love, and soon Miranda was pregnant. Over the next several weeks, they arranged to make Allen's brother the adoptive father, and by her second trimester Miranda already felt the swollen blotches of the virus on her skin. She died five weeks after delivering her baby boy.

But Allen Simmons is still alive. And shows no symptoms whatsoever of the Sexdeath virus. Yesterday, precisely one year after becoming a father, he was officially declared a Miracle -- the sixth in Fairfield County this decade. He has asked his brother to relinquish custodial rights, and

The clattering at the door persisted until Dennis answered.

"William Burnham," said the heavy, white-haired man. "From Population Pius. I'm here to negotiate the reward for Esther Trossi's pregnancy."

"Go away. We don't want your blood money."

"What are you talking about?"

"We didn't mean for my sister to have body sex. Your people lured her into it."

Burnham acted properly offended. "That'd be a sort of murder. We always let the participants and their families decide."

"She has Down's Syndrome. What the hell can she decide?"

"We're trying to save humanity."

"So I keep hearing. Use artificial insem."

"You don't follow the news too closely, do you, Mr. Trossi?"

"The bombings. Yes, I know. Well, my apologies to all the sperm banks, but the terrorists do have a point. This virus is our chance to just die as a species, and the world sure wouldn't miss us."

"People who worked in those labs were killed."

"A very few. But since the terrorists want Mother Earth saved and humanity dead, or at least diminished, why do you think individual scientists should concern them? You might not agree with them, Burnham, but don't quibble with their logic."

"You're on their side."

"I'm on my sister's side."

"All right. Legally, what we're offering belongs to her. She'll bequeath it to you. If you deny me access to her, you could go to jail."

Dennis glared, but finally went to fetch her from her bedroom, where some ancient sitcom's laughtrack was making her giggle along. Her way of feeling a part of things.

"Esther, honey, a man is here to talk with us."

A man. A woman. Never a Pop-Plus agent. Never a doctor. Nuances just confused her. All these years, thought Dennis, and I still go back and forth from loving her to wishing she'd never been born. Wishing I could just abandon her, the way any sensible half-brother would.

In the dinette, Burnham grimaced at the sight of Esther propping Frosty on the table. "Going to have a baby," she said.

Burnham jerked his massive body toward Dennis. "Only one? You don't plan to have the embryo doubled?"

"We're not out to help you replenish the population."

"But the reward depends on that."

"The blood money, you mean. We'll manage without it."

How? On his and Delia's meager incomes, how? The delivery, the overnight care, and then the years of adoptive parenting. Without this hideous "reward," they could never pay for all of it.

Burnham sat forward, in full salesman mode. "My offer is five thousand for a doubling. Fifteen thousand for a tripling. Either way, it should cover the cost of parenting after Esther's gone."

"Where Esther gone? Where I go?" She slapped her glass of water to the floor.

Burnham stared at Dennis. "You haven't even explained it to her, have you?" Before Dennis could answer, he said, "Don't bother. I'm used to this; let me."

No. Couldn't allow that. "Esther..."

From Dennis's mere tone, she looked forlornly up at him. Just like when Mr. Halverfore found out who'd stained his rug or when no one came to her birthday party or when their adoptive mother died.

While Dennis searched for the gentlest words, Burnham said, "One day, Esther, when you fall asleep it'll be permanent."

"Pertamet?"

Dennis shook with fury. "Forever and ever," he said.

"But what for baby?" She began to shriek. "Not ever and ever for baby, Dennis?"

"Dee and I will take good care of it." He eyed Burnham. "With our own money."

Outside, Dennis felt a card thrust into his hand. "If you change your mind, just beep me."

"Burnham, I teach math. You know what one of my students told me? That sometime this spring, your people gave her family ten thousand marks to have body sex with a classmate. Any classmate. It would have been forty thousand if she'd gotten pregnant."

"Don't be jealous. She must be very smart, good genes."

"Not what I meant." Dennis dreamt of pummeling this guy's arrogance right out of him. "You know what families know: that a teenager's lusts are boiling anyway, and sometimes teenagers can be annoying, and besides they're just some niece or nephew or adoptee. But conception or not, Burnham, body sex is fatal. Every time, except for Miracles. So tell me: if I offered your relatives enough money, would you have the guts?"

"I'd consider it."

"You'd consider it. What about the people like my sister? They can't consider things. They don't know how."

"You never warned her, did you? You never even warned her away from sex."

"Only about a million times." Dennis cursed himself, and almost Delia, for having made the diagrams so abstract. Red for poisoned sperm and blue for poisoned eggs and black for when they came together. What could Esther understand of that? She'd only nodded to please them, to make them proud of her. All she'd grasped, if anything, was that their strange lectures embarrassed them. Their stuttering, the fumbled crayons.

And they'd too easily convinced themselves that she'd absorbed their warnings.

He sent Burnham off and rushed back inside.

"Baby needs me," Esther kept saying, and he held her, unable to calm her, unable to quite ask if she understood just what being asleep forever and ever meant.

THE ADOPTIVE PARENTS sat by the bed, the mother solemn and the father drained. Dennis moved toward the near side, across from them. The mottling had reached young Judy's face. She couldn't be weighing even eighty now.

"Mr. Trossi."

"How are you coping, Judy?"

"Not dead yet."

He wished for just one more correct solution or eagerly raised hand. Hardly his best student in Algebra B, but the smartest to be lured into Sexdeath. And from her love of Dixieland, and the copy of The Corn Is Green he'd once seen her reading in the park, he could tell she'd shone bright in other ways. Before this greedy couple had played on her need for their approval. Getting Sexdeath might have won her that, if only she'd given them grandkids.

Leaning over her, he found himself almost glad she'd failed them; these monsters didn't deserve grandkids.

"Everyone from school says hi."

"Why can't they visit me themselves!"

Always such directness. "Maybe they're afraid."

"It's 'cause I failed. No babies." Her eyes said Aren't I right? just as lightly as when she used to murmur answers during the Math-a-thons. Her next words caught on her throat before she finally pushed them out: "Rehearsals. Going well?"

"The kids are trying."

Blankness. She did not catch the double meaning; even last week, she might have. He sat with her, relieved that at least the adoptive parents did not attempt small talk with him.

Soon she issued a moan that slowly twisted into a high-pitched scream. Just a matter of days, now. The scream lasted impossibly long, and then came another. Dennis felt his temples burn, but forced himself to stay and listen. Come autumn he'd be here again, listening to Esther.

The parents didn't flinch. They were used to this by now. So were the staff, judging by the absence of approaching footsteps.

Dennis cringed, thinking of stories he'd heard about the way new parents react once their babies have emerged. How the brighter ones seem to glimpse the deaths awaiting them, the graves anxious to be dug. Heaven, set to welcome them. At least Esther would he spared that.

But when the blotches and the shrieks began, even having Frosty wouldn't help her.

"Mr. Trossi, when is your sister going to die?"

Dennis stepped toward the stage. "Probably in two or three months, Neil." The symptoms would be showing up soon. They'd have to. He couldn't dare hope otherwise.

"They say she's a Miracle. What's that?"

It awed Dennis to think that years ago, such puzzled innocence had been the domain of younger children. Keep adjusting downward, he thought. Just a bit more each year.

"Neil, don't dwell on my sister. Please. Now, later I want you to work on your enunciation..." Dennis caught himself. "The way you say things clearly or not clearly. 'Pleurosis.' That's what the Gentleman Caller says. First he says 'blue roses,' true, but then he says 'pleurosis.'"

"The Caller?"

"The part you're playing."

"Oh. Right."

"But for now, no dialogue. Neil, Karalynn, practice the dance. The one the Caller and Laura do."

"Blecchh." The two of them together, racing to beat the other to a show of disgust.

"Come on, now. Brownies later if you get this right."

Neil said, "My aunt says never ask anyone to dance."

Another neurotic adult, thought Dennis. So intent on sparing a favored child from romance, from the slightest hint of anything that might lead to body sex. But the danger almost added spark. How shriveled his own world would have been if he had not, that winter morning freshman year, clumsily backed his tray into Delia's, sending lettuce and tomatoes flying. When instead of yelling at him she'd quietly helped him pick the food up, he knew his heart and life would never be simple again.

But now he considered Esther. "I guess your aunt's right. So maybe to be safe, just make sure neither of you enjoy this."

Neil and Karalynn both giggled, and timidly proceeded.

As Dennis watched, inhaling sawdust, he remembered how when he'd played this role a high-school actor was still expected to learn his lines, not amble about the stage with sheets of simplified, phonetically spelled dialogue. The memories made Dennis nostalgic in ways he suspected even Tennessee Williams could not have intended.

But all right. This might be the "Second Cast," but he would make their work match that of the Honors actors good old Kenster had kept for himself. Elements of it, anyway. "Very nice," he said, wincing. "Now, a tip about footwork..."

Neil brightened. "I forgot to tell you: my teacher said your sister's going to live."

Which teacher? Which brazen, dreamy colleague? "Neil. Shush."

"Is that why they want to study her?"

He and Delia wouldn't let them. They'd both stand guard against intruders first. No scary blood tests or geneprints or hours with some rude, condescending researcher.

"Neil. Let's get back to the play."

But still no symptoms. Maybe Esther was a Miracle. Like Allen Simmons of Bridgeport and the other lucky rarities. Maybe Heaven didn't want his sister yet. Maybe it would let him keep her.

"Why Frosty? Shouldn't the baby have a different name?"

"Frosty. I like Frosty."

Frosty wouldn't do. Hey, you're the dumb lady who named her kid after her stuffed animal. Frosty wouldn't do at all.

Dennis tried to ignore the stench. Did all newborns smell like this? "How about Judy?" Judy; even with the funeral receding, he would not forget. "You like that name, don't you? You like the name Judy." He knew if he told Esther enough times that she liked something, eventually she would.

She nodded. "Judy's good. Hold her, Dennis. Hold her, Dee."

She lifted the baby, which only made the wailing louder. As Delia helped him hold his niece gently yet securely, he forced himself to look at the eyes. The eyes. Like saucers. A whole face like a tiny Esther's. Keep adjusting downward.

Delia started sobbing quietly. Eleven hours of labor, taking turns at clutching Eather's hand. Eleven hours of labor, and not even a healthy child.

"Why crying, Dee? Why tears?"

Delia forced a smile. "I'm just happy for you, Esther."

"I'm happy you're happy. Pretty baby."

Dennis kissed the tears off Delia's eyelids, and guided her into the waiting room, leaving Esther and little Judy to a pair of nurses.

"Dennis, when the symptoms start in on her, she'll be so afraid."

"Maybe they won't."

"She is not a Miracle. We can't be hoping yet."

"The symptoms would have shown up by now."

"Dennis, we can't prepare for both; for grief and joy." And then, as if her words of caution had raised her own hopes, Delia said, "Even if she is a Miracle, do you want reporters hounding her? Confusing the hell out of her?"

"No." He looked away. "I just don't want her to die."

He would not tell Esther about seeing her old boyfriend yesterday, stumbling in the check-out line, blotches all across his face.

From behind the door, they heard the low, familiar drone of Esther humming, this time to her newborn treasure, more wonderful even than Frosty.

Delia shook her head. "I just hope..."

"What?"

"Nothing."

"Delia. What?"

He caught the fear on her face. When she spun into a different topic, prattled on about the baby, he knew she was just trying to protect him from some horrid thought.

Maybe...

No.

Maybe Delia wanted Esther gone.

They moved back inside the nursery. Esther was rocking little Judy to sleep, more calmly and successfully than Dennis had dreamt she could manage. He watched over her, praying that if the baby suddenly annoyed her, the nurses could keep her from throwing it at the wall. If they failed, they'd berate her. Judy might be just one child instead of the customary two or three, but she was still the precious future. Esther, at least until she could be pronounced a Miracle, was just another dying mother.

FROM A BOOTH above the audience, Dennis controlled the lights for the premiere. Two more months and still no signs. Even if she died tomorrow, he would savor this: the sight of her in the seats below, the sound of her thirsty clapping. Clapping that began a split second after most everyone else's.

In the lobby afterwards, she ran to him. "Good movie," she said, her head bobbing up and down in happy spasms, making tiny Judy's face scrunch up. "Liked it, liked a lot." She couldn't possibly have liked it; he'd glimpsed her squirming, yawning from the First Act on. But she'd seen others praising him, and she loved him.

Esther.

"I'm glad," he said, and hugged her, wondering all over again what kind of person she'd have been without that extra chromosome. What hobbies would she have had? What opinions on the larger world would she have shared with him?

She would need resilience, if ever that world did demand that she be studied just like Allen Simmons and the rest.

He asked Delia to drive her and the baby home. Then he climbed atop one of the lobby's chairs, and grew besieged with shouts of "Speecht" The cast stood beside him. The Gentleman Caller, now Neil Megsburg again, practically hyper-ventilated from all the attention.

When the applause began to surge, Dennis waved everyone to silence. "You're all wondering if Eather's a Miracle. I don't know and you don't need to. Meaning, no news crews, no science journalists, no buzz of any kind that might confuse her, make her worry that she's done something awful. Please. Maybe she'll start showing symptoms in an hour. Maybe never. But nobody's going to upset her."

His gathered friends all hushed, and slowly retreated toward the parking lot, their cars, and home. Neil Megsburg and his aunt stayed behind, and walked with him to his rusty sedan.

"The journalists will be here, Dennis. Can't stop that." The aunt's voice held a touch of pity. "But we'll fend them off as best we can. And because you turned down the Pop-Pius reward, we've formed a citizens coalition. Raised enough pledges to pay for the care of both the baby and Esther, however long she lives."

Dennis shut his eyes. They wouldn't be offering all this unless they wanted something big in return.

"We'll also pay for a trip now and then. To an aquarium, a holo show, the zoo. Esther likes the zoo, doesn't she, Dennis?" A hint of desperation had crept into Ms. Megsburg's voice.

"The terms, please."

In this woman he saw at least a shred of shame, something the Pop-Plus people never showed. "What we're thinking is, if your sister's a Miracle, maybe you are, too. The incidence is much, much higher in relatives."

"But still negligible."

"It's higher. And you, you're smart. A smart, healthy man who doesn't die when he has body sex -- you could have bucketfuls of normal children."

"Not with Delia. She's a different sort of Miracle."

"Not with Delia. With other women. Start with her; impregnate her; then impregnate others."

This was the threat Delia had foreseen, back in the hospital.

They might not allow him to say no. Since they weren't him, they could ignore how long the odds were. And ignore the prospect of his sister grieving. Delia dying.

Maybe his father, his and Esther's, was still alive. If Miracles did run in the family, then that hazy but looming memory might still be breathing. Nobody had ever located him.

"Dennis, just think of all the women you could have."

"How does zero sound?"

"Selfish. There are already ten in town, smart women, who are willing to martyr themselves for you. Improve the gene pool."

"By just a drop. I'm only one man."

"You'd be surprised. We looked it up. The record for paternity is held by this ancient emperor from Morocco: Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty. Eight hundred and eighty-eight kids. And that was before embryo doubling."

"Mr. Bloodthirsty was very unusual. And no doubt very tired. And probably had a press agent who fudged on the numbers."

"You're a teacher; you see the trend. Oh, there'll always be terminal cases and teenagers who think they're immortal and a few old, old men who suddenly get noble. But more and more, it's the retarded people who get martyred, who get coerced into sex. So what's ahead? Nobody wants to think about that, but I'll tell you. Each generation gets more stupid -that's already started. And before long the smart people will lose hope completely, and none of them at all will make the Sacrifice. Why bother? Then someday the last of the retarded caregivers is going to fail the last of the retarded children, and humanity will end."

"A lot of those retarded people will have smart children."

"A small minority. With not enough smart elders to sharpen their talents. Live in a stupid world, and most people will become stupid."

No more great plays, no more call for Laura Wingfields. Or for the beauty of a Bach cantata or a still-life painting. He did not want to see them die. By putting mostly bright kids in the mix, he could help prevent it.

"If I really am a Miracle."

"Your sister is."

So far, he thought. So far.

"My sister also has Down's Syndrome. We're not the same."

"Maybe someday they'll isolate the virus, Dennis. Kill it, I don't know. But for now you have to try this. Other bright Miracles do."

"Then you don't need me."

"We need all the smart genes we can get."

"So that people like Esther can be shoved back into the background? Get scorned the way they used to be? What's unfolding is not all bad, Ms. Megsburg; with so many people being retarded, I wouldn't expect a world war any time soon."

"Don't be glib."

"And don't tell me about obligations. Not until you've taken care of somebody like Esther."

"I have; my nephew. Is it Esther you're worried about, or is it your life? I mean, you might not be immune after all."

Might not? These people probably suspected Jesus also had a messiah sibling.

What would Delia think? Delia, pregnant with his first children, weakening and semi-conscious. Dying. What would Delia think, picturing him with other women?

"Dennis, our offer stands: free medical care for your sister and her baby. Now, these women are willing to make the Sacrifice. Are you?"

Making love to Delia. Taking those timid caresses further, even for just the time before she died.

Delia, dead.

They'd have to decide together.

He moved to Neil, who stood shivering against his aunt's car trunk. "You made a fantastic final Gentleman Caller," Dennis said. He doubted Neil grasped the full meaning of "final." But "fantastic" was definitely understood.

"Thank...thank you, Mr. Trossi."

"The baby's asleep," Delia said, meeting him at the door. "And so is Esther. Temporarily."

"I should get to bed myself." His words prompted only a tired nod and no unease. They'd obviously not consulted her about their scheme.

Perhaps they suspected her of being more loyal to her boyfriend than to humanity.

"Delia, when you looked so afraid in the hospital...now I know why. Guess what Neil Megsburg's aunt suggested to me tonight."

"I can imagine."

So wise, this woman whom his soul had chosen anguish with.

"Well," he asked, "what do you think of the idea?"

"Did they promise they'd take care of Esther?"

"Don't let that sway you."

"Dennis. Did they?"

"Better than we could ourselves. But I don't like the idea of her putting flowers on your grave. Or mine."

"Eventually, she'll forget me. Maybe even forget you."

Just as with our adoptive mom, thought Dennis. It's been years since Esther's even asked about her.

It calmed him to think that if he failed, if Sexdeath did indeed poison him, his sister would not miss him for long.

"Exactly how many women do they want you to kill?"

"Enough for eight hundred and eighty-nine kids, I think. That'd set the world's record."

He didn't want the world's record. He only wanted Delia. And he could see her wondering:

So many poets had extolled this poison. What did it taste like?

"Eight hundred and eighty-nine. Well, we'd better get you in training. Just don't enjoy it with any of them."

He couldn't. Not with Delia gone.

"I'm a little scared," he said.

"I'm more than a little. I'll bet even before Sexdeath, 'the first time' was a scary set of words."

"Maybe the thought of losing you will make me impotent."

"Then we'll just try again."

He wanted to. Oh, he wanted to. "Delia, are you absolutely sure the world's worth it?"

She took his hand. "The world isn't why I want to do this."

"But if I am a Miracle..." The word sounded so pretentious when applied to him. "If I am one, I'll have to grow old without you."

"I'll be waiting."

Waiting? Up there? He'd never known her to believe in --

"On Earth, of course, I'm not so patient." She pressed a hearty kiss upon him, full and long.

Esther. They mustn't wake up Esther.

Soon, he and Delia might have to let the coalition watch them. Make sure he was honoring the agreement.

But not tonight. Tonight was theirs alone. He slid his arm around her waist and she played with his hair. They led each other into bed, and toward Heaven.

~~~~~~~~

By Stefano Donati

IMPRINTS

Marina Fitch lives in Watsonville, California and writes to say that she took a part.time position at a rubber stamp company when she stopped by to purchase a stamp and got offered a job. If you'll forgive the pun, the experience obviously made an impression on her. Last year she published her first novel, The Seventh Heart, a contemporary fantasy set in San Francisco. We're willing to wager our inkpad that she's currently working on a new novel.

Would you like to see the cottage?" I asked, then winced. No way the milky-eyed woman across from me was going to see anything. "Sorry, I didn't --"

"It's all right, dear." Mrs. Grady smiled. She adjusted her upturned face so that for a moment I thought I must be wrong and she could see. "I'd love to. Your home has a real warmth. And it smells wonderful. Lavender, isn't it? And lemon?"

I nodded, then caught myself. "Yes. Lemon wax."

I'd polished the furniture that morning, to impress potential tenants. I glanced at my living room. The walnut coffee table gleamed, the periwinkle sofa was remarkably toy-free, the books in the dark bookshelves stood at attention, the glass hutch winked with the afternoon light. A bowl of dried lavender perched on the coffee table next to Mrs. Grady. I repressed a sigh. At least she could smell my good intentions.

But a blind tenant...what were the liabilities? The risks? Would she bum the place down trying to cook? Break a leg tripping over my seven-year-old's bicycle?

Well, no harm in showing her the place ....

I rose. "The cottage is in the back."

But Mrs. Grady didn't stand. She leaned over and pulled her immense canvas bag closer, resting it against her leg. She reached in and pulled out a lap desk, then stirred the contents of the bag. Soft clunks and thumps accompanied her search. She fished out several blocks of wood of various sizes. Nesting the blocks between the desk and her stomach, she felt along the side of the bag for a flap. She withdrew a sheet of white paper and set it on the desk.

"Now where did I...?" she murmured. "Oh, yes. Of course."

She reached into the pocket of her flowing green jacket and produced a black ink pad. She opened it, setting it on the corner of the desk.

I lowered myself onto my chair.

And watched as the blind woman selected a block, then turned it over to ink the rubber attached to the bottom. With great care, she stamped out a picture.

I scooted closer. A scene appeared: a California ranch house with a small cottage behind, both enclosed by a picket fence laced with roses; stepping stones leading from house to cottage; flowers; three birch trees. I held my breath. My house, my yard --

Mrs. Grady stamped a woman in jeans with her hands on her hips. Me.

"How did you -- ?" I clamped my mouth shut. "Were you born blind, Mrs. Grady?"

"Hmm? Oh, no. I lost sight when I was five." Her fingers crept over the page, smearing the last image stamped, a birch tree. She frowned, gazing sightlessly at the hutch. "There's something missing," she said. She rummaged through her canvas bag. "There!" she said, fishing out another wooden block.

Mrs. Grady inked the stamp, then slapped the image on the paper. A little girl appeared in front of the woman, her head cocked defiantly.

Just then the front door banged open. Andrea streaked past, flinging her books at the couch before careening toward the kitchen. "Mom, I'm home!" she called.

"Whoa! What was --" I began, then decided to forego our usual ritual. "Andrea, come here, Pumpkin," I said. "I want you to meet someone."

She came-- half-eaten snickerdoodle in hand. I gave her my best stink eye. "Andrea, what did we talk about?" I said, trying to keep my voice even. Hard to do, with my throat tightening around the words. "You can have fruit, carrots, or crackers after school. No cookies."

She popped the rest of the snickerdoodle in her mouth.

"Well, I guess there'll be no more cookies in this house for the next two weeks," I said.

Andrea shrugged.

I counted five. It was just a cookie. "Mrs. Grady, this is my daughter, Andrea."

Mrs. Grady touched the little girl stamp. She smiled. "Hello, Andrea. A pleasure to meet you."

"Hi," Andrea said. She peeked at the picture on Mrs. Grady's desk,

then knelt beside her. "Wow. Did you do this?"Mrs. Grady chuckled. "Yes, I did."

"But -- "Andrea's eyes grew wide. She looked at me.

"Don't be afraid to ask me anything, child," Mrs. Grady said. "But what?"

"But you can't see, can you? How did you know where to put everything?" Andrea leaned closer. "Do you have a dog?" she whispered. "More says we have to wait, but if you have one .... "

"No," Mrs. Grady said, touching her forehead to Andrea's. "I haven't really needed one. Do you think I should get a dog?"

"Everybody should have a dog," Andrea said gravely.

Mrs. Grady nodded, a hint of smile twitching the comer of her mouth. She pulled a stamp from her jacket pocket, inked it and pressed it to the paper. A face peered out of the cottage window. Hers.

My qualms about her winked out -- disappeared -- like a star falling.

The next day I came home from the office to find a crumpled scrap outside the front gate. I opened the paper, smoothing it. The picture, done with stamps and colored markers, showed a moving van pulling out of my driveway. Mrs. Grady's smiling face appeared in the cottage window.

I unlocked my front door, then peeked at the cottage. Mrs. Grady's silhouette: glided past the little windows. Busy arranging things no doubt. After I got dinner started, I'd see if she'd like to join us for supper.

If she'd like to join me, at any rate. Andrea was at Brownies. Jenna's more, Linda, usually dropped her off around five, but sometimes Linda invited Andrea to dinner. Tom, Jenna's dad, would be there. Good. The more time Andrea spent with an intact nuclear family, the better. The more time. she spent with a father figure, the better ....

While the corn chowder simmered on the stove, I returned to the sliding glass door. The sun set. No lights went on in the cottage. Mrs. Grady's shadow fused with the dusk.

At ten after five, Andrea burst into the house, a sheaf of papers in her hand. The papers skimmed the coffee table, her sweater rocketed over the sofa, one shoe rolled under the hutch. "More, I'm home!"

I opened my arms wide and intercepted her. "Whoa! What was that?" I said, reciting my part of the ritual.

She pressed against me. "A fruit bat!"

A fruit bat -- she'd never been a fruit bat before. I hugged her and let her go. "Good thing I bought bananas," I said. "After you put your things away, I'd like you to ask Mrs. Grady to join us for dinner. It'll be ready in twenty minutes."

"Okay," she said. She gathered everything m except the shoe under the hutch--and tossed it in her room. I shook my head. I hoped Mrs. Grady liked fruit bats.

Apparently she did. I had to fetch tenant and daughter forty minutes later.

Light glowed in the cottage windows. The door swung open at my knock.

The cottage had been transformed. A four-room mother-in-law unit, it boasted a full bath, a kitchen, a bedroom, and a living room. Most tenants set up a small table in the living room, along with entertainment center, sofa, and coffee table. Mrs. Grady had set up a large butcher block table, four chairs, a canning cupboard, and shelves, lots of shallow, narrow shelves. They stretched from floor to ceiling, covering every inch of wall space in the living room. Two of the shelves folded open in a triptych. Through the open bedroom door, more shelves were visible. All empty.

So far. Boxes covered the floor, each overflowing with rubber stamps.

"Hi, Mom," Andrea said, sorting through a box. She picked out a stamp of a dog with a lobster clipped to its tail. "This one's great," she said.

Mrs. Grady held out her hand. Andrea set the stamp on her palm. Mrs. Grady ran her fingers over the rubber. A smile dimpled her cheeks. "Oh, yes. I was in a silly mood when I bought that one." She twisted a little, facing me. "Is it time for dinner, dear? I so lose track of time when I'm with my stamps."

"More soup, Mrs. Grady?" I asked, reaching for her bowl.

Mrs. Grady sighed. "Oh, land, another bite and I'll burst. Thank you, dear. What a wonderful welcome!"

"And now dessert," Andrea said, eyeing me hopefully. "Mom makes the best snickerdoodles in the whole world."

"Remember what happened yesterday?" I said.

Andrea's face crumpled. She pushed herself to her feet and began gathering silverware and bowls. She stopped at the kitchen door. "Fruit bats need lots of sugar," she said.

"Not when they sneak it without asking," I said. That funny knot formed in my throat. I tried to ignore it. "Any homework?"

Andrea returned to gather the last of the dishes. She shuffled around the table, head drooping. I knew what she was doing, but it doubled the knot in my throat anyway. "I have to think up three questions for the bat lady," she said. Her voice was a woeful hush. She dragged an unused knife from the table, then plodded toward the kitchen. "Ms. Richter says we're getting pictures of our fruit bat soon."

"Her class adopted a fruit bat," I explained to Mrs. Grady.

"She's a lovely child," Mrs. Grady said.

I wadded and unwadded my napkin. "Yes, she is. I just wish .... "

"You just wish you could give her more," Mrs. Grady said.

"Yes, I do," I said. And I caved in. "Andrea, Pumpkin, why don't you put some snickerdoodles on a plate and bring them out for Mrs. Grady. And one for yourself. But remember -- no more sweets after school."

When Andrea returned with the plate of cookies, she rewarded me with a huge smile -- a huge, smug smile. I gave her a warning look, then patted her bottom. "Homework," I said.

Mrs. Grady and I sat quietly after she left. Then I cleared my throat and pushed the snickerdoodles closer to Mrs. Grady. "Cookie?" I offered.

Mrs. Grady took one. She tilted her head, a thoughtful look on her face. "What more do you want for her?" she asked. "What's missing?"

I sighed. "Nothing much, just a father. Greg died when she was a year old. Which means she misses out on all the father-daughter stuff, being the apple of some man's eye. I give her all the love I can, but father-daughter bonds .... "

I pressed my lips together. "It's hard on her. Even the kids from divorced families get to see Dad. And some days are harder than others. The school just had a father-daughter dinner. Her friends kept griping about 'having to go to that thing with Dad.' She would have loved to feel put out."

"Has she asked you for a father?" Mrs. Grady held the snickerdoodle in both hands. "You have dated?"

"Oh, I've dated." I made a face, thinking about the last one. "Barney with a wig," that's what Andrea called Jared, which wasn't exactly true. He was artificially sweet -- cloying -- but he wasn't purple.

I reached for a cookie, snapped it in half. "Andrea says she doesn't want any dad, she wants the right dad. Which is fine with me. So, since I won't be giving her a dad anytime soon, I try to be more of a friend to her. I try to see things her way, cut her a little more slack. It seems only fair."

Mrs. Grady nodded, her milky eyes conveying a vast distance. Even her voice sounded far away. "Is it?" she asked.

I stood by the walnut coffee table and sorted the mail. Bills for Andrea and me -- I tossed those on the coffee table. A small package bearing a change of address sticker for Mrs. Grady. I smiled at the return address. Rubberstilzkin ....

"Mom, I'm home!" Andrea called, hurling her books at the couch before dashing to the kitchen.

I tossed another bill on the coffee table. "Whoa! What was that?"

"A herd of turtles!" Andrea said, reappearing with an apple in her hand.

The phone rang. Andrea backed into the sofa and sat on her math book.

I studied her, letting the phone ring twice more. Then I went to the dining room to answer it. "Hello?" I said.

"Hello, Ms. Hill?" a harried voice said. "This is Ms. Richter, Andrea's teacher?"

I moved to the left so I could see Andrea. She dropped her gaze, staring at her knees. "This is Carolyn Hill," I said. "What can I do for you, Ms. Richter?"

"Andrea's been acting out in class again," Ms. Richter said. "Today she decided she wasn't interested in our math lesson so she left the classroom. My aide found her two blocks from the school, sitting on a bench waiting for a transit bus. With the photo of our adopted fruit bat."

"I see," I said. Andrea peeked at me. I gave her stink eye. She looked away.

"I don't think you do," Ms. Richter said. "She cut the photo from the bulletin board with a pocketknife. Did you know she had a pocketknife?"

I pinched the bridge of my nose. "It was her father's. She's not supposed to have it at school."

"Well it's here. You need to keep better track of it. We haven't got funding for a metal detector."

Ms. Richter and I talked about the problem for a few minutes, then I hung up. I walked into the living room. "Where is your father's pocketknife?"

"Ms. Richter took it," Andrea whispered.

"Good," I said. "I think we'll let her keep it for a while. Care to explain why you left class today?"

Andrea squirmed in place, grinding the math book into the sofa. "We were doing division again and I know division --"

"Not an excuse. When you're in class, you do as the teacher tells you-"

"But Ms. Richter was reviewing it for the dummies and I already know-"

"A little review won't hurt you. And I don't ever want to hear you call anyone a dummy again. Understand?"

She kicked the coffee table leg. "Yes."

"Good." I rolled the tension from my shoulders, glad to be done with the whole thing. "I'll be right back. I'm going to take Mrs. Grady her mail."

Andrea's eyes lit up. "Can I take it?"

She'd been over there every day this week .... "Not this time," I said. "Besides, I hear you've got some math to catch up on."

"But Mom --" "Just do it," I said.

She tilted her chin and gave me her best stink eye -- only a tenth as effective as mine, but coming along nicely. "Needs work," I said. "I'll be back in a minute."

I hadn't been to the cottage since Mrs. Grady moved in the week before. "Hello, Carolyn," Mrs. Grady said, answering my knock. "I was expecting Andrea. She's not ill?"

"No, she's doing her home -- " I stopped. An exhibition of tiny pictures covered the walls. Across from me were plants -- trees, flowers, grasses, leaves, vines, even cacti. Mixed in were stones and fences, ponds and bridges, road signs -- all the stuff of landscapes. A portrait gallery graced the wall next to the plants. Eleanor Roosevelt grinned at me; Beethoven glared.

I shook my head. "I've never seen so many rubber stamps."

Mrs. Grady backed into the cottage, gesturing for me to follow. "And you won't see half of them if you don't come in."

There were animals (a tiger crouching, a frog in Edwardian finery), birds (a flock of flamingoes, a pelican with an eye patch), bugs (an ant carrying an invisible load, two flies sitting down to breakfast), and things, all kinds of things. Cars and planes, cooking utensils, computers, musical instruments, a fire hydrant ....

"You could create an entire world," I said.

Mrs. Grady walked over to the animals and brushed the wooden blocks with her fingers. She chose one, then handed it to me. "It's been done," she said.

I looked down at the stamp. A tabby cat held the Earth between its paws.

Mrs. Grady giggled. Her cheeks pinked like a child's. "When I'm feeling irreverent," she whispered, "I call it the God stamp."

"Well," I said, touching her hand with the package, "I hope you have room for more."

"Always room for more," she said with relish. She took a pair of scissors from the canning cupboard and opened the package. "Oh, good," she said, pulling out two stamps. She felt the robber, then set the stamps on the table: two birds practicing handwriting and a man with an umbrella being blown away.

I glanced at the table. Three plastic stack trays stood in one comer, the middle one completely empty, the top one overflowing. The bottom tray held one sheet of paper. More paper scattered across the desk, each page covered with stamped impressions. On one, a little girl jumped over and over, stamped in a bouquet of colors. I touched a magenta girl --

"Would you like to do a picture?" Mrs. Grady said.

"No, I -- maybe some other time."

"Andrea's done quite a few already," Mrs. Grady said, reaching for the stack in the top tray. "But she's only completed one." She set the papers in front of me.

Andrea's "pictures" were largely experiments. On several she had stamped images at random as if curious to see how they really looked. Smearing marred many of the images, grid-like framing haunted others. She tended toward animals and toys-- a red wagon had been repeated over and over on one page -- with two pages devoted to dogs. Newfoundlands, boxers, fox terriers, retrievers, every dog imaginable. It seemed Mrs. Grady had an inexhaustible supply of canines.

Mrs. Grady handed me the last three sheets. Suddenly the "pictures" became pictures. Or, I should say, the same picture...with variations.

Andrea had followed Mrs. Grady's lead and stamped out our house and yard. She had used most of the same stamps, but instead of the petulant little girl she had substituted a girl holding a stick above her head.

And she had added a dog. Three different dogs. A collie romped in the first picture, a daschund gamboled in the second, a mastiff drooled in the third.

I touched the little girl. Laughing, the gift brandished the stick, leaning back slightly as if the dog might jump on her to get at the prize. My heart ached. She'd wanted a dog for so long. I'd promised her, many times, that when she was old enough, we'd get one. A medium one. No barking rats and no goliaths. I pressed my fingers to the tiny, printed face. "Oh, Pumpkin," I whispered.

Then Mrs. Grady handed me the picture from the bottom tray. It was the same picture, but this time a golden retriever sported with the girl while a woman watched, smiling. The picture had been done in colored inks, everything carefully tinted with markers and color pencils.

"She asked me to stamp out the house and yard," Mrs. Grady said, brushing her fingers across the page. "But I told her, no, all of it had to come from her." She turned those milky eyes on me. "Just as it must come from you. dear."

I tapped the picture. "Can I -- may I keep this?"

Mrs. Grady took the picture and slid it into the bottom tray. "Not this one," she said. "It needs to sit in the tray just a bit longer. And you, what do you want? What will you stamp?"

I straightened and looked around the room. Images crowded around me like expectant children. I shook my head, overwhelmed. "I don't know," I said. "There's too much to choose from."

"It's not too much, dear," Mrs. Grady said. "It's choice. Don't be afraid to make the wrong choice. The right choice will find you." She scrunched her nose at me, a kind of conspiratorial wink. "And in the meantime, experiment. Have fun."

I rubbed the back of my neck and fumbled open the gate. I had just enough time to take a quick shower before Andrea got home --

The golden retriever bounded to meet me. I stepped back. The dog danced around me, barking and wagging his tail. I patted his head.

"Where did you come from?" I said, then glanced at the cottage.

The door opened and Mrs. Grady stepped out, my surprise mirrored in her face. "Did you get a dog, dear?" she said.

"I don't know," I said. "I mean, he was just here."

"Oh, my land!" Mrs. Grady gasped. "It's never happened this quickly before. Not with other people's pictures. I only put it in the tray two days ago. Must be those new inks .... "

The dog licked my hand. "He's probably lost," I said, stroking one of his ears. My fingers brushed a collar. "Here. He's got tags. This'll tell us where he belongs."

I squatted beside the golden retriever, choking on his breath. His tags jangled as I sorted through them -- rabies, license, ID. I turned the ID tag toward me. "Here we go," I said. "His name is Chester and he lives at --" I looked up at Mrs. Grady. "He lives here. Mrs. Grady, you didn't...?"

Mrs. Grady sniffed. "Certainly not, dear. Not without asking you."

I stood. "Well, he's licensed. I'm going to call the SPCA."

Chester followed me to the house and flopped in the flower bed beside the step. Only it was no longer a flower bed. The marguerites I had planted there years ago had disappeared, replaced by a worn, Chester-sized furrow. Two ceramic dishes butted up against the step, one empty and coated with brown meal, the other mineral-crusted and half full of water.

I stared at the dishes, then at Chester. Chester grinned, tongue draped between his lower teeth. "Don't go anywhere," I said, and hurried into the house.

I returned minutes later, stunned. I sat on the bottom step next to Chester. He put his head in my lap.

Mrs. Grady opened her door. "Well?" she said, but I could tell she already knew.

"He's ours," I said. "I don't know how --"

Andrea squealed and clambered over the gate. Chester snapped up a stick and ran to meet her. Dropping it at her feet, he barked.

Andrea fell to her knees and threw her arms around his neck. "Oh, More!" she said, burrowing her face into the retriever's feathery fur. "Where did you find him? Can I name him?"

I held my breath. "What do you want to call him?"

Andrea touched her nose to the dog's. "Chester."

I breathed out. "Good thing," I said.

That Friday afternoon I went to the cottage to invite Mrs. Grady to dinner. Andrea -- and Chester -- had been invited to spend the night at Jenna's. Andrea would also be spending Sunday at the Boardwalk with Jenna's family. I wondered if, maybe, it wasn't too much. But Tom had offered to include her ....

I glanced at the darkened cottage windows. Steam coated the glass, turning the windows opaque. I rapped at the door. "Mrs. Grady?" I called.

The door opened. The scent of roast chicken spilled from the cottage. Mrs. Grady leaned out, her cheeks oven-warmed to a deep rose. "You must be psychic, dear," she said. "I was just about to come invite you to dinner. Chicken and broccoli. And salad. I love those new salad mixes."

I laughed. "I was coming over to invite you."

"Have you started cooking yet?" she said.

"No, not yet."

"Then I win!" She backed into the cottage, gesturing broadly. "Come in, come in! It's almost ready. If you wouldn't mind straightening the table .... "

"Not at all." I switched on the light and went to the table. Two layers of paper matted the surface. I looked around for Mrs. Grady. She'd disappeared. "Where should I put the pictures?" I shouted.

"In the top tray, dear," she called from the kitchen. "They're all Andrea's."

I gathered the papers, curious to see what Andrea had come up with this time. She had done the yard again, with the golden retriever and the girl playing, and the mother looking on, but this time a man stood next to the mother. She had stamped this picture several times, using different men just as she had used different dogs earlier. She had used a cowboy, a man in a tuxedo, a man in snorkeling gear, and Michelangelo's David. In one, the mother was talking to a generic superhero. I set the pictures in the top tray and picked up the last one.

A little girl and her mother stood in the middle of the page, fenced in by the picket and climbing rose stamp. The pickets pointed to the edges of the paper, as if they had been laid on the ground. The little girl looked scared .....

I shivered.

Mrs. Grady came in with two plates loaded with silverware. "Dinner's almost ready," she said, setting the dishes on the table. "Did you see Andrea's drawings?"

I set the picture in the tray. "Yes. It looks like she's auditioning dads."

Mrs. Grady chuckled, wiping her hands on her apron. "It does, doesn't it? She said she just wanted to 'try it on,' see how it felt." Mrs. Grady's chuckle settled into a smile. "And she liked it well enough to try it on several times. But the last one -- that's the important one."

"The one where she's fenced in? Trapped?" I chafed my arms. "That's not what I want for her."

Mrs. Grady tilted her head. "Oh? Well, there's nothing to stop you from stamping what you want after dinner."

"No, no, no," Mrs. Grady said, taking the dirty plates from my hands. "You just sit here and stamp. I'll do the dishes." She arched her eyebrows at my intake of breath. "No protests. I insist. It's what I want."

"I'd be happy --"

"You can wipe the table down, that's what you can do. Then go pick out some stamps. Paper, ink, all that stuff is in the canning cupboard."

So I wiped down the table. Then I approached the shelves. So many images. I scanned each section, drawn to some stamps, amused by others. I kept coming back to one in particular: a garden gate, slightly ajar. I picked it up three times, carried it around, then put it back.

I ignored the picket and rose stamp. The scared girl's eyes pleaded with me whenever I walked past her shelf. I turned her around so that the rubber faced out.

I concentrated on Andrea, then went around the room gathering the "everything" I wanted for her: a computer, a college degree, books, toys, food, people -- everything and anything I could think of. I added several heart stamps for love. I passed over the gate several times. Finally, I took it to the table.

First I stamped a little girl surrounded by mountains of people and things. I frowned. Something wasn't right. I stamped out a different version.. Still off. I did two, three more, adding or subtracting elements. In one, people and hearts crowded the girl. In another, the people stood on one side of her, the things mounded on the other. In the last, hearts circled everything. I sat back, a lacy heart stamp in my hand, inked and ready.

Was this really what I wanted for Andrea? Possessions? I mean, I wanted her to be comfortable. Friends? Of course, but Andrea already knew how to make and keep friends. Accomplishments? Well, yes. And love, although she already had that in plenty. But something was missing --

Mrs. Grady set two mugs of peppermint tea on the table. She sat down, pulling one of the mugs into her hands. She held it, her fingers fencing it in.

I stared at her hands and thought about Andrea's picket fence. I didn't want Andrea to feel restricted, I didn't want her to feel limited -- not by me, not by the father she never knew, not by anything. I wanted her to be free.

I reached for the fuschia ink pad and stamped the silhouette of a little girl jumping, arms flung wide, in the middle of the page, with nothing around her to confine or frighten her. Then I sat back. "That's it," I said, reaching for the tea.

But it wasn't, I could feel it.

Mrs. Grady set down her mug and collected my pictures. She ran her fingertips over each one. She nodded and clucked -- until she came to the girl jumping. Sweeping her hand across the page, she frowned, then swept the picture with her open palm. "Which stamps did you use on this one?" she said.

I handed her the stamp of the girl jumping.

She felt the rubber, the ink staining her fingers. She murmured, then set the papers in the middle tray. "These aren't finished. Maybe next time --"

I retrieved the drawing of Andrea free. "What about this one?" I asked.

Mrs. Grady touched it. Her lips pursed. "Are you sure?"

Doubt crept through me. "I think so."

She hesitated. "We can try it, dear," she said, placing the drawing in the bottom tray. "We can always remove it."

Sunday morning I walked to the corner market for a newspaper. As I walked the block and a half home, my thoughts kept returning to Andrea's picture and mine. Since Friday night, my doubts about both pictures had grown. I opened the front door, mulling the whole thing over on the way to the kitchen. Maybe I should do another picture, a different one --

I froze. Andrea sat on the kitchen floor, crumbs dribbling from her chipmunked cheeks, a large French knife in her hand. Five broken cookies dotted the linoleum like cow pies. Chester nosed one away from Andrea's foot and ate it. Andrea raised the knife, its wide, triangular blade gleaming, then brought it down with a slash. A cookie exploded in two. A deep scar rent the linoleum. It was not the first. Andrea raised the knife again --

I grabbed her wrist. "What are you doing?" I roared.

Chester darted for cover under the kitchen table.

Andrea jerked upright, chewed once and swallowed. Her voice escaped in a crumb-clogged mumble. "Chester and I were hungry."

I pried the knife from her hand and set it on the counter. "You are not to play with that knife. You are never to play with that knife. Or any other knife."

Andrea pulled away, gaze fixed on me. "But the cookies were too big. Chester' was eating them too fast --"

I jerked her to her feet. '"And that's another thing. The dog does not eat cookies or any other people food --"

Someone knocked on the front door. "Yo! Anybody home?"

I stiffened. Jenna's dad, Tom, coming to take Andrea to the Boardwalk.

I looked at Andrea. Her eyes pleaded with me. This acting out, as Ms. Richter called it, was getting worse. Leaving school, playing with knives...I glanced at the gashed and curling linoleum. A line had to be drawn somewhere --

But she'd been looking forward to the Boardwalk all week, counting the days till Sunday. She'd get to spend the day with Jenna and Tom, with a father, maybe not her own father, but a father. The one thing I couldn't give her ....

"Hello?" Tom called. "Carolyn? Andrea?"

My shoulders sagged. "Go on," I said. "Don't forget your sweatshirt. We'll talk about this later."

Andrea nodded, then bolted for the door.

There would be no talk later. We both knew that.

The next day at work I got another call from the school.

"There's been an accident," Mr. Harbin said.

"Dear God." My stomach shrank to a cold, hard fist. "Is Andrea okay?"

The principal's voice grew crisp. "I wouldn't say that."

The knot in my stomach cinched tighter and tighter as he explained. Andrea had taken the French knife to school. A boy in her class, Kirby March, saw it in her backpack and asked to see it. Andrea told him to wait till lunch, then the two of them crossed the field to the pepper tree where no one could see them. They hacked at the tree's knobby bark, then decided to climb to the lowest branch and see if they could saw off a limb. Andrea climbed up first, the knife between her teeth. The yard duty teacher spotted her and shouted. Andrea took the knife from her mouth to answer, then slipped and fell. The knife tumbled from her hand --

My heart pounded. Not her arm, not her face, I prayed.

-- slicing through Kirby's sneaker, lopping off two toes.

My stomach unknotted. Guilt tainted my relief.

"Andrea says the knife is hers," Mr. Harbin said.

"No -- it's -- no," I stammered. "My God, what kind of idiot do you think I am? She's seven years old! Nobody hands a seven-year-old a knife!"

"I thought she might be exaggerating," Mr. Harbin said. The brittleness left his voice, replaced by a more patronizing tone. "Ms. Hill, I've talked to Ms. Richter and the school psychologist about Andrea's recent fascination with knives. We've decided not to contact CPS at this time ...."

I lowered my head to my fist. Child Protective Services. Dear God.

"...upset right now," Mr. Harbin concluded. "I'd like you to pick her up as soon as possible." He paused. "Ms. Hill?"

I had to clear my throat twice. "I'm coming," I said.

Andrea cried the entire trip home. "He almost died!" she wailed. "No, Pumpkin, he didn't," I said, pulling into the driveway. I was caught between an urge to scold and a desire to comfort. Andrea needed both. "Kirby lost his toes, but he didn't almost die."

Andrea's sobs doubled. I switched off the ignition and pulled her into my arms. "Andrea," I said, "someone got hurt very badly. Someone could have died. But they didn't.

"She calmed a little.

"You need to learn from this," I said. I tipped her face to mine. "Did you? What did you learn?"

"Not to -- not to take- knives to school." She sniffed. "Mom? Can I call Kirby and tell him I'm sorry?"

I hugged her. "Of course, you can. Think, maybe, you should apologize to his parents, too?"

She went rigid and pulled away, shaking her head. Terror widened her eyes.

I sighed. "All right," I said, ruffling Andrea's hair. "I'll do it. Come on. We've got a call to make." I opened the front gate. "Why did you take the knife to school, Pumpkin?"

She sniffed. "'Cause I wanted to feel safe."

I stopped, my mind filled with the image of a girl and her mother in an enclosed yard. Not enclosed as in trapped. Enclosed as in safe.

I gripped one of the pickets to steady myself. "You go on ahead, Pumpkin. I need to talk to Mrs. Grady."

Andrea nodded and sculled her way to the house. I followed the stepping stones to the cottage. Mrs. Grady met me at the door. "Is something wrong, dear?" she said. "You're home so early."

"Can you -- " I held my breath. "Would you take my picture out of the bottom tray?"

Relief softened her features. "Certainly, dear."

"Thanks," I said. "I'll explain later."

"No need to explain," Mrs. Grady said. "Just come by tomorrow."

I went straight to Mrs. Grady's after work the next day. It was Brownie day. Andrea wouldn't be home till five. Chester followed me to the cottage, yapping and bouncing, his body wriggling with each wag of his tail.

Mrs. Grady opened the door before I knocked. "There you are!" she said. "I've been expecting you. Ready to do another drawing?"

My cheeks warmed. "Yes. Yes, I am."

Mrs. Grady nodded once. "Good. Andrea was quite put out when I refused to slip her latest picture into the bottom tray. I told her we needed to wait for you."

I stared at her. "What? When?"

"Sunday. After she carne home from the Boardwalk." Mrs. Grady opened the door wide, ushering Chester and me inside. Chester scrabbled at Mrs. Grady's feet, licking her ankles. Mrs. Grady bent to pet him. "You little scamp. Would you like a dog biscuit? Hmm?"

I took a deep breath. "Would it be all right -- may I see Andrea's drawing?"

Mrs. Grady straightened. "No," she said. "You may not." She clucked at Chester. "Let's go in the kitchen, Chester, and whip up a little something for dinner. Wouldn't want everyone to go hungry. Oh, and, Carolyn? Remember to use the stamps you're drawn to, dear."

I went to the shelves to find the garden gate.

Mrs. Grady opened the cottage door. She clucked to Chester, then the two of them went outside. "Andrea, honey, your mother's inside,"she called. "Why don't you show me the garden. Mmm, it smells like Spring!"

My own stamped garden glowed with Spring -- with vibrant marker inks and the soft shading of color pencils. I reached for a tube of iridescent glitter glue and added dew drops to the roses, then sat back to consider my finished drawing.

A picket fence with climbing roses enclosed a grassy field. Unlike Andrea's fence, mine had a garden gate, slightly ajar. Monsters crowded outside the fence at the left end of the enclosure, while inside a mother and daughter held hands. Fewer monsters crowded outside the fence toward the middle. Here the mother and daughter, older now, walked together but separate. At the right end of the page, one lone monster waited outside the fence, a bulbous creature with a silly smile. The mother stood on the inside of the gate and waved. Her daughter, a young woman, waved from outside the gate.

I touched one of the roses. Glitter came away on my finger.

Two sets of footsteps stomped in place outside the cottage door. "It is getting chilly!" Mrs. Grady said. "Let's see if your mother's done."

The door opened. Andrea wriggled past Mrs. Grady and launched herself at me. "Mom, I'm home!" she said, burrowing into my arms. Her nose pressed against my bare arm, cold as a dime in January.

"Whoa!" I said. "What was that?"

Andrea giggled. "A hungry person!"

"Two hungry people," Mrs. Grady said. "Did you finish, dear?"

"Just 'rarely," I said. "But I'm not sure how it's going to work."

Mrs. Grady walked over to the table. Her fingers skimmed the drawing. A smile bloomed on her face. She drew her hand away, her fingertips sparkling with glitter as if she'd touched magic. "Somewhere inside, you know," she said, "or you couldn't have done this."

She slid the drawing into the bottom tray along with one of Andrea's.

The next day, I sat on the couch with the mail in my lap, separating the bills from the junk mail. The door flew open and Andrea rocketed into the living room. Her arm shot out, then recoiled -- without tossing her books at the sofa. "Mom, I'm home!" she called, disappearing into the kitchen.

"Whoa!" I said, dropping a bill on the coffee table. "What was that?"

"A White's tree frog!"

I looked up, then shook my head. A tree frog. I finished sorting the wheat from the chaff and tossed the chaff away. I took the bills to the kitchen --

And caught Andrea sneaking two macaroons.

"That's it," I said, extending my hand. "No more cookies for a week."

Andrea pretended to be contrite. She handed me the cookies.

I opened a drawer and pulled out a plastic vegetable bag. Dropping the macaroons in the bag, I reached for the cookie jar and emptied it into the bag. Then I left the kitchen, headed for Mrs. Grady's.

Andrea trailed after me, mouth agape. "Mom?"

I knocked at the cottage door. Mrs. Grady opened it. "Hello, dear," she said. "Mmm, something smells good .... "

I set the bag in her hands. "We won't be eating cookies at our house for the next week. I was wondering if you'd like some macaroons."

"Oh, I love macaroons," Mrs. Grady said, dipping her hand in the bag.

"And please," I said, "don't give any to Andrea. She can't have any cookies till next Wednesday."

Andrea's jaw dropped even more.

Mrs. Grady took a bite of macaroon and murmured. "Wonderful!" She nodded solemnly. "No sweets for Andrea. I understand."

And suddenly, so did I. I wet my lips, then felt my own eyes widen. That tightness in my throat...gone. So were the guilty arguments that usually filled my head at moments like this. I hadn't even thought, I'd just acted --

I turned to Mrs. Grady. She beamed at me. "Come in," she said. "I'd like to show you Andrea's drawing."

My hand shook as I accepted the paper. Andrea had repeated her picture of the girl and her mother in the yard. But this time the little girl wasn't afraid.

Mrs. Grady and I developed our own ritual-- tea on Brownie day. One week Mrs. Grady ushered me into the cottage, an amused smile just touching her lips. "Andrea did another drawing yesterday," she said. "I think you should see it."

Sure enough, a new drawing rested in the bottom tray. I grasped the back of the nearest chair. Excitement and apprehension tingled through me. Andrea had known what we both needed the last time, but still, placing my life in the hands of a seven-year-old ....

"What is this one about?" I asked, trying to sound casual.

Mrs. Grady grinned. "She's auditioning fathers again."

Placing my love life in the hands of a seven-year-old, I amended. "And who did she choose? Not the superhero, I hope."

"No, not the superhero." Mrs. Grady took the drawing from the tray. "She did something interesting. She couldn't decide, so she stamped several images on top of each other. Watch for a snorkeler who owns a tuxedo, likes country western music, and looks like Michelangelo's David."

"Not bad," I admitted, scanning the people shelf. "But I think I better stamp my own version."

"Remember to use the stamps you're drawn to, dear," Mrs. Grady said.

I smiled. Just what I needed -- a guy who looked like a garden gate.

~~~~~~~~

By Marina Fitch

Section: SCIENCE

GRAVITY FOR THE ADVENTUROUS

We are here to mess with your mind. Let's get that straight from the start. One of the lessons that we have both learned at the Exploratorium is: Take no one's word for the truth. Experiment. Make your own observations.

We are here to pass those lessons along. But first, we are here to mess with your mind.

THE WAY YOU THINK IT IS

At the Exploratorium, we have an exhibit that consists of a clear plastic tube that's about five feet long, hooked up to a vacuum pump. Inside the tube is a small plastic chicken and a brightly colored feather. You can flip the tube over and watch the two objects fall.

If the tube is filled with air, the feather floats gently downward and the chicken drops like -- well, like a plastic chicken. But if you use the vacuum pump to evacuate most of the air from the tube and then repeat the experiment, you get a very different result. The feather and the chicken fall side by side, hitting the bottom of the tube at exactly the same time.

When astronaut David Scott stood on the moon and dropped a geologist's hammer and a falcon feather side by side, he demonstrated the same principle. The hammer and the feather struck the lunar surface at the same time.

Scott's lunar antics and the Exploratorium exhibit both relate to some of the stuff with which Galileo was messing back in 1604. If you took high school physics, you probably learned the principle derived from Galileo's work. It's usually summed up as something like this: in the absence of air resistance, anything you drop will accelerate toward the ground at the acceleration of gravity, usually abbreviated as g. At the surface of the earth, g is just shy of 10 meters per second per second (32 feet per second squared). That means that anything you drop will accelerate from 0 mph to 60 mph (0 to 100 km/hr) in about three seconds. That's what your physics teacher probably told you. And if you're a good science fiction reader, you probably believed your physics teacher.

Not so fast. Take no one's word for the truth. Is what your physics teacher told you really true?

TAKING THE PLUNGE

To prepare for writing this article, Paul suggested that Pat experience free fall by riding "The Drop Zone" at Great America, a nearby amusement park. On this ride, you are strapped into a seat, hauled to the top of an 80-meter tower (higher than a 20-story building), and dropped.

Paul likes this ride. After all, you can make some interesting physics observations during the two seconds of free fall. For example, he says, you can watch the ground as it approaches and note the high acceleration. You can release a penny and notice how how it falls in relation to your fall. You can pay attention to the feeling in your innards as the springy windings of your intestines relax as you go into free fall.

So Paul suggested that Pat, in the interest of science, ride the Drop Zone -- maybe ride it more than once, so she could make detailed observations. Pat, being a diligent researcher, did ride the Drop Zone, but her experiments did not go exactly as planned.

As readers of this magazine know, Pat is usually more concerned with character development than with science. At Great America, character development (or perhaps the lack of character development) interfered with physics research, though Pat did make a number of observations. Pat reported that she closed her eyes as soon as she was strapped into her seat. She observed that she swore a blue streak the entire time the seats were being lifted to the top of the tower, then noted that she screamed all the way down. She did report strange sensations in her intestines, though she refused to describe them as in any way relaxed.

Dave, Pat's research companion, did complete one of Paul's experiments. He placed a penny on his open hand and watched what happened to the coin as he fell. "Did you see that?" he asked Pat, when they reached the ground. "The penny rose away from my hand as we fell."

"See what?" asked Pat, as she opened her eyes for the first time since leaving the ground.

According to Galileo, that penny should have fallen with the exact same acceleration as Pat and Dave. Dave's hand was shielding the coin from the effects of wind resistance so the coin should have stayed right with Dave's hand. What gives? Do the riders on the drop zone accelerate faster than g, or does the the coin accelerate more slowly? Is Galileo spinning in his grave?

To figure this one out, Paul rode the drop zone a number of times. As he repeatedly plummeted to earth, he tried the coin experiment and observed the same strange behavior that Dave had noticed. He also made a few other observations. He noticed the restraining straps pushed down onto his shoulders as he went into free fall. That didn't make sense. Since the seat and Paul went into free fall at the same time, the car should be falling at the same rate as Paul and the straps shouldn't be pulling him down.

So Paul had two puzzles to figure out -- the strange behavior of the coin and the push of the shoulder straps. He started experimenting around home, and figured a few things out, if you have a Slinky available you can do his experiments too.

FASTER THAN A FALLING SLINKY

Try this. Find a Slinky. Hold it by the top turn and let it dangle down from your hand. The bottom should be above the floor. (We had to cut off part of an older plastic Slinky to make it short enough.) With your other hand, hold a set of car keys next to the top of the Slinky.

Before you drop the keys and the Slinky at the same time, try to predict what will happen. Are you going to vote with Galileo and say that the top of the Slinky and the keys will reach the ground at the same time? Or are you a bit more suspicious now?

Okay -- now try the experiment.

Ha! Take that, Galileo! The top of the Slinky beat the keys to the ground. The top of the Slinky accelerated downward much faster than the keys! Faster than the acceleration of gravity.

Now hold the Slinky as you did before and hold the keys next to the bottom of the Slinky. (If your arms are not long enough, bunch up a few turns of the Slinky at the top where you hold it.) Drop them at the same time. This time the keys fall faster, the bottom of the Slinky appears to just stay in place, and the keys beat the Slinky to the ground. Weird.

One last experiment. Fold the Slinky up tight and mark the middle with a piece of tape. This spot is the Slinky's center of mass. (You have to mark it, because when the Slinky stretches under its own weight, the center of mass won't be in the center of the stretched Slinky. I Hold the Slinky by its top again and drop the keys next to the center of mass of the Slinky. The keys and the center of mass fall together, the Slinky and the keys hit the floor together.

In free fall, the center of mass of an object accelerates at g. But if the object can change shape elastically as it falls, some parts may accelerate faster than g and some parts slower.

So what's going on here? Well, gravity isn't the only force working on all parts of the Slinky. The top turn of the Slinky, or the top "slink" (as Paul calls it) is pulled down by gravity, but it's also pulled down by the tension forces from the rest of the stretched Slinky. When you are holding the Slinky, the top turn is pulled up by your hand. The downward and upward forces add to zero so the top turn has zero acceleration. When you first let go, the Slinky is still stretched. The top is being pulled down by gravity as well as by the stretched spring below. So the top slink accelerates down faster than it would with the pull of gravity alone -- faster than g acceleration.

The bottom of the Slinky is being pulled down by gravity and up by the stretched Slinky above. When you first let go, the Slinky begins to pull itself together starting at the top. It takes a while for the change in tension to propagate to the bottom. So the bottom remains at rest for a while.

SLINKY SPINE

The Slinky experiment helped us to understand why the shoulder straps on the ride pulled down on Paul, it wasn't because the car was falling faster than g. Paul's spine is elastic, like a Slinky! When Paul was sitting at rest at the top of the ride, his acceleration was zero. Gravity was pulling down on every bit of Paul and the seat was pushing up on his butt. In particular, Paul's head and shoulders were pushing down on his spine and the seat was pushing up so his spine was compressed. When Paul went into free fall, his spine was no longer pushed down by his head, so his spine expanded. He grew more than a centimeter taller in a fraction of a second. His expanding spine pushed his shoulders into the shoulder straps and Paul felt the reaction force of the shoulder straps on his body.

The human spine expands in free fall, which is something NASA has known for a long time. When astronauts go into free fall they grow, so their space suits have to have room for the lengthened spines. The same phenomenon explains why you are a little taller in the morning after lying down all night. Once you stand up and that massive head of yours squashes down on your spine, you shrink back down. You don't have to take our word for it. (Remember what we said at the beginning of the article?) Measure your height before you go to bed and before you get up and you'll find a difference.

The mysterious behavior of the penny can also be explained by examining what happens to your body when it is suddenly freed from the constraints of gravity. When Paul's arm was extended, holding the penny, the muscles were pulling up against gravity, keeping the arm still. When Paul went into free fall, his arm accelerated down with his body and the muscles no longer needed to pull upward to keep the arm in place. But it took a moment for Paul to get that message to his muscles, and the muscles kept pulling up for a fraction of a second. As a result, his arm jerked up involuntarily, launching the penny up out of his hand to where the effects of air resistance cause it to lag gently behind him as he fell.

THE PROBLEM OF THE BUNGEE JUMPERS

Folks at the Exploratorium are not the only ones performing odd experiments in free fall. A group of bungee-jumping high school student experimentalists, led by their teacher Clarence Bakken, decided to record their acceleration during a jump.

Before we tell you what happened, think about the situation. Before we started messing with your mind, you might have figured that they would all accelerate at g. What do you say now?

Well, every one of them accelerated at least 10 percent faster than g. How could this be?

Here's a clue. The bungee cord they used was tied to the bridge at foot level, hung down over the edge of the bridge and then came back up to them. Bungee cords are stretchy -- if they weren't, the sudden stop at the end of the jump would probably kill the jumper. The bungee cord hanging off the bridge was stretched under its own weight. Think about what happened with the Slinky, and you'll be able to figure out why the bungee jumpers accelerated at a rate greater than g.

When the jumpers stepped off the bridge, they were not only pulled down by gravity. They were pulled down by the elastic forces from the stretched bungee cord.

Here's a Slinky model of the bungee jumpers. Hold both ends of the Slinky at the same height so that the middle sags down toward the floor in a U shape. Hold a set of keys in the hand that holds one end of the Slinky. Drop the keys and that end of the Slinky at the same time. Notice that the end of the Slinky accelerates down faster than the keys!

PEELING THE ONION

Physics professors spend a great deal of time and effort to convince students that in the absence of air resistance all objects fall at g. Understand this simple concept, and you are far ahead of most of the population in understanding how the universe works. However, you have to be careful not to extend simple models too far. In the case of our falling objects, there were elastic forces which increased the acceleration of parts of the object to greater than g.

As a teacher, Paul always begins with the simplest possible model that answers a question or explains an experiment. Modify the question and he may have to shift to a more complicated model. For example, ask how far a baseball drops as it is pitched across the front of a classroom and he'll use Newton's laws to figure it out. Ask how far light falls and he'll use general relativity (which gives exactly double the answer predicted by Newton). So he tells his classes that every answer he gives contains an asterisk*, and the invisible footnote says *"But it's more complicated than that."

When it comes to falling, the important physics idea is that everything falls at g. However, we have just shown you one of the asterisks. Elastic forces within an object can produce accelerations greater than g.

Not So Past, Galileo!

Here's a simple experiment that you can use to demonstrate that not all objects fall at the same rate.

Find a yardstick. (Paul says find a meter stick, but he went metric decades ago. Don't worry about it -- a yardstick will do just fine.)

Lay the yardstick on the floor and lift one end up so that the stick makes a 45-degree angle with the floor.

Now hold a coin next to the end of the yardstick and drop both at the same time. The end of the stick will hit the floor before the coin. Notice that the coin always fails on top of the stick. If you watch from the side, you can see the coin lag behind. That's because the end of the stick is accelerating faster than g.

In free fall, the center of mass of an object accelerates at g. But the meter stick isn't in freefall because the floor is pushing up on the bottom of the stick. Also, the stick rotates as it falls. The combination of the force from the floor and the rotation of the stick leads to an acceleration of the tip that is greater than g. The complete explanation is another asterisk.

~~~~~~~~

By PAUL DOHERTY & PAT MURPHY

THE MERCY GATE

The following story grew out of two separate lines he jotted down: "What's inside All Baba's cave?" and "What's the worst thing that happened to you?" You might not recognize either line' s role in the genesis of this tale, but we think you'll find the results to be powerful and poignant.

Anyone can stop a man's life, but no one his death; a thousand doors open on to it. -- Seneca

1

They came to the world that had died in a single night, the kurtikutt pentad, the Proteus, and the human pair, to the city that had lain undisturbed for a dozen centuries.

A handful of days was all the kurtikutt tomb robbers would allow Bergstrom for his work. At the end of that time the last of his remotes coursed lonely through pale yellow skies, a cold methane wind whistling across its wings. Through the robot's faceted eyes, he looked down on a canvas painted in X-rays and infrared, sonar and radar, gravimetric gradients and the visible spectrum, to render a cityscape of graceful towers, vast amphitheaters, and parklands run riot. This was a preindustrial world, less promising than most Bergstrom had visited in the past eight years; still, he could have spent a lifetime in the city the Hand of God had touched.

"Time to go home now, Evan."

The voice was small and distant, a bit of noise in the data stream, but it drew him down. He tipped one graphite wing and spiraled in, toward the plaza at the city's heart, and the black pearl set there -- the place where lines of electromagnetic force were drawn tight and the gravitational well became infinitely deep, a gate to other worlds.

He swept along streets filled with evidence of the final hours' torment, past smashed merchants' stalls; rune-etched ruby steles, toppled and broken; draft animals' skeletons yoked to overturned carts; crude barricades; a pyramidal gallows, its victim's mummified remains curled beneath the open trap. Across a hundred worlds, the progression had been the same: the sudden onslaught, virulent panic, scattered episodes of compassion or heroism, the swift descent into chaos, the unending silence.

"Evan?" Cara's voice again, this time a bit more insistent. Bergstrom triggered the remote's rudimentary intelligence, instructing it to complete the descent, and slid regretfully from the interface. The virtual reality folded in on itself, bright colors smearing to gray, the world spinning about him, but strong hands bore him up before he could fall.

"Steady now, comrade," the kurtikutts' Second Born rumbled from behind him.

"All right, lover?" Cara Austen said, her voice made hollow by her helmet and his. "You were deep into it." Her mitt brushed the thick hide of his sleeve. Like his, her environmental suit was much patched, a centuries-old salvage job. Through her helmet's scarred visor, Bergstrom saw the fine-boned face and long buttery hair, those electric blue eyes, and he smiled a bit.

"All right now," he said hoarsely. And, over his shoulder: "Thanks."

The kurtikutt let him go, his vibrissae twitching with some inscrutable sentiment. "Sure thing comrade," he said, righting Bergstrom's camp chair. The brute was roughly anthropoid, two meters of dense bone and muscle wrapped in a thick hide. His glittery metallic robes stirred in the methane breeze; the small, enameled shield strapped to the small of his back indicated birth rank in the Ruhk'thmar Clutch. The Second Born needed no environmental suit, only a transparent mask tailored for its broad muzzle and a flask of oxygen-argon mix hanging from a knitted sash. Like the Vandals and Visigoths, the kurtikutts were rugged.

"Chief says we're almost ready to go," Cara said. "He wants to pull out in fifteen minutes." Bergstrom nodded, and began peeling the VR system's induction patches from his wrist seals and helmet.

The wind picked up, whistling through the broken doors and empty-eyed windows of the towers fronting the plaza. It set dust devils to capering among the ruby obelisks placed at intervals along the perimeter of the square and brushed clean the grooves cut into its alabaster paving stones. The pattern grew more complex toward the center of the square, where bands of untarnished metal bound the Portal to the face of the dead world. Tall as a three-story building, sharp-edged and seemingly solid, the black hemisphere hummed faintly.

Though the plaza was largely unscarred, soot blackened the stone walls of a low, circular building not far from the stargate. Its door was smashed and burned, the pavement outside buckled from the fire's heat. The Portals themselves, existing largely outside conventional space, were virtually indestructible, but the mechanisms that aligned one gate with another were more delicate. Neither they nor their operators had long survived on worlds the Hand had touched.

One of the kurtikutts' sledges sat nearby, runners bowed under the weight of a battered antimatter generator. The youngest kurtikutt perched atop the vintage power plant, thick fingers stroking the control surfaces of his hand-built tuning rig. Cables sprouted from the device, snaking across the pavement and passing seamlessly into the Portal. Reconstructing the Outstepper technology was an arcane craft, synchronizing two gates an art. Once the Fifth Born was done, a single step would return them to Chimerine.

"Evan?" Concern edged her voice. "How about it, love?"

Bergstrom took a deep breath, the air thick in his throat. It was as if he could taste some lingering poison through all the layers of his environmental suit, could feel its chill, its holocaust taint. Foolish, perhaps...but then, these places always got to him.

"My last bird is on its way in," he said, stooping to collect his battered recording gear. Twenty kilos of telefactoring systems, josephson arrays, and bubble storage -- a modest container for a decade's work.

"Allow me," said Junior, taking the pack and Bergstrom's chair under one arm. He grinned, displaying a great many sharp teeth, and set off toward the tower where they had made camp.

"His big brother is grumbling about our shares again," Cara said after he had gone. "He's disappointed with the take and wants to make up for it on our end. I think I can hold the line, though.""That damned pirate."

"It was worse with the last bunch," Cara reminded him. "At least we can be reasonably sure these pirates won't try to kill us in our sleep."

"Yes," he said flatly, "they're grave robbers, cheats, and barbarians, but they're not murderers."

He knelt to collect his remotes, a half-dozen robots he hung from his hip belt like game birds. "There's never enough time, Cara. Reisner had a decade just for Nubia."

"But you have a lot of good data, Evan."

"Not enough, and I haven't found any written records at all -- just carvings that seem purely ornamental. This city is as sophisticated as Classical Athens, but you don't reach that level without some system of writing -- you need it for trade, taxation, if nothing else."

"Evan," she said quietly, "we've been through this before. You get a glimpse of a new civilization and you want to study it down to the bones. Every one of them has a history as rich as ours. They each had a Parthenon, a Great Wall, a Jesus Christ, and a Genghis Khan. Most of them had their Neil Armstrongs and Harold Mawsons. Space platforms. Starships. Technology we could only guess at. It's all out there, waiting for you to dig it up. And you're a good archaeologist, lover...but we can't do that kind of work on our own. We can look at one problem -- the most important one, as it happens -- and just do the best we can."

"Sometimes I wonder if it's worth doing." He looked around. "We don't have a place to stand, Cara. Our own records are in pieces, and half the pieces are gone, either destroyed or locked up on worlds still hiding behind quarantine. The Portals themselves .... We can use the technology but we don't understand it, and the Outsteppers have been dust for ten thousand years or more. All we have are theories, Cara -- not even that. Guesses. Hunches."

"You've done good work," she insisted.

"We need to do more. There should be some sort of commission, an agency, to send expeditions to every world the Hand smashed...and some kind of police corps, to keep the vandals out of places like this." He exhaled loudly. "Maybe in another thousand years, when we've built everything up again and people aren't so afraid of the dark."

"We'll go out again in a few months," she said.

"Maybe." Then, his voice flatter: "You did all right, then?"

"Yes .... "She paused, thinking. "A few hundred kilograms of the usual bangles and art objects, including some intricate stone carvings I'm sure I have a buyer for. Four sets of mummified remains --"

"I need those for my work," Bergstrom said sharply.

"And we'll have them recorded before we let them go. I know Findlay Broz will make a bid for those. We'll let him pay for the recording -- full spectrum. Then there's the heavy earthenware and one of those ruby pylons ...... After the Chief's cut, we'll have enough left over to buy our way onto another expedition and, say, six months' living expenses."

Bergstrom only nodded. The silence between them lengthened.

"Do you want me to put it all back?" Cara said finally.

"Of course not."

"Do you want to go back to living on your papers and my teaching?"

"You know we can't. Not and do fieldwork."

"I do know," she said. "I wanted to be sure you did." Then: "We'd better get moving. The Chief isn't in a mood to wait. And I, for one, want to get home again."

Home: was Flanders. Cara's world had been spared the plague, but not the chaos following the collapse of interstellar trade, the refugee hordes and quarantine wars, famine and revolution. It was the work of generations to rebuild, and Flanders' one university was not very old when Bergstrom came to it.

Cara turned away, her back stiff; Bergstrom opened his mouth to speak, then winced as his suit radio awakened with a crash of static. "Home again, home again," the Proteus said across the link, the emission modulated to a crude counterfeit of Bergstrom's own voice. He scowled.

It swooped down from the saffron sky, took a turn around the square and plunged toward Bergstrom, buffering him with the wind from its feathered wings. The pinions flowed like wax, two becoming four, an eagle's wings transforming to a honey bee's. The metamorph hovered, for now about a meter across, an amalgam of practical attributes sewed up in a scaly skin. From its limitless catalog it had selected a sleek, sinuous body, taloned feet, and a narrow head ringed with slitted eyes and less readily identifiable sensors.

"Carry?" it asked from a vaguely human mouth.

"You, no." But Bergstrom took a bulging sack from its claws. "This, yes."

"Gratitude," the Proteus said, fattening its lips to a sweetly smiling cupid's bow. "Kindly refrain from pilferage." It flew off in a flurry of transmogrification.

"Another pirate," Bergstrom said under his breath.

"More of a magpie, I think," Cara said. "But who knows? Maybe the little monster is a top archaeologist, too, back where he comes from."

Smiling sourly, Bergstrom herted the pouch and loosened the drawstring. Nestled inside was a clutch of ruby eggs, finely polished, intricately etched, and glowing with some soft internal light. The same material as the obelisks ringing the plaza, the same runes. They would, he knew, fetch a fair price on the black markets of a dozen worlds.

Throat tight, he looked away and saw the square as it had been, the towers gleaming in the sun, the ruby steles glittering, standing tall above the throngs milling about the plaza. The people were small and fragile, with smooth, translucent skin, long arms and long, many-fingered hands, huge, dark eyes widely set in elongated skulls, slitted nostrils, small, lipless mouths. He heard their voices on the wind, a gentle keening, like the sound of cicadas across a distance.

"The creature does have a weakness for shiny things," he said, handing the bag to Cara. "I haven't seen these before."

She looked inside. "I have," she said. "In some of the towers. The uppermost rooms."

They had gone into the towers to die, most of them-- floor after floor of withered, childlike corpses, flesh so soured by the Hand that it was toxic even to corrupting microorganisms. A thousand towers, a million rooms, legions of carcasses in this one city, and the same all across the planet -across a hundred planets.

"I left them," she said dully. "I just didn't want them."

Bergstrom took the pouch from her. "It's all right," he said.

He followed her across the plaza, frowning.

Trash lay scattered around the tower where they'd lived the past week, a tapered cylinder two hundred meters tall, its weathered facade the color of old bone. A portable airlock was cemented roughly across the entrance; rubbery fabric sealed the windows on the ground floor. The other two sledges were drawn up outside, one piled high with loot, the other with their equipment and the remaining stores.

Junior looked up as they approached, then went back to lashing down their gear. Without a word, Cara walked over to supervise. Bergstrom watched her a moment, his mouth set, before he cycled through the airlock.

The room on the other side took up most of the first floor. Beneath the rubbish scattered underfoot, inscribed tiles created complex patterns; thin, graceful columns poured upward into a vaulted ceiling. A dozen lamps floated about the chamber, projecting wan heat and a dull red luminescence. The bloody glow fell across two of the kurtikutts as they broke down the atmosphere plant. They worked side by side and in silence, perfectly coordinated, stoically efficient. Cara called them The Twins, though the Third Born outweighed his younger brother by at least twenty kilograms.

The pressurized shelter Bergstrom had shared with Cara sat in the far corner, collapsed and rolled into a neat bundle. He settled onto it, cracked open his helmet faceplate and took a shallow breath: heavy, shockingly cold, stinking of methane and the kurtikutts' vinegar reek.

A shadow fell across him. "Your mate her treasure found, and we ours as well," said a voice so deep he felt it in his bones. "And you, Beergstromm?"

"I found what I was looking for," he said flatly. "Clues to how the Hand came, and why. Whether it will come again."

The First Born towered over him, a wall of scarred leather draped in elaborate robes. A jeweled scabbard hung from the silver sash knotted at his waist; one big, seven-fingered hand rested idly on the blade's hilt. His thick arms were bare, corded with muscle and old scars. More scar tissue ran like a river down one side of his head, across the hollow right eye socket and along his throat. His remaining eye was like an opal, unblinking, unreadable.

"Dusty words, and dust," the First Born growled. "Your mate's treasure is more of my liking."

"When the Hand reaches for you," Bergstrom said, "see if it will take a bag of gold instead."

The kurtikutt glared, then threw back his head and laughed, a coyote howl that sent shivers down Bergstrom's spine. "If the Hand comes," the First Born said, "I will send it to you, your sharp tongue to cut it, Beergstromm."

He grimaced. Cara had wanted to buy their way onto one of the kurtikutts" expeditions for years. The Ruhk'thmar pack had been working the fringes of the shadow trade for decades, buying coordinates and Portal access from corrupt operators, moving their loot through the black markets of a dozen worlds, and staying clear of both the syndicates and local authorities. They had no backers, no brokers, no permanent base of operations. Cara had finally caught up with the Chief a month ago, in a dive called. The Cadaver Dog, not far from the stargate on Chimerine. Sooner or later, all the pirates came to Chimerine.

Behind him, the airlock cycled with a wheeze and a gasp of cold methane. Cara came through, then Junior.

"Your mate knows of value," the First Born said. "The Hand may come again -- but she and I will be of wealth in the meantime, hey?"

Cara pulled off her helmet, gave the brute a sour glance and barked a handful of words in the kurtikutts' language. The First Born glowered.

"Private joke," Cara explained to Bergstrom. She smiled up at the kurtikutt. "You're in a big hurry-up, Chief, but your littlest brother is taking all day to align the Portal. How about a remedy?"

The First Born considered. "His ass I will kick," he decided. He lumbered toward the airlock.

Cara touched Bergstrom's arm. "This won't take long," she said. "Shorty just doesn't know when to stop fussing."

"Better that than we end up scattered across the Arm. Teams do go out and never come back."

"That's not us, lover."

He took her hand. "I am an idiot, sometimes."

"Oh, you are not. Sometimes."

The Fourth Born brushed past, pushing a cart stacked with components of the atmosphere plant. His brother followed, carrying their shelter. After they had cycled through the airlock, Cara looked around the empty room and squeezed Bergstrom's hand. "Be a gentleman, sir, and walk me home?"

Shorty was still working at the tabs and levers of his homebrew device as Junior stood watch over the generator. The First Born paced alongside the Portal, then stalked up to the youngest kurtikutt. His bellow echoed from the towers. Eyes wide, Shorty ducked his head and stepped away from the apparatus. The First Born gestured sharply and The Twins dragged up the sledges, one brother yoked to each.

Junior moved forward, but the eldest kurtikutt put a hand to his brother's chest. Their conversation was like the rumbling of a waterfall. When it was over, Junior started back toward the tower they had occupied.

"Now what?" Cara demanded.

The First Born cocked his one eye in their direction. "Your treasure we carry," he growled. "You we do not." He pointed to the gate.

Cara shrugged. "Last one home, lover."

Bergstrom hesitated. "I still have a remote on its way in. I could -- "

"We can't afford to write it off." She gave him a quick grin. "It's all right -- you wait here until it finds its way back."

He watched her walk toward the Portal. Even bundled up in that clumsy suit, he could see the way she moved, the way she held herself. He remembered the nights on Flanders, and the warmth of her in the mornings, and he, too, wanted to be home again.

Static surged from his suit radio. "Just me, love," Cara said across the link. She looked over her shoulder, smiling. "Wanted to tell you not to wait too long...and remember I'll be waiting for you on the other side." He grinned. "And I wanted to tell you what I'd like to do when -- "

The transmission cut off as she crossed the Portal's interface, the darkness closing around her.

"Tease," Bergstrom said under his breath, but he was still smiling. He looked up into the pale yellow skies. Horizon to horizon, they stretched empty. "Come on, damn it."

"Beergstromm!" the First Born thundered. "Time marches!" He raised one scarred arm and The Twins started forward, sledges groaning, their runners gouging the alabaster tiles. The Proteus fluttered overhead, squawking in the pirates' language.

The Portal loomed before him, a cut of night framed against the jasmine sky, a black so deep and formless it hurt to look at it for very long.

A glove reached from it, fingers clutching. An arm. And Cara staggered from the Portal.

Bergstrom caught her and went down with her to the cold stone. Her eyes were wide, her face ashen and sheened with sweat; blood trickled from her nose, smearing her visor. Her mouth worked. "Evan," she said, the word faint beneath rasp of labored breath.

"It'll be all right, sweetheart. Everything's all right." He checked her suit's seals, the telltales on the environmental pack: temperature, integrity, radiation count, pressure, power. "There's nothing wrong, damn it."

She coughed, bright red blood splashing the inside of her helmet. "Oh, lover," she got out. "Oh, Evan, it was worse than you thought."

"Cara ? "

He looked over his shoulder. The Second Born stood over him, hands working at his sides, but the other kurtikutts had drawn back. "We have to get the shelter rigged again," Bergstrom said. "And the med kit--" The words tumbled from him. "First -- get that first, before the shelter, while we can still --"

None of them moved. Then Junior knelt ponderously. "She is dead, comrade." He touched her helmet with one finger.

Bergstrom slapped his hand away. "Get away from us, you fucking monster," he said, his face wet. "Get the hell away or I'll kill you all."

2

"The answer must be ours," the Second Born said in a low rumble. "What happened, we must know it."

In the ruddy glow of a single floating lamp, dried blood painted black Cara's parted lips. Her eyes were closed, their lashes delicate traces against ivory skin. Golden hair spilled unruly across the blanket folded beneath her head.

It was the moment between one breath and another. Bergstrom had lived it before, with the sun coming up over the hills of Flanders, the light of dawn pouring through the bedroom window, as he waited for Cara to open her eyes and smile. It was the moment between sleeping and waking. He sat close by, and waited for her next breath.

"The Portal has murdered your mate," said the First Born, "and may yet us all." He sat on a crate away from the lamplight. "One exit there is, Beergstromm, and in time we must take it or wait for air and food to be exhausted." The other kurtikutts stirred, muttering.

"We are none of us chirurgeons, and we know little of your people," said Junior, his voice almost gentle. "Can you discover the means of her death?"

Bergstrom's eyes squeezed shut. "Just leave her alone."

The box creaked as the First Born stood. "The answer within her lies," he said, coming out of the darkness. Red light poured along the blade of his knife. "Perhaps I will search for it."

Junior reached for Bergstrom as he leaped, but his brother was quicker. The First Born's free hand clamped on Bergstrom's head, temples and crown. Bergstrom grunted as the vise squeezed; his boots kicked at empty air.

"Time marches," the kurtikutt hissed, his vinegary breath washing across Bergstrom's face.

"Murdering... bastard," he forced out.

"The murderer I am not," said the First Born. "But hunted I have, and you are frail prey, Beergstromm."

The Second Born spoke a single harsh syllable. Blackness flooded Bergstrom's sight as the eldest tightened his grip and let loose a stream of words heavy as a hammer blow. Junior spoke again, vibrissae fanned stiffly from his "wrinkled muzzle, and bared needle teeth.

The First Born snarled -- this time something less than words -- and spread his fingers wide. The floor came up at Bergstrom and smashed the breath from him. He lay there, his chest caught in bands of steel, his face to the icy flagstones. He winced at a hot, sweet stink, but it was Junior who came close and said, "You are not the sixth brother of our clutch, but you are our comrade of the hunt." He helped Bergstrom from the floor, set him on his feet as if he weighed nothing and steadied him with one hand. "No harm will come to you, or further harm to your mate."

"She is dead," the First Born snarled. "We must find the reason."

"In your own way, comrade, will you try?"

"He will," said the First Born, "or --"

"Or he will not," said Junior. "Comrade?"

Bergstrom looked down the long wavy blade of the First Born's kris. Remember I'll be waiting for you on the other side, she had said. He took a shallow breath -- all he could manage -- and measured the distance. Then the First Born shoved the dagger into its scabbard and folded his arms across his chest: the moment had passed.

"Weak prey," the kurtikutt grunted. "Too weak even to save himself."

"If we find the way, it will be a scholar who leads, not a hunter." Junior turned to Bergstrom. "Later, comrade?" he said quietly. "But not much later."

From the darkness at the back of the room, the atmosphere plant wheezed and grumbled. Near it, the remaining stores formed a small, untidy pile. And in the shadows a few meters away, a still form lay beneath a weathered tarpaulin. Bergstrom sank back.

The kurtikutts sat in a circle on the other side of the room, speaking in low voices. Junior glanced up as Bergstrom stirred, murmured a few words to the First Born, then stood and came over. "We discuss the paths we may take," he said. "My brother invites you to join us."

Bergstrom looked up, his face blank. Junior studied him for a few moments before settling onto his haunches alongside him. "This time you have spent with her, comrade -- for you this hour was fleeting, but for us it stretched. Do you see my meaning?"

"I hear you."

"Come, then." He put a heavy hand on Bergstrom's arm. "On Chimerine, no one waits for us. In this trap we are alone. No one will save us unless it is we ourselves."

Bergstrom shrugged him off. "It should have been you, you know.

You were going in first, the Chief stopped you, and it was her instead."

Junior's nostrils flared. "There were, here, lengths of gold cloth my brother remembered, a part of our treasure. I was sent to retrieve it. There was nothing more than that."

"Then show me the cloth."

"You are hunting, comrade, but there is no prey here."

"Show me the cloth," Bergstrom repeated. "We may be your comrades of the hunt, but we're not part of the clutch. Your little brother does a fair job on the Portal, but there's always a risk. The Chief let her take it."

"You know I mourn her," Junior said heavily. "In all the journeyings of the Ruhk'thmar, nothing of this like has happened. Always, all among us, kin and stranger both, returned safely home."

"Not this time," Bergstrom said.

She waited for him in the shadows. He went to her.

Bergstrom knelt by her side and slowly pulled back the tarp. He did not move again for a long while; then, when he did, it was to brush a few strands o hair from her face. Her skin was cold and hard as stone, but he did not pull away.

After a time he drew his fingers along her cheek, then across the ceramic helmet seal, to the suit's heavy, quilted fabric, the environmental pack. The status lights glowed wanly under his outstretched hand. The suit still lived, storage cells near capacity, air canisters charged, pressure regulators and recycling systems in readiness. He brought up the diagnostic displays in sequence: all green.

He paused, then lifted her nearer arm from the floor, wincing at its weight and stiffness, then flinched again as the mitt flopped loosely at the wrist. He fumbled at the wrist seal...and it slipped from his nerveless fingers, her arm hitting the floor with a dull thud. A small sound came from the back of his throat.

"Comrade." Junior came over. "The glove?"

Bergstrom only nodded.

Junior worked :silently at the seal. Soon the mitt came free, rough cloth rasping on smooth skin. Her hand was pale, almost luminescent; thin fingers clutched at nothing. Bergstrom motioned, and the kurtikutt passed him the mitt. "Now the other one," Bergstrom said. "Wait...the helmet first, over there."

The Second Born reached across Cara's legs, lifted the helmet easily with one hand and put it in Bergstrom's arms. "Are there tools I will need?" the kurtikutt asked, not looking at him.

Bergstrom stared at the helmet, the smear of blood inside the visor, the dozen or so long, blonde hairs caught in the convolutions of the foam padding. "I won't let you cut her," he said. "You'll have to kill me first." His fingers trembled against the chill metal, the faceplate's crystal, the roughness of scrapes and scratches left by generations of explorers, and uncounted explorations. He knew them all...but for one, fresher than the rest.

Junior reached for her other hand. "If there were a thing to find within her, we would not see it," the kurtikutt said. "I will tell my brother this." He unfastened the cuff seal, then grasped her tightly clenched fist and, gently, opened it.

A sullen fire burned in her palm. The kurtikutt inhaled sharply, the breath whistling through his teeth. "Comrade .... "

The jewel fell free, watery red light pouring along its smooth curves, glittering on the etched patterns, gathering within its heart. Bergstrom caught it as it fell, hissing as the cold stone burned him. He closed his fist around it, holding the hurt.

The kurtikutt shrank back. "My brother took a few of these," he said. "But for me, there is a stink to them."

"She thought so, too." The ruby egg warmed slowly in his hand. "But it is, I know, nothing but dead stone." "Yes."

"Do you think there are spectres, comrade?" the kurtikutt said suddenly.

Bergstrom looked up, the blood pounding in his head.

"A spirit that wears the body," the Second Born said, his eyes on Bergstrom's. "A thing that lives on after the body dies."

Looking away, Bergstrom shook his head. "No. But I wish I did."

The First Born stalked over to them. "You did not dig deeply," he growled.

Junior glided to his feet. "There was no need," he said. "The scent, I think we have it now."

"This?" The First Born took the jewel from Bergstrom and held it up to the light. "A bit of treasure it is, and nothing more. I have many like it." Black lips skinned back from yellowed fangs. "You would sell this, Beergstromm? Soon, perhaps, for air to breathe."

"She didn't have it when she went through the Portal," Bergstrom said. "She had it when she came back."

The First Born glared. "Fools, both of you, and I trapped with you."

"Her suit is intact," Bergstrom said. "Operational. No sign of radiation, pressure, acceleration, electrical shock, tidal forces. Nothing."

"This we already suspected. These would have left their mark. But inside her? In the mouth there is blood."

"She bit her tongue," Bergstrom said. "Her nose is bloody. She hurt herself. Her face hit the inside of the helmet."

"What reason for this?" the First Born snapped. "If she stumbled, where did she fall ? If she was put to ground, what hunted her?" He snarled. "What remains is meat. She is gone, Beergstromm. Too much time have we wasted, respectful of meat." He swung toward Junior. "You said it should be so. She is his, yes, but if there is answer in her, it is ours."

"She had time enough to realize what was happening," Bergstrom said. "It might have been a heart attack. Or stroke."

"And of this there would be no sign?" the First Born demanded.

"To a medician, yes," Bergstrom said. "To us, no. The damage would be too subtle. For a stroke, a burst blood vessel somewhere in the brain. For a heart attack...I don't know if that produces any visible sign at all. Maybe a change in the blood chemistry."

"You may deceive us in this," the First Born said.

"Yes," Bergstrom said. "Does it matter? You wouldn't find anything, and I won't look."

"There is a strength in you, Beergstromm," the kurtikutt growled, "though it is buried deep." Junior opened his mouth, but the eldest cut him off with a snarl. "We are as hatchlings, eyes still closed! We do not know the means of her death-- whether from within her, or of the Portal, or by some hunter on the other side. We must learn the truth of it, and set right the Portal if we can."

"It may be operating as intended," Bergstrom said flatly. "On my world, an ancient civilization constructed magnificent tombs for their royalty. Their treasure was buried with them, so they would have it in the afterlife. And thick walls, hidden passages, traps, and sorcerers' curses protected their treasure from thieves in this life."

"You believe we are accursed, Beergstromm?"

"These people knew their world was being murdered. Maybe they set a trap for the murderer and it caught us, instead."

"Fanciful." The whisper drifted from the back of the room. Behind it came wet, meaty sounds, growing louder. Something moved there in the darkness, half-seen, unfolding itself until it stood close to three meters tall. "Their technology was vastly inadequate," said the graveyard voice.

"Holy Father," Bergstrom whispered.

It came out of the shadows, muscles squirming beneath a scaly hide, red lamplight glinting from the spikes that flared across its massive shoulders. One large eye, black and moist, gleamed from beneath a thick ridge of bone. The wide mouth parted slightly, revealing rows of thorns painted with faintly luminescent drool. The thorns rustled, producing words: "We must explore the Portal."

Distantly, Bergstrom heard Junior make a sound not far from a whine, barely audible and quickly stilled. Behind him, the younger kurtikutts backed away.

"You wear a hunter's skin now," the First Born said, "but I remember when you were but a small bird." His nostrils flared. "A brainless bird, and ill-spoken. Your form is not all that changes."

Towering over the kurtikutt, the Proteus smiled with its mouth full of thorns. Beneath his battered hide, the First Born's muscles were rigid with tension. But he kept his hand well away from the hilt of his knife.

"If we are to live, we need more information," said the Proteus. It indicated one of The Twins, who cowered. "This one is not vital. It will enter the Portal."

Junior took a step forward. "No one of my brothers will be sacrificed." He glanced at Bergstrom, then quickly away. "No one else will be sacrificed."

The Proteus hissed. "Do not challenge me in this," it said. "I move to save us all." It spread its hands, steely serrated claws gleaming in the lamplight. Junior crouched and moved slowly to one side, flanking the monster. The First Born fell back, the kris suddenly appearing in his hand.

"Be careful with him," Bergstrom said, his mouth dry, "but he's not all he seems to be."

The Proteus swung its ridged skull toward him. A faint reek of ozone wafted from the creature.

Bergstrom looked up into its faceted eye. "That's a frightening package," he said, "but you can't mass more than fifteen or twenty kilograms. Stick him with your knife, Chief, and he'll pop like a balloon."

"Beergstromm, what is your tongue after now?" He did not look away from the shapeshifter.

"How much would you say he weighs?" Bergstrom asked. "Twice what you do?"

"Perhaps," said the kurtikutt, "but I have taken larger prey."

"And when he wore wings and feathers, how much did he weigh then?" Bergstrom said steadily. "He can't create mass, just redistribute it. Keep watching him, though. He may not be in your weight class, but he's got the reach."

Junior's muzzle wrinkled. His tongue lolled from his mouth and he raised one hand to cover it. Laughter, Bergstrom realized.

The First Born glared at the Proteus for a moment more, then shoved the kris into its scabbard. "Trickery," he growled. "And as time runs from us."

The Proteus shrugged, a quite human gesture. "We require stronger leadership," it said. It was already shrinking, softening, the spikes and ridges withdrawing into its oily hide. "Our status remains unchanged. One must enter the Portal."

Junior looked at Bergstrom. "Comrade, what of your robots? Send one machine into the Portal, and look through its eyes."

He shook his head. "Not once it crosses the interface. Nothing can --"

"Transmission of information across the Portal would violate relativity," the Proteus said in a voice now blurred and vaguely feminine.

The creature's hide had smoothed. Its trunk narrowed; arms and legs thinned. The head became an ovoid, featureless except for a narrow, lipless slit for a mouth.

"That includes nerve impulses," Bergstrom said, his heart racing as the Proteus transformed itself. "Otherwise I'd suggest you stick your head in and look around, Chief."

The Proteus smiled at Bergstrom with white, even teeth. The skin stretched across its skull fell in, leaving two round holes. Eyes surfaced from within them, black pupils ringed by electric blue irises. The head tilted back; graceful fingers caressed golden hair. Delicate laughter echoed.

"Is this form more to your liking, Bergstrom?" it said with her voice. Her eyes stared at him; her hands roamed over her throat, her breasts, her stomach. "Or do you still find me frightening?"

Bergstrom looked away. "Not now, comrade," Junior said quietly from behind him. "But later. Yes, later."

The First Born sighed. "These games go on too long," he said. "I am thinking now of your ancient kings, Beergstromm."

"A pretty theory," the Proteus said in her voice, "but these people did not have the means."

"They may have traded for the technology," Junior said, "in the time before the Hand. Or a visitor may have laid the trap, if trap there is."

"Trap or accident," the First Born said, "the answer we must find, and quickly." He knuckled the scar tissue around his empty eye socket. "We put aside air, water, and food to last the span of the hunt and little more. Even the power goes, too quickly. The motes at its heart, the light and shadow .... "His teeth clashed. "Beergstromm, your tongue be damned!"

"The antimatter within the generator decays at a constant rate," Junior explained. "We can tap its power, but not conserve it. And when it is gone, we cannot tame the Portal."

"How long do we have?" Bergstrom asked.

Junior looked across the chamber and spoke a few words of kurtikutt; Shorty's reply was barely audible. "Twelve hours remain to us before the power has grown too weak," Junior said. "Even before that, my brother tells me, grasping the Portal at Chimerine grows difficult."

"Then perhaps you'll finally accept the wisdom of my advice," the Proteus said to Bergstrom, running her hands over her hips. "You know I'm right, lover. Tell them."

The First Born sprang, silent, and put his kris to the side of the Proteus's neck. Blue eyes widened, but otherwise the creature remained motionless.

"This game tires me," the kurtikutt said low in his throat. "End it, or your head I will take."

The Proteus smiled thinly. "You must know that wouldn't kill me."

"It would be of an inconvenience," the First Born said. It pressed knife to skin, drawing a thin rivulet of blood. Despite everything, Bergstrom's eyes stung to see it.

"Why do you take his part?" the Proteus asked mildly. "He is useless to us."

The kurtikutt's knife arm trembled. "He is our comrade of the hunt," he said. "End it, now."

The Proteus shrugged. "If it will please you." Without moving its head, the monster shifted its eyes to Bergstrom's. Its smile broadened, becoming sad and sweet as the familiar curves flattened, the pink skin bleached white, and the long, buttery hair withdrew into the scalp. The lips went last, leaving the mouth a narrow slit with ends upturned.

When it was over, the metamorph stood a meter and a half tall, fragile and childlike, its translucent skin taut over thin bones. The lipless mouth smiled, the slitted nostrils flared slightly, and the fiend looked at him with eyes that had through the metamorphosis remained warm and wide and blue.

Bergstrom looked into Cara's eyes and said: "There may be another way."

3

The wind blew along the streets of the dead city, rushing in through all its gaping windows and running out through all its empty doors. It stole across the merchants' stalls and whispered through the gallows' open trap. In the plaza, it lifted a shroud of dust and set the motes to glittering against the stargate's starless night. Bergstrom sat close by, and felt in him the Portal's vast emptiness.

A dozen meters off, Shorty's fingers moved slowly across the control surfaces of his handmade tuning rig. The First Born towered over him, one hand on his jeweled scabbard. Shorty had been at work for the better part of an hour, but the First Born stayed silent.

Twisting a coiled rope, Junior settled alongside Bergstrom's camp chair. "Is there a thing I can do?" the kurtikutt asked, his voice muffled only slightly by the transparent breathing mask he wore.

Sunlight glinted from Bergstrom's visor as he looked into the empty saffron sky. "There's one still out there," he said half to himself. "I was waiting for it, and she went through first. It never came back."

"Later, comrade. Later."

"She'd be angry. Half our profits to replace it." He closed a panel in the robot's breast. The device was inert for a few seconds, then shook its graphite wings. Its head began to turn on its thin neck, back and forth, scanning.

"It will remember for us now?" the kurtikutt said.

"It was built to relay data to my recording rig in real time," Bergstrom said tonelessly, "but it has some onboard storage. I've reconfigured most of the memory, disabled half the sensors, stepped down the resolution of the others. It won't see much, but it'll remember what it sees -- an hour's worth, at least, which is more than we need." Standing, he looked toward the First Born.

The eldest squatted beside Shorty and spoke with him for a few moments, then got to his feet again and came over. "My brother says the Portal is seemingly as it was before," he said, "as if it would lead to Chimerine." He glanced down. "I tire of small birds."

"This one may save your miserable hide." Bergstrom handed the remote to Junior, who shook free a few meters of rope. Working quickly, he fashioned a harness that slipped over the robot's wings and was drawn tight across its breast. He finished it with a square knot and passed the remote back to Bergstrom. "It will not escape us," the kurtikutt said.

The First Born snatched the bird from Bergstrom before he could react. "'You have a strength, Beergstromm, but it is not in your arm." He looped the free end of the rope around his waist, knotted it, then began whirling, the robot over his head, paying out more line with each revolution.

Bergstrom stepped back. "Be careful with it, you bastard." The First Born wrinkled his muzzle and let the remote fly free. It arced toward the Portal, rope trailing, and met the ebony dome two-thirds of the way up. The robot seemed to hang there for an instant, then was gone. The rope fell after it, the first dozen meters or so disappearing into the interface, the rest hitting the paving stones with a muffled slap.

"Give it fifteen minutes," Bergstrom said, settling into his chair. His heart pounded.

The First Born took some of the slack out of the rope and began looping it around his scarred forearm. "If there is a hunter on the other side," he said, "I am ready should your little bird it take for bait." He slid his kris from its scabbard, set it on the ground before him and settled onto his haunches, waiting.

Bergstrom pressed a switch. And remembered: a carousel of images. The Portal, an arc of night. Bone-white towers, yellow sky. The plaza, three figures standing on the dusty stones, falling away (the kurtikutts, lambent in infrared, the First Born's hand still open, arm outstretched, and alongside them the environmental suit's cooler signature). The Portal again, a wall that grew to close out everything else. A shock, a surge, a deeper night, a time unending.

Then: the rush of air again across graphite wings, a sensation of falling, impact, and darkness.

But this was merely the absence of light. Obeying a deeply ingrained subroutine, the remote righted itself and looked around.

Painted in shades of sonar, the gallery stretched beyond his sensors' range. Ranks of willowy columns flowed from the etched floor and into the barrel ceiling high overhead. Elaborate patterns flowered along the stonework to frame row on row of shallow niches, making them part of the design. And within each niche a ruby egg, finely polished, intricately inscribed. A thousand rows, millions upon millions of stones.

The scene slid left, then right as the remote's head panned, the image repainting itself in :radar, in infrared, then again in the visible spectrum before cycling back to sonar. Nothing moved. Nothing changed.

Long minutes passed. Then the view juddered, swaying crazily, the walls of the gallery slowly sliding past as the remote was drawn backward. Again the shock of translation across the infinite, the surge, and utter darkness. Now light again, the black wall stretching upward and the pale yellow sky above it, a mitted hand reaching down, and beyond it a crystal visor framing a drawn face: Bergstrom's own.

The playback ended, the virtual reality shattering, the sense of the dead world pouring in on him, the weight of his own meat and bone, stink of sweat, the sour taste in his mouth, and everything spinning, spinning.

"Comrade... ?" Junior squatted before him, his hands on Bergstrom's shoulders, his face too near. Weakly, Bergstrom pushed him away.

"No hunter," he said thickly. "No threat. A room, vast, somewhere near." He shook his head to clear it, then forced himself to his feet. "Like a church, dark, empty. Somewhere on this world, maybe in this city." He swayed and put a hand on the back of the chair, steadying himself. His environmental suit was awash in sweat. "Underground," he said. "I'm sure of it. It may be right under us."

The First Born stared at him, his teeth set in a carnivore rictus. "Nothing to have murdered your mate?"

"It's an empty room, damn it. No one there. No enemy for you to fight."

The kurtikutt looked at him a moment longer, then stalked off...not toward their camp, but across the square, and away. Junior watched him go. "Now we know no more than before," he said. "Your mate may have crossed into a place where the hunter lives, but you saw another land. Or the hunter may have gone from it. What you saw may have been a trick, a dream put into the machine. Or perhaps this is my dream, comrade." He looked up at the sound of wingbeats. "Or nightmare."

The Proteus swept down from the yellow sky, circling the Portal once before alighting a few meters away. Its head was human, or nearly so -stylized, glossy, a mannequin's head with high cheekbones, blue eyes, and long. blonde hair. The body was monstrous, an amalgam of raptor and reptile, with a thick, snakelike torso and clawed feet.

"You didn't listen to me," the Proteus said, its voice Cara's once again. "Now you've lost valuable time. And for you, time has nearly run out."

"But not for you," Bergstrom said.

The Proteus twisted its lips into a parody of a smile. "You know I am very adaptable," it said. "And very patient. If you do not find a way out, in time others will come. One of them will find the way." The creature flexed its harpy's wings. "I wish you could stay and keep me company, Evan, but I'm afraid you won't last long. You may have enough water, heat, and air for a while, but the food will go more quickly --if not yours, then the kurtikutts'. And when they grow hungry, lover, they will forget you are their comrade of the hunt."

"My brother should have taken your head," Junior snarled. His eyes slid to Bergstrom. "Comrade, you know we would never -- "

"Of course you would," Bergstrom said. "The monster is right about that...about a lot of things."

He walked slowly across the paving stones, each step raising a little cloud of dust. The black wall of the Portal loomed over him, closing out the city and the sky. He felt again its depth, its vast emptiness, and then a subtle vibration as he passed between the bands of smooth, gray metal that held fast the stargate.

"Comrade!"

The kurtikutt's voice echoed, the echoes lost as Bergstrom stepped into the Portal. Darkness enfolded him.

Utter lightlessness. Unspeakable cold. Silence, unmarked even by surge of blood or sough of breath. Time stretched, time enough to believe he would never draw breath again. A pressure, a straining, as if he were being pulled in a hundred different directions. Shapes formed within the darkness, patterns of night and shadow, taking on form, becoming the walls of the vault streaming past him, the unending cavern lit by the foxfire glow of a million jewels. Then a sudden surge, a burst of light, and Bergstrom was through to the other side...

And he was a merchant selling sweetbeetles, fruit vines and northlands succulents from his stall along the radian of the philosophers...

And she was a chancellor drinking up the vernal sun and the loving touch of her husbands in a parkland on the eastern verge...

And he was a sculptor shaping melancholy in his studio not far from the assembly of souls...

And she was a wright turning the shape of the Outsteppers' gate, and from her station watching another party of visitors stream into the world...

And he was a missioner falling to his knees on the bright alabaster stones.

"Comrade?"

Strong hands put him on his feet. He looked up, into the hard stones of a kurtikutt's eyes, and read in them not concern but mere curiosity -an almost predatory interest, abstract yet marbled with a primal taste for blood. More intriguing, though, was the undercurrent of profound loneliness.

"Your kind does not often hunt alone," the missioner said in the kurtikutt's own language, barks and grunts that came awkwardly to him.

Beneath its transparent breathing mask, the animal's muzzle twitched. "I hunt here for trade, while my brothers await word."

"Passage is dear," the missioner said. The kurtikutt's lip curled, but he said nothing.

"Our world is poor," the missioner continued, "but I wish you good hunting." He felt in the kurtikutt's gaze a vague but growing suspicion. "Good hunting," he repeated, and turned away.

The tide of new arrivals surged around him, molegs and Yaenites, a small mob of kappans, a Simonswood in its articulated rambler, towering above all the others -- a dozen or more breeds, and everywhere the humans, who roamed across all the worlds of the Outsteppers' net. His was a backwater planet to all their races, but still they came in search of trade, knowledge, adventure...or to try to satisfy the vague but powerful need that gnawed at so many of them. Their unruly personae spread across the plaza and along the city's radians, carrying with them subtle disorder.

The missioner closed his eyes and pushed himself outward, embracing the city, and it welcomed him with its gleaming towers and windswept streets, the places of assembly and sun-warmed commons, all suffused by the presence of his brothers and sisters, each soul a thread in the tapestry that wrapped the world: the Bonding. He sent himself out along the design, casting after the thread that bound him here most tightly and, finding it, he felt that soul tremble beneath the touch of his. She bore him up in warmth and love, and he knew he was home again.

And felt, only distantly, the vibration of heavy footsteps, his wife's quickening alarm as the rambler bore down on him. He stepped back, meeting up against rough, unyielding fabric. A hand clamped on his shoulder, holding him fast though he struggled. Venting steam and stink, the machine's metal foreleg swept past, close enough to stir his tunic, then the rear leg in turn. The Simonswood looked back from its throne, leafy ocher sensors rustling with agitation.

The hand fell from his shoulder. "You could have been killed." The tone was one of indifference.

The missioner turned, and shivered. It was a human, sealed up in the rude second skin that carried her environment. Lips pressed to a thin line, she stared at him through the bubble enclosing her head. Looking into her cold blue eyes, he saw...nothing. He had fallen against her, he had not known she was there, close by, because there was in her no life or thought, only a cold emptiness. Nothing.

The thing tilted its head, as if listening to something in the distance. "You are frightened," it said, and its voice was a hundred voices. "What are you frightened of?"

"You." His gathering fear set a strain on the fabric; in answer he felt vague concern, and one bright chord of alarm from his wife. "Stay away," the missioner said, as much to her as to the monster.

It gripped his hand in its heavy mitt, and smiled. The crowd streamed past, heedless, the wide-eyed kappans pointing at the fine, gleaming towers, the Yaenite mob grumbling and muttering, a pair of humans looking all around them and everywhere at once. From them he felt anxiety and anticipation and determination and wariness: life.

The creature's grip tightened. Muscle bruised, bone creaked; the missioner nearly cried out, but did not. "You feel it coming," it said in its terrible chorus. "I see it in you."

"What are you?" he gasped.

"You know who I am," it said. "I was here long before these others, long before even your kind. I have always walked among them, these vermin, and since last we met, I have watched their numbers grow, their contagion spread. The Bonding put a name to me long ago, speaking it only in the darker places."

"No." He recoiled as the monster reached with its other mitt, but it merely caressed the side of his face, the rough cloth oddly gentle on his skin. "We destroyed you."

"You tried, you and the Outsteppers. But you only wounded me. You drove me from the light of all your suns, into the shadows." It paused, seeming to listen again, and its smile became a snarling rictus. "I rested there, gathering strength, watching. Learning how to exterminate you, as I did the Outsteppers."

It began to change, the curves and folds of the environmental suit softening. The lines of its face melted, the eyes fell in. The helmet puffed out and then collapsed, flowing into the streaming flesh. Cloth and meat fell away from the hand that still brushed his face, baring a claw of gleaming bone. He bit back a scream as the talons sank into his flesh.

Around him, the crowd twitched as if stung. A cry went up; a shriek; confusion and fright rushed outward, diminishing as it rippled through the mob, those dim intelligences even a few meters away remaining oblivious.

The missioner cast across the Bonding and it strained, it tore, as bright points of fear blossomed in the fabric. It was everywhere; whatever it was, it was everywhere in his world at once.

A big hand lashed out, slapping the claw away in a spray of black muck and flecks of the monster's brittle bone, and the missioner fell. The kurtikutt stood over him, nostrils flared, shaking. He snarled, the sound cutting through the rush and rumble of the mob.

In the sudden silence the demon laughed, a wet, bubbling sound that welled from its depths. It raised its arms, stretching itself against the sky. Its skin grew taut and smooth, paled, turning smoky, then transparent as the monster spread itself on the wind. Taller than the Outsteppers' gate, then higher than any of the towers, barely visible now, a stain, ghostly, billowing, still growing, still laughing -- a thin, vaporous laugh, a memory, a nightmare.

The shouting began. The screams. The mob buffeted him, visitors running from the square. A human female brushed by him, and he saw in her brights, metallic fear. An omblegenna came after, its four snakelike arms flailing. The Simonswood's rambler stampeded back toward the gate; one of the kappans fell under the churning metal legs, its high-pitched screams quickly silenced. The missioner felt its pain only distantly before that, too, was extinguished.

The missioner put one hand to his face and it came away wet with blood. The kurtikutt pulled him roughly to his feet. "You will live," he said, "but not if we stay here."

The sky had turned gray, the sun dim behind it. It was, he knew, the same all across his world.

"Comrade .... "the kurtikutt rasped, the fear boiling off him. "This hunter -- we must find a place away from it."

"If you can," said the missioner, and laid his hand on the beast's head. The kurtikutt flinched at the contact, but some of the fear slipped from him.

"My brothers -- "

"I think you will be with them soon."

The demon's shape filled half the sky, the vaguest of shadows, a breath of night, nearly imperceptible. It continued to stretch, shafts of saffron sunlight pushing through... then it burst, becoming a cloud of gray dust that drifted down, dreamlike.

On the winds he heard its laughter.

He closed his eyes. The clamor of the mob receded, and the kurtikutt's next words, the sounds of his own heart and breath. He found his wife waiting, filled with fear and love and longing. He wrapped himself in her, then cast himself further out, across the fabric of the Bonding.

It was the same all over: a hundred soulless, lightless monsters; their transformation; twilight everywhere; now a rain of dust.

The missioner opened his eyes again as a stillness settled over the square. The kurtikutt stood close by, breathing hard, watching the dust drift down. It stained the alabaster paving stones and drew a film across the towers. It settled on the missioner's outstretched hands, black against his white skin, fading to gray, vanishing. Burrowing. Leaving trails of white heat through his flesh.

The kurtikutt howled, slapping at himself. "Comrade .... "Eyes fierce, it turned on him. The missioner braced himself...but the kurtikutt shook himself once all over and sprinted into the crowd, leaving a trail of dazed and fallen visitors.

The Outsteppers' gate stood impassive above the mob, dark and empty, a hole cut through the universe, humming faintly.

Twitching, the missioner hugged himself. Screams echoed from the towers. The wind carried to him the stinks of smoke and gore. A kappan blundered into him, bleeding from a dozen cuts. An omblegenna clutched at him with its tentacles, then was carried away. The missioner turned, and stared into the face of one of his brothers. One eye, nearly closed, wept blood; the other was wide and wild. The missioner held him for a moment, the pain washing over him, drowning him, then pushed him away. So much pain, a world of it. He sent himself into it, covered himself with it, to find the one he loved.

I am coming.

He went out into the city.

Smoke and chaos filled its radians. A team of helpbeasts dragged an overturned cart. A gray-muzzled kurtikutt crouched in a doorway, pawing at anything that came near. Merchants' stalls were upended. A pack of kappans stoned a human; helmet broken, she choked on bitter air before her skull was crushed. Guideposts were toppled; lost and frightened, newly released souls circled the ruins of their blood-red lattices. The missioner hurried past a gallows, where brothers murdered brothers.

Through smoke and over barricades, sometimes seeking the shadows while violence passed, down streets where blood ran free. Then he was home, stumbling over the corpse in the doorway, up the stairs, higher and higher, to where she waited. He took her in his arms and held her, taking up her love and warmth, and put his hands to her throat. Her soul was freed, flying above the city, the smoke, the death and madness, hurrying away, to the other side.

He could not follow. Instead he climbed higher, into the tower's uppermost reaches, and then outward, across the torn and burning fabric of the world...

And he was a merchant, the life seeping from him in a smashed stall along the radian of the philosophers...

And she was a chancellor, giving her husbands release in a parkland on the eastern verge before turning the blade on herself...

And he was a sculptor, shaping rage and torment in his studio not far from the assembly of souls, as his blood ran from half a hundred wounds...

And she was a wright, turning the shape of the Outsteppers' gate so death could not escape, as the mob screamed outside her station's door and fire blackened her skin...

And he was a man, standing in the gallery, a chamber big enough to hold a world, column upon graceful column, line upon finely etched line, row upon row of recesses carved into living stone, in each a ruby egg millions upon millions, polished, glittering, glowing warm. Souls.

...and he fell to his knees on the dusty stones.

He lay there, face pressed to the inside of his helmet, chest heaving, stale, recycled air sawing his throat, until big hands turned him gently onto his back. Junior looked down at him. "You live," he said. "Comrade, you live."

Bergstrom swallowed bile and coughed, spattering his faceplate with filmy blood. His tongue was thick in his mouth; sounds came out, but no words. His left hand clutched at Junior's robes; his right arm was deadweight. The kurtikutt helped him sit up, cradling Bergstrom against his chest. The First Born looked on, and behind him the Proteus, still wearing its harpy's wings.

"Beergstromm," said the eldest, "that strength you have, I think it is not in your head, either." He bared yellow teeth.

"Mon...ster," Bergstrom slurred. "Bass... tard."

Junior tensed. "Comrade, there is no need --"

The Proteus folded its wings and stared at him with hard eyes. A smile split its mannequin's face.

"Kill...it," Bergstrom got out. "Kill it!"

Sunlight flashed on the First Born's kris, but the Proteus was suddenly elsewhere, its form blurring as it moved. Leathery wings stretched and thinned in an instant, becoming a nest of lashing tentacles. Its skull lengthened, becoming lean and predatory, its mouth agape. The kurtikutt backed away, knife extended. A tentacle briefly wrapped his forearm, coming away with a sucking sound. Blood sprayed from flesh made ragged; bone shone bright white deep within the wound. Silent, the First Born passed the kris to his other hand.

He circled, the blade moving slowly back and forth. Blood streamed down his arm and onto the paving stones. "Beergstromm .... "he hissed.

"His kind .... "Bergstrom fought to make the words. "They...brought the plague. They are...the Hand."

The First Born grinned. "When you were a small bird," he told the Proteus, "I should have taken your head then." He lunged, and missed. A tentacle shot out, slapping his leg. Flesh ripped, blood gouted, and the First Born went down, rolling in the dust. The Proteus's neck telescoped, the head lunging forward, jaws wide, fangs gleaming wetly --snapping shut on nothing as the First Born rolled underneath, the kris slashing upward, cutting through the scaly neck.

Black sap fountained from the stump. The head rolled for meters.

The First Born struggled to his feet, the blood running from him. Tentacles whipped blindly. He gripped them one after the other, severing each. The trunk lay at his feet, inky slime pulsing from its wounds.

"Not dead," the First Born said raggedly. "But inconvenienced." He swayed, the kris slipping from his fingers to clatter on the pavement. Blood drenched his tunic. Junior went to his side, then looked across the plaza and called his brothers with a howl that made Bergstrom shiver.

Bergstrom got his legs under him and stood.

"Comrade," Junior said, "you are hurt."

"Nerve damage," Bergstrom said, the words still indistinct. "Stroke, maybe. Like her." He started toward the kurtikutts, his right foot dragging.

"We both are battle-scarred, Beergstromm." The First Born's muzzle twitched. "I could die now, I think."

The other kurtikutts ran up, their gnarls and growls filling the square. Junior cut them off with a roar, then lowered the First Born to the ground. He ripped his own tunic into strips and began binding his brother's wounds. The First Born grunted, his eye closing.

"You will not die," Bergstrom said, the barks and grunts strange in his mouth. "Not unless you are too much a miser to pay a chirurgeon on Chimerine."

Junior gaped at him. The First Born's good eye fluttered open. "You did not know our tongue before," he said.

"I know it now." Bergstrom's face twisted. "I remember it."

"If a trick this is .... "The First Born tried to rise. "No, it is madness upon you. A wound in the brain you said, it may have murdered your mate, and now in you .... "He fell back, breathing hard. "And mad was I to listen to you."

Junior put his hand on his brother's head. "Comrade. Comrade!" Bergstrom looked at him, trying to focus. "What is this thing in you?"

He shook his head. A thousand voices filled his ears, a million remembrances crowded in on him, filling him. But already they were fading, slipping from him one by one.

"Memories," he said. "Answers." He staggered, but the Fifth Born steadied him before he could fall. "These people...the Bonding. What it was like to be here when the Hand came down. To die...to feel a million deaths, all at once. How they twisted the Portal, so it led just one way. How to get home. How we can get home."

"Madness," the First Born muttered.

"Or not," Junior said. "We can follow him, or wait here for death. For you it will come sooner, without a chirurgeon, but it will come for all of us soon enough." To Bergstrom: "You can find the way to Chimerine?"

"With Shorty's help. But first, there's something else that needs doing." He turned to The Twins. "Bring the shapeshifter to the Outsteppers' gate," he said in their language. "Now."

They looked to Junior, who barked his assent. They hurried off. Shorty trailed Bergstrom as he followed unsteadily.

When he reached The Twins, they were standing well back from the Proteus's bead. One kurtikutt held its trunk, which writhed sluggishly in its grasp; the other held the tentacles far from its body.

The Proteus's teeth clashed as Bergstrom knelt in front of the sleek skull. It was metamorphosing, but haltingly. Buds formed on its underside -- the start of legs, perhaps. Bony ridges thickened, the Proteus's eyes burning from beneath them. The teeth snapped again, then shortened, withdrawing into the jaw. Lips formed, wrinkled, spat out: "Death to you. Death to you."

He grasped the skull behind its ferocious mouth, its oily hide writhing under his hands. "And you're going to live forever," Bergstrom said, "in the room where all your victims are waiting."

Grunting, he threw the Proteus toward the wall of night.

Its scream was cut short, leaving only silence.

4

The sun came up over the western hills and set the morning mist aglow. The fog wrapped wooded slopes and green valleys, a turquoise lake burning with dawn's light. High clouds streaked a delicate blue sky. Not Flanders' sun or sky, but Chimerine's; still, it made his throat ache to see it. Bergstrom had the bed raise him up, and held the jewel to the light. The sunlight poured like molten fire along the lines and channels etched into it, forming patterns he could no longer read.

The door opened tentatively. "Comrade?" Junior looked in. "It was a long hunt to find you, the hospital is so large."

"It needs to be," Bergstrom said. "A lot of people get hurt out there." He slipped the ruby egg under the covers. "Come in."

"Sure thing." He held the door open and the First Born hobbled in, one arm and one leg wrapped in sleek green bandages. Junior pulled a chair away from the wall and his brother settled into it.

"I wondered if you could bear to pay a medician," Bergstrom said.

"Thieves, all of them," the First Born growled. "But, good fortune, they don't know how to bargain. And you, Beergstromm? A damage to the nerves, they tell me."

"They're repairing it, but it takes time."

"And treasure," the First Born said, "but that hunts for you now. The knowledge of that place gathered a high price."

"We shouldn't have sold it."

"Make of it a charity?" the First Born rumbled. "And for charity they would heal both of us, and give you means to live until you are well enough to go out again? This is the way of it, Beergstromm: To everything there is a price. Better than most, you know that."

Silence fell across the room. Into it Junior said, "Across all the worlds we hunt them."'

"And how many of us have they killed?"

The eldest's look turned sour. "Able hunters they are. The fight will be long."

"It'll never end," Bergstrom said. "They're all pieces of the same organism, like a cancer -- leave one piece alive and it will all grow back. Next time it will be stronger, smarter. Its hate will be stronger, too. It wants the universe to itself again."

"My hate also is strong," the First Born said.

Bergstrom sat up with a muffled groan. "We're like animals to them --vermin. The war probably started when my ancestors were still in the trees. The Outsteppers fell first, but the Proteus were beaten back. When the shapeshifters returned, it was as the Hand, making themselves into new strains for each species. Then the Bonding fell...along with a hundred other races. Now we're the only ones left to stand against them -- the survivors."

"The Bonding were a gentle people," Junior said.

"Yes." Bergstrom's look was distant. Their memories were gone from him, but he recalled their flavor. Each of his brothers and sisters, their experiences stored in crystal matrices -- not dead histories, but undying souls. The gallery -- not a dusty library, or a monument, but a temple. "You have to be gentle, when you can read another's thoughts and feel another's pain."

"We are not a gentle people," Junior said. "And we do not have to learn how to be hunters."

The First Born shifted in his chair, wincing. "For the hurt both we took," he said, "for the death of Cara Ausstenn, we will kill them each. There is a bounty, and I will be of wealth from it. You will visit me in the house they build for the Ruhk'thmar."

Bergstrom frowned. "Not if you get any slower, Chief."

The First Born barked a laugh. Junior tried to help him to his feet, but the eldest shrugged him off. "I am not so feeble as believes our scholar." Suddenly he took Bergstrom's hand in his; the kurtikutt's skin was warm and coarse. "Comrades of the hunt, Beergstromm -- and sixth brother of the Ruhk'thmar, if you will honor me."

Bergstrom looked into the obsidian eye, flat and dead. "Brothers," he said.

The First Born gripped his hand more tightly, then released him. He glanced over his shoulder. "My stomach is hollow! The food here is of a garbage heap, and there's little of it."

"We will search out something fit," Junior said. He watched as his brother limped from the room, then turned back to Bergstrom. "He will not hunt again, but he will keep his promise. From his bed he began gathering teams of hunters. They will be his claws and teeth." He came up to the Led. "And where does the hunt bring you?"

"I'm going to take Cara home," Bergstrom said. "After that...I don't know. I've spent my whole life sifting the ruins for bits of the past. For a few moments, I knew' it all. I lived it. I could spend the rest of my life trying to get that back again."

"It would be a good life, I think," Junior said. "After you take her home, comrade, come and find us."

When he had gone, Bergstrom looked out over the green hills and blue skies, so much like home's. He put his hand around the jewel again and felt in it a familiar warmth, and a longing. I'm waiting for you on the other side.

"I'm sorry, sweetheart," he said as the dawn's light poured through the window. "You'll have to wait a while longer."

~~~~~~~~

By Mark J. McGarry

Mark I. McGarry sold his first story when he was eighteen, and has published a dozen more, and two novels, in the years since. He is an editor at one of the largest newspapers in the United States, and is also editor of the Bulletin of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

HOME TIME

MORNINGS HERE ARE JUST as bad as mornings anywhere else. I sit up in my bunk and scowl at the mirror. The ceiling feels close as a coffin over head, and if I reach out either way, I can touch the walls. We travelers need a tight place to call our own; a burrow to crawl into. Here at Epsilon Base, we call them torpedo tubes.

It's my turn to fix breakfast. The three of us chomp shriveled waffles and pseudo-bacon hunched around the little table in the kitchen area. We've all put on weight during our stay; stress and boredom do that to you. Janey's in jeans that were tight three months ago when we started out and now look simply painful, the same T-shirt as yesterday and the day before. Figgis rereads one of his old technical mags, a glob of butter hanging on the strands of the beard he's grown over a face still neat with youth. No one says a word. Janey tosses her greasy blonde hair. She sighs. As I didn't hear any sleep-period ramblings between their torpedo tubes, I guess I'm sitting in the chilly slipstream of a lover's argument.

My turn to clean up. Funny how often the rota works that way, but still I can't be bothered to argue. Gives me something to do before we get ready for the final lump. In a nice domestic touch, Epsilon's Korean designer placed the tiny basin beside a porthole so you can see out as you stand there. I plunge my hands into the warm recycled water.

Outside, the storm has died. My hands pause, aimless fish swimming. Ice furs the rim of the porthole like the white spray that was used in shop windows at Christmas back in England when I was a kid. It's October, which means that the sun here dances a fire around the horizon. The high . winds of a few hours ago have left streaks in the ice like the claw marks of some giant animal. The storm may have died, but faintly through the filtered triple glass, I can still hear the wind. In the Antarctic, it never stops.

By the same cosmic coincidence that made it my turn to cook and clear, it also falls to me to check the outside of Epsilon before our next Jump. There's no room for me to kit up in my outsuit in my torpedo tube, so I have to do it in the one corner of the cramped living pod that isn't strung with washing. Figgis and Janey just sit around and watch as I strip down to bra and knickers. I'm conscious of my wobbling marbled flesh and the stray bits of body hair, but of course I'm just good old Doctor Woolley; she's past modesty and all that kind of thing.

It feels good to squeeze into the privacy of the inner hatch, to bang it shut and watch the warm air cloud to crystal as the frozen atmosphere gushes in. There's no question that, barring the ocean floor, I'm facing the most hostile atmosphere on Earth. Nothing compared to Io or Venus, of course, but astronauts don't have to breathe the atmosphere or fiddle barehanded with bits of frozen machinery that can peel the skin off your hands like a rubber glove. And astronauts have up-to-date equipment. And they're all Taiwanese.

The outer hatch booms open. The shiny outsuit hisses and squeals as it adjusts to the 60-degree drop in temperature. I climb out and down. The white hits my eyes. My lungs go solid tight inside my chest. I glance back. Janey's face is at the porthole. She gives me a smile and a wave, like someone moving off on a train. I stomp a few yards across the ice.

Epsilon is shaped like a dumpy starfish. The central mound contains the main life support systems and the comms bay, with the kitchen, the torpedo tubes, the living bay, the medical bay and snout of the canhopper fanning off. I can't say that Epsilon actually looks like a starfish because --in the one part of the deal that our college really held out for--the whole of the outer body was re-coated in military-grade camouflage paint before we left our home time. Even now, from what must be no more than twenty shuffling paces away, I have to squint hard to make it out as more than another frost ghost given momentary reality by the wind. Janey's gone. Figgis, too. I could almost be alone.

I pick my way around the drifts and hollows, checking for accidental debris; anomalies that would almost certainly destroy us. The bitter wind pushes and pulls at me like an argument. It roars in my ears. I do a slow circuit of Epsilon, then another for luck. The wind has already raked away my first footsteps. I brush ice away from the canhopper's cockpit.

"Woolley!" Janey's voice suddenly crackles over the wind in my ears. "What are you doing out there?"

"Won't be long," I say, then pluck off a glove to reach inside my hood and dislodge the comms wire. I don't need you, Janey, not out here. Woolley doesn't need anyone.

I breathe the air. The wind snatches the frozen vapor from my lips and throws it back in my face as grit. Overhead, the sky is lace over blue oblivion. When I was a child and my mother first told me stories about this place, I used to imagine that there really was a pole up here, striped like a candy stick, around which the planet revolved.

I squint, darkening the lenses of my goggles by a couple of notches with the presspad inside my mittens as I re-inspect the ground. But it makes little difference. Pure Antarctic roars over my inadequate senses. I'm leaning twenty degrees into the wind just to stand up. Looking down at my feet, I see the drift ice racing. Nothing feels still. Snow here is as rare as rain in a desert; all that ever happens is that the wind drives the ice, scooping it into high drifts, baring the underlying strata, destroying-- thank God--every trace of life. White on white on white. I still have to keep reminding myself that we are in the Year of Our Lord, 1890.

Gladstone is Prime Minister in England. Zeta Tauri is still a distant star. Etcetera, etcetera. Look at it this way: if I fumed my back and walked out across the ice away from Epsilon, if I crossed the Queen Maud Mountains and got as far as the McMurdo Sound and came across a whaler lost amid the penguins and icebergs far from its normal hunting ground, if those rough and stinking men would take me aboard, I could visit India in the Raj, Imperial Saint Petersburg, Venice before the flood. Chat with Marx or Freud, ride through London in a hansom cab. The whole world--if my very presence didn't cause it to heave into oblivion--would be mine.

My toes are dying off. I turn back. When I reach the porthole, I remember that I've tom out my comms wire. A tiny worm of panic bores at my spine. But there's no need to worry. Janey's seen Woolley through the porthole, and she lets Woolley in. She and Figgis once again watch the show as this ugly butterfly strips from her chrysalis out-quit, but by now I can't be bothered to feel any irritation. We've all got other things on our minds.

It's time for our final Jump up the line. We clamber through the internal hatch to the communications bay. Figgis is in charge of this aspect of the mission, so he gets the comfy chair in front of the console while Janey leans her rump against a mainframe that's so old it bears an IBM logo. I have to stoop awkwardly under a plastic strut.

Figgis drums his fingers. Janey chews her lips vigorously. Pushing strands of graying mousy hair back from my face, I wonder what exactly it is that I do that gets on their nerves. The numbers on the 2D screen tick by in seconds. The console is a mess of the scribbled stickers that Figgis used to re-label the original Korean han'gul script. Taped beside it is a postcard of Interlaken where he took a pre-Epsilon break, blowing what little advance money the College had been prepared to loan him. The plastic ski runs on the arid mountain slopes look like spilled rolls of toilet paper.

Jumps are something I can never get used to. This is the fifteenth if you count the big power surge that first threw us back to 1565 and the vicinity of the South Pole. From there we've moved up through the years --collecting data and growing increasingly weary of each other--by a series of smaller Jumps powered by our own internal batteries. Now at least we're that much closer to home.

Figgis gives up drumming his fingers and begins to stroke his beard, tugging it as though he's trying to pluck a chicken. The minutes plod by on the screen, and each one is just like any other. Bus this time of waiting is special with worry. Jumps involve the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, the rotation and the ever-outward drift of the Galaxy. And then you must add to that the flow of time itself. What actually happens is that for a dimensionless moment we exist in several times and places at once, hovering like a mayfly over the waters of reality as Epsilon calculates exactly where we should land. So far, the system has worked perfectly....

That's what's happening now. We Jump and the porthole on our right fills with the soundless buzz of the Jump, which is almost the way the old-fashioned TV screens used to go between channels, but pushed back to three or possibly four dimensions. A blizzard without color or sound, a glimpse into the swirling plughole of the non-universe, a place where there is in fact no light at all, where the absence of everything means even an absence of nothing. We all know that our eyes are simply tricking us when we try to look. We know by now that it's better not to.

The screen registers contact. Stocking ladders of data flutter and clear. Figgis sits back and rests his hands behind his neck. The chair creaks. I can smell his sweat. I guess he can smell mine. We brace ourselves for something more. But that's it. This is March 14, 1912. Epsilon is well within tolerance--even if we're not. Figgis pulls harder at his beard. Janey draws another flake of skin back across her lips.

"So what we have here," Figgis says, "is 1912. Tell us what's happening, Woolley."

This is our ritual. I half-close my eyes and recite that Asquith is Prime Minister in Britain, that the Titanic will soon be starting her maiden voyage from Southampton. I describe how Nijinsky's wowing Paris, and explain that China teas just become a Republic. I don't mention that Roald Amundsen has reached the Pole a month and a half ago, and that Captain Scott's men are still struggling to get back to Cape Evans. That goes without saying.

"You see," Figgis says to Janey, tipping her a smile, the beginnings of a reconciliation. "Woolley knows her stuff."

"That's me," I say. I grin and slap the strut I'm leaning on with one of my big hammy hands. "Good old Doctor Woolley...." Epsilon booms faintly. "Let's get going."

"You're the boss," Janey smiles up at me. For a weird moment, I can almost see why men find her attractive. And I wonder if I'd become a lesbian if she turned it on strongly enough using all that stuff with the pressing tits and the fluttering eyelashes, the way she does with Figgis. Perhaps that would be the answer to all Woolley's problems. Janey's smile widens. Woolley finds herself blushing as she heads for the ladder between the dangling knickers and Y-fronts.

JANEY PILOTS the canhopper. Figgis and I squat on the rumbling seats over the engines with the stretcher I rack crammed behind. Watching Janey now, brushing the controls as though they were bruised, the sleeves of her outsuit rolled back from those narrow wrists, I can't help but admire her ease and absorption. The canhopper rocks slightly as the eddy from an ice dune tucks under the fuselage and her hand slides out to brush the boost control. The tone of the right engine alters a fraction through my pelvis, then resumes.

Figgis has got the big Canon holocam balanced on his lap. He nods toward it and says to me, "Did I tell you that Janey and I gave this a trial run a few weeks ago in her torpedo tube?" He's grinning. Back in 1650, Janey and Figgis were at maximum rut for each other. It didn't exactly keep them quiet, but it did keep them more or less out of my way.

I force a nod, and the skin of my outsuit crackles as if it shares my discomfort. Janey's eyes are still on the window. She doesn't even blink. She's so wrapped up in piloting the canhopper that Figgis and I can talk about her as though she isn't here. Over her head on the consale is the date and time. March 14, 1912. And the day is yet young; Epsilon's computers have thoughtfully avoided any kind of Jump lag. It's still only 10:30 in the morning.

Trackless, unseen, undetected, we sail five meters above the ice desert on an electro-magnetic tide. I was expecting a storm, but everything looks clear and sharp as a wedding cake, the sun gold and midway down the sky now, well into the polar autumn. As always, I looked for changes when we first crawled out onto the shattered ice of this new era, but there was nothing. If it were safe for us to Jump as far 1950, it might be possible to pick out that hint grayish haze that the jet pilots had started to report in the sky, but the real differences in this polar environment are being sniffed out by Epsilon's many sensors. More methane, more nitrogen, more carbon dioxide. More of most things apart from oxygen. Even if the dictates of relative safety hadn't determined our choice, the very sterility of the Antarctic would still have made it an ideal place for monitoring the planet. But that's down to the data in the spectrometers that our college will eventually download and sell to the highest bidder. All our poor human senses can report is whiteness.

Janey clicks her lips open. "This is it, folks," she says.

I lean forward to see out of the windscreen. She's right; there are black specks on the horizon. The canhopper sails quickly toward them.

Flags. Uptilted skis.

"For God's sake don't knock anything over...." Figgis murmurs.

But Janey's in control. The engines sigh to a halt. The canhopper settles its smooth underside a safe distance away across the ice.

We bang elbows as we seal up the out-quits and the specially wide and flat-soled shoes. Figgis says he thinks Woolley should go first. Janey nods from underneath her hoot and mask. I feel a flood of gratitude, but as I unseal the hatch, I wonder if they're doing it this way just so that Woolley'll get the blame if anything goes wrong. Not that any of us really need to worry about that.

And out. And down the steps. This really does feel like a historic moment. Even if Scott is a month gone from the Pole and Amundsen by longer, we're lonely travelers here, too. Amid these fragile signs of human presence, it feels as if we've arrived somewhere at last. The wind pours over me. It flutters the Norwegian and British flags. The little tent Amundsen left behind is half-buried in drift ice. He's already safely back at Framheim and preparing to report his triumph to the world, but Scott's team are still out there, with Petty Officer Evans already dead ant Captain Oates starting to limp badly....

Black shapes of tent and ski poles, the sun low and distant across the sparkling ice. The whole scene belongs in some Edwardian painting, but it makes me feel incredibly nostalgic for past times of my own, for the stories my mother used to tell me on late afternoons after school by the lake in the park. Though she had never been to the Arctic, she filled my head with dreams of whiteness; a once-upon-a-time continent that, at least until this last dreadful century, remained almost untouched by man. She told me about Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott.... Their names grew sharp for me as pavement frost. I saw them as silhouettes in the wild white dark, hopeless and determined, their ships crushed by the ice, death walking beside them, struggling endleasly back toward base camp.

We have a picture show back at Epsilon when we've finished. We're all unusually chatty. I don't know about Janey and Figgis, but for me the ordinary details we found out there were the biggest shock. These men may be legends from my childhood history, but here at the Pole they were just weary and afraid. They left an inconsequential litter behind them. God knows why, but one of those narrow bicycle repair tins was lying out on the rough ice. There were frozen dog turds from the huskies, a Norwegian cigarette packet, a screwed-up wrapper of Cadbury's chocolate. It almost looked like the remains of a picnic. I longed to touch.

We kept the holocam running all of the time, and that's what we're watching now. We didn't realize what we were doing at the time as we grouped self-consciously around the tent and the flag, but our pose mimics with terrible clarity those old shots of Amundsen's and Scott's teams doing the same thing. It's eerie. We look almost as tired and afraid.

Janey makes dinner for a change. She ransacks the store for freeze dried plaice and mushrooms, little balls of cardboardy rice. She looks at Figgis all the time he eats. A peace offering, of course. He gets the message and rumbles male comments about how good it tastes. And there's some acidic Frascati she's reconstituted to loosen us up. We keep the conversation safe, going over ground already worn smooth with repetition.

After coffee, I offer to clear up in the expectation that Janey and Figgis will beat a swift retreat to the torpedo tubes to discuss more urgent matters. But something goes wrong behind my back and Janey storms off alone, shouting You Never this and Why Don't You that, leaving Figgis drumming his fingers on the table and the cramped atmosphere colder than it is out there beyond the porthole.

More than happy to stay out of it, I take a shower and give myself a good rubdown, marveling at the swelling blue veins in my legs. Then I flop down inside my Korean-sized torpedo tube balled up in my dressing gown. Faintly, I can hear Janey still sobbing next door. I close my eyes. Relax, Woolley. Tomorrow's a big day. The biggest. I wish I could imagine--

Figgis raps on the hatch. He wants to talk. I let him in.

"This all is so ordinary," he says, crouched between the little shelf and the rim of the bunk. "Janey and I are arguing like kids. I wish I had your distance from this kind of thing, Woolley."

"Didn't the College psychologists tell you what was going to happen when they did the profiles?"

He shakes his head, then nods. "Yeah, but I didn't believe them." He pulls at his beard. "What did they tell you?"

"They told me I'd be lonely.... They told me I was used to it and that I would cope." I pause, but why not speak the truth for a change? "They told me that you two squabbling and screwing would get on my nerves."

He reaches out a hand. My veiny leg is sticking out of my dressing gown as far as my thigh. He gives it a pat. "I'm sorry, Woolley."

"That's okay," I say, shifting slightly to cover myself. "You read any truthful account of this kind of mission, it's always the same. Think of Thigh on the Bounty."

Figgis grins. "And Captain Oates is cursing Scott for his incompetence at this very moment."

"That's right," I say.

He pauses. Janey's gone quiet next door. Probably listening to us, trying to catch the words over Epsilon's plastic hum and the muffled scream of the wind. "Can I ask you a question?"

"Fire away."

"Tell me how you feel about sex, Woolley. I've always wondered."

"You mean, do ugly people have a sex drive! And if so, what do we do with it?"

He doesn't answer. He's down to shorts and a cutoff T-shirt that's ridden up over his taut belly so that I can see the beginnings of his pubic hair. His whole body is clear and sharp; no cause for shame. His eyes are sharp too, and his breath smells sweet through that ridiculous beard: maybe he's drunk another bottle of the wine. You get used to seeing bits of people when you're a doctor. But that isn't the same as the whole.

"Yes," I say. "I do have a sex drive. And I'm not a virgin, either. I was once nineteen like everybody else. You know what it used to be like at those parties when the College was still taking regular admissions? When people paired off, there was always some lad drunk enough to do the ugly bitch in the corner a favor. I went through all of that...that phase. But sex on its own is a disappointment, isn't it? It's everything that surrounds it that counts."

Figgis's eyes don't flicker. He's watching me the way Janey watches the instruments when she's piloting the canhopper. "Would you have liked to have children?" he asks.

That's another question entirely, although I understand from my own bitter inward arguments that it follows on neatly enough. Is that why I'm thinking about my mother so much these days?

I take a breath. "I don't know," I say. "Things would just be different. I probably wouldn't be here for a start."

"Yeah," he says with a sigh, and I realize that I've been tactless. He leans forward. I like the way his young muscles move, and for a moment I wonder if I don't detect some sexual charge--or at least a need for sharing--in this close torpedo air. But he's just trying to shift his arse on the uncomfortable rim of the shelf. Figgis, he's at ease with Woolley. He could almost be on his own. He says, "Do you think Janey's asleep?"

"I doubt it."

"Well maybe I should go see her. Clear the air."

I smile. "You do that."

So Figgis works his way out of Woolley's torpedo tube and bangs the hatch shut, leaving me with his faint mannish odor, my own stale disappointments. I dim the lights and lie back. I play music through my earset for a while. It's Bill Evans in concert, June 25, 1961, but even as the baseline joins the piano for "My Foolish Heart, " I can hear Janey and Figgis next door. Making up. He's groaning, she's groaning. It's no good. I turn the music off and wait for silence. And it comes, it comes. With Epsilon humming and the faint gathering storm, my fingers reach down and find the place, and touch. I realize that I'm aroused anyway. Poor old Woolley gets off just on the sound of other people doing it. My fingers circle and dance. The darkness moves with them. For a few moments, the sun breaks through the rainclouds and flickers white on a lake where laughing bodies dive and mingle, going deep to a place where there's nothing but music, nothing but light.

My vision spins back. This torpedo tube. The sound of my heart. Eventually, I sleep, and I dream, as so often recently, about my mother. And with her face, with her voice, comes an echo of trolley wheels squealing along a hospital corridor, the bright wash of fluorescent light, the itchy feel of the stool on which I had to sit and wait for her on that day she went to collect her test results. The dream's so familiar that part of me's just watching. As she comes back through those swing doors and stoops toward me, somehow still managing to keep a smile on her face- looking, in fact, almost relieved--I realize that she must have already known that she had cancer. Mum was also a doctor, after all. And they always tend to expect the worst when their own health's at stake. So this would just be confirmation that she was dying.

Perhaps she brought me with her to the hospital for moral support; perhaps it was just because it was in the school holidays and she didn't know what else to do with me. And I sat waiting for her on that seat in the corridor whilst the nurse behind the desk gave me sweets that had gone sticky in their wrappers.

The face of the woman I see coming out through those double doors--big jaw, small mouth, big forehead, large, deep, close-set eyes--is much like the one that stares back at me nowadays from the mirror, even if I do sometimes wish I could manage her smile. Mum said something to me as she bent down. Always in these dreams, I can see her lips move, but I can't quite understand. Not exactly. It was something about making the most of time, love. Time. Love. Home. Not Long...somethinglike that. And, as always in my dream--in memory, too--I strain to catch her words. But I can never quite hear them.

MUM DIED WITHIN A YEAR. She fumed gray and her skin faded off her big bones and the pain that she was reluctant to take medication for often made her irritable. Little Woolley was eleven by then, with most of her mother's ugly features, most of her mother's aptitudes. Like Mum, I was already a loner, the giver and taker of easy playground jokes. And, like Mum, I eventually became a doctor. The only thing about me, really, that's different--until recently, anyway, when even my own biological clock has given off the occasional pre-menopausal ping--is that I've never entertained thoughts of having children. Not that Mum took the usual step of pairing off with a suitable man. Like me, I suppose, that course was less than straightforward for her. She went instead to a sperm bank and had the thing done coldly, methodically, without all the lies and the fumbling, the pretenses of passion. Thus it was that little Woolley, the product of a nameless and unknown father, finally entered the world. Thus it was that Woolley began a life that has ended up here in the Antarctic of a different century as the product of genes which had, appropriately enough, been frozen.

Two hours out from Epsilon on the trail of the British Antarctic Expedition under the command of Robert Falcon Scott. Janey pushes the canhopper hard across the ice plateau. She's in control. Figgis drums his fingers. The tight air inside the canhopper resonates as the engines drone. Whatever happened between the two of them last night has left a residue that lies somewhere between love, lust, anger, despair; the Greeks probably had a word for it. It seems to me that they've both finally realized that this relationship is heading in the same direction as every other relationship they've ever been involved in: that the personality profiles were right. The fact is, Janey and Figgis--despite their good looks, their relative youth, their admirable if somewhat over-specific intellects--are both constitutionally incapable of sustaining a long-term friendship, let alone love. At times like this, I feel truly sorry for them, and sense more easily the desperation that has driven them here. Both double-divorcees, Janey and Figgis have been ejected from the present at least as thoroughly as poor old Woolley has. Perhaps they'd entertained thoughts of staying together, of using the chat show and media spin-off fees we're hoping to get when our college goes public to buy a proper house in a Sony enclave and recover custody of the children they've left in their turbulent wake....

Amazing, when you think about it, that we've lasted out this whole month together. But we have--just about. The profiles were right about that, too. Me, I'm simply glad that we're nearly at the end of it, and that the chances seem reasonably high that we'll return to home time.

"Your turn to drive, Woolley."

I blink my way back to the present.

"Okay, Woolley? You look like..." Janey glances back over her shoulder. The canhopper is on hover and she's human again. She smiles a human smile. "...I'd better not say."

Right, I think. Right.

I take the controls. All the dials are pointing toward the top--except for those dials that should be in the middle, which are in the middle, and those which aren't working at all or have been disconnected, which are limp, or blank. I ease the canhopper forward. Another couple of hours on the plateau for Janey to rest before the difficult bit. The ice rushes by, not as fast as before although Woolley does her Woolley best. I search left and right for the tracks left by Scott's men, but there is nothing. Even assuming they kept a course this straight on their return, the wind scours everything away.

The sun has dropped west, but I still need to keep the screen fairly dark. I can make out the faint reflection of Figgis ant Janey behind me. I watch Figgis rest his hand on the inside of Janey's thigh. I concentrate on the driving.

Three Degree Depot flashes by a couple of hundred meters east. Flags and litter. I circle once at distance, but we decide not to stop. We're too afraid by now, too hurried, too eager. The sun slides closer to the ice at our backs, throwing huge shadows. Far ahead, something jagged breaks the flat horizon. The canhopper races on. Saw serrations become teeth, teeth become mountains. The sun sinks lower and reddens, daubing them with blood.

Janey yawns behind me. She says, "Move over, Woolley."

I slow the canhopper without argument. Janey settles into the pilot's seat. Figgis scratches his beard.

The Transantarctic Mountains rise and rise, damming the glacier of the Polar plateau. The ice starts to buckle into great ridges. We're sailing over the wreckage of a vast conflict. Janey has to climb hard on manual to get over and around the pressure faults. Looking out of the side window and down into the blue chasms is almost as bad as staring out of the porthole during a Jump. The canhopper's engines hiss with effort and I lever my arms for balance against the bulkhead.

Everything is huge...blood and shadow. Trying to ignore the part of my mind that insists on trying to give meaning to the shapes, I crane my neck up toward the mountain flanks where there are slashes of bare stone. Scott's men made special detours, just to take off their mittens and touch. In this desert of ice, I can understand why.

We pass into mountain shadow. It can't be possible, but I feel the chill. Then out into a glare of light, too extreme for the screen's somewhat aged dimmers to cope with. Janey slows abruptly as she waits for the whiteout to settle. We're moving through a jagged gouge; it's too rough to be called a valley. The shadow blinks ova us again. Bluish ice tumbles into squares that for a giddy instant could be the size of sugar cubes of the blocks God hewed to make the universe. Janey checks the readouts, draws back to a total crawl. Now that the engines are quietened, I can hear the patter of wind-driven ice striking the canhopper's fuselage.

Slow ahead. The canhopper crests a ridge. There's a glimpse of a far horizon, then another ridge, and my stomach drops into space beyond. The wind tips us like a kite but Janey's hands ate three places at once, taking us down a magnetic slide. The Beardmore Glacier is below us, an immense fan of ice and moraine sloping out from the mountains. The land ends here but the ice carries on, the Great Shelf filling the bay of Ross Sea. My stomach settles and for a few moments I believe I can see the blue rim where the ocean finally begins, but that's 400 kilometers away and already the cloud directly below is thickening.

It closes over. We drift down the Ice Falls...Ghost ships lean from the coiling mist. There are cracks and chasms--it's a devil's stairway. I keep telling myself that five starving men have recently picked their way up and down this glacier and beyond. I can't believe it' not even when Janey slows to point out a discarded glove lying close to a crevasse. Figgis muses that maybe this is the place where Petty Officer Evans fell and neatly lost his life, even if there are grounds for supposing that the accident was dreamed up by Scott to provide an excuse for Evans's drift into insanity.

We pass the flags and the wreckage of Last Glacier Depot. I can sense desperation in those remains as Janey does a slow circuit. Shreds of tom canvas. The ice scuffed as though there was some kind of fight. A dented paraffin can rests a good twenty meters away; it's all too easy to imagine it being kicked or thrown there in anger when they find out that the extreme cold had leeched its precious contents away. And Evans will be sulking and muttering to himself, ill and getting iller. And Scott remains aloof, perhaps already sensing what lies ahead; that his diary will be the only thing that matters. We're catching up on them now, both in time and distance. They were here twenty days ago: unbelievably, it's taken us just half a day in the canhopper to gain a whole month on them.

Everything is so real now. So close. Everything else we've done; all the research, all the secrecy, all the back room deals, all the delays, the endless planning, all the reassurances we've given ourselves that, despite the odd tiff and hiccup, things have been going pretty well; they count for nothing. Suddenly, we realize that we're approaching the only moment in this journey that ever mattered. Forget about fame and money and glory and science ant history. Forget about the muffled arguments in the torpedo tubes and park bench dreams of whiteness, the endless wastes of half a dozen lost centuries. Forget about the hope of what we might or might not bring back to home time. We're simply very, very afraid.

Even allowing for the fact that the universe, at least in mathematical terms, seems to function just as well running backward as it does forward, time travel remains a paradox, a mystery. In many ways, we know little more about it than did the researchers who made that first tentative backward-nanosecond push a quarter of a century ago. Can you really assassinate Hitler, Napoleon, give an early warning to the residents of Pompeii, Hiroshima, Liverpool? The truth is that, in a sense, we still don't know.

Of course, time-travel research was instantly a hot property. Imagine! A bomb that arrives at its target before it's been fired! A strategic early warning computer that Jumps backward to give itself time to issue commands! Better still, you can eliminate the commanders of pesky military rivals before they've been born! For a while, the possibilities seemed endless. But they were not.

The timeline we live within is somewhat elastic, and will seemingly accept the disruptions that the very presence of something like Epsilon will cause, but it is also extremely sensitive. Anything that might actually change things simply disappears with nothing more than a clap of returning air. That, at least, is the generally accepted theory. As, by the nature of these things, any time-disruptive Jumps have simply failed to return, and have left no mark on history, there will always be room for doubt. It may be that the stored-up energy that the outraged meta-universe emits when confronted with an irreconcilable kink in time seeds a new big bang. Or it may be, as some optimists still assert, that those lost time-travelers and recording devices are still out there in some alternate re-run of our world. But even the optimists have no answer to the question of how they can be deemed to have got there using time travel from a "future" that will no longer be their own. And the optimists haven't looked out of Epsilon's portholes during mid-Jump.

For all our hunger for the past, it seems that we can only peer under its very edges. And, for reasons that may have something to do with our penchant for recording and studying history, or possibly even the anthropic cosmological principle, it remains especially dangerous to tamper with the works of man. The very universe, it seems, resists. Thus it was that many international treaties and protocols were agreed, to be policed by watchdogs at least as powerful as those that oversaw the rampant proliferation of nuclear weapons in the previous century. The United Koreans, in particular, were more consistent in the breach than the observance. In view of their spectacular military and industrial success, it may be that they succeeded where others failed. But even they "em to have lost interest now. Time travel--at least in the sense that we once imagined it--is itself in danger of becoming history.

FIGGIS TAKES THE CONTROLS for a while as the canhopper slides away from the rubble of the glacier. Janey curls up in the seat beside me and snatches reluctantly at sleep. A storm blows up quickly, lying flat white across the screen one moment, then tunneling back and back the next. It looks unnervingly like the empty buzz that comes when you Jump.

The clock above the screen says 2:30 P.M. Match 15, 1912. We have a big margin--there really is no need to push this hard--but we are caught up in the urgency of the chase, the need to get things done. Unbelievably, the storm gets worse. Janey takes over, and even she has to use the scanners. The green images flicker. I can see lips and faces, the star-skulls of Lovecraftian Old Ones. Gothic shrines to the wind. Faces in the playground shouting Stupid Ugly Woolley. I close my eyes....

After school, at what was also called home time in those days before the words were purloined, the other kids would stop taunting me when they saw my mother waiting on that bench beside the lake. In the winter, her big hands would be red and blue from the cold, and in the summer there'd be rings of sweat under her arms, and her face would often be so wet that she looked as if she'd been crying. I'd sit down beside her, and she'd tell me about her day and then those stories of the Antarctic and all the other things I suppose most parents tell their kids. Like how she'd sat here on the first afternoon after she'd been inseminated at the clinic, and stared across the water and breathed the scents of mesh-cut municipal grass, ice cream vanilla, litter bins...

Those were some of the last good seasons in England. Summers that brought decent heat, autumns of mist where leaves fell from the living trees, winters of snow and frost. The last glimmers, as it fumed out, of our country's wealth and glory. Across the lake on the hottest of days, lads in cutoff jeans dived laughing from the wooden pier. And, every year since Mum could remember, the cold undertow from the deep natural caverns would draw one of them down, and a body would be discovered days or weeks later bobbing in the lime pits on the far side of town. Mum being Mum, she sometimes tried to warn them of the risk they were taking. But they always just kept on laughing. They'd never listen.

Eventually, we'd make our way up the streets toward home. I'd hold Mum's hand and she was tall above me, and I'd think of Shackleton climbing that last mountain toward the whaling station, and of Scott, and of Captain Oates...

The biodetector at the bottom of the console gives a gentle bleep. I blink awake and lean forward. My spine goes cold. This is much too soon. Scott's men can't be here. I can almost feel the outraged universe preparing to spit us out with one simple cataclysmic heave. Then the rough shape of a calm looms out of the ice storm; a cross and the ripple of a flag...

The canhopper circles and still the biodetector bleeps, unable or at least uncalibrated by its Korean makers to distinguish the frozen dead from the near-frozen living.

"Must be Evans," Figgis says. "Isn't anyone else it could be.... Pity we can't get a decent picture."

So this is the grave of Petty Officer Edgar Evans, who dreamed not of reaching the unattainable, but of retirement and a good pension from a grateful government, maybe enough cash to buy a pub down in some pretty part of Kent. His decline could have had something to do with a fall on the Beardmore Glacier, but what medical evidence there is makes that unlikely. To Edwardians like Scott and his team, the initial signs of mental instability in a man such as Evans would have been a source of puzzled embarrassment. They would try to find a simple physical explanation. Scott had his own complex obsessions; he didn't realize that the simplest hopes are the ones that break most easily. And, although Evans was easily the biggest of the team, he had to make do on the same starvation rations as the others as they manhauled their sledges across the ice.

Janey turns the canhopper back on their trail. In a quiet moment that is probably the closest an old agnostic like me ever gets to prayer, I wonder how I can ever complain about having to put up with her and Figgis when the four men ahead of us have had to share Evans's last hours as he screamed and raved in their tent. And then I wonder--I simply can't help it--what death will feel like; that last push when I cross the final barrier. Will I know about it? Has it already happened?

At last.

We are close.

Janey is at the controls. Even she is keeping the speed down now. We're at the buzzing edges of the storm, with snatches of clarity between the flurries. Moving slow left and right over Scott's estimated course, she finds fresh sledge tracks, the scuff of wounded feet. She follows, keeping low. On the map display at her side, our course now wavers the same drunken line followed by the four men ahead.

It's exactly 1:30 P.M., Friday March 15 local time, when the biodetector starts to bleep. The range is just over three kilometers. The air is jagged crystal now as Janey pulls up the magnification on the detector's bearing. There are black specks against the white. Stooped. They don't seem to be moving...yet they are. Slowly. Janey matches the canhopper's motion to theirs, she increases the magnification again. The canhopper balances their distance, moving forward an agonized footstep at a time.

So that's it. Contact. We dare not move closer for now even with the canhopper's military camouflage. Janey clicks all the controls to Auto. Then her shoulders sag and she draws her hands over her face, rocking back and forth. Figgis is pulling at his beard. I can hear the soft snap as it comes out by the roots.

The afternoon is endless. The canhopper moves forward in tiny jerks. It's agony watching the image of Scott's men magnified against the whiteness, but none of us can look away. Amundsen got to the Pole with skis and dogs, but the British way had always been manhauling. Sure, Scott brought along dogs, but no one had been trained to use them. He brought ponies, which all died, much to the distress of Cavalry Captain Oates. He brought skis, which they didn't know how to use. And he brought three snazzy mechanical sledges, one of which fell through the ice, whilst the others broke down. At the end of the day, every British explorer knew that the Antarctic was about manhauling, a harness and a heavy sledge to pull. Even looking at them, I can't believe it. They've dragged themselves this way across 3,000 kilometers of ice. As Janey and Figgis and I stare out, the thought surely crosses all our minds that we should drift in closer, turn on the canhopper's lights, beckon these men over, feed them, give them warmth...This, I decide, must be how God feels: looking down, knowing that he cannot intervene.

With the engines almost at shutdown, I can hear the wind quicken, then decrease. Ghosts rise up from the ice, white on white. I'm too tired to think, and again I can see claws...ravenous eyes and teeth...faces pushed close and shouting...a park bench...

One of the four men ahead is obviously in greater pain than the others. It's difficult to watch any of them, but with Captain Oates, it actually hurts. He doesn't walk--it's an inhuman shuffle, something out of a monster comic book. He falls behind. After a while, Scott, Bowers and Wilson droop their limbs and loosen their harnesses as they wait for him to catch up. Eventually, he does, but soon he falls behind again. Oates is suffering from scurvy, which was still the scourge of polar explorers at the start of the last century. One of the diseases's many unpleasant characteristics is that it unknits old wounds. His thigh was shattered by a sniper's bullet during the Boer War: by now, the scar tissue will have dissolved.

I watch as he falls behind once more. There can't be any doubt amongst them that their chances of survival are thinning by the hour. Scott has already called Oates "a terrible burden" in his diary. But not for much longer. For today is March 15, 1912, when Captain Lawrence Edward Grace Oates finally walks out of history--and into legend.

Evening of a sort. With Oates still shuffling far behind, the others begin to put up the tent. It takes a long time and there are fresh ice flurries coming from the east. Clumsy fingers. Clumsy minds. None of them seem inclined to take a piss before they go in; they'll be dehydrated as well. Or maybe they've given up caring. They close the tent. Oates finally gets there too. There's an odd sort of pantomime before they let him in.

Janey rests the canhopper on the ice for an hour. None of us is hungry, but we eat, guessing that the men inside the tent are doing the same, sharing out the frozen crumbs of their few remaining rations. We have hot soup, crackers, a chocolate bar each. The wind howls. After an hour and no sign of further activity, Janey starts up the canhopper again and drifts in much closer. Down from two kilometers to one, then five hundred meters...four...three...two...one hundred. Then fifty. She uses the screen projection and the biodetector to make sense of the storm, but now that we are this close, the tent, the skis and the sledges are clearly visible through the streaming white. Janey kills the canhopper's engines. In the sudden silence I can hear the rattle of ice against the fuselage. ..and canvas fluttering...

We all dress awkwardly in our out-quits and move the litter of the journey away from the canhopper's outer door in case anything should get blown out. It's uncomfortable in all this thick padding, but we dare not be anything but fully ready now. We wait. Wilson--the doctor in the party --has given Oates a heavy dose of morphine. They all hoped without saying that it would finish him off.

The storm is unnerving graywhite static. Any time now. We wait. The storm quietens a little. The midnight sun flickers gold. Just as the drift ice begins to sweep over again, the side of the tent flutters oddly. For a moment, I think it's just a twist of the wind, but then I see it jerk again. There's no doubt that the laces of the outer flap are being pulled. A head appears. We watch without a word. Janey's gloved hand circles the canhopper's door release.

Oates falls out from the tent on hands and knees, his head down between his shoulders. Behind him, the ties jerk as someone pulls them shut again. He crawls forward without looking up, makes an effort at standing, fails as his right leg shoots out at an agonizing angle. He's dragging something behind him. I can't exactly make it out through the storm, but I know from the records that he's taken his sleeping bag and boots out there with him. Neither would be any use to him, but at the very least it must have been plain to the others what Oates was doing.

Still, we wait. It could take several hours for him to die, and it was decided long ago that we should wait for him to get at least twenty meters from the tent. But he's moving so slowly. He keeps standing up...falling over. He looks drunk--maybe the morphine has affected him. After about twelve meters, I put up the hood of my outsuit and say Let's Go in a shout that comes out as a whisper. Janey pushes the release. The Antarctic storm roars in.

I climb down the steps from the canhopper. Swaying against the wind, I unclip the syringe gun from my belt. My body is screaming hurry hurry, but the last thing we dare risk is one of us sustaining an injury. I take my bearings as Figgis and Janey back out with the stretcher. Oates still has his head down. The screaming wind is masking whatever noise we are making. He still hasn't seen us or the canhopper.

We push forward toward Oates and the tent. They've stacked their gear on the far side to act as a feeble windbreak, so at least we don't have to worry about tripping over a sledge or damaging something. Figgis has a flashlight on the shoulder of his out-quit. The idiot turns it on, and I signal wildly to him through the blizzard, too excited to think about using the comms set. The tunnel of light, if it caught directly on the tent's filthy weave, would shine straight through. Janey gets the message, and reaches to turn the thing off herself. Still, Oates is crawling, the ties of the sleeping bag looped around his trailing injured foot, his hands wedged up inside the reindeer skin finnesko boots for leverage. And the world is still here. The ties of the universe haven't broken. And Oates hasn't seen us.

I push on into the storm. Half my mind is still on that tent and the three men inside it who belong, untouched by us, in history. Now, Oates looks up, his hands still pushed into the boots like clumsy mittens. I'm three meters from him. I raise the syringe gun to quieten him, expecting him to yell or struggle; seeing the three of us coming out of this storm must surely feel like one last nightmare on top of every other. His face is blotched red and white inside the porthole of his balaclava, puffed beyond all normal expression. Maybe it's that or snowblindness, but I can sense no surprise. Reluctant to use the gun unless I have to, I bend forward, holding out my hand. I know it's absurd, but I'm smiling under my mask. Hi, we're from the future. Please keep quiet. For God's sake don't take us to your leader.

I get a whiff of him even through my mask and the storm. Gangrene. I grab at the cloth covering his shoulders. It's half-rotten and starts to break up in my hands, but Figgis and Janey have got the message and are moving quickly to the left. Oates looks straight up at me. Maybe it's just the pain, but I get a cold feeling of recognition. He moans something. It's far too quiet to be heard over this storm, but to me it sounds like make the most of. Time. Home. Hurry. Something like that. Now I give him the syringe gun. His body has no strength. He goes loose instantly.

Janey and Figgis lay the stretcher on the hissing ice. The three of us roll Oates onto it. We can't take any risks. Figgis untangles the sleeping bag before we lift the stretcher up. He has to use his bare hands, and Janey grabs one of his gloves just before the wind spins it off into the storm.

We lift the stretcher, and, as we do so, the boot comes away from Oates's right hand. This time, I remember the comms set.

"Remember," my voice crackles loud in my own head. "They found the sleeping bag and the right boot."

Figgis gives what could be a thumbs up. As we back away toward the open door of the canhopper, the boot and the loose sleeping bag start to tumble east, where they will be discovered next spring by Surgeon Atkinson's party after they have found Scott and the others dead in their tent just the few extra kilometers they managed to drag themselves down the trail.

It takes a million times longer than it should for us to haul the stretcher up inside the canhopper. I have to keep telling myself that what we're doing is already part of history. Oates is safe. Nothing has changed. This is the exactly what always happened, right down to that boot and that sleeping bag tumbling off in the terrible wind. The body of Captain Lawrence Oates was never found. Never was and never will be. We were here. We took him. We've always been part of history.

The door swings in on silence. The ice swirls confetti, settles on the canhopper's plastic floor. It's still freezing in here and our breath is pluming clouds, but already the heaters are starting to whir, already Janey is sliding into the pilot seat, slamming on the engines. Already we are on our way.

Figgis helps me settle the stretcher into the supports behind our seats. Janey's pushing the canhopper ridiculously bard. I rip off my mask and yell at her to cool it. Steadying myself with one hand, I tear the wrapper off a steel and cut through layers of hood and balaclava. I have to remind myself that there really is a human being underneath this mess.

I ease the boot away from his left arm. Oates has slit the reindeer skin down as far as the toes so that he can get it on and off his swollen foot. But something else looks odd about it. There isn't time to think now, but my mind tells me anyway just as I drop the soggy weight to the floor. It's his left arm, but this is the right boot. I glance back at Figgis and Janey. They are too busy for anything right at this moment. I say nothing.

He needs oxygen. I turn up the supply and hold it above his face without touching the seared flesh. One breath. Two. Easy now. Then I take a whiff myself. The smell of Oates gets worse as I slice away more layers. I have to keep the overhead heaters on full to bring his body temperature up fast and the flesh and the rags--sometimes it's hard to be quite sure which is which--are starting to warm.

Oates's hands are swollen tight, the skin and nails peeled back like old paint on a fence. I drag my suddenly sweating body from the outsuit and work in underwear--hardly sterile conditions, and God knows what Captain Oates is going to think if he wakes up now. But Oates is barely alive. The shock of us and the stretcher and the syringe gun can't have helped. The blood analysis is up on the screen. It tells me that Wilson gave Oates a lot more morphine than anyone back at our college had predicted. I can't imagine what power it was that moved him across the ice.

I take another hit of oxygen before I start work on the legs. This is the worst bit. I already know what I'll find from the smell of rotting meat, but that doesn't make it any easier. The right leggings are swollen taut from the thigh to the feet. I tease apart a seam and start to cut down and through. The flesh is white...blue...red...black...green.... It spills out like weak jelly. I cut further. Bits of bone jut up. Just as I reach the knee, Captain Oates's eyes snap open. I wonder if the morphine has somehow nullified my own injection before I notice the screen and realize that this is the characteristic spasm that begins seconds before the heart stops beating.

I jam open his mouth and slam the electrodes onto his wasted chest. Bits of flesh flake away and I snap some bones in my hurry. I'm shouting for help and even Janey must have sensed the sudden urgency because she's brought the canhopper back to float. Figgis knows enough to hold the oxygen over Oates's mouth end otherwise keep out of my way as the body jerks and shudders with each shock. After the initial panic, I work smoothly. Apart from the mess Oates is in, it's textbook stuff. But the body gets looser and harder and the moment comes that has nothing to do with clinical judgment or the flat traces on the screen when I know there isn't anything left to fight.

History was right.

Captain Oates died in the Antarctic.

CLIMBING THROUGH RUINED CITES of the ice pack and the Beardmore Glacier, the air inside the canhopper is appalling. The improvised body bag isn't much help, and the lowest temperature I can get Oates down to is 3 Celsius. Planning on bringing a live passenger back to Epsilon, we left all the cryogenic stuff back in the medical bay. He'll keep, of course, but that isn't really the point.

So this is it. The end, really, of everything. The whole point of our journey was this one big gamble, of doing what no one else had ever done and bringing a live human being back to our home time. The idea was daring, perfect. Not only that, but it would be Captain Oates! Our college would be rich again! The research grants would pour in! We'd get paid regularly! We could even start taking in students! It wouldn't matter then that the loans for the project were secured by dubious means, that we're breaking national law and international treaty. The glory, the fame, would eclipse any problems. All of England, all of Britain--Europe, even, as a whole--would stir from its poverty. Fearful and amazed Oriental eyes would turn toward us once again.

Flags of ice and cloud drift over the golden peaks. Janey hogs the canhopper's controls. Figgis breathes through his fingers. No one says a word. No one needs to; our failure is there in the blackened ruin fermenting behind us, it's there in every sickening breath. I can't sleep, and find it hard to even close my eyes. When I do, I get the feeling that the darkly reproachful ghost of the dead Captain is standing beside me.

The sensors finally detect Epsilon up ahead. Janey makes an uncharacteristic botch of docking the canhopper, giving the outer bay a dent. She curses. Figgis and I exchange hollow glances; there'll be an inquest about that when we get back to home time. Now that we're returning with a corpse, there'll be an inquest about everything.

In the medical bay, I finish off doing the things I should have done inside the canhopper. No point in actually tidying Captain Oates up, of course. Now that he's just an archaeological relic, the specialists will squeal if I do so much as wipe his diarrheatic arse. Looked at from this angle, old Doctor Woolley here has already done a lot of damage trying to save his life. They'll want every ounce of dirt, every drop of the fluid that is pattering through the stretcher to the floor. All of it will be worth something, and will help defray our costs. But a few preparations are necessary before I freeze him.

I've got a mask on, but the gas Oates is giving off is still enough to sting my eyes. Graywhite slashes of his body peek out through what my steels and the Antarctic have done to his clothing. The flesh over the ribcage looks like it's under suction, the arms belong on a burnt chicken. Only the penis and the bluish scrotum look anything like they should, jutting with jaunty irrelevance from a nest of hair. As I take a couple of blood samples (watery pink from the neck, clotted purple from the shriveled buttocks) to determine the exact stage of decay, Oates's narrow deepset eyes stare at me. His teeth are clenched, the wide lips drawn back through the beard like a grin. This sort of thing never used to bother Woolley when she did pathology, but that's many years off, and far away from here.

Talking to the eyes of the cameras, I give him the necessary jabs to slow the formation of damaging ice crystals in the cells, one for each portion of each limb. Just like pricking a turkey for the oven, as my old pathology professor used to say. Then I stretch out the protective film, lock in the pumps and the cables. The film shrivels over him like shrinkwrap on cheese, pushing the bloated hands flat, smoothing the face and widening the eyes, catching the penis at a funny angle, leaving it sticking up like a tiny monument. I feel the cold breath on my skin. Goodbye, Captain Oates. The ice got you after all.

Janey's torpedo tube is open and empty: Figgis's is closed. As I flop down inside my own, I hear the fall of their voices over the faint scream of the wind. Sounds like Woolley this and Woolley that, but that's probably my paranoia. I did my best--I've been over it all a thousand times already. The one question mark hangs over the syringe gun, and the College experts had agreed that there was a margin of safety with Oates's probable level of morphine.

But I can't help wondering....

I see Oates's face staring out at me out from the balaclava. His lips moved, shaping words that were like time, home, move, hurry, love; something like that. Even then, I don't think I panicked. It just felt for a moment as if he understood, as if he had gone out of the tent expecting to be rescued. But that's impossible. So no (I'll tell the inevitable inquiries), I don't think Doctor Woolley panicked. No way.

When I awake in my torpedo tube, silence has frozen over Epsilon, settled soft and heavy. I climb out and stumble around the plastic floors in plimsolls and an old football jersey. I stow away the clean washing. I tidy up in the kitchen area. I wipe down the floors with disinfectant that smells like a forest of plastic Christmas trees. Everything is faintly but sickeningly pervaded by the smell of Oates, but I get childish satisfaction from putting things back where they belong, as if I'm making some kind of point about the state of this expedition. Stupid really, but I'd imagined that people would look at Woolley differently after Epsilon. Yes, Woolley had been kidding herself, just like Janey and Figgis. The only difference was, I didn't even realize I was doing so.

Epsilon needs to be clean and tidy. I don't want people to get the impression that we've let things slip when we Jump to home time. In the comms bay, I peel off Figgis's postcard of Interlaken. Beyond the portholes, I see that snow is falling, rare as rain in a desert. I smile as I look out, watching it flutter at the glass, dancing in graceful drifts. Then, suddenly, it's gone. Absolutely nothing takes its place.

Four hours later, Janey and Figgis and I are talking in that slow way that finally comes when your panic glands run dry. The air inside Epsilon is growing warmer and the smell of Oates seems to be getting worse--or maybe it's just us. They both thought Woolley had finally flipped when I hauled them out of their torpedo tube. I got a grim kind of satisfaction out of showing them the empty buzz beyond the portholes, but that soon passed as Janey started to hug herself and say, So What Do We Do Now until the question became a meaningless sound.

She's calm as any of us are now after the jab I gave her and sits at the kitchen table with her arms folded tight. Emptiness surges at the triple glass behind her back. We're no longer in the Antarctic. We're no longer anywhere. I wish we could put some kind of curtain up over the porthole, but the idea seems comically domestic.

"There was no power surge, so this has nothing to do with Epsilon's own Jump engines," says Figgis, walking his fingers toward us across the table, then walking them back again. "It looks as though some natural force had intervened between us and, well, reality. Of course, " his fingers reach up to his beard, "I could be wildly wrong."

Behind us, the buzz goes on and on. It seems both dense and fragile. You keep expecting it to roar. There isn't any sound.

I decide to tell them about the mix-up with Oates's left and right boots. For once, they don't bother to argue. Any explanation is better than none at all. That, or something else we've overlooked, must have been enough for the universe to reject us as foreign matter.

It seems as if the non-state out there is slowly eating away at Epsilon. The electronic filters in the porthole glass are weakening, and there are signs that the outer coatings of camouflage are breaking up.

"There has to be a chance," Janey says as the angry grayish light-thatisn't-light flickers. "Otherwise we'd be dead already. So if the computer could work out a pattern, we could probably Jump back to home time...maybe not to England, but at least to the Antarctic. Then, we just get in the canhopper and aim for the coast. You know what it's like there. We'd soon come across a mine or a rig or a garbage tanker."

"Are the sensors still working?" I ask.

Figgis shrugs. "They're not broken. But there's nothing out there to record. There isn't even a vacuum.... I mean, if there was, Epsilon would simply have burst. But I think Janey's right. We have to Jump. What else can we do?"

Janey nods, the movement notched by the trembling of her head. "That has to be it."

"How can we Jump when we don't know where we are?"

"Do you have a better idea?"

"I have a simpler one," I say. "We could just step outside." Figgis and Janey stare at me. Now they know I'm mad.

"Like Captain Oates," I add.

"Jesus," Figgis whispers, "you mean you're expecting to be rescued'"

The sweat down my back feels colt even though the air is getting warmer by the minute. Epsilon generates heat--heat that it's designed to radiate into an atmosphere. But now there is no atmosphere, and the outer skin is getting warmer and warmer as it corrodes. We can't turn off the life supports, and even if we tic, there would still be the heat the three of us are generating. I wonder how long it will take for poor old Oates to thaw...but we'd all be long dead by then.

"Look," Figgis says, "if you want to asphyxiate or fry or implode whatever else would happen outside, that's fine by me, Woolley, but don't expect us to follow. If we can time things right we might as well try a Jump..." His voice trails off uncertainly. I think he genuinely hasn't realized until that moment that we're really not discussing means of escape, but ways of ending our lives.

"If you want to get back to home time that badly..." I say, "...and assuming you'd recognize what you found."

"It's home." Janey grins and shivers.

Out of the window, I think for a moment that I glimpse something. But it's just Woolley's mind playing tricks, imposing order on chaos. It's just more static' more nothingness. On and on. It's a creepy sensation, like gazing into the eyes of God. I have to look away.

"Will you let me go?' I ask.

But Janey and Figgis are staring at each other. Figgis has already got the impossible equations of the Jump blurring his eyes and Janey's white and eager. They don't stand a chance, but then neither do I. That's our only hope.

I leave them and head for the medical bay, where a faint mist rises from the famous Captain Oates. Death and freezing have smoothed the suffering from his face. Under the grime and the beard, he's even faintly good-looking. The sort of large, deep-set features that look terrible on a woman, good on a man.

There's no porthole in here, but part of me can feel the emptiness outside anyway: it's there at the back of my jaw like the pain of wisdom teeth and beneath my fingernails, it's in the places where blood and bone corrode. The lights are dimming as the life support struggles to keep up. How funny, after the frozen Antarctic, that the most immediate threat to our lives is this increasing heat.

For now, Oates is still solid as a brick, looking up at me with unwavering pearly eyes. Even my old pathology professor would have to admit I've done a good job on him; pity no one's ever going to see it. Still, Woolley tells herself, there's always a chance. Everything you do in life is a race against death and time, so why should this be any different"

I open a fresh steel. Fortunately, Oates's legs are spread wide enough for me to make a rough incision in the perineum below the scrotum. Through the film, into the frosty flesh. Crude stuff, but I'm not doing any damage to the cells that matter. It takes another steel to work my way up, avoiding the ridge of the pelvis. The sartorius, the vas deferens, the symphysis pubis...I'm sweating rivers but my hands are cold and clumsy. I slice through the woven scrap of a label. Burberry Mills--Empire Cotton--Size 34M.

The steel is blunting again. As I peel the scrotal sack away in its entirety, the frozen penis snaps like...like, well, a frozen penis. I let the whole lot clang into a bucket. Contrary to popular belief, whilst sperm are manufactured in the testicles, the live ones are stored in the seminal vesicle at the base of the bladder prior to ejaculation. It's that and the icy pink stone of the prostate below it that I eventually extract.

I have to be careful thawing the fluid, and even then I need to thin it out with plasma. Rather than chance the artificial stuff we have in store, I centrifuge a little out from my own blood, and then centrifuge the mixture again, to concentrate what little there is of Captain Oates's semen. Everything takes an age. Human reproduction is a messy process at the best of times, even when it doesn't involve a frozen and malnourished corpse. Messy--and chancy. But Mother Nature's profligate with her resources--even here, in this no-place. I risk the couple of extra minutes it takes to get a quick sample under the microscope, and I can't help smiling as I watch the meager few tens of millions of living sperm I've managed to filter jostle on the console screen. It's against all the odds, really, to have got even this far.

So at least there's a faint chance. I know I've hurried the thaw, and I've hardly stuck to professional clinical standards, but maybe if you break enough rules the odds eventually start to tumble back in your favor. I half expect Janey and FWs to walk in just at the most embarrassing moment, but it doesn't happen. The medical bay hatch stays gloriously shut.

My hands are trembling and the syringe feels a whole lot bigger than it should. And cold; like most doctors, Woolley doesn't spare much thought for the patient, least of all when it's herself. I draw in a shivering breath. But, pushing the syringe, I feel nothing at all. Not even lonely or afraid.

I'm sure the textbooks would say that I should lie down now with some soothing music. But even if all that were possible, I'm too keyed up. I just drop the junk into the chute and feel the heat of Epsilon break over me in a sudden wave. You had it easy, Mum, wandering though the glass doors at whatever clinic it was that you went to. The odds against conception must be phenomenal. But then, they always are--and I want to take something with me when I step out from Epsilon.

Figgis and Janey are still in the comms bay. They're sitting at the console, but their eyes are on Woolley as she clambers through the hatch. The screen on the right of Figgis glitters with some weird kind of graph-doubtless something to reassure them when they finally find the courage to Jump--but the one on the left displays a fisheye view of the medical bay, where Oates's body lies with a half-thawed hole where the genitals should be. Of course--the cameras. Woolley was too busy worrying and watching the hatch to think straight. Should I need it, the look on their faces is confirmation that they've seen everything.

Incredibly, I find myself blushing. My dry throat clicks open and shut as I try to pull out some words. I give up with a kind of shrug; I just don't know what to say.

"What are you doing? " Janey finally asks, the buzz from the porthole behind her face seeming to swarm in around us.

I'm still dressed in my old football jersey and plimsolls. Worry and lack of sleep won't have done much to improve my looks either, and I get the impression that if Woolley takes too many steps toward Janey and Figgis they'll cringe or run away. Perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad idea to chase them, get an idea of how the alien felt in all those old movies set in places like this. Me and Mum, we always used to root for the monster.

"We're, er..." Figgis makes a clumsy wave toward his graph "We're working out the probabilities. This can't be entirely nowhere. For a start, there's the erosion of Epsilon's outer surface. That's happening at a measurable rate, which means that it must be governed by the some sort of external law. I think we've got a chance."

"Yeah," Janey nods. "We've got to risk it. You're not still thinking of, ah..." She pauses and studies her ragged fingernails for a moment "Just going through the hatch?"

Neither of them can look at me. But I can feel their thoughts fluttering against my face like hot breath. They want me to go outside. Even if I didn't feel this odd compulsion, their pressure might almost be enough. All it takes is a few steps. I look longingly at the handle of the inner hatch, but some instinct still holds me back. I have to say something...maybe words about time, hurry, home, not much. That kind of thing.

I clear my throat. It comes out as a phlegmy bark. I wipe my lips. For a moment, I thought I'd finally got to those words that Mum spoke to me when she came through the swing doors of that hospital corridor. But perhaps that's too much to hope for.

"I'm going outside for a while," I croak. "I may be some time."

It seems faintly illogical to go out dressed in a sleep-stained football jersey, but even more illogical to use an out-quit. My feet carry me. The inner hatch swings back without my realizing I've pushed the handle. Then it closes behind me. No conscious action seems to be involved anymore, which is a good thing because I'm not sure that I have the courage to go on. Silence buzzes beyond the porthole. Oates is a gray wraith at my shoulder in this tight space between inside and out; it seems as if it's his hand that turns on the inner seal, even though part of me knows that it's probably Figgis doing it on remote from the comms bay, making sure that stupid ugly Woolley doesn't let the emptiness blast in.

Without thinking, I brace myself for a chill. But of course it doesn't happen. As the outer door swings out, it seems to turn some kind of corner and I lose sight of it entirely. The air stays put, neither drawn out nor compressed by whatever lies beyond. I understand more clearly now that there is no light out there, there's nothing that my senses can truly relate to. It's a bit like standing over a drop, looking down from the high board at the swimming pool. And then it's like nothing at all. There are colors there if I want to see them, shapes and sneering faces from the playground pushed close just before home time. Stupid Ugly Woolley. Everything tilts up and I feel myself sliding. Oates is a black mist that curls around me, some sort of atmospheric effect. I draw in one last breath. Then I let go.

I feel a rush, sparks in my eyes. It really is like the swimming pool, like diving, like falling asleep. I can hardly believe that it takes this long for my brain to dissolve; that I still have time for this particular thought. Then that I have time for this next one. The clinical part of me is amazed. There's even still a faint sensation of falling. Who'd have ever thought that death would be this interesting? Woolley should have done it instead of Osteoporosis Fractures for her thesis. But it's too late for all that now.

Then there's a jolt of pain. It's localized, my right leg. Feels like striking...something solid. I wait for the pain to spread. Bang. My other leg. Jesus, it hurts the way it does when you walk into something, a sharp reminder from your body to look where you're going. Then the palms of my hand slide across something sharp, they go hot and wet. Blood. Fingers to my mouth taste salt, my tongue touches...gravel. I pull in a breath that fills with the scent of litter bins and water, of fresh-cut municipal grass. For a moment, it feels as though hands other than my own are helping me up. But then they are gone. I open my eyes alone.

Hauling myself onto the bench, I look around through the green blotches in my eyes. It's a hot day. People are flirting with a benign sun. There's a little girl down the path staring, a Mr. Whippy ice cream dripping down her knuckles. Her mother takes one look at me and pulls her away. Woolley's still in this stained football jersey, but at least it's summer. People will just think I'm one of the local nutters.

Across the squinting water, lads in singlets are splashing and diving into the lake from the short wooden pier. It's so hot, I almost want to join them. And there's another part of me wants to go over and shout, wag my finger, tell them about the boys from other summers who drowned, were drawn down by the cold undertow to re-emerge in the lime pits miles outside town. But I just watch them and smile. And I feel this honeyed sunlight. Eventually, it's home time, when the younger children break out from school. They glance uneasily at this funny-looking woman as they run and chatter on their way to their old TVs and their dinners and their future lives. I smile, frightening them by doing so.

Evening starts to grow. Streetlight trickles across the water. The park keeper stares. I realize that I must have been sitting here for a long time; relaxing, doing almost what the fertility manuals would recommend. But conception's a tricky process. It could still be hours ahead--or never. That's a chance I'll have to take.

As I walk up the streets toward my home, I start to wonder if I ever really left it that morning. After all, there are still a great many things that I don't understand. Of course, there's hope now there's time, there's time now there's hope. At least twelve happy years lie between me and that morning at the hospital, coming through the swing doors with the results of the biopsy buzzing in my head to find little Woolley swinging her legs on that itchy seat, looking happy, bored, uncertain as she waits for her mother. I'll have to talk to her, express something about hope, love, home, time, make the most; something like that. I have no idea what it is. But when the time comes, I think I'll know what to say.

CARTOON: "Day 573 of the project: Let's just say there are many, many, many, many ants and leave it at that."

~~~~~~~~

By Ian R. MarLeod

Voyages by Starlight, lan MacLeod's first story collection, came out last year, and just a few months later his first novel, The Great Wheel, appeared to good reviews. His last appearance here was "Verglas" (Oct. 1996) and this story finds him again exploring colder climes, but this time the trip to the Antarctic region yields some decidedly unexpected results....

BOOKS TO LOOK FOR

The Bear Comes Home, by Rafi Zabor, W.W. Norton & Co., 1997, $25.

IF YOU WERE reading my column around this time last year, you'll remember my waxing enthusiastic over The Bear Went over the Mountain by William Kotzwinkle, a delightful mockery of the officiousness that claims much of the literary world. Through his bear protagonist Hal Jam and the novel Jam had "written," Kotzwinkle poked fun at authors, agents, editors, publishers, critics, and academics alike.

Well, Rafi Zabor's The Bear Comes Home also features a bear as protagonist, and offers up some pointed criticism of another established art/entertainment industry (in this case, the music world), but there the similarity ends. Where Kotzwinkle took a light-hearted approach that left one gasping with laughter, Zabor approaches the matter much more seriously, though no less effectively.

The Bear in Zabor's novel comes from a long line of circus bears who have hidden their intelligence from humankind until the Bear's soon-to-be keeper and friend Jones wins him in a card game as a cub. Living in Jones's apartment, the Bear reads voraciously when Jones is out and about, listens to Jones's extensive jazz collection, and even takes up playing a clarinet he finds in the closet, though he knows it's not quite his instrument. When he finally reveals his intelligence to Jones, the first thing he does is get Jones to buy him an alto sax.

When the novel opens, the two are plying a circus bear act on the streets of New York City, but the Bear has larger ambitions. He wants to play jazz on stage. His first real gig ends in disaster, leaving the Bear incarcerated over a long winter, but upon his escape, his life begins to look up. He gets a recording contract, starts a tour, and even meets the woman of his dreams.

But this is a philosophical bear, as well as a musical one, and for every good thing that happens to him, he can't shake, or come to terms with, his "outsider" status. Much of the book is taken up with his attempts at fitting into a human world. In lesser hands, the philosophical thrust of the narrative could easily have bogged the novel down into unreadability, but Zabor proves to be an excellent, even lyrical, author, and the metaphysical concerns provide as much of a page-turning impetus here as might the high action events of a thriller.

Zabor also knows his jazz, inside and out. From guest appearances by the likes of Charlie Haden, the constant referencing of the giants in the field, and Zabor's sharp insight into the music industry, the novel rings true. What particularly fascinated me was how ably he's managed to capture the sound of music with only words on the written page--especially his ability to translate the process of improvisation so that it not only makes sense, but excites one almost as much as listening to the real thing.

If Zabor could find the musicians to play the music the way he describes it here, he'd have a brilliant soundtrack to accompany this fascinating novel. Only where do you find a player who can take the best of Bird, Coltrane, Jackie McLean, and Ornette Coleman, and still have his own voice?

But perhaps Zabor's greatest accomplishment is how quickly he makes us forget the implausibility of the Bear's existence in the first place. He gives us neither a cute talking animal, nor simply an anthropomorphized bear, but a fully realized character who just happens to be a bear; a creature, similar to us in enough ways that we may empathize with him, but who, in the end, will remain forever alien.

A word of warning: if graphic depictions of an interspecies love affair would offend you, you'll want to avoid this novel.

Think Like a Dinosaur and Other Stories, by James Patrick Kelly, Golden Gryphon Press, 1997, $22.95.

Arkham House is one of the oldest and best specialty press publishing houses, and for many years James Turner was its editor. Now Turner has started up his own imprint, Golden Gryphon Press, concentrating on short story collections such as the book in hand, and utilizing the same high quality paper, design, and binding that have long made Arkham House books such lovely treasures to read and own.

For the press's first book, Turner couldn't have done better than choosing a collection by James Patrick Kelly. Kelly's short fiction ranks among the very best the field has to offer, and if you have any doubts, the material collected here is proof positive. Kelly doesn't ring one false note with these novelettes and stories, and his palette is varied. There's the hard sf of the 1996 Hugo winner "Think Like a Dinosaur" and the socio-political sf of "Standing in Line with Mister Jimmy"; the sensitive contemporary fantasy of "Dancing with the Chairs" and "Faith"; the pure weirdness of "The First Law of Thermodynamics" and the post-holocaust sf of "Crow."

The "voice" of the narrative is invariably suited to the story--sometimes tough, sometimes tender, always polished--while his characters live and breathe from the moment of their first appearance. A collection such as this is a pure treasure trove for those of us who love short fiction for it gives us in one book the best the field has to offer: thoughtful, well-crafted stories that enlighten, disturb, and fill us with wonder. What's so refreshing, in these days of specialization, is that all these varied voices have their origin in the same author's mind. Highly recommended.

If you can't find Think Like a Dinosaur in your local book store, Golden Gryphon Press is distributed by Independent Publishers Group, 814 North Franklin Street, Chicago, IL 60610.

Steel Rose, by Kara Dalkey, ROC Books, 1997, $5.99

Many writers who transpose the folklore of faerie mythology to a contemporary setting inevitably get it wrong--if they don't muddle the facts, then they don't capture the spirit. But Kara Dalkey doesn't stumble with either in her latest novel.

Steel Rose opens with Pittsburgh performance artist T.J. Kaminski working on a new act and accidentally summoning up a couple of tommyknockers who offer to help her out. But, of course, bargains struck with faerie are never what they seem. At first the pair help her put together a new piece of performance art that's a rousing success, but they have their own agenda, and before T.J. knows it, she's stuck in the middle of a war between the two courts of Faerie --the Seelie and Unseelie Courts --and her personal life and problems are forced onto a back burner.

So far, not much new. Besides its use in the old fairy tales that provide the novel's source material, this theme has cropped up in any number of contemporary fantasy novels. But Dalkey does a number of things right: her novel retains the rollicking fun of the old tales while managing to maintain a serious edge of danger in amongst the light-hearted aspects. More happily, she doesn't take sides. There are good and bad aspects to both the Sidhe of the Seelie Court, the tall noble elves of the deep forest found in both Shakespeare and Tolkien, and the "working class" element of the Unseelie Court, the trolls and hobs and knockers and the like. This isn't one more cosmic struggle between Good and Evil, or even Order and Chaos, but rather one more battle in an incomprehensible --to human ways of thinking--eternal struggle in which neither side is wholly right or wrong.

The only tricky part is that Dalkey's first person protagonist T.J. is a shy, introverted, rather desperate, and somewhat self-centered sort of a person. Such a character isn't the easiest to pull off, and frankly there were times when she was annoying, rather than sympathetic. But mostly this is an entertaining, fast-paced novel that combines both the magic and headlong fun of an old fairy tale with a contemporary setting and sensibility, and the good parts far outweigh T.J.'s occasional lapses into navelgazing.

Material to be considered for review in this column should be sent to Charles de Lint, P.O. Box 9480, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1G 3V2.

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By CHARLES DE LINT

BOOKS

To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis, Bantam Spectra, 1997, $23.95

Days of Cain, by J. R. Dunn, Avon, 1997, $23

Three in Time: Classic Novels of Time Travel, by Chad Oliver, Wilson Tucker, and Poul Anderson, White Wolf/Borealis, 1997, $14.99

NOT LONG ago, Jeanne Calment, the French woman widely recognized as the oldest living human being, died at the age of 122. She was born in 1875, a time before telephones, radio, movies, computers, nuclear warheads, cars, airplanes, and just about everything else we associate with modern times, and yet she lived to see it all -- the Somme and Hiroshima, the Moon landing and the fall of the Berlin wall. In one human lifetime (albeit an extraordinarily long one), the world has changed more than it had in all of human history.

It's no wonder then that we're a culture obsessed with the passage of time. We live our lives by clocks and calendars, and we divide our histories -- personal and communal -- into ever-smaller segments: our late teens, early thirties, and mid-fifties; the '40s, '60s, and late '80s. This seems so natural to us now that it's hard to believe people haven't always been so fixated on time -- indeed, that it's only in that same span of Mme. Calment's life that the almighty clock has come to regulate every aspect of our lives. And, not coincidentally, it's during that period that the science-fictional concept of time travel has become one of the most familiar literary devices in or out of the genre.

One of the reasons for the ubiquity of time-travel stories is their adaptability; the theme can be used in the service of many different points of view, for many different purposes, and the best time travel stories employ the device in a way that captures something essential about the particular time in which they're written. Connie Willis's latest novel, To Say Nothing of the Dog, is that kind of book. She takes us again to 21st-century Oxford -- the setting of her Hugo and Nebula Award-winning short story "Fire Watch" and her Hugo- and Nebula-winning Doomsday Book -- where historians use time travel to study the past, but things rarely go smoothly. This time the university has nearly been taken over by the wealthy Lady Schrapnell, who's determined to create a perfect replica of Coventry Cathedral (which was destroyed during World War II) and has conscripted most of Oxford's historians to assist her in the task, researching every tiniest detail so that the project will reproduce the cathedral exactly as it was on the eve of the bombing, down to such incidentals as a piece of Victorian kitsch known as the bishop's bird stump.

Historian Ned Henry has been charged with locating this hideous object, of which no pictures exist, and he's having a very hard time of it; the project's deadline is fast approaching, and he's made so many "jumps" in search of the thing that he's delirious with time-lag. But with so many other historians off on errands for Lady Schrapnell, Ned's the only one who can help when a crisis arises: another time traveler has done something to alter the course of history, and Ned must go back to figure out what got changed and put it right.

To Say Nothing of the Dog is Willis in her screwball comedy mode --snappy, fast-paced, and witty, buoyed by crisp dialogue and Willis's near-perfect comic timing. Willis is unquestionably the field's best writer in this mode, and her skills improve with each outing. "Fire Watch" is an excellent story, but in comparison with the new novel, it feds rough-edged and unpolished. Willis has by now become a supremely confident writer -- the sentences in To Say Nothing of the Dog are honed and taut, there's nary a wasted word.

The book's intellectual dimension balances the funny side nicely. Ned's attempts to correct the timestream provide the opportunity for Willis to ruminate on the "causes" of history -- is it the result of individual actions or great impersonal forces? -- and, in contrast to more traditional conceptions of history, Willis portrays it as refreshingly nonlinear: "...Professor Overforce and Professor Peddick were both right. They were just a century too early for chaos theory, which would have incorporated both their ideas. History was indeed controlled by blind forces; as well as character and courage and treachery and love. And accident and random chance. And stray bullets and telegrams and tips. And cats." Because it's nonlinear, Willis's timestream is resilient and stable, able to recover from interference and minor alterations on its own. The structure of history doesn't collapse if a dinosaur hunter steps on a butterfly.

It's this aspect that makes To Say Nothing of the Dog a time travel story uniquely designed for our times: in the end, the timestream isn't fixed by the efforts of Ned Henry and the other time travelers, but in spite of them. This is not a story of human competence triumphing over adversity, nor is it a tale of human bungling destroying the world; it's a tale of human insignificance, at least on a cosmic scale. Willis somehow makes this view uplifting -- human insignificance here seems almost a relief: we can't fix what's wrong with the cosmos, but it's not our responsibility, either.

It's hard to imagine a clearer distillation of the feeling of the '90s, a time of widespread exhaustion, when conditions for most people in most places aren't especially terrible, but the belief in human power to right the remaining wrongs has ebbed to a low point. Gone are the heady days of the '30s and '40s, the dreams of skillful engineers taking the cosmos in hand, and equally past are the nightmares of the '50s, '60s, and '70s, nuclear holocaust and Orwellian police states; in their place we have a benign sense of powerlessness and resignation. It's not that the possibility of disaster has completely receded -- there are still plenty of nukes out there -- but the '90s are not defined so much by anxiety as by a mounting awareness of our own limitations. Willis captures that without making it depressing, and that may be the toughest of the many difficult tricks that To Say Nothing of the Dog pulls off masterfully.

J. R. Dunn's second novel, Days of Cain, in most respects could hardly be more different from Willis's book, but at its heart it shares the same outlook. Where Willis is sprightly and lighthearted, though, Dunn is sober and relentless, staring unflinchingly at the darker side of a cosmos in which human beings may not have the power to change things very much.

Days of Cain owes much more to the time travel tales of the past than does To Say Nothing of the Dog: its main character, Gaspar James, is a monitor in the "temporal extension" of "the Moiety," a a term that describes the "ultimate union of consciousness in the late epochs of the universe." The temporal extension exists to protect from disruption the timeline that leads to the Moiety -- it's a time patrol. As the story begins, a band of renegade time travelers, led by Alma Lewin, one of Gaspar's old recruits, has set out to prevent the Holocaust, and Gaspar has been brought in to stop them.

The Holocaust has become so familiar a topic that its horrors have --almost -- lost their their power to shock, but Dunn's rendition of life in the camps, the cruelties of the Nazis and even the prisoners toward each other, the indignities and savagery that filled every day, has a freshness and conviction which revive the Holocaust's unparalleled capacity to scald the imagination. Dunn avoids the easy dichotomies the Holocaust invites: not every camp sufferer is a saint, and not every Nazi is a demon. Most are people caught up in events they cannot control, tragically aware of their own failures to live up to an heroic ideal. Dunn gives us several chapters from the viewpoint of Reber, a camp administrator too cowardly to resist the escalating cruelties of his comrades, devoured by guilt for the rest of his days; with balanced portraits like this, the true horror of the Holocaust -- for both its victims and its perpetrators -- suffuses the novel like the sickening smoke from the camp furnaces.

Dunn's timestream is more vulnerable than Willis's -- it needs the protection of millions of workers in the temporal extension -- but' at a deeper level, Dunn's characters face a situation not unlike Willis's: history is a vastly complex system, each part depending on all the others, and there's no way to "fix" the past without sacrificing the future. Prevent the Holocaust, or any other disaster, and you might wipe out a million billion other beings who never have a chance to live. Humans are, as in Willis's cosmos, essentially powerless to improve the world beyond a certain limited point. Dunn focuses on the difficulty of living with that situation: How can we not try to change something like the Holocaust? And if we try, how can we forgive ourselves if we fail?

For Dunn and his characters, it's not enough that on the whole history works out pretty well -- that the world of the Moiety is far better than a thousand or a million possible alternatives. In To Say Nothing of the Dog, the proverbial glass is half full: it's good enough that the Allies won World War II -- in fact, Willis never even mentions the Holocaust. But in Days of Cain, it's half empty: so many awful things have happened that it's hard to take any pleasure in the knowledge that it could have been worse. Together, Willis's and Dunn's books paint complementary portraits of our time: certainly we're glad that events have worked out as relatively well as they have, but we're still wrestling with our deep feelings of guilt over the tragedies that we have failed -- and continue to fail -- to prevent.

The three novels gathered in Three in Time make even clearer the ways in which the time travel story has changed over the years -- no one could mistake any of these books for one written today. But that's hardly a mark against them: despite some inevitable datedness, each one has a solid core that shines through the accumulated dust of decades, a beating heart that enables it to live on.

Chad Oliver's The Winds of Time (1957) is a fine and moving novel, but it's a strange choice for this volume. It's not actually about time travel, at least as that concept is usually imagined. Out on a fishing trip, Wes Chase takes refuge from the weather in a cave, and there discovers a small group of alien space travelers who hold him hostage while they learn about his world and, in the meantime, tell him their own story. One of many crews sent out to find other space-faring civilizations, they crashed on Earth fifteen thousand years ago. Realizing that, to have any hope at all of return, they would need to wait until Earth developed a technologically advanced culture, they hid themselves in a mountain cave and put themselves into a deep chemical hibernation, from which they have just recently awakened.

Wes somewhat reluctantly decides to help them, but he's hard put to think of what he can do: he knows that his world is centuries away from having interstellar travel. His solution not only rescues the stranded aliens, but offers him a chance for a new life after his old one has fallen apart.

On some levels it's surprising how un-dated The Winds of Time seems: though the alien rocket landing end-down on "a boiling column of flame" is pretty old-fashioned, Oliver's mention of "folding" space for faster-than-light travel, and the deep yearning of the aliens to find beings like themselves around other stars, could be right at home in a novel of today. At one point he even ridicules pulp sf in the very terms we might use now: "the cardboard horrors...reptilian monsters slathering after ripe young cuties, mutants who had no emotions coldly plotting the obliteration of the Good Guys with the Sense of Humor..."

In other ways, though, Oliver's novel is just as backward-seeming as that pulpery: the aliens are so similar to humans that Wes has no trouble booking them into a motel room, and while there is some thematic sense to having them be so similar, I don't think it would have hurt Oliver's point about the oneness of civilized beings if the aliens (or even any of the other civilizations they had encountered) were less humanoid. And certainly there's no thematic necessity to explain why the aliens are all male, and all white-skinned. Nonetheless, the essential parts of Oliver's story succeed despite such quibbles; The Winds of Time is a good choice for the editors of the White Wolf Rediscovery series (of which this is the first volume) to have brought back into print. My only substantial question is why they chose to include it in a collection of time travel novels.

Wilson Tucker's classic The Year of the Quiet Sun (1970) leaves no such questions-it fits the paradigm of the time travel story almost to a tee. Against his better judgment, and not entirely of his own free will, Brian Chaney, a statistician and sometime Biblical translator, becomes part of a team requited by the U.S. Bureau of Standards to take a short trip into the future. They're interested in seeing how accurate their social predictions are, so they can tailor their policy more closely to conditions down the road. What they find is nothing like what they expected, however: before the year 2000, race wars have divided and nearly destroyed the country; one time traveler is killed and another wounded in their visits to the future. The chaos is so complete the team doesn't even speak about ways to avert the coming catastrophe.

Tucker's book reveals the changes that swept the country and the sf world in the years after The Winds of Time: where Oliver foresaw a space-conquering, ever-improving future, Tucker sees a world torn apart by its internal struggles, never coming close to the stars. Oliver was already beginning to admit such worries -- the vast majority of the civilizations his aliens had encountered had destroyed themselves with their technology before they'd ever achieved space travel -- but he was still optimistic enough to think that human beings would beat the odds. For Tucker, those odds will overwhelm us far more quickly than Oliver would have imagined.

In There Will Be Time (1972), Poul Anderson sees a near-future riven by race war as well, though his tale of a boy born with the ability to move himself through time carries much further into the future, revealing better possibilities centuries ahead. Though it's the latest of the novels in Three in Time, in many ways it feels the most old-fashioned: Anderson's use of time travel as an excuse for airing political philosophy has more in common with Wells than with Oliver or Tucker.

Jack Havig discovers his time traveling ability when he's a young boy, and he uses it for some of the childish pranks one might expect, but as soon as he's grown he gets bigger plans: he's certain that there must be others like him, and he sets out to find them by going to first-century Jerusalem, the day of Jesus's crucifixion, figuring it's the kind of historical event that would draw time travelers from many eras.

Sure enough, he finds them --or, rather, they find him -- and he discovers that further in the future, after the "War of Judgment" has wrecked civilization, they've joined together in a group called the Eyrie to try to rebuild it, recruiting time travelers from every century to the cause. Jack grows increasingly uncomfortable with the Eyrie's methods, though, and eventually rebels, determined to take over the Eyrie and accomplish the goals it only honors in lip-service.

Tucker, writing in 1970, doesn't seem so far from Willis and Dunn: his perspective has shifted from dreams of the stars to concern with the problems humans are having right here at home. Though he provides no theoretical reason why his time travelers can't change the course of history, events in the story prevent it -- for all practical purposes, his characters are just as powerless to prevent tragedy as are Willis's or Dunn's.

Anderson's perspective, on the other hand, seems to derive from a time before even Oliver's: Jack has flitted back and forth through time, and yet the suffering and death of centuries leaves him apparently unmoved. He bemoans the loss of cultural treasures, such as the buildings of the Acropolis, but has nothing to say about the toll in human lives. He seems far more like the other people of the Eyrie than he should.

I don't mean to suggest that there's not a great deal that's likable about There Will Be Time. I think it's the kind of book I would have enjoyed much more when I was thirteen and more easily seduced by fantasies of power like Jack's. But for my money, I'd choose a book like Willis's or Dunn's -- or Oliver's or Tucker's -- every time. These are books which use their science-fictional conceits to examine the difficulties and challenges of living a real human life with limited power to change the course of events -- books that could help us figure out how to live with those limitations ourselves.

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By ROBERT K.J. KILLHEFFER

EDITOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS

IT'S THE passion that stands out most.

Throughout her book reviews from the 1960s, Judy Merril's insights and intelligence sparkle, but it's her passion that really stands out. She loved this sf stuff from its pulpiest roots up to its crowning splendors, and she wanted to make damn sure you knew about the best of it too. Judy's dead now, but the many volumes of The Year's Best S-F anthology she edited are easy to find used and they show the same brilliant love of sf that marked her reviews. This flame burned bright.

Another one of science fiction's pyrotechnic wizards, Alfred Bester, has his best short fiction in a new (albeit poorly titled) collection, Virtual Unrealities |Vintage). One of my absolute favorites, Bester was a bon vivant whose stories brim with brig; they bubble with wit on reading after rereading. Sadly though, the two stories published here for the first time are disappointing -- one's a fragment and the completed story, while gratifying to read, doesn't rank with the masterpieces assembled here.

A pair of Beagles followed me home this month, and yes, I would like to keep them. Peter S. Beagle's Giant Bones (Roc) marks this master fantastist at the top of his form with five new novelets, while The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche ant Other Odd Acquaintances (Tachyon Publications) collects classics like "Lila the Werewolf" along with some juvenalia and a scattering of essays. The stories show that mastery of voices that makes all of Beagle's fiction a joy to read.

Martha Soukup remarks of "The Arbitrary Placement of Walls" that the story marks her "settling, finally, into knowing what I'm doing," and her collection with the same title (from DreamHaven Books) is interesting to mark the many regions where this talent will indeed settle.

Lest you think I read only short fiction, I'll only mention Harlan Ellison's "precariously poised" Slip page (Houghton Mifflin), Lucius Shepard's Barnacle Bill the Space' Orion-UK), James Patrick Kelly's Think Like a Dinosaur and Other Stones (Golden Gryphon), and Ray Bradbury's Driving Blind (Avon) and tell you instead about a terrific fantasy novel: The Iron Ring (Dutton) by Lloyd Alexander. Alexander is, of course, known best for his Prydain novels, which are steeped in Welsh mythology, but this time out he has assayed Indian culture and thought with this tale of how young Prince Tamar came into his own. Lloyd Alexander is a living master who's always worth the trip to the YA section to find.

With The Moon and the Sun (Pocket), Vonda N. McIntyre has moved away from the space opera she has given us in the past decade and focused instead on the court of France's Louis XIV, the Sun King. This fabulous fantasy of the king's quest for immortality is lush, lyrical, magnificent, and magical.

Another alternate history, Ward Moore's 1953 nova Bring the Jubille, has long held its deserted reputation as a masterpiece and one of the best Civil War stories, but it has long been unavailable as well. Blessings on Del Rey for bringing it back into print. A. different sort of reissue is William March's 1954 nova The Bad Seed (Ecco Press) which is better known for the movie (starring Patty McCormick as Rhoda) than it is for the original novel. The book's a curious work with lots of odd touches that ultimately add up well, especially since the book features a creepier ending than the filmmakers could risk.

The word "sumptuous" scarcely begins to describe the artwork collected in Vincent Di Fate's terrific Infinite Worlds (Penguin Studio). This is the finest book on sf art I've seen in a long time. I just hope there's a lower-priced edition coming, 'cause this book belongs in every sf enthusiast's collection.

And finally, I can't resist mentioning Neal Barrett, Jr.'s latest offbeat mystery, Bad Eyes Blue (Kensington). When you're in an anything-goes mood, Barrett's mysteries really go. This one features some cameos of other Texan novelists that add to the gonzo fun.

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By GORDON VAN GELDER

THIS SIDE OF INDEPENDENCE

THEY WERE TAKING UP Kansas in big bites.

Geelie hovered above, detached, observing Stark night cloaked the world under a shrunken sun, save for the pit, where hell glared. Magma glowed in the darkness where the rock, hectares wide, crumbled in the gravitor beam. Shards of the world upreared, uproared, black edged with glowing red, and lofted into the groaning air, pieces of a broken pot. The bloody light spattered on the swag-bellied ships that hung above--crows tearing at the carcass with a loud continuous clamor. Pieces of the planet fell back and splashed in thunder and liquid fire, yellow and scarlet. Old Earth shuddered for kilometers around.

The glare, the heat, the tumult filled the world. But from a distance, Geelie saw, it was reduced to a cheerful cherry glow and a murmur of sound, lost in the endless night. In her long view, Kansas was a vest sunken plain of contorted rock, dusted with silent snow under a shaded sun.

"Aung Charah in Tigerclaw to Goblong Seven," Geelie's speaker said.

"Goblong Seven to Aung Charah," she said.

"Geelie, take a swing around the south side of the working pit and look at the terraces there. I think the magma is flowing up on them."

"Hearing and obedience."

Kansas was a hole walled with stairsteps of cooled lava, terraced for kilometers down to the pit of hell. As fast as the rock froze, it was tom off in hectare-sized chips, to feed the hungry space colonies.

Geelie swung her goblong and swooped down and around the work site. She peered intently in dimness, blinded by the contrast. The magma was definitely crawling up on the lower terrace of cooled rock.

"It's slow as yet, " she reported, sending the teleview to Aung Charah.

"We'll have to watch it, however, or we'll have another volcano. Check on it frequently," he told her.

"Hearing and obedience," Geelie said. She leaned forward to peer up through the windscreen.

The Sun was a flickering red candle, the cherry color of the magma. As she watched, it brightened; brightened; brightened again, to a dazzling orange. Then it faded, paused, recovered--briefly showed a gleam of brilliance that glimpsed the black rock below, streaked with snow. Then it faded, faded further, almost vanished.

The Sun was a candle seen through a haze of smoke. But each drifting mote was a space colony with solar panels extended, jostling in their billions jealously to seize the Sun. One by one, the planets of old Sol had been eaten by the colonies, till only Earth was left, passed into the shades of an eternal night.

And now the Old World's historical value had been overridden by the economic value of its water, air, and rock. Also, its vast gravity well was a major obstacle to space traffic.

Noon, planetary time, Geelie thought.

She took her goblong in a long sweep around the work site, occasionally touching the visual recorder's button. Her Colony, Kinabatangan, was a member of The Obstacle-Leaping Consortium; she was part of Kinabatangan's observer team.

A gleam of light caught her eye, and she looked sharply aside. Ease, she realized. Puzzled, she looped the goblong back again more slowly and sought for the gleam. She found it, but it immediately winked out.

That was odd, she thought. A bright light, yellow or even white--surely artificial--on the highlands to the east. That was disputed land, it was not yet being worked. Perhaps, she thought, observers had set up a camp on the planet.

She called Aung Charah and reported, got permission to check it out. "If I can find it," she said. "The light is gone again; door closed, perhaps."

"I'm having Communications call; I'll keep you informed," Aung Charah said.

She acknowledged and cruised as nearly straight as she could along the beam she'd seen. Presently the land mounted in broken scarps before her, vaguely seen in the wan bloody light of the Sun. Vast masses of shattered rock, covered with snow or capped with ice, tumbled down from the highlands. Missouri, that was what its uncouth name had been, Geelie saw, keying up her map.

At this point there'd been a great sprawling city, Kansas City by name, more populous than a dozen colonies. The parts which had straggled over the border had been mined and the once vertical scarp had collapsed. East of the line, everything this side of Independence on her map had fallen into the hole that was Kansas.

"Aung Charah in Tigerclaw to Geelie in Goblong Seven," said her speaker. "Communications reports no contact. We have no report of anyone in that area. Behinders?" Dubiously.

"Unlikely. However, I am checking. Goblong Seven out."

It was three hundred years since stay-behind planetarians had been found on the mother world. Considering how bleak it now was, Geelie considered them extremely unlikely, as by his tone did Aung Charah.

She cruised slowly over the tumbled mounds of snow-covered rubble that marked the old city. Kilometers it extended, and somehow Geelie found that more oppressive even than the vast expanse of riven rock behind her. She could not imagine the torrents of people who must have lived on this deck. The average Colony had only a hundred thousand.

She peered into the dimness. The rubble showed as black pocks in the blood-lit snow. Presently she came to hover and pondered.

Possibly she'd seen a transitory gleam off a sheet of transpex or polished rock or metal in the old city, she thought. But the color was wrong. No. She'd seen a light. Perhaps there were commercial observers here from a different consortium -- not necessarily spying on The Obstacle-Leaping Consortium. There might be many reasons why commercial observers would want to keep secret.

Infra-red, she thought. The oblong wasn't equipped with IR viewers, but Aung Charah had given her a pair of binox. She unharnessed and slipped into the back for them. And a few minutes later she saw a plume of light against the chill background.

It leaked in two dozen points from a hill of rubble a kilometer away. Geelie got its coordinates and called Aung Charah to report.

"I'm going to go down and request permission to land."

"Of course this `Missouri' is not part of our grant," Aung Charah said. "They -- whoever they are -- will probably have a right to refuse. Do nothing to involve us legally."

"Hearing and obedience."

Geelie sloped the oblong down, circled the mound, presently found a trampled place in the thin snow and kicked on her lights. Aiming them down, she saw footprints and a door in an ancient wall made of clay brick, a wall patched with shards of concrete glued together. The mound was a warren, a tumble of broken buildings run together, with forgotten doors and unlighted windows peering from odd angles under a lumpy, snow-covered roof.

She sent back a teleview, saying, "I wonder if this is an observers' nest after all."

"Any answer on the universal freqs?"

"One moment." She called, got no answer. "I'm going to lend without formal permission and bang on the door."

"Very well."

Geelie landed the oblong, leaving its lights on, and slipped into the back. She pulled her parka hood forward, drew on her gloves, and opened the door. A breath of bitter cold air entered, making her gasp. Ducking out, she started for the door.

Movement caught her eye and she looked up, to see a heavily bundled figure standing atop a pile of rubble by the wall.

"Hello!" she called.

"Hello," came a man's voice. He was not twice as thick as a normal human, she saw -- he was simply wearing many layers of cloth against the biting cold.

Geelie exhaled a cloud of vapor, calming herself. So crudely dressed a man had to be a behinder -- and who knew how he would react?

"I-I am Geelie of Kinabatangan Colony, a member of The Obstacle-Leaping Consortium. Permission to land?"

"What? Oh, granted. That would be you, working over there in Kansas?" His tone was neutral, if guarded. His accent was harsh, rasping, but not unintelligible.

"Yes."

"What brings you here? Will you now begin on Missourah?"

"No," she said. "missourah," carefully pronouncing it as he had, "is disputed by a number of consortiums and wrecking companies. It will be years before they have settled that dispute."

"That's good to hear," said the other, and moved. With a dangerous seeming scramble, he slid down from the rubble pile.

Confronting her, he was a head taller than she, and very pale, a pure caucasoid type, in the light from her oblong. He even had the deep blue eyes once confined to caucasoids, and his beard was yellow.

"Name's Clayborn," he said, proffering his hand. "Enos Clayborn."

She squeezed and shook it in the european fashion. "Pleased to meet you, U -- er, Mr. Clayborn."

"Won't you come in out of the cold?" he asked, gesturing toward the door.

"Thank you." She followed him gratefully. The bleakness more than the cold chilled her.

The door opened, emitting a waft of warm air that condensed into fog. Geelie stepped in, inhaling humidity and the smell of many people, with an undertone of green plants. It was like, yet unlike, the air of a Colony; more people, less plants, she thought; not so pure an air. She was standing in a vestibule with wooden walls covered with peeling white paint; overhead a single square electrolumer gave a dim yellowish light.

Clayborn fastened the door behind her and stepped past her to open the other door, gesturing her through it. Pushing her hood back, Geelie opened her parka as she entered a room full of tubs of snow, slowly melting; piles of wooden boards; piles of scrap metal; shelves full of things obviously salvaged from the ruins; an assortment of tools. Beyond this was yet another door, opening into a large, brightly lit room full of furniture and people.

"Enos is ba -- Enos has brought someone!" "Enos has brought a stranger!" "A strange woman!" The exclamations ran through the room quickly, and a couple of people slipped out. Moments later, they and several others returned.

"Folks, this is Geelie of -- of --?" Clayborn fumed to her.

"Kinabatangan Colony," Geelie said. Old people, she thought. "Observer of The Obstacle-Leaping Consortium."

"Those are the ones mining Kansas, " Clayborn said. "Geelie tells me that they won't start mining Missouri" (pronouncing it differently, she noticed) "for quite a few years yet."

Clayborn in his mid-twenties was the youngest person in the room, she saw. The next youngest were four or five hale middle-aged sorts with gray in their hair, perhaps twice his age, and ranging up from there to a frail ancient on a couch, big pale eyes fumed toward her and a thin wisp of cottony hair on a pillow. A dozen and a half at most.

"How long have you been here?" she asked, marveling.

"Forever," said one of the white-haired oldsters drily. "We never been anywheres else."

Geelie smiled back at their smiles. "I am awed that you have survived," she said simply, removing her parka and gloves.

"This is our leader, Alden," said Clayborn pulling up a chair for her.

"The last hundred years was the worst," said Alden.

The behinders, having overcome their shyness, now crowded forward and Clayborn introduced them. Geelie bowed and spoke to all, shook with the bolder ones. When she seated herself, one of the women handed her a cup on a european saucer. She looked at them with awe, reflecting that they must be a thousand years old.

"Brown," she heard them murmur. "Brown. Beautiful -- such a nice young woman. Such beautiful black hair."

She sipped a mild coffee brew and nodded her thanks. "The last hundred years?" she said to Alden. "Yes, it must have been."

For over nine hundred years Earth had been in partial shadow and permanent glaciation, but the Sun still shone. Then the greedy colonies broke their agreements and moved massively into the space between the Old World and the Sun. Earth passed into the shadows, and shortly thereafter they began to disassemble it.

"'Course, our ancestors laid in a good supply of power cells and everything else we'd need, way back when Earth was abandoned by everybody else," Alden said. "No problems there. But how much longer will the air last?"

"Oh, maybe another hundred years," she said, startled. "Freezing it for transport is a slow process."

"And the glaciers? They came down this way back when the Sun shone bright."

Geelie smiled, shook her head. "It's so cold now that even the oceans are freezing over, so the glaciers can't grow by snowfall. Also, frankly, the glaciers were the first to be mined; that much fresh water was worth plenty. Of course the oceans are valuable too, and they have been heavily mined also."

"The snowfall gets thinner every year," said Clayborn "We have to go farther and farther to Bet enough. Soon we'll be reduced to thawing the soil for water."

Geelie's response was interrupted by the discreet beeping of her wrist radio. She keyed it on. "sung Charah in Tigerclaw to Geelie in Goblong Seven," it said in a tiny voice, relayed from the "oblong.

"Geelie to Aung Charah," she said into it. "I have received permission to land and am with a group of native Earthers."

"Behinders," said Alden drily.

She flashed him a smile and said, "Behinders, they call themselves."

"Er -- yes," said Aung Charah, sounding startled. "Er -- carry on. Aung Charah out."

"Hearing and obedience. Geelie out."

"Carry on?" Alden asked.

Geelie sobered. She had been excited and amazed at meeting these people and had not thought ahead. "Well," she said. "He represents the Consortium and dares not commit it. You are not his problem."

"We never thought of ourselves as anybody's problem," said Alden mildly. "More coffee?"

Geelie bowed to Lyou Ye, who stood to respond, then reseated herself behind her desk and frowned.

"Behinders," she said. "They must be the very last. It's been what, three hundred years since any have been found, that lot in Africa." She looked sharply at Geelie." "sung Charah is right, they're not our problem. They live in `Missouri,' however it's pronounced, outside our grant. They're the problem of the Missouri Compact."

"But those people won't settle their disputes for years, possibly decades," said Geelie. "We can't just let these behinders die."

Lyou Ye glanced aside, frowning, and tapped her finger. She'd come a long way, Geelie knew, in a short time. A very beautiful woman, ten years older than Geelie, with waving masses of dark red hair and the popular tiger-green eyes contributed by gene-splicing, she was commonly called Ma Kyaw, "Miss Smooth." But she was intelligent and fully aware of the power of public opinion.

"Very well, if you can find a Colony willing to sponsor them, I'll authorize shipping to lift them out, " Lyou Ye said abruptly. "It won't take much, fortunately, by your description. Declining population ever since the Sun was shaded, I take it, with only this `Enosclayborn' in the last generation. They'd have ended soon enough. You found them just in time for him," she added. "He's probably still a virgin."

"I'd personally like to thank Geelie for all the time and trouble she's put in for us, her and all her folks," said Alden.

Geelie flushed with pleasure as they applauded her.

"Now, I'll just ask for a show of hands," Alden continued. "All them that's in favor of flyin' off into space to a colony, raise your hand."

Geelie leaned forward eagerly.

There was a long pause. The behinders fumed their faces to each other, Geelie heard a whisper or two, someone cleared a throat. But no one looked at her.

Alden stood looking around, waited a bit, then finally said, "Don't look like there's anybody in favor of the city of Independence movie' into a colony. But that don't mean nobody can go. Anybody that wants to is naturally free to leave. Just speak to me, or to Miss Geelie here."

Shocked, horrified, Geelie looked at them. Someone coughed. Still no one looked at her. She fumed a stricken gaze on Enos Clayborn. He looked thoughtful but unsurprised. And he had not raised his hand.

So silent was the room that the purring of a mother cat, entering at the far side with a squirming kitten in her mouth, seemed loud.

Alden fumed to her. "New ideas, like flyin' space, sometimes is hard to take in, " he said kindly. "We had since yesterday to talk it over, but still it's a new idea. Enos, you might take the little lady back to Gretchen's nest and give them kittens a little attention."

Enos smiled at her, and faces were fumed from the cat to her, smiling in-relief. "She's bringing her kittens out," Geelie heard them murmur. "They're old enough for her to introduce them around."

Numbly she followed the tall young man back through the warren of abandoned passages to the warm storage room where the cat had her nest.

When he evidently intended merely to play with the kittens, she said, "Enos, why -- why didn't they vote to go?"

"Well, we're used to it here. As Alden said, it takes time to get used to new ideas." He handed her a kitten. "This is the runt -- the last born of the litter. We named her Omega -- we'll give them all shots in another month or two; she'll be the last cat born on Earth."

Absently she took the purring kitten, a tiny squirming handful of fur. "But you'll all die if you don't go!"

"Well, we'll all die anyway," he said mildly. "Ever notice most of us are old folks? A lot aren't so far from dying now. They'd just as soon die in a place they know. We've been here a long time, you know."

"But -- but -- you're not old! And your parents, and Alden's daughter Aina, and Camden--"

"I wouldn't know how to act, anywhere but here," he said mildly. He smiled down at the proudly purring mother cat.

GEELIE, LYOU YE, and Aung Charah sat in the small conference room.

Lyou Ye grimaced. "So that was their reaction? I'll admit it wasn't one I'd foreseen. All the other behinders in history agreed to go. Some of them signaled to us."

Geelie shifted her position uneasily, cross-legged on a pillow, and nodded unhappily. "I even offered to send them to a european Colony, so they'd be among familiar-seeming people, but that didn't help."

Aung Charah shook his head. "We're Betting a lot of publicity on this," he said. "The newsmedia are not hostile yet. But what will they say when the behinders' refusal becomes known?"

Lyou Ye frowned. "They'll blame us, depend upon it. Have any of them interviewed the behinders?"

Aung Charah shook his head. "They have to get permission from the Missouri Compact, which is very cautious. These planetarians have rights too. Invasion of their privacy...." He shook his head again.

"If we leave them here to die, we'll certainly be blamed," said Lyou Ye. "I'm tempted to order Consortium Police in to evacuate them forcibly."

Geelie sipped her tea, looking at "Ma Kyaw." That's your sort of solution, she thought. Direct, uncompromising, get it done, get it over with. And somebody else can pick up the pieces, clean up the mess.

"Alden would certainly complain if that were done," she said, speaking up reluctantly. "The media attention would be far worse. Violation of planetary rights...they may even have some claim to the old city of Independence. The Missouri Compact may legally have to wait for them all to die to mine that part of its grant."

Lyou Ye grimaced again. "I suppose you're right."

Aung Charah set his cup down. "Media criticism won't hurt the Consortium if we leave them here. The criticism we'd get if we violate their rights might affect us adversely. Investors--"

Lyou Ye was a "careerman." She nodded, frowning, lips pursed.

Geelie looked around the room, so unlike the comfortably cluttered warren in which Enos lived. In one wall, a niche with an arrangement of flowers, signifying This too shall pass; the woven screen against another wall, with its conventional pattern of crows over tiny fields curving up in the distance; the parquet floor with its fine rich grain; the subtle, not quite random leaf pattern of ivory and cream on the walls; the bronze samovar and the fantastically contorted porcelain dragon teapot, the only ornate thing in the room.

Enos was right, she thought. He would not know how to live in a place like this.

She thought of the world that was all he had ever known, a place of snow-powdered rock and brooding, perpetual night, a red-eyed Sun blown in the wind. A bare, harsh, bleak place without a future. For him, in the end, it could only mean tending the old "folks" as one by one they died, and then the penultimate generation, the generation of his parents, as they also grew old. At last he would be left alone to struggle against the darkness and the cold until he too lay dying, years of solitude and then a lonely death.

"There's no help for it," said Lyou Ye broodingly. She looked at Geelie. "You'll have to seduce Enosclayborn."

Geelie swept snow from a rock onto a dustpan, dumped it into a bucket.

"Don't get it on your gloves," Enos said. "It's a lot corder then it looks."

"How much do you have to bring in each day?"

"Not much; I usually overdo it. I enjoy being outside. The air is clean and cold, and I can see so far."

Geelie shivered, looking around the lands of eternal night. "Doesn't the shaded sun bother you?"

"It's always been like that." He looked around at the dim, tumbled landscape, emptying his bucket into the tub. "It's always been like this. Okay, that should be enough. Take the other handle and we'll carry it in."

In the vestibule they put the tub of snow in the row of tubs, and shed their parkas. Despite the slowly melting snow here, it seemed warm and steamy after the sharp cold air outside. Still, remembering the bleak world without, Geelie shuddered. She would have moved close to Enos even if she had not planned to do so. He put an arm around her, not seeming particularly surprised.

"You'll soon get used to it yourself," he said tolerantly.

"Never," she said, meaning it, cuddling close, her arms around him. She lifted her face for a kiss, nuzzling her breasts against his chest.

Enos put his palm on her cheek and pushed her gently aside. "Let's not start something we can't finish," he said.

Geelie blinked up at him, uncomprehending. "In your room -- or the kittens' room -- out in the passages--" Independence was a maze of warm, unused, and private passages.

He cupped her face with both hands and looked fondly at her. "Thank you very much, Geelie, for your offer. I will treasure it all the days of my life. But your place is in Kinabatangan, and mine is here, and we should not start something we cannot finish."

The pain of rejection was like a child's pain -- the heavy feeling in the chest, the sharp unshed tears. Then came a more poignant grief --grief for all that she could not give him, that he would not take from her.

"Enos!-Enos!" she said, and then her sobs stopped her speech.

"O Geelie, Geelie, " he said, his voice trembling. He held her close and stroked her hair.

ALDEN CAME AND SAT beside her in the cozy common room of Independence, where she sat watching Jackson Clayborn and Aina Alden play checkers. "You look a little peaked," he said quietly.

She slid her chair back and spoke as quietly. "I suppose so."

"Enos will be back soon enough. He's lookin' through his things for something to fix that pump in the hydro room. Enos'd druther fix things and tinker around than play games like that." But he was looking inquiringly at her.

"Well, someone has to keep things going," she said wanly.

"Ye-ah." Alden drawled the word out, a skeptical affirmative. "Someone does, though we got a few hands here can still tend to things." Abruptly he said, "By your face and your attitudes, these last few days, I reckon you ain't persuaded Enos to go with you?"

Geelie looked sharply at him. "No," she said shortly.

"I was afraid of that," he said, low. Startled, Geelie leaned toward him. "Did you think I was fightin' you? No, I was hopin' you'd persuade him. God knows you got persuasions none of us can offer. We can't offer him nothing. "

Passionately she whispered, "Then why won't he come with us? All he says is that his place is here -- and after that he won't say anything! Why? "

Alden's response was slow in coming. "I suppose he can't say why because he don't know how. Why he should feel his place is here, I don't know. My place is here; I'm an old man. But he don't listen to me any more than he does to you."

He shook his head. "If he stays, what'll he have? All he'll have is Independence, as long as he lives -- the man from the Missouri Compact explained that. That's all. I guess," slowly, "for him, that's enough."

The kitten, Omega, jumped from Geelie's arms and began to investigate the room, not having sense enough to stay away from Lyou Ye. She was "Miss Smooth" no longer, stalking about the room and visibly trying to contain her anger.

"A flat refusal! I can't believe he refused you. Do you realize there've been over seven thousand Colonies offering them a place to live -- over five thousand offering to take the whole group. And we can't get even the young one to leave Earth! What is wrong with him?"

"He says his place is there," said Geelie, nervously watching the kitten prowl.

"He's been brainwashed by those old people," Lyou Ye said.

"Not intentionally," Geelie said. "I discussed it with them, and they prefer to stay, but they would be happy to see Enos go. They know there's no future for him there."

"And for some uncommunicable reason, he thinks there's no future for him with us," said Lyou Ye, more calmly. She shook her head, ran her hands through her mass of auburn hair. "I suppose he's been unconsciously brainwashed from birth, knowing that he was the last one, that he was going to take care of them and die alone, and he's accepted that. It won't be easy to break that kind of life-long conditioning. Well." She shook Omega away from her ankle and fumed to Geelie.

"Your tour as Observer is almost up. Would it be worthwhile to extend it and give you more time to work on him?"

Geelie put her hand to her chest. "No," she said, and cleared her throat. "No, it would not be worthwhile. I...can do nothing with him."

"We'll send somebody else, but I don't have much hope. These cold-hearted euros can be so inscrutable." Lyou Ye sat and examined Geelie. "You're right. It's time we got you away from Earth," she said gently.

The weather in Kinabatangan was clear and calm when Geelie resumed from Earth. She pulled herself to the bubble at the axis and looked down at the tiny, idyllic fields and villages below, past the terraces climbing the domed end of the vast cylinder. She could have walked down the stairs, but took instead the elevator. At Deck level she was met by her cousins and siblings, the younger of whom rushed her and engulfed her in a mass hug, all laughing and babbling at once, a torrent of brown faces.

Half-floating in a golden mist of warmth, brilliant sunshine from the Chandelier, and love, Geelie let them lead her between the tiny fields and over the little bridges. She breathed deep of her ancient home, air redolent of the cycle of birth and death. They came presently to her small house in the edges of Lahad Datu. Frangipani grew by its door and squirrels ran nervously across its roof. A flight of harsh black crows pounded heavily up and away from the yard, where the tables were.

They'd spread a feast for her, and she ate with them and listened while they told her of the minute but important changes that had occurred in her absence. As she floated in this supporting bubble of light and warmth, Kinabatangan came back to her. All was as if she had never been away.

Her lover had found another, in the easy way of Kinabatangan, and that night Geelie slept alone. And in sleep she remembered again the bleak black plains of righted Earth, and the man who inhabited them, who had chosen to wander alone forever under a frozen Sun.

She awoke and had difficulty remembering whether she was in Kinabatangan, dreaming of Independence, the half-seen land of Missouri stretching stark around it -- or in Tigerclaw dreaming of Kinabatangan. She looked around the tiny room with its paper walls, its mats, the scent of frangipani in the air -- she was in Kinabatangan, in her own little house, on her own mattress on the floor, and it was over. All over.

Omega yawned, a tiny pink cavern floored with a delicately rough pink tongue. The kitten was curled on the other pillow. Geelie reached for her.

"Oh! You little devil," she cried, flinging the kitten aside.

Startled, Omega had bitten her hand, and now stood in the middle of the room, looking at her with slit eyes.

Furious, Geelie leaped from her bed. But she could not stand, all the strength went out of her legs and she sank to the floor, sobbing. "Omega, Omega, I'm sorry, s-sorry." Grief as great as for a planet tore at her.

Omega crept cautiously over and sat staring up at her, watching Geelie weep.

~~~~~~~~

By Rob Chilson

Rob Chilson notes that he does not have anything against the great state of Kansas (despite this story's opening line). Though he himself is a Missourian living in Kansas City (Missouri, that is), he admits that may of his best friends are Kansas

Like Dorothy said, there really is no place like home (even if you happen to come from Topeka or from Lawrence).

ACCELERATED GRIMACE

AH, YES, I'LL SHOW YOU US, Ralph and Marilyn, together forever in photograph, being rich on a sailboat Off the Hamptons. Ralph was never an unsuccessful artist in any medium but the dollars-for-kilobytes really came in after Ralph began selling virtuals antholographs based on his take on my inner thoughts. He put up with me because my meanness is so visual. I put up with his brain rape to become his widow. Sometimes, when we were sailing, I wondered if he wanted me to murder him. His brain suck went deep.

Back when we were semi-rich, I reamed significant things and how to forget them, putting together memories of a woman turning in a night party with my husband Ralph's nervous hands twitching over his computer mouse and keyboard as he pulled images from his files. Put up with it --he's doing so well I'd remind myself. Forget it. Wives inherit. If I killed him, his child would be the sole heir.

One Sunday, Ralph quoted from and commented on the Sunday New York Times article on the brain-scanning machines, "'Each human being tested believes he or she is the center of the universe.' Marilyn, they can't know this absolutely. The sample is too small."

Every Sunday, Ralph walked Jones the dog and came back with frozen croissant dough, fresh fruit, and chocolate while I downloaded The New York Times through the modem. I printed a paper copy on the large printer/ scanner so we could read it traditionally. I'd fold it in traditional order and would hand it to Ralph when he came back. Then he stripped down again to pajama bottoms and bare feet, curling around the newspaper as though he'd tear it to shreds for a nest, his Sunday New York Time.

He always pulled the art section free first, but was possessive of it all, though he'd read bits to me. I couldn't look at any section until he finished the whole paper. While he read to me, I made our breakfast, wrapping croissant dough around Belgian chocolate bars, dipping strawberries in cream and arranging them with cheese slices on the breakfast plates. These rituals we called our marriage. His lovers didn't have rituals.

As I listened to Ralph read this Sunday, I wondered why the scientists needed a machine to know each living being was the star of its own story. Everyone was egotistical. I almost said, but of course it's true but perhaps I'd become the Artist Widow if Ralph didn't realize that I, too, was a Center of the Universe. So I asked, "How large a sample? How diverse?"

"Four hundred people. IQs from 63 to 155. Female, male."

"Mothers?" I asked.

"The mothers were more important than their children who needed them to be born and raised."

My mother always told me reared, not raised. Cattle are raised. Children are reared. "What about Buddhists? " I asked. "Artists? "

"Each Buddhist meditated perfectly, saving the unenlightened by the bushel. But they didn't have any artists. That's why I said the sample was too small. You can't sample the human race without artists."

As the croissants came out of the oven, I remembered gorges. "What if it's true? The center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere. Or something like that?"

He looked up at me over his reading glasses, an image prop. Before Ralph let me sign the pre-nuptial agreement, I had to have vision corrective surgery. Glasses intensify the eyes, remind of the brain directing the eyes, not the effect he wanted on his women. He asked me, his own eyeballs severe as he liked behind the black frames, "Do you think you're the center of the universe?"

Not the center, a center. Of course, the center of my own universe. l said, "I'm an observer. I love beautiful things." Ralph was close to becoming a thing. I gave him his plate and wondered if I could slip the Book Review Section away from him without his noticing.

"`Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,"' Ralph quoted from Ezra Pound. In my passage through the art world, boring and intriguing anecdotes alike spiraled into my memory waiting to be rescued by a semantic sailor who could untangle golden stories from weed pulp. In that nothing quite my own was me. Undifferentiated from my anecdotes, a nothing not quite my own, I could be cheated on, my past lovers freeing him for his present adulteries. Art and artists were not time bound --all past, no present.

In my future, I'd be on the prow of a sloop off the Hamptons, with another art widow, laughing as we hauled up sails made of our husband's surplus canvases. We baked excess CDs into clay targets and shot them as they began tumbling to the ocean. Excess production -- blam fallen to a sporting clay shotgun.

Would Ralph die in a car wreck like Pollack, be hit by a beach cab, stroke out in a mistress's bed, or bleed out the gut-shot victim of a wannabe's violence? I, who could always recognize talent that intrigued with the morbid, picked Ralph because he reeked of success and early death.

When we first met, he had put me naked on a dais, my hair flowing like seaweed over my skull bones and skin, wearing glasses then myself. Still a canvas man then, he painted deviations from me, while I snapped my thoughts around his future coffin. My imagination sailed the art widow's schooner off Southampton, leaving behind at Springs his perfect tombstone.

His first wife had been the fellow art student; the second had been the gallery owner who ignored all her artists' affairs with wealthy buyers. Now I was devoted to becoming his widow.

So we could read brains now. "Marilyn, what are you thinking," he asked. "I'd like to know."

Under my skull bones, wrapped in aura mater, my thoughts, aware they could be read now, began to move anxiously along the neurons and dendrites. "I don't like the idea of this machine," I said. "Shouldn't some things stay mysteries?"

"I want to read you," Ralph said. He looked over his glasses at me again, the half glass coming up to the bottom of his irises. His chest hairs were beginning to fluff up after his sweaty walk with the dog. Jones came up and pushed against Ralph, begging for croissant.

"But what will you know?" I asked. "The sample is too small to prove anything. They didn't include artists."

He said, "I can use your thoughts as metaphors."

I wondered if the wild boy mask concealed a mirror reflecting void. The two nouns bounced the mediating participle between them as though thinking about whether to insert a hyphen. I almost said, Only if you let me read you, then realized I preferred my idea of him to any possible reality. "But I'm your mirror, the woman you look at." Jones came over to me and nudged me with his nose. I fended him off, wondering if dogs also thought they were the centers of their universes.

Ralph put the Book Review beside my plate without looking at it himself. Did this mean he doubted my mind was as dedicated to his image as his mirrors were? "If you need to stay mysterious, I understand," he said, meaning I'll never forgive you for denying me access to material.

The Book Review lay beside my chocolate croissant. I picked up the croissant first, its chocolate heart congealing. He'd found the classic croissant chocolate this time, slightly gritty, more bitter than sweet, an Aztec flavor. And it had chilled enough while we talked of brain readings so it didn't squirt when I bit down. I looked back at Ralph, then opened the Book Review.

While I ate the croissant and looked for interesting books, Ralph shot me with strobes and the data-back view camera. I'd see myself tomorrow on photo canvas or in a virtual space, Mandlebrotted into the brainscape Ralph wanted to invade.

But you can't figure me out. I'm attached at the back to infinity, I wanted to quote from Lafcadio Hearn. But, the future widow sails flapping in a tack, I just said, "Looks like the most interesting books are now CD-ROM only."

He took the Book Review away from me to see what had intrigued me. They were all histories--art, technology, and war. I said, "My mind and I are your Sargasso Sea." Perhaps I could cheat the machine. Perhaps the technicians doing the reading could be bribed.

DISBELIEVING the mind-reading machine turned out to be popular at the next couple of gallery openings. Technology in general faded in the art market that month. More and more people claimed to be able to tell the difference between machine-ground colors and those the artist ground by hand. Ralph sold nothing that month, but I still trusted my bet.

Ralph's ex-wife brought neo-primitives to the opening of someone else's light sculptures. She pulled out two Lucite-boxed paintings from her portfolio. Ralph, despite being a techno-man who sent his sculpture designs out to CAM workshops and his virtuals and holo works to the best recording and editing studios, had already begun to get fascinated with the theory. No sales for a month will do that to anyone. His ex-wife opened the boxes and said, "Look. Tell me if you can see the difference or not?"

Ralph juggled the two paintings before him, talking as he looked. "If a machine does any of the work, it isn't the machine and you, with the machine as a tool, it's the person who made the machine and you. Then the patron looking at the work is at least the third collaborator. Plus I steal or not from all the past artists who become my collaborators either way. Do you think anyone can express a private vision unmediated by collective experience?"

His ex-wife said, "If you grind your own colors, you know what you're using them for. The emotionality affects the grinding. And I can see this. I'm not saying this means collaborative art is wrong, but the actual physicality of it is a visible distinction the artist can use semiotically."

That season, we could all see the difference between hand-ground pigments and machine-milled before the tedium of grinding one's own colors obliterated the making of those distinctions.

I asked, "Ralph, why don't you start working in egg tempera?" If I remembered correctly, egg tempera must be used by the end of the day and is harder to retouch than watercolors. I wondered, too, if the mind-reading machine was utterly transparent or if the conceptions of the designers colored the end result. His ex-wife took the paintings out of his hands before I could see them and slid them back into their lucite jewel boxes.

Ralph swung around one of the support posts in the gallery, not exuberantly enough to avoid the appearance of pose. Everyone looked once to see who, then turned Manhattan faces back to each other, all centers of the universe. Ralph said, "So, this is what you're representing now? "

The ex-wife smiled at me, and said, "Yes. Clear messages from human to human."

I said, "Who makes the paper or weaves the canvas or planes the boards? "

"All hand-done," she answered, but she didn't claim by the artist who signed in the comer. In past big-money art eras, artists' apprentices ground the paint, gessoed the boards, put down the plaster for the frescos, hauled the blocks from the quarry, painted draperies, sky, and settings. So, now, in Mexico or India, other hands left their messages under the ones given by the primary artist. Probably a computer-aided workshop technician had more optimistic messages than a Third World craftsman.

Ralph said, "I'll follow it, but now I'm trying to get Marilyn to sit for a brain-machine reading."

The ex-wife asked, "Why?" as though what he asked was essentially absurd.

"For images to twist," Ralph said. "For another brain to collaborate with."

The ex-wife swung her eyes at me, just noticing I was really there, not a semiotic indicator for the position new wife. I remembered her name. Judy. She said, "But all you'd know is that you aren't the center of her universe any more than you were the center of mine." Judy was mother of The Child. When I was growing up, I wondered what kind of children Kafka would have had. Now, I'm not curious. Ralph sees The Child alone most of the times, taking him to the Bronx Zoo, the Metropolitan, the Frick, the Coney Island Aquarium where dolphins who also think they are the center of the universe tease their handler by doing the trick before the one she asks them to do now.

I said, "The sample isn't large enough," and smiled to back her away from us. Go, ex-wife, back to your accounting programs and your brave new artistic movement and your Artist's Child. After she made her excuse about coming back after she'd talked to her artists, I asked Ralph, "Do you really think I'm different from everyone else?" My question's tone seemed a trifle off.

Ralph said, "I want to know you even better."

Though her tender flesh is near, her mind I cannot fathom. Whose quote was that? From Asia, no doubt, not a Western sentiment at all. "Ralph, don't." The brain machine was a hoop to jump a wife through. I remembered the one time I'd gone with Ralph and his son to Coney Island. The dolphins and the handler locked themselves into mutual piss-off, the handler's face getting redder and redder. Even the adults who'd only come with children realized what the dolphins were doing to her. Perhaps we didn't understand it from the dolphins' point of view--trapped in a sonic cage, perhaps hearing the sea echoing beyond them through the water table, the filtration pipes. Maybe they just couldn't remember the tricks in time? Maybe they didn't want to be possessed completely and disobeyed out of anger, not knowing what it was to tease. "Are you teasing? Don't tease me with this. I want to always be able to surprise you. "

"We could read each other," Ralph said. "No secrets."

I tuned my vocal chords to perfect jest. "What if I told you I tolerated your mistresses because I plan to be your widow?"

He smiled. I smiled back, eyes corrected so I could drive him while he thought up images unrestrained by stop lights. Hips wiggle, a hint. My eyes unfocused to look at him the way a cat looks with half-closed eyes at a favorite. I said, "Let's read Jones first. What will he think?" Could I convince myself to adore him for the duration of the reading? I'd seen fully intelligent women appear to adore dolts, but then I hadn't been inside their minds.

From the outside, I looked like those women. I wore the heavy silks fashionable with artists' wives this season, the cut as curious as a Klein bottle, buttoned with one piece of monkeypod wood. My blonde hair, each strand coated with density enhancers, swung in an asymmetrical cut. For an instant, I see myself from the outside in my mind's eye, a construction from earlier mirror inspections as to how I should appear, then I look through my own eyes at Ralph, an artist in spectacles.

I left him at the party, flirting with a woman in a mohair sweater dress.

"We'll both do it together," Ralph said over another Sunday New York Times. "Make it mutual."

"Do what? " I asked, hoping he didn't mean for us to be brain-scanned together.

"Have our thoughts read."

"Isn't the technique still a bit primitive? " I asked, then bit into my croissant. The chocolate this time was too sweet and too runny inside the hot pastry. Blisters rose behind my top incisors. I wiped my chin and took another bite anyway. The times called for pain. "Can they really read someone as complex as an artist?"

"I've been asking friends with Columbia-Presbyterian connections," Ralph said. "The researcher in charge is fascinated by the idea of crossreading a couple."

Stop thinking of the sloop off the Hamptons. "Ralph, you'll ruin my mystery." Oscar Wilde's mean quip, women are sphinxes without secrets, popped into my thoughts.

"Both into both," Ralph said. "They only ask that we sit in on the discussion."

How could the experimenters check the veracity of their machines? Wasn't anyone embarrassed about being the center of the universe? "Whatever." I wanted to ask him to promise not to leave me whatever I thought, but didn't want to suggest that anything might go wrong with these readings.

"I'll lead you into my mind," Ralph said.

Oh, so that's it. Ralph wants me to know even more about his real center of the universe. But was he being completely honest? He started by wanting to read me.

Before our time in the mind machines, I went to my beauty technicians. They tightened my skin, resheathed my hair, re-tinted the violet in my eyes, smoothed out wrinkles with tiny injections, waxed my legs and superfluous pubic hair, shaded my face to show heart-breaking cheekbones. I couldn't ask if there was a way to beat the mind-reading machine.

Home with my beauty tuned, I looked through my dresses for one Ralph seemed to like best and found one I'd forgotten, the one I'd worn when we first met: red silk knit. Not a wife's dress at all, I first thought, then I reconsidered. I would add a scarf to close up the open-work top.

I left the loft in dark sunglasses. Ralph and I took a taxi up to Columbia-Presbyterian. Ralph put his hand on my knee to steady himself through a turn, but didn't say much. He was waiting for the real communication.

We went into the big buildings and found a guide to the NeuroPsychiatry Department, then followed a post-doc through the halls to the lab.

The five lead researchers moved around in a mess of VR suits, helmets, gloves, pots of electroconducting jelly. The lab looked like a parody of an artist's lab. Or perhaps a contemporary artist's studio was a parody of this. The one woman on the team was dressed in a suit her body wasn't accustomed to. She was slightly overweight, blonde but not enhanced. The senior man wore sweat pants and a neoprene ear warmer pushed above his ears to keep his hair back. The other three wore college student jeans and shirts.

The woman was Dr. Drake, whom we could call Beth. I did precisely that, asking, "Beth, what are the VR suits for?"

She said, "The brain goes down to the fingertips. We need to read from the whole body."

VR suits were sweaty. All that beauty work for nothing. The senior man and Ralph huddled together, talking tech in front of the monster Cray computer that would construct my thoughts from twitching fingernails and the brain's electromagnetic currents. I asked, "Where can I hang my clothes? And do you have somewhere I can shower after?"

"I'll get a tech to show you," Beth the woman science person said. I wondered if she slept with the senior male, but then decided I didn't want to know. Could a woman make a place without the mate? I knew several women in the art world who weren't spousal proteges. Three were gay. Five married safe guys who supported what their wives did. Only one was ambiguously alone, not using sex for connections or support. Unmated, she was a sexual threat to or a sexual reject by both sexes. We all wanted her to fall desperately in love with one of the ruthless ambisexual boys just to see her turn human.

So, whatever this science woman was, I left with her to change into the VR suit. She smeared my head with electroconducting jelly. The helmet's electrodes crunches through my expensive hair. I came back out to see Ralph also approaching me in another suit. We should have flippers on our feet, I thought, we so resemble divers.

What is Ralph expecting? I'd know soon.

The head scientist said, "We're going to let you see into each other's mints through the VR goggles. I'd like to remind you that this will be digital simulation of your minds, not precisely your own visual cortex constructions. You'll `hear' each other, see what visuals you imagine."

Beth added, "It will take time to fine-tune. You both might want to lie town for a few minutes."

I'd rather have run. Would they drug me? Would they please drug me. Ralph ant the chief guy scientists chatted. I slipped the VR goggles over my eyes and began adjusting the machine to my thinking, trying to see if I court image fake things.

Beth salt, "Sometimes the suggestibility effect brings things to consciousness that you might not want to think about. We can cut out if you remember anything really upsetting, give you a milt shock."

The VR goggles fed me my thought images.

"Who goes first?" Ralph asked.

"Flip a coin," I salt, caught in the memory of the ex-wife's hand-done art.

Beth said, "Ralph's better calibrated."

Ralph said, "But I want to read her."

I walked into his heat and found my image waiting. He was the center of the universe, an artist and a poseur, married to the only woman in the universe who knew that being the best of poseurs was an art form....

But I'd never thought he was a poseur. Ralph showed me how he'd calculated his work to cultivate the rich women who bedded him and bought his work and talked of him as their artist. Each time, he married with progressively better calculations about a wife's value. My beauty blunted husbands' fury ant flattered wives in their adulteries.

We were jolted. Ralph said, "She knows this. Before we came here, she spent five hundred dollars on face and body tuning."

I was his mortal pay-back for the high status games played with kitsch art counters: the cheap-trick pasta neons ant black velvet jolting the visual cortex; the computer art stolen from gainers.

A fraud, but then that, too, is an art form. Besides, all his colleagues were frauds, too, only he was the best fraud.

I don't think so. But the thoughts in the goggles came only from him. A quivering eyelid, a muscle spasm in the hand, eyebrow flinches, shifts of electric currents in the brain--all these things read as visible expressions of the invisible.

Ralph said, "And you'll love me anyway." His image of me nodded.

Then, from the back of his mind, a slender river filled with fractal images began to flow. "The subconscious, are you ready for it or is there anxiety?" one male voice said.

I looked in the river and saw a thousand images better than anything he'd done. Young Ralph dissolved into his work, then I saw his memories of Raphael at the National Gallery in Washington, those sinister Madonnas and Children. Somehow, underneath it all, Ralph wasn't a fraud. The game he played was the art of sliding his images through preconceptual barriers.

And there were no other artists except for him and the great dead. Inside the self-depreciation concealed by the public ego was the private ego, a tender monster.

"Enough," Ralph said. "It isn't real, just my young self's fantasies."

So we switched. I couldn't feel or see Ralph making his way through my mind. I tried to hold on to the river he'd sent out of his subconscious, but then I remembered, trying hard not to think about it, the sloop off the Hamptons. The VR goggles began to play my own visual images. I mourned Ralph and my youth and the painted sails tattered. Then I remembered my own days in art school and felt like a bitch sharpening her teeth on other people's bones because it was easier to steal than to bring down my own deer.

You are my artist, I thought at Ralph. Did I ever have an image river flowing through my subconscious? I saw myself beautiful, then time carved wrinkles into my face, pulled down my bones, broke my hip, and threw me into the grave, remembered only as The Widow.

And there was no more universe after me. Hideous and deformed as Time made me, I was the true center figure of the story.

Webbed in Sargassum weed, I floated through the art world, my beauty a lure for the bloated self behind the weeds. Ralph's fractal river floated into my sea and the images spread out. I drew them close with my wiggling lure that looked like a clitoris and ate them.

I loved Ralph's images. I hated them. My own river dried behind my eyes. The single woman artist, sexually ambiguous as ever, walked through as though neither river or sea existed and said to me, "But this was your choice, to lose what you could do."

Ralph's voice beyond my VR suit said, "Oh, but your sea is fantastic. That Sargassum fish dangling a woman in front of her huge maw."

The brain machine wasn't completely honest. In my own VR goggles, I'd seen the lure as only a body part. I rethought fiercely and Ralph said, "Ah. Marvelous, marvelous self-hate."

I realized that he'd always be the center of his universe, no matter what he saw of mine. My fierce craving to be his widow....

"Yes, your fierce craving to be my widow is your true identity, " Ralph said, his voice as though his throat had engorged with blood.

We were centers of the universe, uncommunicative even when ultimately revealing. Whatever my mindput on the virtual goggles, Ralph could distort it with his own eyes and mind.

I was relieved and horrified. I'd seen too much of my own mind.

Ralph's next project, of course, was high tech and virtually real. A skeleton fucked me. I sailed on his image river, the sails his black velvet optic cheats. He led me on a leash to his adulterous patrons. On the end of a Sargassum fish's first dorsal ray, long and bent into a fishing pole, I dangled naked, luring floating panels of Raphael madonnas into the gaping fish maw.

I looked across the gallery and saw Ralph smiling through his spectacles while gallery hounds ate his images of my images of me. A line waited for the prime goggles: a huge body of Ralph sailing a Sargasso Sea, dominating its weeds and four-inch angler fish waving even tinier naked me's at him.

My mind and I were his Sargasso Sea. A sea's thoughts were more trivial than a dog's.

I can't kill him. I must outlive him.

~~~~~~~~

By Rebecca Ore

Rebecca Ore's shorter fiction has been collected in Alien Bootlegger and Other Stories and her recent novels is include Slow Funeral and Gaia's Toys. Coming up is a new one entitled The Outlaw School

"Accelerated Grimace" grew out of her experiences in the poetry community in New York and in California, where she observed the curious behavior of the spouses and ex-spouses of many famous artists, who seemingly wanted to have their cake and eat it, too.

PLUMAGE FROM PEGASUS

You Won't Take Me Alive! (Without at Least Ten Percent of the Box Office Gross)

"A ROMANCE writer's two-year flight from justice ended in a style befitting one of her novels this week, when law enforcement agents knocked on her door at a low-budget motel just outside Los Angeles. Rather than surrender without a struggle, Barbara Joslyn stabbed herself in the chest.

"As Federal agents closed in on her...Ms. Joslyn barricaded herself in her cramped motel room and shouted that she `would not be taken alive.'"--The New York Times, May 5, 1997.

"Let me through, I'm from the SFWA."

As soon as the hard-eyed, bigshouldered young cop--standing intimidatingly with folded arms on the crowd side of the yellow police tape--heard those words, he gave me a deferential nod, lifted up the plastic ribbon, and ushered me under. Even this rookie plainly knew who had saved the asses of his buddies in countless similar situations across the country. I was hoping his superiors did too.

Once on the far side of the barrier, walkie-talkies crackling practically in my ears, I found myself in the middle of a barely controlled mob. Plainclothes detectives, armored SWAT snipers, squat HAZMATrobots, reporters, priests, psychologists, editors, agents, publicists, film directors--the usual mix of do-gooders and vultures you always find at this kind of tragic scene. Using perceptions and intuitions honed from dozens of equally chaotic past confrontations, I zeroed in on the guy most likely in charge: a smartly coiffed City Hall type wearing a suit that probably cost as much as I made in a month.

I waved my open wallet, credentials showing, under his nose. "Dorsey Kazin, SFWA Griefcom. Whadda we got here?"

Maybe it was the sight of the understatedly famous silver rocket next to my name in gold-leaf, maybe it was the calm assurance in my voice. Maybe it was the chance to dump this whole mess in somebody else's lap. Whatever the case, the guy's stern but nervous exterior collapsed faster than the Wizards of the Coast publishing program, and he spilled his fears into my tender ear like a kid telling his mother what he did that day in second grade.

"Am I glad to see you, Mr. Kazin! Ruben Spinelost here, assistant to Mayor Whiffle." I tendered the guy a perfunctory shake. "Afraid I'm in a little over my head in this dustup. Never dealt with one of these new-fangled hostage-based contract negotiations before."

I cut him off. "Get used to it, Rube, this new tactic's all the rage --and I do mean rage. Brief me quick now, before our gun-toting Gernsbackian decides to lay a few of his more violent cards on the table--or maybe his hostage's ear."

Spinelost consulted a paper. "Well, the writer involved is someone named Theodolite Sangborn. He's published--"

"Not necessary. I got everything I need to know about him along those lines out of his SFWA file. I'm an instant Sangborn expert on his whole life, from his formative childhood traumas down to how he deducted his mistress's hotel room as a convention expense on his last 1040. Not to mention his entire miserable midlist genre career. What I need from you is some idea of the kinds of demands he's making, and who he's got in there."

Spinelost used his cheat notes to answer the last question first. "He's holding his editor, a woman named Sherri Drysack. Ex-editor, I should say. Apparently she made the mistake of deciding to pay him a visit in person to offer her condolences--"

"On Bollix Books dropping Sangborn like a squirming roach when his last novel stiffed. What a damn fool! Didn't she know her presence would be like holding a lit match to a powder-keg?"

"Obviously not. I believe she's, um, fresh out of Bennington. Fine school, of course, but.... Anyway, now Sangborn is using the leverage represented by her peril to demand a new three-book, seven-figure con tract, with twenty percent royal ties and assured softcover editions Oh yes, he also wants Leapsgerb Studios to option his last book for; cool million."

I cursed eloquently. "These Heinlein wannabes with their de fusions of canonical stature make me sick. They should consider themselves lucky to get a Whelan cover, like Sangborn did on his Interstellar UPS, never mind option' and kick-in clauses. And it always falls to Griefcom to hand them a reality check."

Spinelost coughed politely "Speaking of checks...."

"Don't get your boxers in a twist over nothing, Rube. Assuming I can bring this whole debacle to a safe conclusion mutally agreeable to all parties, the city will be fully compensated for any extraordinary expenses--as long as no charges are pressed against our author, of course. Whichever publisher picks up Sangborn will cut a check to the municipality tomorrow--and probably make a nice little donation to the FOP. It's standard industry practice now. They just write it off as a line item on the author's royalty statement."

"Very good. Still, I rather miss the old days--"

Just then a bullet zipped by over our heads like something out of Harrison's Deathworld. Spinelost and the other suits fell to the ground, while the rest of us hardened campaigners just groaned cynically at the requisite touch of melodrama. From the innocent-looking suburban house where Sangborn was holed up came a shouted threat.

"Hey, people! I want to see some goddamn action here, maybe a cover proof or a multi-city booktour itinerary, and fast! Or Little Miss Blue Pencil is going to have a new buttonhole in her Donna Karan jacket!"

I patted my coat pocket to make sure my cell-phone and palmtop with speed-dialer attachment were there, then grabbed a loud-hailer from agape-mouthed-social-worker.

"Sangborn! It's Dorsey Kazin! I'm coming in for some face time. Don't shoot anymore, or these guys will put you on the remainder table faster than you can say Robert James Waller!"

Silence for a moment, before Sangborn answered. "Okay, Kazin, I trust you. But no one else!"

Handing back the hailer, I marched forward, the mob of officials falling aside respectfully to let me through.

The time spent crossing that inevitable empty and unnaturally silent street to the writer's house is always unnerving, no matter how often you've done it before. Sure, you figure they're not gonna do anything crazy at this point, with a solution to their problems so close, but you never know for certain. I still broke out into a sweat when I remembered how my onetime partner, Alyx Jorus, had gone permanently out of print, drilled through the heart as she approached a writer involved in that hellacious work-for-hire Star Wars novelizations snafu. There are some cases I wouldn't touch with a ten-light-year pole.

As I crossed to Sangborn's bungalow, I tried to reassure myself by thinking of all my peers who were even now successfully and routinely doing my same job across this nation of belligerent, mad-dog writers. Those various Griefcom professionals from all the sister and brother organizations to SFWA--the guilds of the mystery writers, the romance writers, the western writers, the horror writers, the screen- and teleplay writers, even PEN--they all stood invisibly shoulder-to-shoulder with me as I strode up to Sangborn's door. So bolstering was my ghostly crew that when I got there I was able to knock with confidence, call my name, then enter.

A disheveled Sangborn sat on the couch in the darkened living-room, semi-automatic rifle loosely gripped. (SFWA sold armaments through the Forum now, and had coffers overflowing with cash.) His hair was as messy as a sheaf of manuscript pages dropped in a wastebasket, his face was stubbled, and he was sweating like one of Fabio's fans getting an autograph. Perched insouciantly on the edge of a coffee-table, Sherri Drysack was, by contrast, cool as one of Anne Rice's vampires. Tucking long hair behind one perfect ear, she said, "It's about time you got here, Kazin. My Dayrunner's showing two appointments and a meeting later this afternoon, and I'm like, hello, can we get these negotiations moving, or are we still in like the Stone Age?"

"Sangborn didn't kidnap you, did he? You're in collusion with him."

"Duh, Earth to Kazin, Earth to Kazin: wake up and smell your double-latte! Of course I'm in this with him. I was planning to jump ship at Bollix all the while, and Sangborn is my meal-ticket out."

I looked at the pitiful hulk on the couch. Shoeless, his hands shaking, his eyes redder than Mars before Robinson got his mitts on it, he looked the most unlikely prospect for success I had ever seen.

"You must have an ace in the hole. What is it?"

Drysack whipped a manuscript out of her briefcase. "Thought you'd never ask, Kazin. Here's three chapters and an outline for an open-ended series that's going to take the sf world by storm. Sangborn's going to make Niven and Pournelle look like Hall and Flint after this."

I took the handful of papers from her and started reading. After a while, I let out a genuine whistle of astonishment. "Looks like the real thing. A postmodern space opera based on an amalgam of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Didn't think the old hack had it in him."

Drysack moved to sit beside her property, draping a possessive arm around his shoulder. She slitheringly crossed one Victoria's Secret-sheathed leg over the other. Sangborn let out a plaintive mew like a Hurkle. "Oh, Theo's far from washed up. He has a lot of good years left in him. All he needs is some tender loving care from the right editor--and of course some fat residuals on any TV series loosed on the Bronteverse."

I dug out my cell phone and palmtop and summoned up a fist of publishers in a screen window. Having picked a likely candidate, I mated the speed-dialer and phone. While the connection was being made, I moved to one of the windows, pulled the drapes aside, and gave the all-clear sign to the cops. As they began to move in, I saw one of the figures in the crowd answer his own ringing cell-phone.

"Loomis Harmonica here. Is that you, Kazin?"

"Damn right. And I'm sitting on the hottest concept to hit sf since Asimov read Gibbon. Is the publisher of Mary Kay Books interested?"

"You bet your bottom Imperial credit we are. Put Drysack right on."

I passed the phone to the eager lady editor, then walked across the room to a shelf of liquor bottles. I poured myself an undiluted vodka, and knocked back half of it.

Hell of a way to earn a paycheck. But when the Muse calls, you gotta answer.

Especially if she's packing heat.

~~~~~~~~

By PAUL DI FILIPPO

GRAFT

"I HAVE TO DECIDE BY tomorrow," said Marie abruptly.

"Tomorrow," Why so soon? I thought you had to build up your resistance first or something."

"It's been a week -- the doctor says it's time. And there's a new registration in, an almost match, he says."

"Oh, wow, who is it?"

Marie glared at her fried. "They didn't tell me that, obviously. But they showed me her picture, from the neck down. She's twenty-eight years old, and -- it's beautiful skin. The doctor said if I don't take it now, somebody else will, right quick."

"Well, you know my opinion. If it'd been me, I'd have signed that donor request form the first time they stuck it in front of me."

"Yes," sighed Marie, "I know you would've."

She was lying in an isolation box in the burn ward, floating on a cushion of warm, moist, medicated air, her body packed in a gel that both sealed her flesh as her skin used to and helped to ease the trauma caused by a fire that claimed almost sixty percent of her skin, though by some odd quirk her face had been spared.

"Sure I would. In the first place, if you use self-grafts, you'll be stuck in here two or three months, won't you?"

"At least, yes. But that's a lot better than it used to be."

Joan made a rude sound. "Big deal," she said. "You're in trouble now --now's what counts--and if you take the skin replacement, you'll be out in a week or two. Seems to me that's not only better in time, but it's got to be better medically--anything that lets you heal faster has to be better."

"The doctor agrees with you there. How do you know so much about this anyway? "

"Oh, I keep up with news like that. You never know when it'll come in useful."

Marie stared at her friend incredulously. "You've anticipated getting practically cremated by a truck going the wrong way on the freeway?"

Joan laughed. "Not quite," she said, patting the clear side of Marie's box. "But I do know I'm going to get old someday, and I want to know all my options before I need to exercise them."

As she looked at her friend, Marie supposed she should have figured that. Joan had been using anti-aging and anti-wrinkle drugs for years, most of them still rare and wildly expensive. She'd also had a tummy tuck or two and some subtle lifts here and there, and she'd visited several bizarre and very private clinics that injected her with fetal goat tissue or some such nonsense in hopes of eternal youth. None of this was covered by national insurance, but "Hey," she always said, "if you can afford it, why suffer?"

Joan had every right to be pleased with the results, Marie conceded. She was fifty years old, but looked like a woman in her twenties, thirty max. To be fair, Joan did take care of herself in other ways; she ate right, and she religiously followed the regime laid down by her personal trainer at the club. Marie was no slouch, but she did indulge in a more-than-occasional bacon and egg breakfast and often found the lure of a book more potent than her appointment at the club. But until recently she'd never been tempted by drugs or surgery. Fifty herself, strangers guessed her at forty or forty-five, and she was content with that. She liked the character of older faces; she liked her own more than Joan's, which, though pretty, struck Marie as rasher bland. Where was the life Joan had lived? Not in her face, that's for sure.

But recently Marie had become mildly uneasy about the rest of herself. When she spread her hand and arched her wrist backward, she could see the tiny puckerings that meant the elasticity of her skin was slipping, her chest and thighs were blossoming with tiny crosshatches she couldn't bear to call alligator skin; her arms and legs were dryer than they used to be--her over-the-counter creams apparently couldn't keep up.

And maybe it was her imagination, but Carl's eyes seemed to linger more than they used to on younger women they encountered on the streets, in restaurants, at the parties of their friends. She'd always been fully confident of Carl's fidelity, and besides, while he worked at the firm, he'd never had time for a fling--they'd had fights, in fact, Marie calling him a workaholic, Carl accusing her of being jealous of his work, work he loved, damn it, he really did. He'd surprised the hell out of her, then, when he quit two years ago, saying that's what he wanted all along, early retirement, the security and freedom to travel and do what he wanted.

To be sure, he still spent hours in his study when they were home, mesmerized by the array of electronics that kept him connected to big boards and financial houses all around the world. This was really fun, he claimed, doing just for their own portfolio what he used to do for others, shuffling money fast enough to earn another five or ten thou with a few taps on the keys.

"Why do you bother?" she asked, though she knew the answer. "We've got far more now than we could spend in two lifetimes."

He shrugged. "It's partly a game--I could lose it, too, you know. But I never will, not for long anyway."

That was not idle boasting, Marie knew. Carl was brilliant at what he did. When he did lose, he'd back up and look around, then carefully select the maneuvers that would not only recoup the loss but add to the account. The total was important to Carl--concrete proof of his own ability--but the game was even more important.

And he did, as promised, take more time for himself, for them. In just two years they'd been to Hawaii twice, to Paris and Moscow, to Kenya and New Zealand. But his eyes, or so it seemed to Marie, were moving around more, too, perhaps comparing her to the young lovelies that seemed, suddenly, to dominate the landscape wherever they went.

Which is why she said now to Joan, "I think Carl wants me to go for the skin replacement."

"Honey, don't take this the wrong way," said Joan, after hesitating a moment, "but that doesn't surprise me much. You'll look twenty or thirty years younger, you know, and men are so shallow. To them, it's real important that their women look good--and that means young."

Marie shot her friend a glance, but Joan, incapable of irony, seemed unaware of the obvious corollary, that women who acquiesced in this judgment must be equally shallow.

"How about the girls? What do they think?" Joan was asking now.

"They agree with Carl," said Marie, but she didn't elaborate, and Joan knew better than to pursue the subject. Denise and Suzanne had flown in right after the accident, but neither could bear to see their mother floating in that box--so they claimed--and after hearing that Marie would be fine regardless of what she decided, they whizzed off again, with promises of their undying support if Marie needed it. They were both still single, both corporate lawyers, and the joy of Carl's life. But Marie found, to her abiding dismay, that as the years passed she had less and less to say to her daughters.

"Everybody thinks I should go ahead with it," she cried now in some despair. "Everybody but me. I just don't think it's right!"

Joan scrabbled at the plastic, as if reaching for her friend's hand. "Honey, we've talked about this before, but that was in the abstract. I told you then I thought you were nuts. But it's not abstract anymore, and now I really think you're nuts!"

"But, Joan, I'd be getting somebody else's skin, and she'd be getting this!" Marie couldn't gesture, but it was clear what she meant, the badly burned remnants of skin that would take months to regenerate enough self-grafts, even with the labs that speeded up the process by growing cells into patches off-site, so to speak.

"She volunteered for this, you know; you aren't stealing anything from her. Quite the contrary--you'll be paying her a small fortune."

"It still doesn't seem right," insisted Marie. "Just because I have money, why should I be able to buy someone's skin--or eyes or breast or kidney, for that matter."

"For heaven's sake, Marie, it's perfectly legal. You can sell anything you want that doesn't disable you and put you on the public dole."

"Legal, shmeagal, that doesn't make it right!"

"Why not? Some people sell their kids, for crissake. That's what those private adoptions add up to, you know."

"So who says that's right either?"

"Okay, well, how about a poor artist? She might paint a masterpiece, something she knows is really good, but if she's poor enough she'll sell it for a pittance, won't she?"

"That's not the same either."

"I don't see why not. A person has something you want, and that person wants your money--that's what makes the world go 'round, my friend."

Marie felt frustrated--she just couldn't seem to find the words that would convince Joan there was at least a moral point worth discussing here. For now, she gave up. "I guess I'll have to think about it."

"You said it yourself, kid--you're out of thinking time. You've got to make up your mind that this is the right thing for you to do." Joan rose. "Well, I better get going and let you get some rest." She leaned over and kissed the top of Marie's box near her face. "But I'll love you either way--you know that, don't you?"

Sudden tears sprang to Marie's eyes. "I do, Joan, and--thanks." She watched Joan's retreating back. There were times, she knew, when she judged Joan harshly, when she wondered why she bothered with someone of so few interests, so little depth. But it was Joan, wasn't it, who wasn't repelled by Marie's gel-packed body, who spent hours chatting with her here in the hospital, who touched her, or what passed for touching sealed away as she was in this box.

Carl didn't do any of that. Later that day, as usual, he spent his second fifteen-minute visit pacing about nervously, unable to maintain a coherent conversation, to more than glance at her in the isolation box. "The yen fell today," he was saying, though fully aware that Marie couldn't care less, "but we were out of there anyway. The Eurodollar should stay strong for a couple months, though."

Marie watched him, the light from the setting sun making his skin glow strong and gold. His skin was one of the things that had drawn her to him, so many years ago, his naturally golden skin that seemed to promise dreams and soft riches, like sunshine. He was poor then but he already acted rich, and the combination of events that made him truly rich seemed to let him grow into his skin so that it matched his bank account, a literal embodying of golden riches.

Now he hesitated. "Look, Marie," he said finally, not looking at her, "I'm not trying to put any pressure on you, you've got to make your own decision, but if you decide on self-grafts, if you're going to be stuck here for a few months--well, I think I'll go on to Switzerland for a while. There's a conference I thought I might attend, and maybe I could look for that chalet we were talking about buying. No, don't say it--" He raised a hand, though Marie had said nothing-- "I know I shouldn't, but-- darling--you know I can't stand hospitals. It's stupid and low, I know, but I can't help it."

Marie knew that was true. When Carl's own mother had been dying of cancer in this same hospital, it was Marie who'd come to sit with the woman, to tell her all about what Carl was doing. Carl's mother was hurt, Marie could see that, but she couldn't criticize her golden boy any more than Marie could.

Now he chatted brokenly about other things, and Marie murmured appropriate responses. Even after he was gone, she saw him, at meetings with bright young go-getters in silk dresses and suits, sipping toddies in firelit resorts, being shown through houses by real estate agents in elegant wool skirts slashed to the hip. She saw the taut, beautiful, youthful skin of the donor.

"Oh, god," groaned Joel. "I love your skin."

They were lying on Annie's bed in her cramped apartment, and Joel was writhing sensuously, dramatically, along the length of her, his hand flowing across her like the wave of a gentle surf.

Annie took a deep breath. She'd figured this was the best time to tell him, when they were both warm and mellow from love, but now she felt too full herself to risk the moment. But she had to sometime, so--

"I'm going ahead with it, Joel."

His hand froze a millimeter above her belly, a tiny, terrible charge electrifying the space, reigniting a desire she resisted. "You went back to Donor Net?" he asked, his voice heavy and dull. She nodded.

Suddenly he was on his knees, one leg on either side of her, looking down at her. "So what's it to be," he demanded. "One of your beautiful eyes--" and his thumbs gently closed her eyes and brushed across them. "Or your breasts, are you giving these to some rich bitch with cancer--" but his hands weren't as harsh as his words as they gently cupped and fondled her breasts. "Or will it be your hair, are you giving up your scalp to someone who years for this glory?" He picked up handfuls of her long, silky black hair and crushed it gently in his hands and buried his face in it.

Then he dropped his hands, her hair. "Well?"

"My--my skin, Joel. I'm going to sell my skin."

For a moment he stared at her in incomprehension. Then--"Are you out of your fucking mind?"

At that she rolled angrily off the bed and snatched for her clothes. "There's a woman--she was burned--she's willing to pay a fortune for my skin."

Joel continued to stare at her. "Are you out of your fucking mind?" he repeated.

"Stop saying that!" Annie screamed. "I know what I'm doing."

"Annie? Annie? Is anything wrong?" came an anxious voice from the next room.

"Oh, shit, now we've woken Mom. It's okay," Annie called. "Joel and I just--disagree about something."

Joel grabbed at her as she was about to pull on her jeans, pulled her back on the bed, and stroked her arm. "I just can't believe it," he whispered, stricken. "I just can't believe you'd even consider selling this."

"Don't be such a child, Joel," she said, pulling away again. "Where else can I make that kind of money?"

"Beg it, borrow it, steal it--I don't know, anything!"

"If I begged or borrowed--that's even if I could--I'd eventually have to pay it back, and how would I do that? And, sorry, but I don't know how to steal that much."

"But, Annie, your skin! What would you get in its place?"

"Some chunks of charred skin." Joel gagged--not an act. Annie felt like gagging herself, but she reached out to pat Joel's head. "It's not as bad as it sounds," she said, wondering who she wee trying to convince. "Just a few months of waiting for self-grafts and lab grafts and regeneration. I'll be as good as new. She's older--the burned woman--but the doctor says my younger genes will tighten it up and mane it young again as it grows in."

"I still don't see why you can't just put your mother in a nursing home, Annie."

"We've been over this before, Joel. She'd die there, I know she would. She's said so herself a thousand times--she's terrified of the very idea." Annie thought of the hours and hours of conversation with her mother, as the Lou Gehrig's disease got progresively worse, as she needed more and more care. No way could Annie's income from waitreesing stretch to cover a full time nurse while she was away, not on top of the apartment, clothes for the kids, food, the phone bill. No way.

The government was no hap. If Mom went to the nursing home, everything would be paid for--room and board, medical care, everything. But out of the nursing home, at most she'd qualify for a visiting nurse to stop in once a day, not good enough very soon when she wouldn't be able to get a drink of water or go to the bathroom by herself. Something had to happen now.

"Why's she so scared of the nursing home anyway? It's not a snake pit."

"Her mind's still good, Joel, and she sees herself fuming into a vegetable if she goes. She keeps talking about her own mother. Gram was totally different, her mind was gone, but that's the image Mom has, this vacant, drooling face looking up at her from a wheelchair. To this day she feels guilty about putting Gram in there."

"So why did she?"

"Same reason as me--she couldn't afford to give up work to stay with Gram, but even with work, she couldn't afford the extra help."

Joel sighed deeply, then fell silent for a while. She could feel him watching as she slipped on her silk bra and buttoned up her buttery yellow silk blouse. She loved the feel of silk, like a constant kiss on her skin-- it was her one extravagance.

"What do the kids think?" Joel asked at last.

"I haven't told them yet."

"Omigod." Silence. Then--"How long you gonna be away?"

"Two or three months. They'll have to go to a foster home."

"They won't like that, especially Sam."

Annie shrugged. Ten-year-old Sam had been a problem recently, but he was smart; he'd understand. As for seven-year-old Beth, she'd brood and cry and stroke herself, but she'd survive. Things could be worse--had been far worse before Annie had kicked their abusive father out of the house three years ago. Sam still had nightmares about Frank, but she thought Beth had pretty well gotten beyond it except for her moodiness.

"What about your mom?"

Annie busied herself at the mirror with her hair. "Well, that's the hard part. She will have to go into a nursing home while I'm away. I've got to convince her it's the only way, that it's just for a little while."

"Look, babe, much as I love you, I'm not going to volunteer to stay here with her. I've got my own work to do."

Joel sounded surly, but Annie knew the surliness masked his frustration that he couldn't make it right for her. In the months she'd known Joel, he'd been generous to her and the kids and even to Mom--but his treats were small because he had so little himself, the proceeds from his few sales barely supporting his drafty studio downtown and supplies of precious paint. "I wouldn't ask you to stay, Joel. But--"

"Well?"

Annie closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and then turned to him, appeal naked in her eyes. "Could you--do you think you could visit her while I'm gone? She's got to be convinced she's gonna get out."

"Hog, boy," breathed Joel, resistance flickering in his eyes.

Annie stiffened. "I'm not really asking much, you know. I just thought if you could--"

"Well, wait a minute here. I haven't said no. It's just not something I ever planned on when I fell for you, you know, that I'd be visiting your mother in a nursing home. If you're gonna make so much money, why don't you just get nurses here?"

"They're giving me a third up front, a third after the procedure, and a third when I'm released. The first third'll just cover the kids and the rent. And if I borrow against what I'm getting, with the interest, there won't be anything left when I get out."

"Hog, boy."

Everything in Annie screamed against what she was doing--selling her skin in the first place, farming out Mom and the kits to make it happen, putting this burden on Joel, the first good guy she'd met since she'd kicked Frank out. She must be crazy. But....

"Okay, I'll try. I can't promise it'll be every day or that I can stay the course--but I'll try. And I won't just run on you. I'll let you know if...things change."

A rush of pure gratitude and love swept through Annie, and she turned and gathered Joel in her arms.

"There's a condition," he said slowly.

She looked at him, not tense yet but prepared to stiffen.

"Put 'em off a day or two and come down to the studio and let me paint you nude."

Annie thought about this. She'd resisted his invitations before, out of a natural shyness--not directed at Joel but at the strangers who might see her and leer at her if Joel sold the work.

"Your skin--" he was saying brokenly. "Your beautiful skin. I want it on my canvas, at least, before it belongs to someone else." He ran his fingers along her arm, causing the tiny hairs under the silk to electrify her skin.

Annie put her own hands on Joel's still naked flesh, felt him react to her touch. "Yes," she whispered, "okay, but first I'll give you a private audience here and here and here."

Joel groaned and reached for the buttons of her just-donned clothes.

HOW WEIRD, thought Marie distantly, to be so pampered here in the Wilcox Wing of the hospital. She'd lived her whole life in a number of houses within five miles of here, she'd been in the hospital three times, with appendicitis as a child, then when the girls had been born, but she'd always before been in the regular wards. There was no problem with that, she'd had wonderful care, she would never have questioned it if she'd woken up there after leaving intensive care, but she had to admit the Wilcox Wing, which tendered an extra bill separate from the basic care charged to the government, was awfully nice.

The private room had a French door that opened on a balcony where pots of spring flowers flourished. More flowers crowded the room itself, furnished like an elegant hotel. Nurses kept watch via an array of equipment from a central station and looked discreetly in on Marie every so often, withdrawing when she didn't need anything. When she did, they were prompt at bringing her books, something to drink, help in moving about.

The gel was gone and so was the isolation box. For a few days the skin had been puffy with the trauma it had undergone--the two women, unconscious, had lain side by side on their cushions of air while the surgeons made their tidy cuts and slipped off the other woman's skin and what skin Marie had left, had exchanged them like slipping the contents of one envelope into another, had tidily sewed Marie up and taken her to Wilcox to recover.

And by now she felt amazingly good, with very little pain. The skin was tight still--the donor had been remarkably close to her in height and weight, but her body was distributed differently. With each passing day, however, her own body was generating a few new cells and she was diligent about the exercises they taught her in therapy. In a month or two, they said, she'd never know the difference.

She spent hours staring at herself. Everything from the shoulders down was new, was the skin of a woman she didn't know, would never know. But now it was hers.

She refused to think of the other woman, down there in an isolation box in intensive care for a couple months to come, waiting for Marie's frayed skin slowly, slowly to build itself up enough to be grafted elsewhere, for the meager patches to be sent on from the lab.

No, she wouldn't think of that.

She'd think of the rekindled light in Carl's eyes when he came to visit her after the surgery, after the initial swelling had diminished, of his almost prurient interest in the line between her old flesh and her new--not a stark line but one softened by the surgeon's skill, blending in the slightly different colors of the two skins--in her breasts, clothed in new flesh, in her new nipples that had not nursed her daughters though they'd nursed someone's children, in her lower parts--What...what did they do there, asked Carl, licking his lips, swaying a little when she told him.

Still, every now and then Marie shivered, uncontrollably, as if something in her wanted to shake off this skin. When she thought of her mother, for instance--

Mom had had a heart transplant, which failed after six months. But what a glorious, ghastly six months it'd been, while Mom pondered her joy in her continued existence compared with her knowledge that her donor was dead, victim of random violence on the city streets. She felt like a thief in the night, Mom said, a ghoul feasting on life, and yet when she died, her last words were of her gratitude to a dead man for the gift of six months.

In her memory, Marie's father had lavished pots of money on a donor registry lobbying for changes in the law. Those changes came, though ironically, to Marie's thinking, there was too much squeamishness about the presumed consent plan, whereby organs from the dying could be used unless the person had specifically denied permission. Far less threatening, in most people's eyes, was the capitalist system: One could donate organs, or sell them, but would never be required to give them up.

At any rate, Marie and her father went on with their lives, closer, perhaps, than most fathers and daughters. Partly that was because Marie was only fourteen at the time and couldn't understand why there wasn't another heart for her mother, and another and another and another if need be. Partly it was because they liked each other a great deal.

Just about the only disappointment each suffered in the other was Marie's decision to become a teacher. She was hurt when her father wasn't thrilled, after all his lectures about the duty to give something back to society, and he was hurt when she didn't leap to carry on with him at the shoe plant he'd founded and fostered. Marie's feelings were rather soon soothed, as her father's interest and pride in her work grew, and her pain was sharp when, after he sold the plant, the new owner broke it up for its assets and laid off the two hundred employees who'd worked so loyally for her father.

Marie blamed herself, but her father didn't. By then he could say to her and mean it, "No, no, my dear. You belong in the classroom. You're a natural teacher. Every year you're touching a hundred different lives, and that's what matters, that's what counts."

He didn't take the break-up well himself; every day, it seemed to Marie, he became grayer and slower and more silent.

It was the closest she came to leaving Carl, whom she'd married by then. Despite the courtesy and sympathy he gave Marie's father when they were together, when he was alone with her he admitted his impatience. "It was the right thing to do," he insisted. "That old plant wasn't anywhere close to efficient. His name lives on, you know -- the shoes are just made in China, much more efficiently."

"But what about those two hundred workers?" Marie asked bleakly. "Doesn't `efficiency' mean taking advantage of them, using them and discarding them just for a paper profit?"

"That's not the right spin," said Carl. "They'll find other work -- or else they don't deserve to. But capital has to act for itself, for stockholders, or nothing gets done. Can't you see that?"

Marie couldn't, no.

Soon after that her father came to live with them, a gray man who sat at the dinner table and watched TV in the evening without saying a whole lot. Carl would talk enthusiastically about various maneuvers at the brokerage house where he worked, and Dad listened politely and then asked, "But what do you do, what do you make that means anything?"

"We do it all," Carl said, but Dad shook his head -- Marie didn't know whether he was denying Carl or the system or his own life, but he didn't live long enough for her to find out for sure. He died five years after he sold the business, but while the doctors ruled it a heart attack, Marie called it heartbreak.

What he left in his will, combined with their savings, Carl parlayed into a bigger and bigger fortune, shifting it here and there as the financial boards moved up and down. Marie paid little attention after the first, when she'd asked, "Dad would hate this, wouldn't he?" and Carl shrugged. "Yes," he said, "and that's why his business was worth more dead than alive."

Something was wrong with that logic, Marie knew, but she didn't know what.

She'd taken family leave to care for her dad during his last few months, then, when they discovered Carl's mother's cancer, he persuaded her not to return to work. He was honest and humble in his appeal. "You did it for your dad," he said. "Please -- help me. When I was a kid my grandad was in the hospital with cirrhosis, and they made me go see him every week. It was horrible, watching his stomach swell and his face puff out. I just couldn't take it, Marie, when it's my mom in there."

His mother lived another six years, alternating between complete health and horrible sickness, between losing her hair and regaining it, between determination to beat the disease and maudlin, drunken acquiescence in her own death. In the meantime, though Marie fiercely missed her work and her students and her colleagues, she gradually built another life for herself, centered on Carl and the girls, on the country club and the health club, on Carl's mother and on volunteering at the arts center, on the vagaries of her own existence. After Mother Lou died, Marie thought she was fully prepared to go back to work, but school systems were no longer particularly interested in her, preferring younger teachers swarming fresh from college with the newest theories. Carl himself urged her not to bother--"I'm making enough for both of us"--and Marie's biorhythms were by now attuned not to early rising and a bell schedule, but to tennis tournaments at the club and various theatrical and sports events the girls insisted she absolutely had to attend.

She and Carl had been young and poor when the girls were born, and she'd taken minimum leave to have them, hire a sitter, and get back to work. But about the time when her father came to live with them, Carl began to campaign for private schools. "With the board your dad's paying us and our income, we can afford it," he insisted.

"That's not the point. If people like us don't support the public schools, who will? The school's great here anyway."

But Marie lost that argument when the girls themselves chimed in in favor of private school. From the beginning, Carl had fostered in them a sense of their own worth, an effort Marie mostly applauded, though his purchases of designer clothes for them when they were still in grade school irritated her no end. And he had also insisted on enrolling them in skating lessons and piano lessons and special computer classes when the family was still struggling just to meet the mortgage.

Since Marie had given in to all of this, she knew she shouldn't have been shocked when all three of them voted for private school, but she was, she was profoundly hurt and shocked, feeling the decision a slap to all she'd worked for. But she was outgunned and knew it, and so she held her tongue.

Since then, she'd done little to merit her daughters' esteem, though Carl had no complaints that she knew of. It was a funny feeling, now, to accept her daughters' gushing approval of her new skin, her healing body. She hadn't done anything to warrant the praise, and yet -- how sweet it was to feel Denise's kiss, to hold Suzanne in her arms and know they accepted her as one of them.

Marie ran her hands over her skin -- someone's skin -- no, her skin and reveled in its taut golden health.

SIX WEEKS LATER Annie still lay packed in gel in an isolation box, bored out of her skull. And in between bouts of boredom came niggling worries about what was going on outside. She'd waited until the last minute to tell Sam and Beth what was going to happen, and that was a real mistake. Beth had begun to tremble violently, but Annie was distracted from comforting her by having to try to talk rationally to Sam who, white and raging, got all macho and protective and tried to forbid her to go through with it. And despite her daily phone calls to the kids assuring them that she was all right, the tears and anger continued in the foster home, until now the foster mother claimed she was at the end of her rope and threatened to take the kids to Protective Services. Annie had to plead with her to try again, to please try to understand their worries and help them get through this.

The situation at the nursing home wasn't much better. Annie was allowed to call only at certain times, but every day her mother complained about the food, the regime, the antiseptic smell masking other, even less desirable odors. Every day she raged that Annie had tricked her and planned to leave her here forever. Every day she burst into tears and asked if Annie were coming to get her.

Yet that wasn't the worst of it. The worst, it seemed to Annie, was that every day her mother's complaints and rages and tears sounded a little paler, a little more tepid. Annie strained in her isolation box, ignoring the nurse waiting impatiently to disconnect the speaker phone, willing gumption back into her mother.

The floor supervisor at the home assured Annie that her mother was fine, but even so, the combination of boredom and worry was taking its toll on Annie. At least her healing was going well. The grafts should be completed in a few weeks and then after another couple weeks she'd be free, but she thought she might lose her mind in the interim.

Joel's visits were the only bright spots. At first he'd had trouble even coming in the room, then resisted looking at her in her box, then become fascinated with the eight of her floating there covered in the yellowish gel. He even insisted on watching one day as machinery sluiced away the ointment so the doctors could reach their gloved hands through the self-sealing portals to clip small pieces of new akin and move them elsewhere, to augment these with patches grown in the lab.

The grafts had been about two-thirds complete the day Joel watched, and even with her limited vision down the length of her body, Annie agonized at what he was seeing: chunks of still raw flesh not yet seeded with new skin; bizarre islands of mottled, puffy skin in some places, remnants of the burned woman's skin, expanding outward as it regenerated; palely pink skin where grafts had been moved and taken hold.

The next day Joel brought his sketch pad and asked if he could bring his oils. Annie wasn't altogether sure she wanted to be painted even in the box -- she absolutely refused to let him paint her degelled, as it were -- but she figured she owed him big time for overcoming his distaste for hospitals to visit both her and her mom.

He was frowning and moody as he set up his easel, but Annie didn't ask; she wouldn't go looking for more bad news.

"I sold a painting yesterday," he said abruptly as he began to squirt paint onto his palette. He didn't look at her.

Annie was confused. "Well, that's great -- isn't it?"

"Sure. It was the one of Diego and the dog, remember?"

Annie did. She'd been with Joel, as a matter of fact, when they came upon the skinny, homeless boy sitting huddled in front of a jewelry store with one arm around a bony dog and the other leaning on his knee, holding a cup. Joel immediately offered the boy a couch in his cramped studio for a couple days if he'd let Joel paint him, and the boy agreed. Then Joel wanted to get him down to Protective Services, find a home for him, but Diego slipped away that night and Joel never saw him again. In the painting Joel had replaced the jewelry store -- too obvious, he said -- with a bare, board fence. Diego and the dog were recognizably themselves, but their bodies were angled somehow, their joints out of kilter, clashing with the city towers rising like a fantasy land behind the fence.

Annie knew the painting was one of the best Joel had ever done, and so did the gallery owner who occasionally hung one of his works, though she mostly dealt with already up and coming artists.

So now Annie's voice was soft as she said, "That's wonderful, Joel. That painting deserves--"

"Julie was embarrassed when she called. The guy offered half what I wanted for it."

Annie sucked in her breath. "Oh, Joel, half?"

Joel still hadn't looked at her. "I had to take it, Annie. The landlord was threatening to kick me out of the studio unless I came up with the back rent."

Annie willed away the tears she felt threatening; she couldn't let Joel see them. "You never know, Joel. Maybe that guy, the buyer, maybe he saw everything in that picture. Maybe he really couldn't afford more."

"Maybe," said Joel savagely. "Or maybe he's the husband of the woman who bought your skin." He made a vicious stab at the canvas before him, but then--"Ah, I can't work today"--slammed the palette into his case and strode over to stare out the window.

"Come here, Joel. Sit by me for a while," said Annie.

Joel did so, leaning forward so that his arms and head lay draped across Annie's box. She wanted to leap out and hold him, wrap him in her protective gel so that both of them would be out of it and safe for a while.

Joel raised his head enough to rest it on his wrists. He looked down at her, untouchable yet eerily close.

"Your mom thinks I'm part of the conspiracy, you know."

"Wha-a-at?"

"Yeah. She's starting to say you're trying to get rid of her on my account, and my visits are just a smoke screen."

"But that doesn't make any sense!"

Joel shrugged and sat up wearily.

"Joel, please! Please don't give up! Please -- go and reason with her."

"Sure, Annie, for all the good it'll do."

After Joel left, Annie called the nurse to dial the phone, but, she was told, her mother was asleep just then. Five minutes later the nurse was back. "Call for you," she said, and toggled a switch on the speaker near Annie's box.

"Yes, yes?" Annie called out eagerly. "Is that you, Mom?"

"No, Ma'am, this is Officer Rakowski at the Twelfth Precinct. We got a young man named Sam here who says he's your son."

"Omigod! What's he done? Is he in trouble?"

"Not yet, but he will be soon if he keeps running with the kids we found him with. Some of them are into deep shit. But today somebody's gotta pick Sam up and sign for him."

"But, Officer, I'm in the hospital, and the people he's staying with, I don't think they'll come get him. Please, Officer, could you bring him here, to the hospital, and I'll see he gets home?"

"Sorry, Ma'am, it's not policy--"

"Please!" Annie was almost weeping.

The man paused. "Well, it's strictly against policy, but I'm on my way out anyway. All right, what room you in?"

It took only about fifteen minutes, but to Annie the time seemed to expand into a bubble of eternity, a bubble that broke instantly when Sam burst into the room, took one horrified look at Annie, and bolted, screaming incoherently.

"Hold it there! Hold it!" said the officer, grabbing him. "Isn't that your mother?" He looked none too happy himself, his eyes anywhere but on Annie.

"No, she's not!" screamed Sam. "That's not my mother!"

"Sam!" Annie called, scrabbling futilely at the side of the box. "Sam, it's okay, baby. Come here. Look at me."

Sam resisted a moment longer, but then something in him seemed to collapse. He turned slowly and shuffled toward the box. He kept his eyes on the floor.

"Look at me, baby," said Annie quietly. "Look at me."

Sam did so.

"I didn't want you to see me like this, honey. But you've got to understand. It's real hard in here -- but it's even harder being away from you. If I have to worry about you, it'll be impossible for me, can't you see that? I need your help, Sam!"

Sam still looked defiant. "You don't need my help. You wouldn't even listen when I said not to do this, and now look at you -- you're a freak."

"You know why I did it, Sam, why I had to do it. It's the system, Sam, just buying and selling, that's all."

"Yeah, well, the system sucks. That's what the guys say."

"What guys? The ones--"

"Yeah. The Green Dragons."

"A gang? Oh, Sammy, no--"

"The system sucks," Sam repeated, glaring at Annie and then at the officer, who was still in the room.

Annie took a deep breath. "You're right, Sam, it does," she said, startling the boy into looking back at her. "But it works, Sam, can't you see that? I know I look funny here, but I'm fine, really, and I'll be out of here soon, and we'll be together again. It works, Sam."

Sam looked doubtful, but Annie rushed on before he could speak.

"And I do need your help, Sam. I need you to be strong and look after Beth. She's so little she can't understand, but you can, can't you Sam? You can understand and help me with Beth, can't you?"

Sam wavered for a moment, and then threw himself across the box much like Joel had done earlier. "Oh, Mom, I just want to go home!"

"Shin, shin, baby, so do I. It won't be long now, shin."

Annie let him lie there for a few minutes before she called to the policeman. "Officer, the duty nurse has my wallet. Would you ask her to give Sam some cab money--"

"I'll take him back, Ma'am. Don't you worry. And Sam and me, we'll have a nice chat on the way."

Relief gleamed in Annie's eyes.

Annie didn't sleep much that night, despite the sedatives wafted in with the antibiotics and pain killers. The box felt as if it had shrunk. She wanted to scream and pound its walls, but since that was impossible, she lay there and thought about death, about how terrible and beautiful death would be.

Marie preened before the mirror, admiring herself in the designer dress Carl had bought for her homecoming day. The high collar hid the faint line of demarcation that would be with her the rest of her life, but her bare arms and legs glowed golden against the silk sheen of the dress.

There were only two small problems. Her own mirror pointed out the first: Her face with its fine crosshatches and lines that didn't smooth out when she stopped smiling or frowning, that face no longer matched her body. But, the doctors assured her, the discrepancy would even out. The body caring for this new skin was no longer young; it would, in time -- how long depended on her own genes and overall health -- in time it would look like that of a middle-aged woman, just like her face.

And that was the second problem.

But here was Carl, proudly holding out his arm for her. In a few weeks, he'd told her, love in his eyes and voice -- she didn't doubt its veracity -- soon, when she was well enough to travel, they'd go to Switzerland. She'd love the house he'd found. It was perfect, near the slopes of a posh resort but private enough to be a love nest for his baby and him. Marie was surprised at how something within her, her heart or her stomach, had lurched at his choice of words.

She recognized the name of the resort; that was where Joan went every few years for massage and mud baths and injections of mysterious youth serums. Marie would make an appointment now, for next year, and reserve a place as often as the experts there recommended, as far into the future as they'd make appointments.

For this first trip, Carl would have to be patient a little longer. She'd already arranged with Joan's plastic surgeon to take care of her face.

But before she acted on any of these plans, she would have a second honeymoon with Carl right in their own bedroom. She would take off all her clothes and let his hands and eyes rove her skin; she'd tangle him in its golden net.

Before she'd checked into the hospital, Annie treated herself to one thing: a silk outfit of sunshine gold with flowing pants and a loose top that responded to her slightest movement with liquid grace.

Unfortunately, she had to rely on the mirror to assure her that it was as beautiful as it had been when she'd bought it. She remembered the soft, sleek feel of it as it floated or clung to her body--

-- but she couldn't feel it now.

The doctors had warned her that the tiny nerves that cause the skin to feel pain and delight, that those would be transferred with her skin, where they would likely dig into the recipient's system and make themselves at home. But that woman's nerves were gone, on the sixty percent of flesh that fire had claimed. It was an iffy thing, the doctors said; the severed ends of Annie's own nerves might regenerate and worm their way into her new skin -- or they might not. Or they might do so haphazardly, restoring feeling in one breast but not the other, for example.

So far that had not happened, but be patient, the doctors said; these things take time.

Be patient, that's what the staff at the nursing home said, too, when Annie went there directly from the hospital to pick her mother up. She'd continued to deteriorate physically, they said, but that was only to be expected. But something seemed to give way in her mind, as well, something not connected to the disease.

Her mother just stared at Annie when Annie hugged her; she didn't react to Annie's tears or Annie's pleas.

She was little better in the weeks since they'd all come home. She talked a little, finally, but mostly in monosyllables. Yes, she'd like to watch TV, she'd say if asked; no, she didn't want a glass of wine.

Annie was shocked at how small her mother looked, at the eyes that seemed to avoid focusing on Annie. Her mother acted like one mortally betrayed, and Annie ranged from rage to guilt but forged her public face into a solid front of good cheer.

A practical nurse now stayed with Annie's mother while Annie was at work. Her charge was no trouble, the nurse insisted, asking only to be moved from time to time, or for a different program on TV.

The children were much better, after a brief period of acting out. Annie wore slacks and long sleeves despite the summer heat pressing cruelly on the apartment, so Beth forgot, in time, that her mother had been gone. A few days after their return, Sam asked to see, and after a moment's hesitation, Annie pushed up her sleeve and held out an arm for him.

He'd hissed and looked away, then looked back and up at her. Then he nodded and Annie rolled down her sleeve. She knew better than to hug him then, but later, when she was tucking him into bed, she did, she hugged him fiercely as he sobbed on her shoulder.

Neither of them ever referred to her skin again.

Then there was Joel. He had brought Annie home from the hospital in a cab, treating her reverently, solicitously, as if she were made of spun glass. Then he stopped in once a day, awkward and uneasy until the day he grabbed Annie's hands and drew her into her bedroom and took off her clothes with quick, nervous hands and gazed at the expanses of taut, shiny white skin, at the puckers where grafted skin met skin unharmed in the fire.

"Will it -- will it even out?" he asked, his eyes on hers.

"No."

He reached out a trembling finger to trace a line across her arm, and then with a sound she could not translate as a sob or a groan or a growl, he fumbled off his own clothes and seized her and made love in a way that made Annie cry out because she knew he was not making love to her but to his idea of himself as someone to whom such a superficial thing as skin meant nothing.

She cried, too, because while she as a person responded as she always had to Joel, her skin did not. She felt his roving hands as pressure, but not as hands of love. She gently held his head as he feathered kisses across her neck and stomach and hips, but that was her only clue that they were being bestowed. She welcomed him inside her and felt that, but not the warmth of his tongue on her breast.

They pushed to come together, as if willing pleasure from a duty.

Since that first time, lovemaking had settled into something resembling their old habits, though Annie concealed how little her flesh responded to Joel's touch. But she simultaneously felt feverish and a chill wind -- not arising from the fan he had set up next to the bed -- when he described to her the triptych he planned: Annie, headless, before the skin exchange; Annie in the box; Annie now.

"God, I love your skin," he whispered, running his hand down the length of her in a sweet, seductive search she could not resist. She closed her eyes to his touch and her ears to a tiny voice inside her that screamed with loss and rage.

~~~~~~~~

By Christine Beckert

There are a lot of phrases we use to describe compassion: If you could see what I see, if you could walk a mile in my boots, if you could love a week in my skin..

Christine Beckert is a former high school English teacher living in Massachusetts. Her short fiction has appeared in such magazines as Amazing Stories and Tales of the Unanticipated. She dedicates this story to Nancy Voneman, an instructor of nursing who provided technical information for this tale.

THE BOY WHO LOST AN HOUR, THE GIRL WHO LOST HER LIFE

TONY WOKE WITH SUCH A start. Light from the full moon flooded through the window of his bedroom at the side of the bungalow. Moonlight clearly lit the Donald Duck clock on the wall. The clock hung higher than Tony could reach, unless he stood on a chair. Little hand between three and four. Big hand at the bottom. Half-past three.

Panic seized him. He jerked up his left wrist. On his new Aladdin watch the big hand was at the bottom but the little hand pointed between two and three. It was half-past two by his wristwatch. Despite Daddy's promise, despite Tony's own vows, he'd woken up too late. Daddy must have tiptoed around the house at two ay-em. He had come in here, but he hadn't wakened Tony.

Aunt Jean, who always wore Jeans, had given Tony the watch the day before for his fifth birthday. He was Big Five. Soon he'd be starting real school. Pride was one reason why he kept the watch on when he went to bed. But mainly, if he took it off, he might forget exactly where it was when the time came to change all the clocks.

At the birthday party he had gone round showing the wristwatch to Tim and Michael and Sarah and the others just a bit too much, until Sarah and Tim had thrust their own presents at him a second time, as if he hadn't liked those enough: the toy police car, the bendy dinosaur...

Home wasn't big enough to hold a party in. In the wooden comm-unity hall along the road there'd been balloons and cakes and musical chairs and pass-the-parcel and a magic-man. When he went to bed Tony had been so tired. He'd asked for his curtains to stay open. Mummy said the moon would keep him awake later on. Maybe she thought he was scared of the dark. Oh no. He hadn't wanted Daddy to need to switch on the light at two, and dazzle him. Because the curtains were open, before he fell asleep Tony had seen the real police car cruise slowly past. It had stopped by the high wall of the huge house along the road where children lived who were odd because they didn't have Mummies and Daddies.

From the bottom of the bed, Big Bear and Little Bear stared at Tony now with glittery eyes. The birds hadn't started their chorus yet. It was so quiet. Tony squirmed along the duvet toward the bears. Pressing himself right up against the window, he stared at his Aladdin watch again.

It was half-past two for Tony. It was half-past three for Daddy and Mummy and the rest of the world.

The top bit of window was open for air because the weather was warm earlier this year than usual. He heard a voice calling softly, "Hey there!"

When Mummies and Daddies came to collect their children from the party, they stood around for a while drinking glasses of wine.

"This is the night, isn't it? It is forward, not back--?"

"Do we lose an hour or do we gain--?"

"Look: when it's two o'clock it becomes three o'clock. We're an hour ahead of where we were. So it stays dark longer in the morning--"

"Seven o'clock is really six o'clock--"

Wine could make grown-ups silly. They seemed to be getting heated up about nonsense, but this was important to Tony in view of his new Aladdin watch. During the magic show Aunt Jean had been sipping wine at the back of the hall with Mummy and Daddy. Now she was sitting on her own. So Tony asked her about this business of "changing the docks."

She'd laughed. "I'm not sure a child can follow this!! Grown ups get flummoxed enough. Foreigners must think we're crazy, unless the same thing happens in their own countries. Well, in our country twice a year the time changes. Spring forward, Fall back: that's how you remember. Fall's another name for Autumn, you see."

No, he didn't see.

"Because in the Autumn all the leaves fall off the trees. That's when time goes back an hour. The original idea was to make the world lighter on winter mornings. But now it's Spring, so tonight the time goes forward again to what it ought to be anyway. So all the docks have to change."

Who could possibly change all the clocks in the world? Did they change themselves?

Aunt Jean took another swallow of red wine. "People change their own clocks, Tony."

He brandished the watch she had given him.

"You have to change it yourself." She giggled. "Two o'clock in the morning: that's when the time changes."

When everybody was asleep in bed? People must get up specially. But his Aladdin watch didn't have a `larm--like those watches which would go beep-beep.

"It doesn't have a `larm!" he protested.

Aunt Jean seemed annoyed. "Well, I'm sure I'm very sorry about that!"

Back home, the man on the TV said how everyone should put their clocks forward at two in the morning; so this must be really important.

You had to put your own forward. Had to do it yourself. Tony was Big Five now. He asked Daddy to promise to wake him up at two, cos there was no `larm on his watch. "You oughtn't to have said that to Aunt Jean," Mummy told him quite sternly. "As though you weren't satisfied! You hurt her feelings."

Daddy made a never-mind face at Mummy. "It's his birthday, after all--"

"Huh, at this rate he won't have another--"

"Let's forget it, hmm? Tiring day. I'll wake him up at two." And Daddy had winked at Mummy.

"What happens," asked Tony, "if you don't put the clock forward?" "In that case," Mummy said sharply, "you get left behind."

He'd been left behind. Cos they thought he'd been rude to Aunt Jean; but he hadn't been!

A little girl was standing in the garden by the big rose bush, out of sight of the street. She was waving to him. She must have been left behind too!

The big window was kept locked for safety when the house was empty and at night, but Mummy had showed him how to unlock it in case there was ever a fire. As he pushed the window open the girl came closer. She was skinny, with untidy short brown hair. Her dress was printed with gray flowers which might have been any color during the day. That dress looked a bit torn and dirtied. Her thin ankles poked into trainers fastened tightly by those cling-together straps.

"The clocks have changed," Tony told her, and showed his Aladdin watch. "I've been left behind!"

For a moment he thought she was going to laugh at him, but then she replied firmly, "You aren't the only one."

"Daddy promised to wake me but he left me sleeping when he changed the clock."

"You won't be able to wake your Daddy now," she said with absolute certainty. "You can't wake a Daddy or a Mummy or anyone. They're all in a different hour. They're in their own world." She seemed to know all about this. Of course she must, if she was here and able to talk to him. What had she done that was wrong?

"They wouldn't be able to see you!" she hissed.

Tim had told Tony about a movie. Tim's baby-sitter and her boyfriend had wanted to watch the movie, and Tim was supposed to be in bed upstairs. Tim's home was bigger than Tony's; it had two floors. Tim had crept downstairs. The door to the sitting room was ajar. He had watched through the gap.

Once upon a time in a big old house a little girl had died horribly. A man and woman moved in, who didn't know about the girl. They already had two young sons but they wanted a girl as well. Soon somebody whom no one could see was using the toilet. Somebody was taking snacks and milk from the fridge. Somebody was knocking things over and breaking them. At first the parents thought their own boys were to blame--but then an awful accident happened to one of the boys, which couldn't possibly have been his fault. The grown-ups called for a priest to come and throw water around the rooms and pray and exercise the house...

That's how it would be here at home. Tony would use the toilet and he'd get hungry and thirsty, but Mummy and Daddy would never see him because he was an hour behind.

"What can I do?" he asked the girl.

"Do what I say," she said. "I know what to do. We have to go somewhere special." She painted up at the full moon. "That's a face up there."

"It's the Man in the Moon."

She stamped her foot angrily. "No, it isn't. It's a face all right, but it's the face of a clock. Only, you can't see the hands till you go to a special place. You have to see the hands move on the Moon. Then you can come back home, and it'll be all right."

Tony gazed at the bright blotchy Moon. It was as round as a clock tonight, a luminous clock.

"What if I just wind my watch forward now?"

"Too late," she sang out, "too late! You'll only break it!"

How did she know about the Moon?

"People have been to the Moon," she said.

"I know that!"

"That was to see about fitting new hands on it. The old hands are invisible 'cept to people who get left behind--and from special places. The spacemen stuck a spike in the Moon for the new hands. Soon it'll be a clock everyone can see, 'cept if it's cloudy."

"You can't see all of it all the time--"

"They'll light it properly. You're wasting time! I won't show you the place if you don't come now."

Tony pulled on his clothes and shoes and he climbed onto the hard windowframe, which hurt his knees, and dropped himself down on to the path.

The aid was taller than Tony by a head or more. Maybe she was seven. Or eight.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"People call me Mar-gar-et." She spoke each sound as if they were strange to her. "But I'm not a Mar-gar-et. I'm Midge."

A small garden hugged the bungalow. At the back of the garden was a fence. One of the planks had rotted and shifted aside. The girl already seemed to know about that. A grown-up couldn't get through the fence, but Tony could, even if it meant scraping clothes; and Midge was so skinny.

Behind the fence was a waste place--and beyond was a forest of Christmas trees in rows, with lanes which went on and on.

As Midge went with Tony into the forest, she asked, "What's your name, anyway?"

"It's Tony--I thought you knew about me!"

She caught hold of his hand, the one with the watch. Her own hand was sticky and strong.

"I know all about you! You had a birthday party. Balloons and Mummies and Daddies."

She must have peeped through the window of the comm-unity hall. She must have seen him walk back home with his parents, carrying his presents. He tried to pull away, but she tugged him along with her into the forest. "You have to come with me and see the hands of the Moon!"

Because of the Moon it was bright enough to see all the silvery branches.

"I want to go home," he begged.

"You can't go back yet. You'd still be too early. An hour too early."

"I'd have asked you to the party if I'd known you, Midge!"

She laughed.

And he began to cry.

With her free hand she slapped him on the cheek.

"Cry-baby," she mocked. "It's horrid being lost, Tony. Never being seen. Never being heard. 'Cept by my friends who can see the hands of the Moon."

Did she really want him as her friend?

"Where's the place?" he sniveled.

"It's at the far end of the forest."

He'd be safe until then, wouldn't he? She wouldn't slap him again? He let her lead him along, though really he couldn't have stopped her from dragging him.

After a while she said, "You'll have your time back--but I shan't. Not till the Moon grins wide and spits me out like it grinned and swallowed me once, and my friends."

"You said the Moon wasn't a man with a face, you said it was a clock!"

"Mainly it's a clock. Mainly!"

Tony was terrified. Who were these friends who were waiting at the far end of the forest?

THE PAIR OF THEM CAME to a clearing. All around it, the boughs of the Christmas trees jutted like hundreds of barbed spears. The Moon glared down. Tony should easily have been able to see other children waiting, but he couldn't. Midge's friends must be hiding behind tree trunks. She sat down on soft nice-smelling needles, pulling him with her. Then she shuffled round behind him.

"Look up, look up," she chanted. "Gape at the Moon. Keep your eyes open. Don't close them. Don't look anywhere else or I'll have to hit you."

Tony stared up. His ears were alert for any rustle of feet creeping closer, but the pine needles would deaden the noise. The Moon began to blind him to anything else. Soon there was just that bright blotchy flat disc.

"It's horrid being lost, Tony--"

Desperately he tried to see hands on the Moon. Gaze as he might, he couldn't.

Gradually, out of the corners of his eyes, he became sure that other children were indeed sitting around in the clearing, clasping their drawn-up knees and staring at him. He didn't dare look to make sure.

"The Moon's made of stone," came Midge's voice, "and so am I. Hard stone." Did she have a stone in her hand? Was she was going to hit him with it the moment he stopped gaping? "A stone clock. A moon-dial..."

His eyes were watering with effort. Of course he blinked now and then.

"Please, Midge," he begged, but no reply came.

Gray light began to dawn. A hundred birds started singing. The Moon was fainter now, a sickly yellow. When it sank slowly behind the top branches of a Christmas tree at last he saw the dark pointers upon the Moon's face--and he cried out, "Yes, yes, I can see them!"

Midge wasn't there anymore. She'd gone. He hadn't heard her leave because of the birds. Nor were there any other children in the clearing. He was alone.

His legs had cramped. He staggered but soon he was running.

Only when he had climbed back into his bedroom, and the Donald Duck clock caught his eye, did he think to look at his wristwatch. Little hand near five. Big hand at nine. It was quarter to five--by the clock and by the Aladdin watch as well.

Mummy came in to wake him, but he was already awake. He'd been fretting whether she would come, or whether he'd have to go to the kitchen on his own--and would they be surprised to see him? Had they been trying to lose him? "I'm sorry!" he told her.

Mummy looked suspicious. "What about?"

"Cos I was rude to Aunt Jean."

"Oh...I thought you'd broken something."

He pointed at the clock. "Daddy didn't wake me at two."

"You were dead to the world, but your Daddy thought you'd want to see the right time in the morning--"

Oh yes. To see the right time was everything.

She realized what he had said. "At two? Did you think we'd sit up till two?"

With the summer term Tony started real school. The school bus took him there and brought him back. Different Mummies would ride on the bus in case bigger children behaved badly. Always two Mummies, so that they could talk to each other.

One hot day, men were busy tearing up the road near the huge house with the wall all around. A red light halted the bus, and Tony saw Midge on the pavement. She was standing stiffly beside a big woman who wore a blue suit. Those flowers on Midge's dress were pink roses. Tony rapped his knuckles on the glass, then he slapped his flat palm, which made more noise.

The woman in blue had noticed Tony and was frowning. Midge only stared emptily in the same direction as ever. He slapped harder.

"Stop that," he heard a Mummy call out. "Stop it right now! Don't make fun."

The other Mummy said to her friend, "That's the girl that runs away. Though she's supposed to be severely," and she said a big word.

Back home, Tony asked his Mummy, "What's or-tis-tic mean?"

"Artistic," she corrected him. "It means you're good at painting and playing music and things like that. Did a teacher say that about you today?"

Tony shook his head. He mustn't have heard right in the bus. Anyway, Midge hadn't said anything to him about paint or music. He remembered how blank her look had been, as if her face was a stone.

~~~~~~~~

By Ian Watson

Although we're a few months away from the weekend when our clocks spring ahead one hour, it's too early to think about such matters. Time, after all, does not stand still

The prolific Ian Watson certainly doesn't stand still, either. The most recent of his many books include Oracle, Hard Questions, and The Books of Mana.

A SCIENTIST'S NOTEBOOK

BRIGHT FUTURE: FIXING THE GREENHOUSE

LAST TIME I treated the deep intricacies of our biosphere, which may very well be more complex than the vaunted human brain.

Our Earth's enigmatic, complicated facets profoundly affect the global warming problem. No issue holds more profound possible consequences for the next century.

Yet there may be ways to attack the greenhouse effect catastrophe--which many fear looms on the horizon of the next century--without paying enormous, tragic costs.

I ended last time with an innocuous solution: plant forests to sop up the excess carbon dioxide put into the air by burning fossil fuels. Ecologists stop there; anything more imaginative seems to many to be unwarranted interference in the natural cycles that support all life.

But should this be so? I argued before that people will want solutions that let them keep, or even improve, their lot in life. Can some technological fixes bring this about? Let's get a bit science fictional...

THE GERITOL SOLUTION

After the forests, the oceans comprise the other great sink of greenhouse gases. Some estimates say they absorb 40 percent of the fossil fuel emissions. In coastal waters rich in runoff, plankton can swarm densely, a hundred thousand in a drop of water.

Plankton color the sea brown and green where deltas form from big rivers, or where cities dump their sewage. Tiny yet hugely important, plankton govern how well the sea harvests the sun's bounty, and so are the foundation of the ocean's food chain. Far offshore, the sea returns to its planktonstarved blue.

The oceans are huge drivers in the environmental equations, because within them the plankton process vast stores of gases. In ice ages, CO₂ levels dropped 30 percent.

Could we do this today! Driving CO₂ down should lower temperatures, certainly. But how!

The answer may lie not in the warm tropics, but in the polar oceans. There, huge reserves of key ingredients for plant growth, nitrates and phosphates, drift unused. The problem is not weak light or bitter cold, but lack of iron. Electrons move readily in its presence, playing a leading role in trapping sunlight.

A radical fix, then, would be to seed these oceans with dissolved iron dust. This may have been the trigger that caused the big CO₂ drop in the ice ages: the continents dried, so more dust blew into the oceans, carrying iron and stimulating the plankton to absorb CO₂. Mother Nature can be subtle.

Still, such an idea crosses the momentous boundary between natural mitigation and artificial means. Here is the nub of it, the conceptual chasm. With a boast that may cost his cause dearly, the inventor or of the idea, Dr. John Martin at the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California, said, "Give me half a tanker full of iron and I'll give you another ice age."

The captured carbon gets tied up ins "standing crop" of plankton; basically, this is ocean forestation. The CO₂ dowry dissolves into the lower waters, perhaps eventually depositing on the seabed. If we decide to stop the process, the standing crop will die off within a week, providing a quick correction.

First proposed in 1988, this "Geritol solution" has had a rocky history. Many derided it automatically as foolish, arrogant, and politically risky. But in 1996 the idea finally got tested, and performed well.

Near the Galapagos Islands lies a fairly biologically barren area. Over 28 square miles of blue sea scientists poured in 990 pounds of iron throughout a week of testing. Immediately the waters bloomed with tiny phytoplankton, finally covering 200 square miles, suddenly green. Plankton production peaked nine days after the experiment started.

A thousand pounds of iron dust stimulated more than 2000 times its own weight in plant growth, incredibly higher than any fertilizer ever makes on land. The plankton soaked up CO₂, reducing its concentration in nearby sea water by 15 percent. This deficiency it quickly made up by drawing carbon dioxide from the air.

But there is some evidence that little of the newly fixed carbon actually sank. It seems to have come back into chemical equilibrium with the air. Controversy surrounds this essential point; clearly, here is where more research could tell us much.

Projections show that since this process would affect only about 16 percent of the ocean area, a full-bore campaign to dump megatons of iron into the polar oceans probably would suck somewhere between 6 and 21 percent of the CO₂ from the atmosphere, with most recent estimates fixing around 10 percent. This would dent the greenhouse problem, but not solve it entirely.

Even such partial solutions attract firm opponents. Geoengineering carries the strong scent of hubris.

Ecovirtue reared its head immediately after the 1988 proposals, well before any experiments. Many scientists and ecologists saw in it an incentive for polluters, on the Puritan model that any deviation from abstinence is itself a further indulgence.

Some retaliated; Russell Seitz of Harvard said the experimenters were downplaying their results out of fear of seeming politically incorrect. "If this approach proves to be environmentally benign," Seitz said, "it would appear to be highly economic relative to a Luddite program of declaring war against fire globally."

Of course there are big uncertainties. How would the iron affect the deeper ecosystems, of which we know little? Will the carbon truly end up on the seabed? Can the polar oceans carry the absorbed carbon away fast enough to not block the process! Would the added plankton stimulate fish and whale numbers in the great Antarctic ocean: Or would some side effect damage the entire food pyramid?

Costs are better known; there is nothing very high-tech about dumping iron. Martin estimated that the job would take about half a million tons per year. Depending on what sort of iron proves best at prodding plankton, the iron costs range between ten million to a billion dollars.

Total operations costs--fifteen ships steaming across the polar oceans all year long, dumping iron dust in lanes -- bring the total to around ten billion dollars. This would soak up about a third of our global fossil-fuel generated CO₂ emission each year.

There will be side effects to growing so much sea algae, which are fed on by other plankton. Probably this feed cycle will produce tiny aerosols which in turn stimulate cloud condensation. Over the long lanes left by the steaming iron-spreaders, cottony clouds will form.

Is this bad? After all, clouds reflect sunlight, lessening the overall heating problem. This points to the other grand greenhouse strategy --altering the reflection of the planet itself.

REFLECTING ON REFLECTIVITY

What could be more intuitively appealing than simply reflecting more sunlight back into space, before it can be emitted in heat radiation and then absorbed by CO₂?

People can understand this notion readily enough; black T-shirts are warmer in summer than white ones. We already know that simply by painting buildings white they stay cooler. We could compensate for the effect of all greenhouse gas emission since the Industrial Revolution by reflecting less than one percent more of the sunlight.

Astronomers call a planet's net effectivity the albedo, and a mere half of one percent decrease in Earth's would solve the greenhouse problem completely. The big problem is the oceans, which comprise about 70 percent of our surface area and absorb more because they are darker than land.

The most environmentally benign proposal for doing this is very high-tech: an orbiting white screen, about two thousand kilometers on a side. Even broken up into small pieces, putting such parasols up would cost about $120 billion, a bit steep.

As well, we would have to pay considerably to take them down if they caused some undesirable side effect. In fact, one is certain -- a night sky permanently light-polluted, making astronomers and moon-struck lovers irritable.

Using more innocuous dust to reflect sunlight does not work; it drifts away, driven off by the sun's light pressure.

Attention first turned to reflectors at high altitudes because much sunlight gets absorbed in the atmosphere on its way to us. Spreading dust in the stratosphere appears workable because at those heights tiny particles stay aloft for severe years. This is why volcanoes spewing dust affect weather strongly.

Even better than dust are microscopic droplets of sulfuric acid which reflect light well. Sulfate aerosols can also raise the number: of droplets that make clouds con dense, further increasing overall reflectivity. This could then be local cooling, easier to monitor than CO₂'s global warming. Such small controllable experiments we could perform now.

The amount of droplets or dust needed is a hundred times smaller, than the amount already blown into the atmosphere by natural processes, so we would not be venturing big dislocations. And we would get some spectacular sunsets in the bargain.

The cheapest way of delivering dust to the stratosphere is to shoot it up, not fly it. Big naval guns fired straight up can put a one-ton shell twenty kilometers high, where it would explode and spread the dust. This costs only a hundredth of the space parasol idea. Rockets, balloons, and aircraft all perform worse.

But why stick to dust when we already add a perfectly good reflecting area to the upper atmosphere as part of everyday flying -- aircraft exhausts? Sweetening the fuel mixture in a jet engine to burn rich can leave a ribbon of fog behind for up to three months, though as it spreads it becomes invisible to the eye.

Since fuel costs form about 15 percent of airlines' cash operating expenses, for seven million dollars this method would offset the 1990 U.S. greenhouse emissions, quite a cheap choice.

Even hiring air freight companies to carry dust and dump it high up would cost only ten times more, so the approaches are economically interchangeable. Perhaps an added asset is that quietly running rich on airline fuel will attract little notice and is hard to muster a media-saturated demonstration against.

But there are, as always, side effects. Dust or sulfuric acid would heat the stratosphere, too, with unknown impact. Some suspect that the ozone layer could be affected. If a widespread experiment shows this, we could turn off the effect within roughly a year as the dust settles down and gets rained out.

Stranger ideas have been advanced. For example, making a very high altitude screen of many aluminized, hydrogen-filled balloons far above air traffic could work, and self-distribute itself over the entire globe.

But the balloon parasols would cost twenty times the jet-plume approach. Ruptured balloons falling in the back garden could irritate all humanity. Imagine late-night comedians using them as props...

These ideas envision doing what natural clouds do already, as the major players in the total albedo picture. A 4 percent increase in stratocumulus over the oceans would offset global CO₂ emission. Land reflects sunlight much better than the wine-dark seas, so putting clouds far out from land, and preferably in the tropics, gets the greatest leverage.

Still, the most recent research shows that global averages are misleading, because climate dynamics depends on how spatially patchy reflectivity is. Even as we plan, we must keep in mind our ignorance of the complexities.

Making clouds is an old but still controversial craft. Clouds condense around microscopic nuclei, often the kind of sulfuric acid droplets the geoengineers want to spread in the stratosphere.

The oceans make such droplets as sea algae decays, and the natural production rate sets the limit on how many clouds form over the seas. Clouds cover about 31 percent of our globe already, so a 4 percent increase is not going to noticeably ruin anybody's day.

Tinkering with such a mammoth natural process seems daunting, but in fact about four hundred medium-sized coal-fired power plants give off enough sulfur in a year to do the job for the whole Earth. (This in itself suggests just how much we are already perturbing the planet.)

The trouble is that coal plants sit on land and the clouds must be at sea. A savvy international strategy leaps to mind: Subsidize electricity-dependent industry on isolated Pacific islands and ship them the messiest sulfur-rich coal. Their plumes would stretch far downwind and the manufactured goods could revitalize the tropical ocean states, paying them for being global good neighbors.

A more boring approach, worked out by the National Academy Panel, envisions a fleet of coal burning ships which heap sulfur directly into the furnaces. They spew great ribbons of sulfur vapor far out at sea, where nobody can complain, and cloud corridors obediently form behind.

Best would be to use these sulfur clouds to augment at the edges of existing overcast regions, swelling them and increasing the lifetime of the natural clouds. The continuously burning sulfur freighters would follow weather patterns, guided by weather satellite data.

At first these should operate as regional experiments, to work out a good model of how the ocean-cloud system responds. Moving from science to true geoengineering could take a decade or two. This low-tech method would cost about two billion dollars per year, including amortizing the ships.

The biggest political risk here lies with shifts in the weather. The entire campaign would increase the sulfur droplet content in our air by about a quarter. Probably this would cause no significant trouble, with most of the sulfur raining out into the oceans, which have enormous buffering capacity.

Keeping the freighters a week's sailing distance from land would probably save us from scare headlines about sudden acid rains on farmer's heads, since about 30 percent of the sulfur should rain out each day.

Maybe some collaboration would work here. Freighters burning sulfur could also spread iron dust, combining the approaches, with some economies. Further scrutiny will probably turn up further savings; these calculations are back-of-the-envelope sketches.

Also, the freighters would operate far from people's everyday lives, avoiding Not In My Back Yard movements. This is definitely not so for, say, firing dust into the stratosphere; with the booming of naval guns.

ALBEDO CHIC

The National Academy of Sciences panel that studied mitigation measures found that "...one of the surprises of this analysis is the relatively low cost" of implementing some significant geoengineering It might take only a few billion dollars to mitigate the U.S. emission of CO₂. Compared with stopping people in China from burning coal, this is nothing.

We should not hold the 1992 Panel report, thick with footnotes and layers of qualifiers, to be a road map to a blissful future. Their estimates are simple, linear, and made with poorly known parameters. They also ignore many secondary effects.

For example, forests promote clouds above them, since the water vapor they exhale condenses quickly. Growing trees to sop up CO₂ then also increases albedo, a positive feedback bonus. Is this the end of the chain? Unlikely.

Perhaps the greatest unknown factor is social: how will the politically aware public (those who vote, anyway) react?

If they are painted early and often as Doctor Strangeloves of the air, the geoengineers will fail. Properly portrayed as allies of science, they could become heroes.

Here a crucial factor is whether the agenda looks like another top down contrivance, orders from the elite. A Draconian policing of illegal fuel burning will indeed look this way, but mitigation need not It will play out far from people's lives, out at sea or high in the air.

Better, perhaps widespread acceptance of mitigation strategies could lead to an albedo chic, with ostentatious flaunting of white roofs, cars, the return of the ice-cream suit in fashion circles. White could tee appropriate again after Labor Day

More seriously, simply addling sand or glass to ordinary asphalt ("glassphalt") doubles its albedo. This is one mitigation measure everyone could see -- a clean, passive way to Do Something. Cooler roads lessen tire erosion, too. The urban heat island effect, which drives up air conditioning energy consumption in summer, would ease.

About one percent of the U.S. is covered by human constructions, mostly paving, suggesting that we may already control enough of the land to get at the job. Many small measures could add to a global change. Every little bit would indeed help.

This is crucial: mitigation wears the white hat. It asks simple, clear measures of everyone, before going to larger scale interventions. Grass-roots involvement should be integral from the very beginning.

This should go apace with efforts at the nation-state level, especially since mitigation intertwines deeply with diplomacy.

Here appearances are even more critical, given the levels of animosity between the prolifigate burners (especially the U.S.) and the tropical world.

Plausible solutions should stay within the Panel's sober guidelines. Learning more is the crucial first step, of course. This is not just the usual academic for more funded research; nobody wants to try global experiments on a wing and a prayer.

Beyond more studies and reports, we must begin thinking of controlled experiments. Climate scientists have so far studies passively, much like astronomers. They have a bias toward this mode, especially since the discernible changes we have made in our climate generally have been pernicious Such mental sets ebb dowry. The reek of hubris also restrains many.

But a time for limited experiments like the iron-dumping one will come. This will be the second great step as we ponder whether to become geoengineers. Constraints must be severe to insure clear results.

Most important, perturbations in climate must be local and reversible --and not mercy to quiet environmentalist fears. Only controlled experiments, well diagnosed, will be convincing to both sides in this debate.

Indeed, the green plume near the Galapagos Islands showed this. Its larger features were best studied by satellite, which picked up the green splotch strongly against the dark blue sea.

But the crucial issue of whether the carbon stayed tied up in ocean waters was poorly diagnosed. Satellites were of no help. Slightly better funding and more scientists in dispersed, small craft could have told us a lot more.

Third, careful climate modeling must closely parallel every experiment. Few doubt that our climate stands in a class by itself in terms of complexity. Absent a remotely useful theory of complexity in systems, we must proceed cautiously.

While computer studies are notorious for revealing mostly what was sought, confirming the prejudices of their programmers, methods are improving quickly. They can explore the many side avenues of weakly perturbing geoengineering experiments. Invoking computer models as crucial watchdogs in every experiment will calm fears, at least among the elite who read beyond the headlines.

Still, going from the local to the global is fraught with uncertainty and certain to inspire much anxiety. We will always be uncertain stewards of the Earth.

And probably the greenhouse shall not be our last problem, either. We are doing many things to our environment, with our numbers expected to reach ten billion by 2050. What new threats will emerge?

Fresh disasters shall probably spring from the many synergistic effects that we must trace through the geophysical labyrinth. Once we become caretakers, we cannot stop. The large tasks confronting humanity especially the uplifting of the majority to some semblance of prosperity, must be carried forward in the shadow of our stewardship.

PURITANS AND PROPHETS

Americans have a deep propensity for pursuing morality into the thickets of science. The cloning of a sheep in Scotland provokes stern finger-pointing by archbishops and ethicists dike. This we must expect as scientific topics become ever more complicated, and freighted with profound implications.

So it inevitably shall be for greenhouse gases Of course it would be far better to abstain from burning so much. The fossil carbon resources are a vast heritage whose utility, convenience, and endless applications we -- or rather, surely our great-grandchildren-shall not see again.

But the experience of the last several decades holds no grounds for even a sliver of optimism Modem prosperity is built upon cheap, handy energy. Billions of new people added to the carrying capacity of the planet --which some globalists believe we have already exceeded -will only exacerbate our habit of digging wealth from the ground, the burnable corpses of early life.

In the end, the deep Puritan impulse to scold and condemn will fall upon deaf ears in both the emerging and the advancing nations. It has not fared well among its natural constituency, those who are far more easily moved by campaigns to end smoking, save the whales, or stop sullying the city air.

But among the able nations, those who have the foresight to grasp solutions, an odd reluctance pervades the policy classes. Ralph Cicerone, a noted atmospheric physicist, noted that "Many who envision environmental problems foresee doom and have little faith in technology, and therefore propose strong limits on industrialization, while most optimists refuse to believe that there is an environmental problem at all."

Having sinned against Mother Nature inadvertently, many are keenly reluctant to intervene knowingly. Sherwood Rowland of the University of California it Irvine, who predicted with Mario Molina the depletion of the ozone-layer, declared "I am unalterably opposed to global mitigation." This added considerable weight to the abstention cause.

At root, we see ourselves as the problem; only by behaving humbly, living lightly upon our Earth, can we atone. Here most scientists and theologians agree, at least for now.

The next century shall see a protracted battle between the prophets who would intervene and the moralists who see all grand scale human measures as tainted. Even now many advance their argument thee to even speak of geoengineering encourages the unwashed to even more excess, since the masses will think that once again science has a remedy at hand.

Some, though, will say quietly, persistently, Well, maybe science does...

Comments (and objections!) to welcome. Please send them to Gregory Benford, Physics Department, Univ. Calif., Irvine, CA 92717, or gbenford@uci.edu.

~~~~~~~~

By GREGORY BENFORD

THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP

THE TRIP DOWN FROM Seattle in the rattling old Mercury wagon took most of two days. Jimmerson tried to sleep for a few hours somewhere south of Mendocino along Highway 1, the Mercury parked on a turnout and Jimmerson wedged in between the spare tire, his old luggage, and some cardboard boxes full of what amounted to his possessions. None of it was worth any real money. It was just trinkets, souvenirs of his forty years married to Edna: some salt and pepper shakers from what had been their collection, dusty agates and geodes from a couple of trips to the desert back in '56, old postcards and photographs, a pair of clipper ship bookends they'd bought down in New Orleans at the Jean Lafitte Hotel, and a few books, including the Popular Science Library set that Edna had given him for Christmas a hell of a long time ago. Most of the rest of what he owned he had left in Seattle, and every mile of highway that spun away behind him made it less and less likely that he would ever return for it.

News of Edna's death had reached him yesterday in the form of a letter from the county, identifying Doyle Jimmerson as "responsible for the costs incurred by Edna Jimmerson's burial." And of course he was responsible--for more than just the costs. They were married, even if he hadn't seen her for nearly a year, and she had no other kin. He would have thought that Mrs. Crandle, the next door neighbor, would have sent him the news of Edna's death sooner, but Mrs. Crandle was a terrible old shrew, and probably she hated him for how he had left, how he had stayed away....

He had never felt more married to Edna than now that she was dead. His long-cherished anger and all his tired principles had fallen to dust on the instant of his reading the letter, and as he lay listening to the slow dripping of the branches and the shifting of the dark ocean beyond the car windows, he knew that he had simply been wrong--about Edna's fling with the Frenchman, Mr. des Laumes, about his own self-righteous staying-away, about his looking down on Edna from the self-satisfied height of a second-story hotel room along the waterfront in Seattle where he had lived alone these past twelve months.

There was a fog in off the ocean, and as he lay in the back of the Mercury he could hear waves sighing in the distance. The eucalyptus trees along the roadside were ghostly dark through the mists, the ocean an invisible presence below. There was the smell of dust and cardboard and old leather on the air, and water dripped onto the roof of the car from overhanging branches. Now and then a truck passed, gunning south toward San Francisco, and the Mercury swayed on its springs and the fog whirled and eddied around the misty windows.

Before dawn he was on the road again, driving south along the nearly deserted highway. Fog gave way to rain, and the rugged Pacific coast was black and emerald under a sky the color of weathered iron. It was late afternoon when he pulled into the driveway and cut the engine, which dieseled for another twenty seconds before coughing itself silent. He sat there in the quiet car, utterly unsure of himself--unsure even why he had come. He could far easier have sent a check. And he was helpless now, worthless, no good to poor Edna, who was already dead and buried....

Of course Mrs. Crandle hadn't sent him a letter. He wasn't worth a letter. He wondered if the old woman was watching him through the window right now, and he bent over and looked at the front of her house. There she was, a shadow behind the drapery, peering out at him. He could picture her face, pruned up like one of those dolls they make out of dried fruit. He waved at her, and then, before he got out of the car, he opened the glove compartment and looked for a moment at the blue steel .38 that lay atop the road maps and insurance papers and old registrations. The gun appeared to him to be monumentally heavy, like a black hole in the heart of the old Mercury.

He shut the glove compartment door, climbed stiffly out of the car, and took a look at the house and yard. The dichondra lawn was up in dandelions and devil grass, and the hibiscus were badly overgrown, dropping orange blossoms onto the grass and walkway. The house needed paint. He had been meaning to paint it when he'd left, but he hadn't. Things had happened too fast that morning. Let the Frenchy paint it, he had told Edna before he had walked out.

He headed up along the side of the house, where a litter of throwaway newspapers and front-porch advertisements lay sodden with rain, hidden in front of Edna's Dodge. Someone, probably Mrs. Crandle, had been tossing them there. The right front tire of the Dodge was flat, and it looked like it had been for a long time. Instantly it occurred to him that Edna must have been sick for some time, that she hadn't been able to get around, but he pushed it out of his mind and continued toward the back door, only then spotting the box springs and mattress tilted against the fence by the garage. Someone had covered it with a plastic dropcloth to save it from the weather, but the sight of it there behind the cloudy plastic was disorienting, and he felt as if he had been away forever.

The house was closed up now, the curtains drawn, and he had to jiggle his key in the lock to turn the bolt. The door creaked open slowly, and he stepped in onto the linoleum floor after wiping his feet carefully on the mat. At once he felt the emptiness of the house, as if it were hollow, reverberating with his footsteps. He walked as silently as he could through the service porch and into the kitchen, where the tile counter was empty of anything but a glass tumbler still partly full of water. He reached for it in order to pour it into the sink, but then let it alone and went out into the dining room, straightening a chair that was out of place at the table. The old oriental carpet was nearly threadbare outside the bedroom door (Edna had always wanted him to step past it, so as not to wear it out before its time) and seeing it now, that footworn patch of rug, he felt the sorrow in the house like a weight.

He listened at the bedroom door and allowed himself to imagine that even now she sat inside, reading in the chair by the window, that he could push the door open and simply tell her he was sorry, straighten things out once and for all. If only he had a chance to explain himself! He reached for the doorknob, hesitated, dizzy for a moment with the uncanny certainty that all the emptiness in the house was drifting out from within that single room, wafting under the door, settling on the furniture, on the carpets, on the lampshades and books like soot in a train yard.

Setting his teeth, he fumed the knob and pushed open the door, peering carefully inside. Very nearly everything was as he remembered: the chairs by the window, the long bookcase on the wall, their bird's-eye maple chests, the cedar trunk at the foot of the bed. He walked in, crossing the floor to the bedside table. On top of it lay a glass paperweight, a silver spoon, and a faded postcard with a picture of a boardwalk on it--Atlantic City? Jimmerson almost recognized it. He had been there before; he and Edna had. He picked up the paperweight and looked into its translucent glass, clouded by milky swirls. He could almost see a face in the swirls, but when it occurred to him that it was Edna's face, he set it down again and fumed to the bottom shelf of the table. A liqueur glass sat there. There was a greenish residue in the bottom, an oily smear, which smelled vaguely of camphor and juniper and weeds. He set the glass down and forced himself to look at the bed.

It was a single bed now, and although it wasn't a hospital bed, there were cloth and Velcro restraints affixed to the frame--wrist and ankle restraints both.

HERANG Mrs. Crandle's doorbell, then stood back a couple of steps so as not to push her. She opened the door wide--no peering through the crack--and the look on her face held loathing and indifference both. "So you've come back," she said flatly. Her white hair hung over her forehead in a wisp, and her house smelled of cabbage and ironing.

"I've come back."

"Now that Edna's dead you've come back to take her things." She nodded when she said this, as if it stood to reason.

"Our things, Mrs. Crandle," he said unwisely.

"You have no claim," she said, cutting him off. "You walked out on that poor woman and left her to that...parlor rat. You might as well have killed her yourself. You did kill her. As sure as you're standing here now, Doyle Jimmerson, you took the breath of life right out of that poor woman." She stared at him, and for a moment he thought she was going to slam the door in his face.

"I didn't kill her, Mrs. Crandle. After forty years of marriage she chose another man, and I...."

"She chose nothing," Mrs. Crandle said. "She met a man who was a conversationalist, unlike some men I could name, a man of culture and breeding, and you flew off the handle. What did she want for herself but some of the finer things in life?--a nice dinner now and then at the French Cafe instead of once a month at the Steer Inn. You're beer and skittles, Doyle Jimmerson, but a little bit of Edna wanted a glass of champagne. That's all she wanted, Mr. Jimmerson, if you're capable of taking my meaning. And when she stood up for herself, you walked out, as if she was having some kind of affair."

"A conversationalist? That's what he was? I can think of a couple of other terms that aren't half as polite. Even you called him a parlor rat. Him and his stinking chin whiskers, his damned champagne. I couldn't stand it. I told her what I'd do before I'd stand it." But even when he said it he knew it was false. Anyone can stand anger. He could simply have thrown his anger out with the bath water. Loneliness and betrayal were another matter, not so easy to throw out. What had Edna suffered? The question silenced him.

"Yes, I did call him a rat," Mrs. Crandle said evenly. "And I'll just remind you that you abandoned your wife to that creature, even though you knew what he was. You couldn't take him, so you left Edna to take him. And she found out too late, didn't she? All of us did. Now she's dead and you've come down here to gloat. You won the war. To the victor go the spoils, eh?"

"I'm not the victor, Mrs. Crandle. I didn't win."

"No, you didn't, Mr. Jimmerson. You lost something more than you know."

He nodded his agreement. He couldn't argue with that. "What do you mean she fount out `too late' Did the Frenchman have anything to do with...?"

"Nothing and everything I guess you could say. No more nor less than you had."

"Hap me out here, Mrs. Crandle. Edna. ..she wouldn't tell me much."

"Well I'll tell you a thing or two. You went inside that house just now, that house where you yourself should have been living this last long year. And so maybe you've seen the room where she died. I was with her there in the last couple of weeks. I stayed by her."

"I thank you for that."

She looked at him in silence for a moment, as if she were tired of him. "You saw the bed?"

"I saw the bed, Mrs. Crandle. I saw the restraints."

"There was almost nothing left of her there at the end. That's all I can tell you. And I mean nothing. She was empty, Mr. Jimmerson, like something made out of sea foam. Any gust of wind might have blown her into the sky. At night, when the moon was overhead, she. . . she would start to drift away, poor thing."

"The moon..." he said, not quite comprehending. The word "lunacy" leaped into his mind. He pictured that lonely bed again, Mrs. Crandle sitting in Edna's seat by the window, knitting and knitting while Edna drifted away, strapped to the bed frame, their old double bed out in the driveway, going to bits in the weather. "She... When she called the last couple of times she sounded a little confused. Like she had lost track of things, you know. She even forgot who I was, who she had called. I guess I just didn't grasp that."

"That's a crying shame."

"Worse than that. I was pretty sure of myself, Mrs. Crandle--sure that I was in the right. What I mean is that I was so damned self-righteous that I put top spin on everything she said. Heaven help me I even twisted what she didn't say. She can tell me all about the Frenchman, was what I thought at the time, but she doesn't know her own damned husband of forty years. Hell," he said, and he rubbed his face tiredly, conscious now that rain was starting to fall again, pattering against the porch roof. "I guess I thought she was trying to get my goat."

"And so you got mad again. You hung up the phone."

"I did. I got mad. I was a damned fool, Mrs. Crandle, but there's not a thing that I can do about it now."

"Well you're right about that, anyway, if it's any consolation to you."

"Tell me about it, then. Was it Alzheimer's?"

"I'm sure I don't know. I'm not certain it was in the medical books at all. It was a wasting disease. That's all I can tell you. Sorrow did it. Sorrow and abandonment. Gravity weighed too heavily upon her, Mr. Jimmerson, and when it looked like it would crush her, she did what she had to to. She made herself light. That's the only truth you'll find town here. I can't tell you anything more than that." Mrs. Crandle swung the door nearly shut now, and he shoved his foot against the jamb to block it.

"Where is she, Mrs. Crandle? You can tell me that much."

"Over at Angel's Flight," she said through the nearly closed door. "They buried her last week. No service of course, except for the Father from up at the Holy Childhood. He said a few words alongside the grave, but it was just me and a couple of the others from the old bridge club. I suppose you can get over there tonight and make your peace if you want to. Or leastwise you can try to make your peace. I hope you can find the words." She shut the door firmly now, against his shoe, and then opened it long enough for him to jerk his foot out before slamming it shut again.

He hadn't gotten anything out of her except bitterness, which was as much as he deserved. He headed down the porch steps, realizing that he hadn't really wanted to know about the bed restraints. What he wanted to know was what had gone through her mind while he was sitting kill of self-pity up in Seattle. What she had thought about him, about the long years that they were married, what her loneliness felt like. He had lost her for a year, and he wanted that year back, along with all the rest that he hadn't paid any attention to. No matter that it was bound to be a Pandora's box, full of sorrow and demons, and perhaps without Hope at the bottom, either.

Evening had fallen, with big clouds scudding across the sky in a wild race, the rain falling steadily now. He headed up Magnolia Street through the downpour. The street lamps were on, haloed by the misty rain, and the gutters already ran with water. Living rooms and front porches were lighted, and be saw a man and a woman looking out through a big picture window at the front of one of the houses, watching the rain the way people sit and watch a fire in a fireplace. He thought of where he would sleep tonight and knew that it wouldn't be among the dusty ghosts in the house; the back of the Mercury would be good enough for him, parked in the driveway, despite what Mrs. Crandle would think and what it would do to his back.

Where Lemon dead-ended into Marigold, he turned up through the big wrought iron gates of the cemetery, and drove slowly toward the stone building nearly hidden in the shade of a cluster of vast trees. Vines climbed the walls of the three-story granite mausoleum, and light shone out from within a deep lamp-lit portico in the tower that served as an entry. There was a second high tower at the rear of the building, lit by lamps hidden on the mausoleum roof. This second tower was clearly a columbarium, the hundreds of wall niches set with tiny doors. A stone stairway spiraled upward around it, and rainwater washed down the stairs now as if it were a mountain cataract. Beyond the tower lay a hundred feet of lawn strewn with headstones, and beyond that a walnut grove stretched away into the darkness, the big white-bunked walnut trees mostly empty of leaves. Above the shadowy grove the moon shone past the edge of a cloud. Jimmerson angled the Mercury into a parking stall, cut the engine, and sat watching for another moment as an owl flew out of the grove and disappeared beneath the eaves of the tower. He got out of the car, slammed the door, and hunched through the rain, ducking in under the portico roof where he rang the bell.

He heard footsteps inside, and the arched door opened slowly to reveal a high-ceilinged room with stone floors and dark wood paneling. The man in the doorway was tall and thin, with a stretched, Lincolnesque face and a rumpled black suit. Jimmerson stepped into the room, which smelled of gardenias, and the man swung the door shut against the rain.

"It's a hellish night," he said, and he nodded at Jimmerson. "I'm George Gladstone."

"Doyle Jimmerson, Mr. Gladstone. I'm glad to meet you."

"I see. You must be Edna Jimmerson's...?"

"Husband." He felt like a fraud. "I was in Seattle when I heard. On business. I drove straight down."

"I'm certain you got here as quickly as you could, Mr. Jimmerson, and welcome to Angel's Flight." A long sideboard stood against the far wall of the room, and on top of the sideboard was a bowl of floating gardenia blossoms and an iron clock. The sound of the ticking clock filled the mausoleum. A gilt-framed painting hung above the sideboard depicting a man and a woman dressed in robes, ascending into heaven in defiance of gravity. An arched door stood open in the clouds, and the Earth lay far below. Here and there above it more people were ascending, tiny wingless angels rising into the sky against the blue of the ocean.

"Very nice picture," Jimmerson said. And he peered more closely at the door in the clouds, at the light that shone from beyond it. There was something in the spiral brush strokes that looked like eyes, hundreds of them, staring out from heaven at the world of the living.

"We like to think of ourselves as a celestial depot, Mr. Jimmerson."

"That's a comforting thought." He fumed his back on the painting. I wonder if I could see...Edna's grave. My wife. I realize it's late, and the weather and all..."

"Yes, of course you can."

"You don't have to take any trouble. If you'll just show me the way... "

"No trouble at all, Mr. Jimmerson. Give me a moment and I'll see to the equipage." Jimmerson followed him into an adjacent room, where a display of coffins was laid out, the coffins set into niches along a stone wall, all of them tilted up at the head end to better show them off. Light shone down on them from candle-flame bulbs in iron chandeliers high above in the ceiling, but the light was dim and the room full of shadows cast by the coffins and by the complex framework of iron that supported them. Jimmerson looked them over, vaguely and shamefully wondering which sort Edna had been buried in--nothing expensive, probably.

They were apparently arranged in order of extravagance. A simple coffin-shaped pine box lay nearest the door, the two-piece lid nailed tight on the bottom and hinged open at the top to reveal a quilted satin lining within. There was a fancier box next to it--some sort of exotic veneer with chrome hardware, and next to that a white-lacquered box with gold handles and a round glass viewing window. Jimmerson stepped across co it and looked in through the porthole, then gasped and trod back when he saw that there was someone inside--a man, pale and thin and with his coat collar too high on his neck.

He forced himself to take another look, and he saw this time that it was a display dummy, its hair very neatly combed and its cheeks rouged. A fly had gotten inside somehow and died, and it lay now on the white satin pillow alongside the dummy's head. It occurred to him that he ought to point the fly out to Gladstone, just for the sake of friendliness, but Gladstone had utterly disappeared, and the mausoleum was silent but for the ticking of the entryway clock. Jimmerson ran his hand over the polished ebony of the next casket, and then walked along past a half dozen more--gold-leafed, inlaid, and carved and with handles and hasps and doodads of silver and ivory. There was an Egyptian sarcophagus, the lid thrown back and supported by a heavy-linked chain. The raised image on the lid was of a pharaoh-looking robed man with a conical beard, his arms crossed, his head turned to the side. In his hands he held a richly painted ankh and a striped serpent, and within the casket, tilted against a brass easel, lay an explanatory placard suggesting that instead of a pharaoh, the image of your loved one might be fashioned on the lid, holding anything at all in his hands--a favorite tie, a fountain pen, a golf club. The casket was extra wide, the paneled sides fit with slots that contained a pair of decorative flasks and a cut crystal tumbler. There were other slots left empty, book-size cubbyholes and a sliding glass panel suitable for a framed photograph.

"All the comforts of home," Gladstone said, coming into the room. "Room at the foot end for a companion as well. Mr. Hemming, the car dealer from Santa Ana, was interred with his dog."

"They killed the dog?" Jimmerson asked, horrified.

"Oh heavens no. The dog died of grief. It's not at all uncommon. Dogs are particularly sensitive that way." He stared at Jimmerson for a moment, as if he intended the comment to make some sort of point, a not very obscure point, and then he said, "Perhaps you'd like to see a little something." Jimmerson followed him out of the room, back toward the rear of the mausoleum where their footsteps echoed down a long corridor lit with flickering wall sconces. There were heavy wooden doors in the stone walls on either side. Gladstone stopped at one of the doors, removed a skeleton key from his pocket, and unlocked the bolt, swinging it open on its hinges to reveal a room containing half a dozen steel tables. A cord emerged from a slot at the bottom of one of the tables, and floating like a helium balloon some few feet from the ceiling, tethered by its foot to the cord, was what appeared to be a shroud-draped human corpse, its face and bare feet exposed to the dim light of the room.

Jimmerson at first took it for another dummy, and he glanced at the ceiling, expecting to see wires. There were none. He stared at it, uncomprehending, but then with a growing certainty that the thing's pale flesh and stringy hair was in fact the flesh and hair of a dead man. Gladstone stepped across and tugged on the cord, which wound down into the table. The corpse descended a couple of feet and then floated slowly upward again when he let go of the cord, its feet swinging around in a clockwise direction, then back again. "He'll come down on his own fairly soon," Gladstone said, seeing the look on Jimmerson's face. "These cases always do. It takes about twelve hours for the spirit to flee the body after death, and then the remains are earthbound once again. Often there's nothing left but a paper shell, easily inflatable if the family wants an open casket funeral."

"What...what on earth did he die of?"

"A broken heart, Mr. Jimmerson. I'll tell you that plainly. Medical science calls it `voluntary dwindling' when they call it anything at all. Which they don't, for the most part. It's utterly beyond the grasp of medicine. These are matters of the spirit, by and large. And it's rare, I can assure you, that we get two such advanced cases in a single week." He stared at Jimmerson again, who suddenly remembered the restraints on Edna's deathbed. What had Mrs. Crandle said about Edna's "drifting away"? Had she been speaking literally...?

"Was Edna...?"

Gladstone nodded slowly, and Jimmerson leaned against the plaster wall to steady himself.

"She's out of harm's way now," Gladstone said, patting Jimmerson's arm. "Let's have a look at her grave, shall we?"

He led the way down the corridor again, Jimmerson stumbling along after him, until they came out into a sort of stone gardener's shed with a lean-to roof. Mud-caked spades and shovels stood tilted against the wall, and a steel backhoe scoop lay on the floor alongside the iron debris of a dismantled engine, greasy pistons and bolts and hoses dumped haphazardly on the ground. Two yellow rain slickers hung from hooks by the door, and Gladstone stepped over the engine parts and took them down, handing one to Jimmerson. It had an attached hat with a wide brim, and the coat itself hung to Jimmerson's knees. Gladstone passed him a black umbrella, then opened the door and stepped out into the rain, which was falling more lightly now.

Jimmerson followed him along a narrow stone path, hoisting his umbrella against the mist and fuming it into the wind, which gusted through the trees, sweeping down a litter of dead oak leaves that whirled away across the grounds. The night smelled of wet leaves and clay, and the moon shone between the clouds, the headstones casting long shadows on the grass. The path wound in a wide circle toward the walnut grove, past a lily-choked fish pond and a cluster of mossy concrete benches. Gladstone finally stopped at the edge of a small, gently sloping hill where a rectangle of new turf covered a tiny grave. They stood silently for a moment.

"It's awfully small," Jimmerson whispered at last.

Gladstone nodded. "It's not uncommon," he said, "that a dwindler can fit into a casket the size of shoe box, once the spirit has flown. And it's not without its advantages, I suppose, when all is said and done. Very conservative burial, specially speaking."

"Will there be a headstone?" Jimmerson asked. "I guess it's up to me to order one."

"One should arrive from the stonecutters late next week, actually. It was paid for by a Mr. des Laumes, I believe the name was. French gentleman. You must have known him." Gladstone gave him a sidewise glance, then looked quickly away.

"Cancel the order," Jimmerson told him.

"It's too late for that," Mr. Jimmerson. "The work's underway. Very elaborate, too."

"I don't want elaborate. I want simple. This Frenchman's got no right to order a headstone. Who gave him permission to shove his oar in?"

"Permission, Mr. Jimmerson? In the absence of any other offering..." He shrugged helplessly. "Of course, now that you've resumed..."

"That's right. Now that I've come home Mr. des Laumes's headstone can go to hell. If the work's already started, then I'll pay for it. Mr. des Laumes can have it back with interest, too-on top of his head."

"As you wish, sir," Gladstone said. "It only has to snow once before I get the drift." He nodded and winked, shook Jimmerson's hand, and then moved off down the path again, heading back toward the mausoleum. Jimmerson stayed by the graveside, forcing himself to simmer down. By God, he wouldn't let this Frenchman give him another moment of grief, not one more moment--especially not here at Edna's grave.

It struck him suddenly that he ought to have brought flowers, something...a keepsake of some sort. His boxes of stuff were still in the Mercury, and he looked out across the hundred yards of rainy night toward the shadowy station wagon, picturing the clusters of quartz crystals they'd brought home from Death Valley and the pair of conical ceramic tornadoes from Edna's family reunion back in Kansas.

But what would he do with them?--scatter salt and pepper shakers across the grave like amulets? He knelt in the grass and ran his hand over the wet squares of turf fitted over the grave, and he felt the freshening rain patter against his slicker. He didn't bother with the umbrella now, but pulled the hat brim down over his forehead, closed his eyes, and tried to pray.

Prayer didn't come easily. He tried again, trying to concentrate, to focus, but almost at once he doubted his own sincerity, and the prayer fell to pieces. His father had told him years ago that a man couldn't pray when he was drunk, and although Jimmerson wasn't a drinking man, he had enough experience to take his meaning. Now it seemed to him that a guilty man had an even more precarious time praying than a drunken man, and for a long time his mind went round and round with partly formed apologetic phrases, half of them addressed to Edna, half addressed to the sky, until finally he shoved the hat back off his head and knelt in the rain with his forehead in his hands, utterly defeated.

He looked up finally to find the moon high in the sky, free of the walnut grove now. Down by the fish pond there was the shadow of Gladstone waiting patiently in his yellow slicker on one of the concrete benches. Jimmerson rose to his feet, his knees creaking beneath him, and walked carefully downhill to the path, where he looked back at Edna's grave.

She wouldn't speak to him. She couldn't. She had gone on.

Jimmerson stood once again in the room with the clock and the flowers, where he had just signed the work order for Edna's headstone- her true headstone, a simple granite slab: loving wife of Doyle Jimmerson, marriage date as well as birth and death. Jimmerson had contracted for the plot adjacent to hers, too, and paid for a twin-headstone for himself.

"I'm afraid I still don't entirely understand Edna's death," he said, standing finally in the open doorway.

"No less than I do, perhaps," Gladstone told him. "These deaths are always a mystery--the secret of the deceased, you know. I'm familiar with the physical manifestations at the end, of course, but the progress of the disease itself is not in my province."

Jimmerson nodded. "So it's not a virus? It's not something she caught?"

"Caught?" He shook his head. "No more than you'd say that a fish catches a baited hook. Rather the other way around."

"Hook? What do you mean?"

"Let's just say that voluntary dwindling isn't entirely voluntary, Mr. Jimmerson. It's voluntary in the main, of course. As I understand it, no one dwindles unless he chooses to dwindle. But the process can be.. .facilitated, perhaps. Suggested."

"Facilitated how?" The Frenchman's face leaped into his mind again, complete with the fact of Mrs. Crandle's apparently despising the man. He had been right!--the man was a cad; although the knowledge of having been right looked like damnation to him. Had he left Edna to some sort of murderer?

"I'm rather at a loss," Gladstone said. "It's my policy to know nothing more than it pays me to know. I might be able to help you, though, although the word `help'...." He shook his head.

"I'd appreciate that, Mr. Gladstone. Anything you can do for me."

Gladstone stared at him again, narrowing his eyes. "You recall the man in the embalming room, tethered to the cord...?"

"Yes, of course."

"He told me much the same thing once, not so very long ago. Death of an old friend, in his case. They'd had some kind of sad falling out and hadn't spoken in years. So I'll caution you to be particularly careful of what you learn, Mr. Jimmerson. And I'll tell you that Mr. des Laumes teas purchased more than one headstone in his day."

WITH THE HELP of Gladstone's Jimmerson found the curiosity shop downtown. It was near the Plaza, and from the sidewalk the shop was apparently empty. The linoleum floor was cracked and buckled, scattered with yellowed newsprint and empty White Rock and Nehi soft drink bottles that hadn't been sold in grocery stores for years. The windows were hung with cobweb, and the broad sills were covered with a heavy layer of dust and dead bugs and a litter of old business cards. Jimmerson and Edna hat often remarked on the shop when they'd walked downtown. Leases near the Plaza were at a premium, yet the shop had gone untenanted since either of them could remember.

As he stood outside, looking in at the window, it seemed to him that the place had a curious perspective to it. He couldn't quite tell how deep it was. The walls were hung with mirrors, dim with dust, and the hazy reflections, depending upon where he stood, made the store appear sometimes to be prodigiously deep, sometimes to be a space so narrow that it might have been one-dimensional, cleverly painted on the window glass. The front door, weathered and paint-scaled, was nailed shut, and a number of envelopes had been dumped through the brass mail slot over the years, many of them with long out-of-date postage stamps.

Gladstone's map led him around the comer, past a Middle Eastern deli and a shop selling Italian antiques. The day was windy, the sky full of tearing clouds, and Jimmerson pulled his coat tightly around him, turning another comer and heading north now, searching for the mouth of the alley that Gladstone had assured him lay at the back of the old buildings. There was the smell of Turkish coffee in the air, end of wet sidewalks and open Dumpsters, and he walked straight past the alley before he knew it. It wasn't really an alley as suck' but was a circular doorway in the brick facade of the buildings, and it opened into a sort of courtyard, a patch of gray sky showing far overhead. Jimmerson peered into the dimly lit recess before stepping over the high curb and into the sheltered twilight. The courtyard was utterly silent, the walls blocking even the traffic noise on the street. He walked hesitantly along the wall, trailing his right hand, and watching to see if there was anyone about. He felt as if he were trespassing, and he was ready to apologize and get the hell out if he were challenged at all. But the courtyard was empty, the brick pavers up in weeds as if no one had walked there for an age.

A row of high, shuttered windows with an iron balcony looked down from the second story; the lower story was nothing but weathered brick, uninterrupted except for a single deeply set door with a heavy brass knocker and a tiny peephole. Jimmerson stood looking for a moment at the door. Gladstone had described it to him, and, seeing it now, he felt as if he were at the edge of something, as if something were pending, as if opening it would change things irreversibly and forever.

A gust of wind blew into the courtyard, kicking up a little wind devil of leaves and trash and dust, and Jimmerson ducked into the doorway recess, out of the turmoil. He put his hand on the door knocker, but the door was apparently unlatched, and it immediately slammed open, propelled by the wind. Jimmerson slipped inside, pressing the door shut behind him, and stood for a moment in the quiet darkness, letting his eyes adjust. He heard sounds now, the shuffling of paper and a noise that sounded like the muted cawing of a crow, and he stepped carefully along down the hallway toward what was clearly the back door of a shop that fronted on the Plaza, the door's wavy glass window dimly lighted from the other side. Hesitantly, he rapped on the glass, ready to convince himself that there was nobody there, that Gladstone was a lunatic. The floating corpse might as easily have been a clever balloon. And Mrs. Crandle was so stupefyingly obscure that...

He heard a voice from beyond the door, and he knocked again, harder this time.

"Come in," someone said, and Jimmerson fumed the knob and pushed the door open, looking past it at the interior of a cluttered curiosity shop. He nearly tripped over an elephant's-foot umbrella stand that held a dozen dusty umbrellas, some of them so old and shopworn that their fabric was like dusty lace. There were thousands of books stacked on open shelves, tilting against the walls, piled in glass-fronted cases alongside crystal wineglasses and flasks and decanters. There was a famished silver ice bucket with S.S. Titanic inscribed on the front, and fishbowls full of marbles, and no end of salt and pepper shakers--grinning moon men and comical dogs and ceramic renditions of characters out of ancient comic strips. The skeleton of a bird hung from the ceiling, and beneath it stood propped-open trunks full of doilies and tablecloths and old manuscripts. A painting of an ape and another of a clipper ship reclined against a long wooden counter scattered with boxes of old silverware and candlesticks and hinges and dismantled chandeliers. The silver seemed to shimmer where it lay, and there appeared above it a brief crackling of flame, like a witch fire, that died out again with a whoosh of exhalation.

He noticed a crow on a high perch, staring down at him, its head tilted sideways. The crow hopped along the perch, clicking its beak, and then said, "Come in," three times in succession. Beyond the crow's perch, back past the clutter of collectibles and curiosities, lay more rooms full of stuff. He could make out toasters and fans and other pieces of electrical gadgetry, old clothes and musical instruments and coffee mugs and articles of wooden furniture, most of it apparently thrift store junk. Back in the shadows something rose slowly into the air and then descended again, and there was the brief sound of moaning from somewhere deep in the shop, and another gleam of witch fire that ran along the tops of the books leaving a ghostly trail behind it that drifted lazily to the ceiling.

There was a movement behind the counter, and Jimmerson saw that a man sat back there on a tall stool. He was a small man with compressed features, possibly a dwarf, and he read a heavy book, his brow furrowed with concentration, as if he were unaware that Jimmerson had come into the shop.

A sign on the counter read, "Merchandise taken in pawn. Any items left over thirty days sold for expenses." Another sign read, "All items a penny. No refunds." Jimmerson looked around again, this time in growing astonishment. The shop was packed with collectibles, some of them clearly valuable antiques. A suit of armor in the comer appeared to be ancient--a museum piece--and there was a glass case of jewelry that sparkled like fireflies even in the dim shop light. The all-items-a-penny sign must be some sort of obscure, lowball joke.

"Selling or buying?" the dwarf asked him suddenly, and Jimmerson realized that he had put the book down and leaned forward on his stool. There was a lamp on the counter, a great brass fish that illuminated half his face. The other half remained in shadow, giving him a slightly sinister appearance. "Lucius Pillbody," the dwarf said, extending his hand.

"Doyle Jimmerson," Jimmerson told him. "I guess I'm really just...curious."

"People who are just curious can't find me," Pillbody said. "So don't be coy. Either you've got something to sell to me or else you're looking to buy."

"I'd simply like to ask you a couple of questions, if I could. My wife died recently. Her name was Edna Jimmerson."

"That Jimmerson! Of course. Wonderful woman. Very good customer."

"She bought a good deal, then?" He could easily imagine Edna buying almost any of this stuff, taking it home by the bagful-although he hadn't seen any evidence of it in the house aside from the odds and ends on the bedside table.

"I can't recall that she bought anything," Pillbody said. "But then that's hardly surprising. Why would she?"

"Well... A penny? Why wouldn't she?"

"Because, Mr. Jimmerson, like most of our customers she was interested in lightening ship, throwing the ballast overboard, you know, unencumbering herself."

"I guess I don't know. I've been away."

"I mean to say that she pawned a goodly number of her own possessions." He waved his hand, gesturing at the lumber of stuff in the shop. "Heaven knows how much of this was hers. I don't keep books, Mr. Jimmerson. I used to separate things out a bit--Mr. Jones on the east wall and Mr. Smith on the west wall, figuratively speaking, which worked well enough if Smith and Jones were willing to let go of a great deal of merchandise. But what about Mr. so-and-so, who came in with a single item and never returned?"

Jimmerson shook his head helplessly.

"Well, I could tag it, of course, and arrange it on a shelf, alphabetically, say. But there were a hundred Mr. so-and-sos and I was always losing track. Tags would fall off. I'd have a busy week and have to find a second shelf to handle the overstock. In thirty days, of course, the merchandise would come off that shelf and find its way onto yet another shelf. And nobody ever claims their pawn, Mr. Jimmerson. In all my years in the business only a couple of resolute customers have changed their mind and asked for their merchandise back. Possessions, Mr. Jimmerson, are a great weight to most people, and I'm afraid that your wife was no exception, if you'll pardon my saying so."

Jimmerson nodded blankly. Apparently he knew far less about Edna than he thought he did. He had never really paid attention, never tried to see the world the way she saw it. He had always been too caught up in his own point of view, in his own way of seeing things. Even with this damned Frenchman. Edna obviously found something in the man that she couldn't find in Doyle Jimmerson. What was it? Jimmerson had never asked, never even thought about it.

"Anyway, now there's no order to things," Pillbody said. "Smith and Jones are scattered far and wide. I made some effort--when was it? mid-century, I guess--to order things according to type, but to tell you the truth, that didn't work out very well either. A certain amount of the merchandise is--what do you call it? Off color, perhaps. Obscene is nearer the mark. I'm talking about the product, let's say, of a particularly disturbed mind, of the human id at its darker levels: your murderer, your pervert. You'd be astonished at what you'd find in here, Mr. Jimmerson. Objective tokens of murder and rape. Illicit sex. The sort of trash that you or I would repress, you know, hide away from the light. Does that astonish you?"

"I don't know," Jimmerson said. "I guess I am astonished."

"All of it went into the room back in the southeast corner, what I used to call the parlor room. Full to overflowing, I can assure you. Now and then a customer would come in, feigning interest in books or jewelry or what have you, but by and by he'd disappear into the parlor room, and I knew what sort of thing he was really after, groping around back there in the dark. There was one man, a Mr. Ricketts, who frequented the parlor room. One of my best customers, if you want to define the word purely in terms of copper coins, which none of us do. Mint?"

"Pardon me?" Jimmerson asked. He was utterly baffled now. Murder? Perversion in the parlor room? No wonder this place was hidden away.

The man held out a small bowl of white mints. Jimmerson shook his head, and the man shrugged. "Looks just like depression glass, doesn't it?" He tilted the bowl, allowing Jimmerson to get a better look at it. It was pink, and had a sort of repeating pineapple pattern on it. There was something not quite symmetrical about the bowl, though, as if it had gotten hot and partly collapsed of its own weight, and it had a heavy seam down the center of it, as if it had broken and been welded back together. In each of the pineapples there was a depiction of the same human face, vaguely angry, its eyes half shut.

The face looked remarkably familiar to Jimmerson. The bowl too, for that matter, although he couldn't for the life of him place it. The dwarf set it down carefully.

"What finally happened," Pillbody said, "was that the parlor room began to stink. Even now you've noticed a certain smell on the air." He squinted seriously, as if Jimmerson might dispute this somehow, but Jimmerson nodded in agreement. He had gotten a whiff of it now and then, an undefinable smell of rot. "It was almost poetic. Artistic you might say. The smell would draw this man Ricketts the way rotten meat draws flies, not to put too fine a point on it. Well, I simply couldn't stand it any longer. I have to work here. If I had my way, I'd throw all of it out, straight into the bin. But then of course I don't have my way, do I? Which of us does? So finally I fell upon the idea of scattering the stuff throughout the store, an item here, another item there, and when they weren't any longer in close proximity, they stank a good deal less, although it took years for them to really settle down. Meanwhile I moved--how shall I put it?--a more pleasant selection of merchandise into the parlor room. Much of what we receive here is not altogether unpleasant, after all, at least to you or I. The problem was essentially solved, aside from the telltale remnants surfacing here and there. Too much order, I said to myself, and you start to breed problems. Things start to stink. Unfortunately, one can still detect the odor back there in the parlor room, especially on a rainy day, when the air is heavy. It's like spilled perfume that's soaked into the floorboards. And of course I still get the same sort of customer nosing his way back there, although Mr. Ricketts has been dead these twenty years. Killed by his own filthy habits, I might add."

Jimmerson nodded blankly, then picked up the candy dish again and looked hard at the pattern in the glass, at the unpleasant repeated face....

It was his own face.

He was suddenly certain of it, and the realization nearly throttled him. He looked in surprise at Pillbody, who merely shrugged.

"As you've no doubt realized, that was one of your wife's items, Mr. Jimmerson."

"Can I buy it?" He hardly knew what he meant by asking. If it had belonged to Edna, though, he wanted it, no matter what it cost. No matter how strange and inexplicable.

"I'm afraid that raises a fairly delicate question, Mr. Jimmerson."

"What question? If I know the answer... " He gestured helplessly.

"Has Mrs. Jimmerson...passed on?"

"Last week."

"Then the bowl's for sale. Let me find something else to put the mints in." He rummaged around under the counter, finally drawing out what looked like a tin basin. "I got this from a barber's wife," he said. "Take a look." He held the basin up so that Jimmerson looked into the bottom side, which was highly polished, almost a mirror. Instead of his own reflection Jimmerson saw a man with a beard looking back out at him, his throat cut from ear to ear, blood running down into the white cloth tied around his neck. He recoiled from the sight of it, and Pillbody set it down on the counter.

"Doesn't affect the flavor of the mints at all," he said, and he dumped the candy out of Edna's bowl and into the basin. "That'll be a penny." He held out his hand.

"Just a penny?"

"Just one. Everything's a penny. But I'll warn you. If you try to return it, you'll pay considerably more to get rid of it than you paid to possess it. Could be entirely impossible, out of the question, unthinkable."

"I don't want to return it," Jimmerson said, and he dug in his pocket for a penny. The dwarf took the coin from him and set it on the counter. Jimmerson looked around then, suddenly certain that he could find more of Edna's things, and straightaway he saw a familiar pair of salt and pepper shakers--ceramic tornadoes, one of them grinning and the other looking like the day of judgment.

"Were these...?" Jimmerson started to ask.

"Those too. Only two weeks ago."

This was uncanny. Jimmerson had the same shakers in his box in the back of the Merc. Except his were smaller, he was sure of it now, and the faces not so clearly defined. One of these had the unmistakable appearance of Edna's dead Aunt Betsy, and the ceramic platform that they stood on was divided by a piece of picket fence that recalled the rickety fence around the Kansas farm where Edna had grown up. His own salt and peppers had no such fence.

"You're certain these were hers?" Jimmerson asked.

"Absolutely."

"I don't recall that she owned any such thing. We bought a similar pair years ago, in the Midwest, but they're different from these. They're in my car, in fact, parked out front." He waved his hand, but realized that he no longer had any idea where "out front" was. His shoulders ached terribly, and he felt as if he had been carrying a heavy pack on his back for hours. His ears were plugged, too, and he wiggled his jaw to clear them.

"These were very recent acquisitions," Pillbody said. "Mrs. Jimmerson brought them to me along with the candy bowl. It's not surprising that you were unaware of them."

Jimmerson fished out another penny. "All right, then. I'll take these, too," he said.

Pillbody shook his head. "I'm afraid not, Mr. Jimmerson."

"I don't understand."

"One thing at a time, sir. You'll overload your circuitry otherwise. You'd need heavy gauge wiring. Good clean copper. The best insulation."

"Circuitry? Insulation? By God then I guess I'll take the whole shebang," Jimmerson said, suddenly getting angry. What a lot of tomfoolery! He gestured at the counter, at the books in the wall behind it, taking it all in with a wave of his hand. He pullet his wallet out of his back pocket and found a twenty-dollar bill. "Start with the jewelry," he said, slapping the money down, "and then we'll move on to this collection of salt shakers. We'll need boxes, because I've got more money where this came from. I'll clean this place out, Mr. Pillbody, if that's what it takes to get Edna's merchandise back, and if my money's no good here, then we'll take it up with the Chamber of Commerce and the Better Business Bureau this very afternoon."

Pillbody stared at him. "Let me show you a little something," he said quietly, echoing Gladstone's words, ant he reached down and pulled aside a curtain in the front of the counter. Inside, on a preposterously heavy iron stand, sat what appeared to be a garden elf or a manlike gargoyle, perhaps carved out of stone. Its face had a desperate, constricted look to it, and it squatted on its hams, its head on its knees and its hands pressed against the platform it sat on. "Go ahead and pick it up," Pillbody said. "That's right. Get a grip on it."

Baffled, Jimmerson bent over, put his hands on the statue, and tried to lift it, but the thing was immovable, apparently epoxied to the platform on which it sat. Seen up close, its face was stunningly lifelike, although its features were pinched and distorted as if by some vast gravity of emotion. Jimmerson stepped away from it, appalled. "What the hell is it?" he asked. "What's going on here?"

"It's mighty heavy, isn't it?"

"This is some kind of trick," Jimmerson said.

"Oh, it's no trick," Pillbody said. "It's a dead man. He's so shatteringly compressed that I guarantee you that a floor jack wouldn't lift him. A crane might do the trick, if you could get one in through the door."

"I don't understand," Jimmerson said, all the anger gone now. He was sure somehow that Pillbody wasn't lying, any more than Gladstone had been lying about the floating corpse. "Does this have something to do with Edna, with the dwindling that Mr. Gladstone mentioned?"

"The dwindling?" Pillbody said. "After a fashion I suppose it does. This was a gentleman who quite simply spent too much money. I don't have any idea what he thought he was buying, but he endeavored, much like yourself, to purchase several hundred collars' worth of merchandise all at once. He was, how shall I put it? A parlor room client, perhaps. In my own defense, I'll say that I had never had any experience along those lines, and I quite innocently agreed to sell it to him. This was the result." He gestured at the garden elf.

"How?" Jimmerson said. "I don't..."

Pillbody shrugged theatrically. "I didn't either. The man was simply crushed beneath the weight of it, piled on top of him suddenly like that. Surely you can feel it, Mr. Jimmerson, the terrible pressure in this shop?"

"Yes," Jimmerson said. His very bones seemed to grind together within him now, and he looked around far some place to sit down. He thought he heard the floorboards groaning, the very foundation creaking, and there was the sound of things settling roundabout him: the crinkle of old paper, the sigh of what sounded like air brakes, a grainy sound like sand being shoveled into a sack, the witch fires leaping and dying...

"It's like the sea bottom," Pillbody whispered. "The desperate pressures of the human soul, as heavy and as poisonous as mercury when they're decocted. Our gentleman was simply crushed." He shook his head sadly. "I can't tell you how much work it was to get him up onto the iron plinth here. We had to reinforce the floor. Here, let me get you a chair, Mr. Jimmerson."

He dragged a rickety folding chair from behind the counter now and levered it open, then drew the drape across the front of the thing in the counter cubbyhole. Jimmerson sat down gratefully, but immediately there was the sound of wooden joints snapping, and the seat of the chair broke loose from the legs and back, and Jimmerson slammed down onto the wooden floor where he sat in a heap among the broken chair parts, trying to catch his breath.

"My advice is simply to take the candy dish, Mr. Jimmerson. Tomorrow's another day. Tomorrow's always another day."

Jimmerson climbed heavily to his feet, steadying himself against the counter. He took the dish and nodded his thanks, and Pillbody picked his penny up off the counter and dropped it into a slot cut into the back of the fish lamp. Jimmerson plodded heavily toward the door. He had the curious feeling that he was falling, that he was so monstrously heavy he was plummeting straight through the center of the Earth and would shoot feet first out the far side. He reached unsteadily for the doorknob, yanked the door open, and stepped into the dim hallway, where, as if from a tremendous distance, he heard the dull metallic clang of the penny finally hitting the bottom of the brass fish. There was the sound of an avalanche of tumbling coins, and then silence when the door banged shut behind him.

He felt the wind in his face now, the corridor stretching away in front of him like an asphalt highway, straight as an arrow, its vanishing point visible in the murky distance. Moss-hung trees rushed along on either side of him, and he knew he was on the road again, recognized the southern Louisiana landscape, the road south of New Orleans where he and Edna had found a farmhouse bed and breakfast. The memory flooded in upon him, and he gripped the candy dish, pressing it against his chest as the old Pontiac bounced along the rutted road, past chickens and low-lying swampland, weathered hovels and weedy truck patches. Edna sat silently beside him, gazing out the window. Neither of them had spoken for a half an hour.

She had bought the candy dish from an antique store along the highway --late yesterday afternoon? It seemed like a lifetime ago. It seemed as if everything he could remember had happened to him late yesterday afternoon, his entire past rolling up behind the Pontiac like a snail shell. The memory of their argument -- his argument -- was abruptly clear in his mind. He heard his own voice, remembered how clever it had been when he had called her a junkaholic, and talked about how she shouldn't spend so much of their money on worthless trash. He saw the two of them in that little wooden room with the sloped ceiling, the four-poster bed: how after giving her a piece of his mind, he had knocked the candy dish onto the floor and broken it in two. She had accused him of knocking it off on purpose, which of course he said he hadn't, and he had gotten sore, and told her to haul the rest of the junk she'd bought out of its bags and boxes -- the ceramics and glassware, the thimbles and postcards and knickknacks -- and he'd cheerfully fling the whole pile of it into the duck pond.

He shut his eyes, listening to the tires hum on the highway. Had he knocked the dish onto the floor on purpose? Certainly he hadn't meant to break it, to hurt Edna. It was just that.... Damn it, he couldn't remember what it was. All justification had vanished. His years-old anger looked nutty to him now. What damned difference did it make that Edna wanted a pink glass candy dish? He wished to God he had bought her a truckload of them. His cherished anger had been a bottomless well, but now that she was gone, now that the whole issue of candy dishes was a thing of the irretrievable past, he couldn't summon any anger at all. It was simply empty, that well.

He glanced out the car window at a half dozen white egrets that stood stilt-legged in a marsh, and he reached across the seat and tried to pat her leg, but he couldn't reach her. She sat too far away from him now. He accelerated, pushing the car over a low rise, the sun glaring so brightly on the highway ahead that he turned his face away. He held the dish out to her, but she ignored him, watching the landscape through the window, and the sorrow that hovered in the air around her like a shade was confused in his mind with the upholstery smell of their old pink and gray Pontiac. The car had burned oil -- a quart every few days -- but they had driven it through forty-two states, put a lot of highway behind them, a lot of miles.

"Take it," he whispered.

But even as he spoke it seemed to him that she was fading, slipping away from him. There was the smell of hot oil burning on the exhaust manifold, and the sun was far too bright through the windshield, and the tires hummed like a swarm of bees, and the candy dish slipped out of his hand and fell into two pieces on the gray fabric of the car seat.

When he came to himself he was outside again, standing in the wind, the door that led to the curiosity shop closed behind him. He searched the paving stones for the broken candy dish, but it was simply gone, vanished. He tried the door, but it was locked now. He banged the door knocker, hammering away, and the sound of the blows rang through the courtyard, echoing from the high brick walls.

THE CAFE DES LAUMES lay two blocks west of the Plaza, near the old train station. It shared a wall with I Tubbs Cordage Company, and across the street lay a vacant lot strewn with broken concrete from a long-ago demolished building. In the rainy evening gloom the cafe looked tawdry and cheerless despite the lights glowing inside. There was no sign hanging outside, just an address in brass numbers and a menu taped into the window. He watched the cafe door from the Mercury, not quite knowing what he wanted, what he was going to do. He opened the glove box and looked again at the .38 that lay inside, and then he gazed for a moment through the windshield, his mind adrift, the rain falling softly on the lamplit street. He shut the glove box and climbed tiredly out of the car, walking across the street and around the side of the building, its windows nearly hidden by overgrown bushes.

He was alone on the sidewalk, the cordage company closed up, the nearest headlights three blocks away on the boulevard. He ducked in among the bushes, high-stepping through a tangle of ivy and parting the branches of an elephant ear so that he could see past the edge of the window. The cafe was nearly empty -- just an old man tiredly eating a cutlet at a comer table and two girls with bobbed hair huddled deep in conversation over a tureen of mussels. Jimmerson saw then that there was a third table occupied, a private booth near the kitchen door. It was des Laumes himself, his curled hair brushed back, a bottle of wine on the table in front of him. His plate was heaped high with immense snails, and he probed in one of them with a long-tined fork, dragging out a piece of yellow snail meat and thrusting it into his mouth, wiping dripped sauce away with a napkin. His chin whiskers worked back and forth as he chewed, and the sight of it made Jimmerson instantly furious. He thought of going back out to the car, fetching the .38 out of the glove box, and giving the sorry bastard a taste of a different sort of slug....

But then he recalled the broken candy dish, and somehow the anger vanished like a penny down a storm drain, and when he searched his mind for it, he couldn't find it. To hell with des Laumes. He hunched out of the bushes again and walked up the sidewalk to where an alley led along behind the cafe. The building was deeper than it had appeared to be, a warren of rooms that ran back behind the cordage company. It was an old building, too -- hard to say how old, turn of the century, probably, perhaps an old wooden flophouse that had been converted to a cafe. There were a couple of windows aglow some distance along the wall, and beyond them a door with a little piece of roof over it. Jimmerson tried the door, but it was locked, bolted from the inside. He spotted a pile of wooden pallets farther up the alley, and he hurried toward them, pulling one of the pallets off the pile and dragging it along the asphalt until he stood beneath the window. He tilted it gingerly against the wall and climbed up the rungs until he could see in over the sill.

A high-ceilinged room lay beyond the window, a table in the corner, a row of beds along one long wall, a big iron safe near the door, some packing crates and excelsior piled in a heap on the floor. The beds rose one atop the other like bunks in an opium den. Each of the beds had a small shelf built at the foot end, with a tiny wineglass hanging upside down in a slot, and a small decanter of greenish liquid, possibly wine, standing on the shelf. Three of the beds were hidden by curtains, and Jimmerson wondered if there were sleepers behind them, like dope fiends on the nod. He heard a rhythmic sighing on the air of the alley around him -- what sounded like heavy, regular breathing, a somnolent, lonely sound that reminded him somehow of Edna's deathbed. A man entered the room now; it was the old cutlet eater from inside the cafe. He moved haltingly, as if he were half asleep, and without a pause to so much as take off his shoes, he climbed into one of the bunks and pulled the curtain closed.

Another of the curtains moved, pushing out away from the bed hidden behind it, and as Jimmerson watched, a man in a wrinkled suit and stubble beard rolled out from beneath the curtain and balanced precariously on the side rail of the bunk, apparently still asleep. Jimmerson braced himself, expecting him to tumble off onto the floor, but instead he tilted slowly back and forth, as if buoyed up by whatever strange currents circulated in the room. He muttered something inaudible, and the muttering dissolved into a muffled sob. And then he tilted forward again so that he seemed to cling to the bed with a knee and an elbow. There was the sudden crash of something hitting the wooden floorboards directly beneath him, and at that instant he lofted toward the ceiling like Gladstone's dead man. But there was a tether tied to his ankle, the other end of the tether affixed to an iron ring bolted to the bed frame, and the man leveled off and floated peacefully just below the ceiling.

The object on the floor was clearly a teddy bear, or at least the replica of a teddy bear, and from where Jimmerson stood it appeared to have been contrived with uncanny verisimilitude -- apparently out of rusty cast iron. It looked worn from years of handling, its nose pushed aside, one of its eyes missing, a clump of stuffing like steel wool shoving out of a tear in its leg.

Along the wall opposite stood an open cabinet divided into junk-filled cubbyholes, much of it reminiscent of the stuff in Pillbody's shop --bric-a-brac mostly, travel souvenirs and keepsakes. Jimmerson made out what appeared to be an old letterman's sweater, a smoking pipe, a caned seashell, a tiny abacus, a copper Jell-o mold in the shape of a child's face, an exquisitely detailed statue of a nude woman, her face downcast, her hands crossed demurely in front of her. He saw then that there were name placards on each of the cubbyholes, hung on cup hooks as if for easy removal.

He stepped backward off his makeshift ladder, his hands trembling, and started back down the alley toward the street, although he knew straightaway that he wasn't going anywhere. Gladstone had warned him about this, so it wasn't any vast surprise. He had largely come to understand it, too -- what Pillbody's curiosities amounted to, what it was that Edna had sold, why she had grown more and more vacant as the months had slipped past. He thought about the odds and ends on her bedside table, the medicinal-smelling bottle with the green stain, the liqueur glass, and he wondered if one of these narrow beds had been hers, a sort of home away from home.

Retracing his steps to the pallet, he climbed back up to the lighted window and forced himself to read the names one by one, spotting Edna's right away, the third cubbyhole from the left. He could see that there was something inside, pushed back into the shadows where it was nearly hidden from view, something that caught the light. He strained to make it out -- a perfume bottle? A glass figurine? He searched his memory, but couldn't find such an object anywhere.

The door opened at the far end of the room now, and an old woman walked in, followed by des Laumes. Her hair was a corona of white around her head, and she was wrinkled enough to be a hundred years old. The floating man had descended halfway to the floor, as if he were slowly losing buoyancy, and the old woman grabbed his shoe and a handful of his coat and steered him toward his bed again, pushing him past his curtain so that he was once again hidden from view. She bent over to pick up the thing on the floor, but des Laumes had to help her with it, as if it were incredibly heavy. Together they shoved it into a cubbyhole marked "Peterson." She fumed and left then, without a word.

Des Laumes remained behind, looking around himself as if suspicious that something was out of order. He appeared to be sniffing the air, and he held a hand up, extending his first finger as if gauging the direction of the wind. Jimmerson moved to the comer of the window, hiding himself from view. A moment later he peered carefully past the window casing again.

The Frenchman held the statue of the woman in his hand now, scrutinizing it carefully. Then he peeked inside one of the cubbyholes and retrieved a glass paperweight that appeared to Jimmerson to be packed with hundreds of tiny glass flowers. Des Laumes held it to the light, nodded heavily, and walked across to the safe, spinning the dial. He swung the door open, placed the statue and the paperweight inside, and shut the door.

Jimmerson climbed down again and set off up the alley. His thinking had narrowed to a tiny focus, and his hands had steadied. Within a few seconds he had the .38 out of the glove compartment. He slipped the gun into his trousers pocket, then walked straight across the street, up the flagstone path to the cafe. The door opened and the two girls with the bobbed hair came out, arguing heatedly now, neither one of them looking happy. Jimmerson slipped past them through the open door, face to face with des Laumes himself, who stood there playing the host now. The Frenchman reached for a menu, gestured, and moved off toward a table before realizing who Jimmerson was. He turned around halfway across the empty cafe, a look of theatrical surprise on his face. "What a pleasure," he said.

"Can I have a word with you somewhere private?" Jimmerson spoke to him in the tone of an old and indebted friend.

"It's very private here," the man said to him. "How can I help you?" His face was bloated and veined, as if corrupted from years of unnameable abuse, and he reeked of cologne, which only half hid a ghastly odor reminiscent of the stink in Pillbody's "parlor room."

"Help me?" Jimmerson asked, hauling the gun out of his pocket and pointing at the Frenchman's chest. "Better to help yourself. I'll follow you into the back." He gestured with the gun.

"I've been shot before," des Laumes told him, shrugging with indifference, and Jimmerson pulled the trigger, aiming high, blowing the hell out of a brass wall sconce with a glass shade. The sound of the gun was crashingly loud, and startled horror passed across des Laumes's face as he threw his hands up.

Someone peered out of the kitchen -- the chef apparently -- and Jimmerson waved the pistol at him. "Get the hell out of here, " he shouted, and the man ducked back into the kitchen. There was the sound of a woman's voice then, and running feet. A door slalomed, and the kitchen was silent. "Let's go," Jimmerson said, aiming the gun with both hands at the Frenchman's stomach now. The man turned and headed back through the cafe, past the kitchen door, down a hallway and into the room with the beds. Keeping the pistol aimed at des Laumes, Jimmerson reached into Edna's cubbyhole and pulled out the trinket inside -- a glass replica of what appeared to be the old Pontiac.

He hesitated for a moment before slipping it into his pocket, steeling himself for the disorienting shift into the past, into the realm of Edna's memory. Probably he would lose des Laumes in the process. The Frenchman would simply take the pistol away from him, maybe shoot him right then and there....

But nothing happened. He might as well have dropped his car keys into his pocket. "The safe, " Jimmerson said.

Des Laumes shrugged again. "What is it that you want?" he asked, turning his palms up. "Surely..."

"What I want is to shoot you to pieces, " Jimmerson told him. "I don't know what you are -- some kind of damn vampire I guess. But I don't have one damn thing to lose by blowing the living hell out of you right now. You should know that, you...stinking overblown bearded twit." He stepped forward, closing in with the pistol as if he would shove it up the Frenchman's nose. The man fell back a step, putting up his hands again and shaking his head. "Now open the safe," Jimmerson told him.

The Frenchman spun the dial and opened the safe door, then stepped aside and waved at it as if he were introducing a circus act. "Clean it out," Jimmerson told him. "Put everything into the boxes." He picked up a packing crate and set it on the floor in front of the safe, and des Laumes took objects out one by one and laid them in, packing the excelsior around them.

"This is common theft," the Frenchman said, shaking his head sadly.

"That's right," Jimmerson told him. "And it'll be a common hole in the head for the good Pierre if he doesn't hurry the hell up. That's it, monsieur, the statue, too. Now the stuff in the cabinet. Fill those boxes." He thought about the chef, the rest of them that had fled through the back door. Would they go to the police? He made up his mind right there on the spot: if he heard sirens, if the door flew open and des Laumes was saved, Jimmerson would shoot the man dead before he handed over the gun.

Des Laumes filled a second packing crate and then a third, until every last piece of bric-a-brac lay in the crates. Except for the glass automobile, Jimmerson hadn't recognized any of it as Edna's. And even if des Laumes knew the source of the things in the safe, he wouldn't tell Jimmerson the truth about them. The man was an end-to-end lie, with nothing at all to recommend him but his idiotic beard like a runover tar brush. Jimmerson was heartily sick of the sight of it, and with the .38 he motioned des Laumes against the wall, away from the sleeping people on the beds. He easily pictured killing the man, shooting the hell out of him, leaving him dead and bloody on the ground.

But somehow the taste of it was like dust in his mouth. How would there be any satisfaction in it' He could as easily picture Gladstone shaking his head sadly, and the idea filled him with shame. More trouble, more pain -- anger like a drug, like alcohol, like lunacy, having its way with him again.

There were no sirens yet, no need to hurry.

"Sit down," he said, and des Laumes, his face white now, slumped obediently against the wall. Holding the gun on him, Jimmerson removed one of the liqueur-filled decanters from its niche in the shelf above an empty bed. "Drink it like a good boy," he said, handing it to him, and he held the pistol against the man's ear.

De Laumes stared at him, as if he were making up his mind. He shook his head feebly and started to speak. And then, as if suddenly changing his mind, he heaved a long sigh, shrugged, and drank off the contents of the decanter.

"That's it," Jimmerson said. "Down the hatch." He fetched out another decanter, and forced him to drink that one, too, and then a third and a fourth. All in all there must have been two quarts of the stuff, and the room reeked with the camphor and weeds smell of it.

Des Laumes's face had rapidly taken on a green pallor, and he looked around himself now, a growing bewilderment and horror in his eyes. He clutched his expanding stomach and slowly began to rock forward and backward, his head bouncing with increasing force off the wall behind, his eyes jerking upward in their sockets, a green scum at the comers of his mouth. Jimmerson backed away in case the man got sick, watching as the rocking intensified and des Laumes began to jackknife at the waist like a mad contortionist, his forehead driving impossibly against the floorboards, a piglike grunting issuing from somewhere deep inside him.

Jimmerson awakened the four sleepers, two women and two men -- the old cutlet eater and poor Peterson. The women, both of whom still clutched their handbags, were surprisingly young and bedraggled, and they looked out from their beds, blinking their eyes, growing slowly aware of des Laumes's thrashing on the floor. One by one Jimmerson helped them down, untethering them from the beds, unbolting the back door and letting them out into the alley. Mr. Peterson walked like a man on the moon, high-stepping through the puddle, and it occurred to Jimmerson to offer him back his cast-iron teddy bear for ballast, but he saw that it wouldn't be a kindness to him. Soon enough he'd be heavy again.

When the four of them had reached the street, Jimmerson hauled the packing crates out into the night and then headed around the cafe to where the Mercury was parked. He climbed inside, fired it up, and swung around the corner into the alley, letting the engine idle while he loaded the crates into the rear of the car along with his own boxes of junk.

There was a noise from inside the cafe like rocks hitting the walls, and Jimmerson looked in through the door, which was partly blocked by des Laumes himself. The Frenchman had levitated a couple of feet off the floor, and his body spasmed in midair like a pupating insect in a cocoon. The room roundabout him was strewn with unidentifiable junk --rusty iron and dirty glass and earthy ceramic objects, misshapen and stinking. Jimmerson pulled the door shut and climbed into the Mercury, slamming the car door against the sounds of knocking and grunting and moaning, and backed away down the alley, swinging out into the street and accelerating toward home as the rain began to fall again. He reached into his pocket and took out the glass Pontiac, which he set carefully on the top of the dashboard so that it caught the rainy glow of passing headlights, and it was then that it dawned on him that he should have left des Laumes a penny.

He had needed every cubic inch of the big rental truck in order to clean out Pillbody's shop. The dwarf had made him sign a release, and had talked obscurely about Jimmerson's "aim being true." "On the up and up," he had said. "Solid copper wiring. No imperfections." But he had taken the thousands of pennies happily enough, although he had refused to drop them into the brass fish until Jimmerson had packed up what he wanted and driven away. Jimmerson had wanted it all, and Pillbody had worked alongside him, running wheelbarrows full of curiosities out the back and across the courtyard to where Jimmerson had backed the truck up to the circular brick doorway of the courtyard.

The truck crept east along Maple Street now, the engine laboring, the overload springs jammed flat, the tires mashed against the rims, the truck bed heaving ominously from side to side. Jimmerson sat hunched in the driver's seat, which sagged beneath his weight, and he fought to see the road in front of him as bits and pieces of arcane and exotic imagery stuttered through his mind like subliminal messages, almost too rapidly to comprehend. His skin twitched and jerked with competing emotions: dark fears rising into euphoric happiness, dropping away again into canyons of sadness, soaring to heights of lunatic glee. Somewhere in the depths of his mind he heard the clatter of pennies cascading and was dimly aware of the howling of the truck engine and the smell of hot oil and burning rubber. There was the sound of a hose bursting, and a wild cloud of steam poured out from under the hood, and in the swirling vapors a startling array of faces appeared and disappeared. Edna's face came and went, and he recognized the face of the bearded man with the bloody neck, and felt a stab of vicious and shameless satisfaction for the duration of a blink of an eye, and then one face was replaced by another and another and another, a dozen at a time, a hundred -- a tide of shifting visages soaking away into the sands of his ponderous and overloaded memory.

Now and then he came to himself, heard the truck creaking and groaning, saw that he had made his way some few feet farther up the road, felt the seat springs burrowing against his thighs, the cramping of muscles, the pressure on his bones and his teeth. His breath rasped in and out of his lungs and his head pounded and the truck engine steamed and roared. Edna's face appeared before him time and again now, and he was swept with her memories -- the memory of a fire in a hearth on a rainy night, the two of them in easy chairs, an atmosphere of utter contentment that he squirreled away in his mind, holding fast to it, and yet at the same time crippled by the thought that she had given this memory away too, that joy might have become as great a burden to her as sorrow....

He saw that he was nearly at Oak Street, nearly home, and he cranked the steering wheel around to the right, felt the weight of the load shift ponderously, the truck tilting up onto two wheels. For a moment he thought he was going over, and in that impossibly long moment the pennies continued to fall into Pillbody's brass fish, and the faces whirled in the steam in wild profusion, and Jimmerson felt himself crushed like a lump of coal by a vast, earth-heavy pressure.

HE OPENED his eyes when he felt the sun on his face next morning. He lay slumped on the seat in the cab of the truck, and he moved his arms and legs gingerly, testing for breaks and strains. His jaws ached, and his joints felt stiff and sore, as if he were recovering from a flu. He sat up and looked out the window. Somehow he had made it home, alive, although he had only the vaguest recollection of arriving -- the truck shutting down with a metal-breaking clank, hard rain beating on the roof off and on through the night.

He opened the door and stepped down onto the street, seeing that he had driven the passenger side of the truck right up over the curb, and the wheels were sunk now in the wet lawn. Most of the paint was gone from the truck body, apparently shivered off, and the tires were flayed to pieces. The truck bed was nearly emptied, scattered with just a few odds and ends of bric-a-brac. Late yesterday evening Pillbody had finally given up counting pennies and purchases, but even so they must have come awfully close to square in the transaction if this was all that had been left unpaid for. Jimmerson climbed heavily up onto the bed and filled a crate with the leftovers, then climbed down again and hauled it into the garage where he had taken des Laumes's three crates yesterday morning. He set about methodically smashing each object to fragments with a sledgehammer, making sure that none of them could ever be sold, not even for a penny. Peterson's iron bear took the most work, but finally it too crumbled into a hundred chunky little fragments that Jimmerson dumped into a pickle jar and capped off. And now, with Pillbody's stuff either consumed or broken, and des Laumes's cafe cleaned out, the whole lot of it was once again a memory, a thing of the past.

He went inside where he showered and shaved and changed into fresh clothes, and then he hauled the single bed outside and threw it onto the back of the truck, replacing it in the bedroom once again with the double bed from out by the garage. Edna's remembrances -- the paperweight, the postcard, the silver spoon, and the glass Pontiac -- he put into the curio cabinet in the living room. He would never know what they meant, and their presence in the house would remind him of that. He opened the windows finally, to let the air in, and then went out through the front door, climbed into the Mercury, and drove downtown.

The curiosity shop was emptied out, no longer a mystery. The old storefront, with its dusty litter, its confusing mirrors, and its nailed-shut door had been swept clean, and he could see through the window into the rear of the shop now, clear back into Pillbody's parlor room where workmen were rolling fresh paint onto the walls. He got back into the Mercury and headed west. The Cafe des Laumes had collapsed on itself, the windows shattered, the walls fallen in, the roof settled over the wreck like a tilted hat. Jimmerson wondered if des Laumes himself was in there, under the rubble, whether the man had simply imploded in the end. To hell with him. It didn't matter anymore.

He swung a U-turn, rested his arm along the top of the seat, and drove back south toward the cemetery, where he would try once again to pray.

~~~~~~~~

By James P. Blaylock

Those readers who have already discovered the work of James P. Blaylock (his many novels include The Paper Grail, Homunculus, The Digging Leviathan, and most recently Winter Tides) know that his fantasies show a keen appreciation of life's oddities and eccentricities. The following novelet, which was published in a limited edition by A.S.A.P. a few months ago, marks Mr. Blaylock's first appearance in these pages. It's a pleasure to introduce you to Doyle Jimmerson and the unusual truths that await him in the old curiosity shop.

GONE TO HEAVEN SHOUTING

I'VE BEEN ON THIS QUEST for forty-seven years, ever since my sixteenth birthday. Every once in a while I find what I'm looking for, and the restless urge to search settles for a little while. It sleeps.

It never sleeps long.

I haven't been home in thirty years, though I've directed others there.

There are music webs in every community. Find a thread to follow and it will lead you to little knots of musicians who will give you other threads, if you treat them right. There's the church choir circuit, and the community choir circuit, and the big performing arts centers that play host to all kinds of different musicians, big names in classical, rock, folk, alternative; and then there are the contra dance groups, and the old time fiddlers, and the rock bands and the jazz bands and the other people who play in little night clubs and taverns and small concert halls. There are high school garage bands who know about each other.

Then there are the people who practice alone at home when no one else is around to hear, and those I can almost never track down, their threads are so short. Mostly they aren't the ones I want, but it hurts me to know that perhaps sometimes they are.

Some threads lead to more than one sort of musician, and some never cross into alien territory at all.

I never know where I'll find my people. I used to search for them in a more diffuse way, move into a town and walk its streets up and down and wait for the tug of recognition, watch for a gesture or a flash of light or a certain look around the eyes. These last few years I've gone to the music webs, tweaked threads, listened for rumors. I'm probably missing a lot of my people. Not all of them have found their way to music.

Not all of them wish to be found.

I've caught more family fish with music as a net than I did just strolling and trolling with no bait at all.

My name is Cyrus Locke. I carry a fiddle.

Also nice bamboo spoons for rhythm, and a pennywhistle and some harmonicas, but those are easier to hide.

IT WAS A DECEMBER Saturday night like many they get in the Pacific Northwest, stars scattered across the dark sky, fog lying like pooled milk in roadside a ditches and in low spots in the pastures. The air smelled of cold and woodsmoke. I was traveling by air, the way I do at night when people are less likely to notice. I don't go directly over the roads, where headlights might catch me, but I keep close enough not to miss the sort of buildings I want to investigate.

I had watched a Christmas parade that morning in town, paying particular attention to the various marching hands, but I hadn't seen any trace of my people, though I'd enjoyed the spectacle. Now I was just covering territory and listening. On a cold night you don't often hear music. People have got their weatherproofing up and keep their tunes inside. I would rather search than hole up, though, especially since I had just finished three cups of coffee at a diner and was wide awake.

I drifted over a small country school, slowing to look at it properly. Sometimes there are community events in a school of a Saturday night, and I specialize in community events. If someone is going to shine, that's a good place to find them.

No sign of life there, but on the air a thread of music.

South of the school was a big old oak tree, and huddled near and beneath some of its limbs, a grange building. Light, music, parked cars. Just the sort of place I liked. I chose a shadow in the grove of oaks behind the building and slipped down into it, checking the back porch for people smoking or children playing. I used to get caught once in a while in the early days, when I hadn't learned caution. Once getting caught led to one of my better discoveries. All in all, though, I'd rather pick my moments.

I stood for a while listening to the music. Country western, swing, old tunes that I remembered hearing on radios in backwoods in the fifties, early in my questing years. I took my spoons and a D-pitch harmonica out of my knapsack and stuck them in my pants pockets, then lifted and lodged the knapsack in high branches of one of the oak trees.

On the ground again, I opened my fiddle case and took out Lucia. She's been with me twenty-two years, ever since I rescued her from a pawn shop. If I had some of the gifts of other people in my family I might be able to get her to talk, tell me her past history. What I know of her is that the label inside says she's a copy of a Stradivarius, like most fiddles you find, and it has the name of a German city and a date, 1897. I got out the bow and tightened the hairs, then tuned the fiddle, listening to the music leaking out of the building, an old tune Hank Williams had covered in the early fifties, "Take These Chains from My Heart."

I put the fiddle and bow away, straightened, took a deep breath, then wandered around toward the front of the grange, wondering how these people took to strangers. The windows were curtained with what looked like yellow-orange sheets, so I couldn't see in. One window, the one nearest the stage, was open to the frosty night. I caught a whiff of people: cologne, perfume, and sweat. I heard the shuffling sound of dancers on a wooden floor.

There is a dream that comes to me sometimes, more often lately than I like, of all the world poisoned and empty and dead. The only colors are gray, black, brown, and ice-white. In this dream I am alive.

In life I have survived many things and anticipate surviving many more.

In the dream, I am alive, but alone.

I opened the double door into the grange hall and saw people dancing and people playing music and I smiled the way I do every time I know my dream has not come true yet. I am so glad to see people alive, whether they are family members or not. My heart lightened. I edged to the left, where older folks were sitting on a padded bench, and murmured to a white-haired woman in a pale blue dress, "This a private party, or can anybody join?"

"Welcome, stranger," she said. "Go right on up and make yourself at home." Such a nice smile she had.

They were playing "If Teardrops Were Pennies" as I edged past couples dancing. Everyone had smiles for me. I smiled back. Sun has beaten my skin brown and folded, and age has bleached my hair oyster-shell white. I am a fraction taller than most but can still fit into clothes I find on the medium rack in thrift stores, like the scuffed loafers, faded dungarees, gray-and-white striped shirt, black leather vest, and beat-up bomber jacket I was wearing.

All around the cavernous room were people who looked vaguely like me in size and age, some sitting on benches that lined the walls, some out on the dance floor, coupled and whirling. A few of them were a little more dressed up than I was. There were a few kids too, and some younger couples. My dream of destruction retreated as I looked around and felt that for this moment I had found a home and a family.

I get this family feeling at the best of times. Sometimes it's deceptive. Often it's not, though. There are other places and people, foreign to where I stood that Saturday night, that feel even closer to home to me. Sometimes I walk into alien worlds when I open a door. Sometimes after I've spent a little time in an alien world it embraces me too. Not many cast me out completely.

There were three people with guitars toward the front of the room, and a woman with a string bass, two fiddlers, one white-haired fellow with a bandolier of harmonicas, a young woman with a banjo, and an older woman sitting and strumming a mandolin. Three microphones on stands amplified voice, fiddle, harmonica, cords were hidden under little throw rugs. Black instrument cases littered the stage behind the musicians, and the desks and floor near where they were playing. Some cases had instruments still in them; a rotating cast of musicians, apparently.

Not quite sure of the particular protocol of this place, I took a seat near the woman with the mandolin and held my fiddle case on my lap. She was wearing a turquoise sweatshirt with big furry white cats painted on it in glitter. She had red-framed glasses and a big grin, and curly dark hair shot with silver. Her earrings were silver snowflakes.

The tune ended and she smiled and nodded at me. "You new in town?"

"Yep."

"Welcome to Spruce Grange." She held out a hand and I shook it. "I/m Alma."

"Cyrus," I said.

"Care to join us?"

"Love to."

"You want to sign up for a couple tunes?" She nodded toward a yellow shopping pad sitting behind the musicians on a podium that had been shoved up against the stage. "You can just play backup if you want."

"I'll sign," I said. One of the fiddlers stepped up to the central microphone and began "Black Velvet," an old waltz. I hadn't heard it in a long time. It was surely pretty.

I edged behind the other musicians, who made room, and picked up a chewed pencil. The sign-up sheet had twenty numbers with names listed beside them: Joe W., John I., John P., Grace, Calvin, Annie, Jim, Sharon, Lilian, Harry, Dale, Earl, Everett, fine old names with nothing strange about them. None of them sounded like names my family would use; we generally venture farther away from common when naming our babies. I wrote "21" and "Cyrus," wondering where on the list they had reached, how soon they would expect me to play.

Someone would tell me.

I set my case on the edge of the stage, opened it, and got out Lucia and the bow. Tightened bow hairs, ran some rosin across them, checked my tuning, glanced at the other musicians near me, got a nod and a smile from the bass player, and edged into the tune, playing melody very softly to get it back in my fingers and my head, then venturing into harmony, observing the rules of being a backup player: Listen to the leader. Never play louder than whoever is leading, and never play fancier. Follow the leader's tempo by watching his or her foot tapping even if other people are lagging behind or getting ahead. Smile.

It wasn't great music, but it was good-enough-to-dance-to music, and that was swell. People were moving to it and smiling. Near the door at the other end of the hall, three people were even boot-scooting while nearer couples held each other and waltzed. New ways coming in, I thought, then wondered how I knew they were new. I was melding just a little. Thoughts can travel by air, and air is my sign. Join a tune, mix with it, slide under the surface, add your mite while others are adding theirs, and you can get a little tangled with the thought-stream.

Here it was friendly for the most part. The first fiddler focused on fingering, hoping the tune would stick with her until she got through her fourth repeat of it. The second fiddler hated the sound of the banjo, but didn't hate the banjo player. One of the guitar players was annoyed at the second fiddler, thinking that the second fiddler was misbehaving by playing fancier than the first fiddler grandstanding. Bad manners. The mandolin player was interested in me. She did think I was a good-enough musician, and so far not too musically pushy, and that was warming.

I let the thoughts go and sank into the music, which had a life of its own. The tune had its shadowy ancestry, passed from person to person, and its brief life, born at the first bowstroke, dying with the final flourish, in the middle it reached out into people's heads and planted its seeds there. With luck it would be reborn many ways -- a hum, a whistle, or maybe a kid hearing it and wanting to figure out how to play it. Tunes were like benign viruses. They could sure as shooting mutate from one life to the next, too.

The first fiddler kicked up her foot to signal that she was approaching the end of the tune. She closed it down after that, nodded to the few people who applauded, turned and told us, "Chinese Breakdown," and started on her second tune.

I played twiddles that supported her tune and watched people two-step lively around the floor. It was so fine to see people enjoying themselves in the midst of music and dance. I basked in it, part of the music tapestry myself.

After a while I woke out of the moment and thought about my quest, and opened up my ears for that particular thread of sound that would tell me I had found a family member. An overtone, a harmonic that nobody else could quite produce. It was not a sound that came out of an instrument, but I could hear my own melody there in the overhead, singing about who I was and what I was doing at that moment, a tumbling tune of joy.

Faintly, faintly, masked by other sounds, there was the thread I sought. Fainter than I had ever heard it before. I tuned my listening to this trace, kept my mind on it while my hands played music along with the first fiddler.

It was a strange little melody, plaintive and constant. "Chinese Breakdown" came to a rousing finish and the dancers and listeners clapped, and still this tiny tune played on, the same notes sounding, no shift in awareness (my own tune had spun to a waiting pedal note until the next overtune would rise and it could harmonize). In the brief break between one player and the next I listened to the faint tune and recognized it. "Bright Morning Stars Are Rising," an old Christmas tune whose origins I did not know.

One of the guitar players stepped up to the mike, then turned back to face the musicians. "Hey, Good-Looking,'" she said, "in G." She grinned at us. "Alma, play me in, okay?"

The mandolin player nodded and grinned and struck up the tune and pretty soon we were all flowing along the notes together. The guitar player had a nice clear voice and the bass kept good rhythm and dancers flocked to the floor. In the middle between verses the guitar player surprised me by turning to me and lifting her brows, then nodding toward one of the mikes. I stepped up and played a verse, wondering how this would all work out in the hierarchy of musicians, that she had asked a stranger for backup before she went to the ones who were already here. Such tiny shifts and swedes in the living dynamic, everything could change, or everything could absorb change and return to its flow unimpeded.

I played well and strongly, decorated notes with flourishes, finished my verse and nodded back to her, smiling, then stepped away from the mike. "Thanks," she said, and sang the second verse. It was all right. The others still projected contentment. Polite, friendly, welcoming people.

The tiny thread of family still played, underneath it all, unchanging as the evening moved on. We played down through the list, with some people putting down instruments and going out to dance and others coming in off the floor to pick up instruments. I played two tunes, "Florida Blues" and "Kentucky Waltz."

Then the musicians took a break and most people went to the dining room for potluck desserts.

"Mighty fine, mighty fine, Cyrus," Alma said as she put her mandolin back in its hardshell case. "Hope you'll come next week. We're playing out at Ethel Creek Grange then."

"Thank you. I don't know if I'll still be in town, but I appreciate the invitation."

"Want some coffee?"

"In a couple minutes, thank you," I said.

She smiled, picked up a cane that had been lying beside her chair, and moved off after most of the others toward the dining hall.

I put my fiddle away, set the case on the stage. The mystery tune was still playing, clearer now that other ambient noise had quieted. I looked around the nearly empty room.

I glanced through the door into the next-door room and saw a combination kitchen-dining room which ran the length of the dance hall but was narrower across: cream walls, lace curtains, two rows of end-to-end long narrow tables draped with paper tablecloths, folding metal chairs lined up on both sides of them and people sitting in the chairs, talking. At the far end of the dining room was the kitchen area, with a counter spread with snacks in dishes or supermarket plastic containers. People lined up, holding paper plates, to get desserts. Some dropped a dollar into a donation coffee can on the buffet.

A few people lingered on the benches in the dance hall, talking with each other. One of the guitar players, a tall old guy named Dale, was still sitting up front and noodling on his guitar. The banjo-playing woman came back from the kitchen carrying two Styrofoam cups of steaming coffee. She set them down carefully and then sat next to Dale.

I wandered up the hall and down, pausing near the small clots of people and listening for the tune. Not there, not here, not there. I wandered toward Dale and Rose, the banjo-player. The tune was louder there, but it didn't seem to be coming from either of them.

I climbed up onto the stage.

Louder.

Was someone hiding up here? I was satisfied at this point that the tune was something other people didn't naturally hear, since no one else had responded to it. The music had that flavor of family, and it went on and on. It was hard for me to believe that some lost lonely person would hide out on the stage or in the wings making this music when there were so many friendly people out front.

Not everybody in my family can adjust to regular people, though. Lots of them hide out entirely and never mix. There seems to be more and more of a trend toward isolation with some of my people, and I deplore it. Wonderful people are everywhere. You miss a lot if you stop looking for them.

Simple blank flats framed the stage, with a few pieces of rickety furniture against them. The back wall held a working door. I went through it, listening to the air, tasting. Bats, somewhere up above in the galleries. To the left, to the right, slender dark corridors leading to the wings. No complicated stagecraft here. I had seen grange skits before. Full of enthusiasm, nothing complicated. Occasional raw talent. Occasional trained talent.

On a table, a straw farmer's hat. A bouquet of silk flowers in rust and bronze and gold.

No sign of the tunemaker.

"What are you looking for?" asked a voice from behind me. I turned and found Alma leaning on her cane and peering at me along the backstage corridor.

That was the question, wasn't it?

Without the aid of music as a carrier, I had no idea what she was thinking.

"A tune," I said after a moment.

"You're looking for a tune behind the scenes at Spruce Grange?"

"Do you know that old Christmas carol, 'Bright Morning Stars Are Rising'?"

"Eh?" She cocked her head.

I listened to the trace of music. Here, close to its source, I heard a child's voice singing the words on top of thin fiddle notes. I lifted my voice and joined the song in mid-verse: "'Oh, where are our dear mothers? Oh, where are our dear mothers? Day is-a-breaking in my soul.'"

Alma took two steps back, her face clouding, mouth drooping from its smile.

"What is it?" I asked. "I didn't mean to upset you."

"Why are you looking for that song here?" she whispered.

I opened the door in the scene and stepped out into the light on stage. She entered from the wing. I sat on a metal chair among the instrument cases, and she sat on a chair next to me and laid her cane on the floor.

"Something is singing that song," I said.

"What do you mean?" Her eyes were bleak behind her glasses.

"Do you believe in ghosts?" Some people do, I know. I believe, but then, I've met a number of them.

"No," she whispered. She looked right and left, then stared down at her feet.

"Never mind, then," I said. I patted her hand.

A thread of family here, but not really in the present time. I could come back later and search, I was pretty sure, after everybody else had left. Might as well enjoy what was left of the evening.

"When I was a little girl," she whispered, and looked up at me. I smiled and waited.

"When I was a young girl, I was searching in the woods for scrap metal to help with the war effort. My daddy had gone off to war and I was a wild girl, a handful, roaming up and roaming down. Momma couldn't keep me home at all. Any excuse to get out would do. I was out picking blackberries before there were any ripe ones, or looking for filberts or pears or apples from trees gone wild from pioneer orchards. Scrap metal was a good excuse to wander, those years.

"It was in these woods, just back of the grange here-- that was before there were all these people in the valley; folks lived much further apart, and the town was a lot smaller in those days- in these woods I found them."

"Who?"

"That little family. They'd raised a house out of up-and-down logs, not regular crosswise. Squatters was what they was. This all used to be part of Tim and Adeline Venture's donation land claim, but they never did log it all off, weren't enough kids in the family...well.

"So I was running through the woods keeping an eye out for metal, only I was so far in wasn't much chance anybody had left any metal thing out there. I thought I was walking where no man had walked before, and then I smelled smoke and came to a clearing."

She paused, her eyes staring unseeing across the hall. Below us, out on the dance floor near the microphones, Dale and Rose played a mournful old song about departed lovers and lonesome train whistles. The banjo made everything sound spunky.

"Morning glories had twined right up over the house." Her voice had dropped to a whisper. "I never saw such a thing before or since. Up-and-down logs -- some still part of growing trees, Cyrus, with branches sprouting out the top. Did you ever hear of such a thing?"

"Maybe," I said quietly. If the family she talked about had any sign Earth people in it, with their gifts of growth and plant-talk, many things were possible.

"And a little vegetable garden up near the house," Alma murmured, looking into the past. "Sassy green leaves on those squash vines. Tall corn. Lacy carrot tops. I tell you, I felt like I had walked into a fairy tale, this snug little house in the middle of nowhere with the flowers growing all over it."

She fell silent again. I sat and listened to the child's thin voice. "Oh, where are our dear fathers? Oh, where are our dear fathers? Oh, where are our dear fathers? Da-a-ay is a-breakin' in my soul."

"I woulda run away again," said Alma presently. "Too many stories my ma told about tripping over a fairy mound and going into another land for a century or two until you come out and everything's changed, everyone you know is dead. I woulda run, but the wind changed then, and I smelled that smell, and heard the child's voice."

She was quiet a long time then. I feared the other musicians would return from the coffee-and-dessert break and the music would start and Alma would fall out of her memory into the present. Once she left this confiding mood, I would not know how to bring her back to it, and she was getting to the meat of the story now.

I touched her hand. A terrible temptation came over me to use my powers of persuasion and force the story out of her, but I waited, and the impulse passed. I could make people talk about anything, I could make them forget afterward everything they had said; but I could not make myself forget what I had done, and those memories were difficult to live with. I had enough of them already.

"The child was singing that song," Alma said. "Her voice didn't have much voice left in it, if you know what I mean. And the smell was the smell of dead things that have been lying a while in the heat."

"What happened?" I whispered.

"She wandered around the side of the house, a thin little girl in a dirty white dress that was all tatters. She was sick. Her cheeks were caved in, and her eyes sunk down in her head. Come to find out later, after the doctor saw her, she probably hadn't eaten anything in days, and there were vegetables lying on that ground just as fine as anything you see in the market. She wandered and wavered around, singing. `Some have gone to heaven shouting.'"

I could hear her singing that verse even as Alma spoke.

"I stepped out of the woods. `Little girl, little girl. Who are you?' I said. She didn't even look my way, just pranced away and back, singing. I went to her and caught her hands. She looked at me then, and her eyes were like a dead person's. She hummed the tune. Months afterward I couldn't get it out of my head.

"The smell was stronger. I didn't know what to do. I wasn't so old myself. `What's the matter, little girl?' I said. She sang at me and that was all. She didn't try to pull away or anything. Just sang."

Alma's hand slipped from under mine. She put her hands over her eyes. "You know, I knew that everything had gone wrong, and I didn't know what to do. I let go of the girl. I opened the door of the house. The door, it had a carving of a man's face on it, a bearded face with leaves all around it, and it scared me some -- too much like something from Ma's tales, a door that could look at you.

"I opened that door, and that horrible smell came out, stronger than before, and the buzzing of flies. Only light in the room came from it might be a hole in the roof, I didn't look long enough to figure it out; but there was the two of them in there on a bed, lying under that hard light, dead, as far as I could tell, for days maybe; covered with flies."

She lowered her hands from her face, gripped mine in both of hers. "She had to be going in and out," she whispered. "The fire was still lit. That was hard for me to know, that she would go inside with them in such a state." She shook her head.

"I didn't know what to do. I took the girl's hand and led her out of there. The grange was the closest building. I led her here. It was a Saturday, and women were quilting. I brought the girl here and they all started up like a flock of birds. Someone got the doctor. They tried to feed that child, tried to give her water, tried to get her to name herself, but she never did. Only thing she ever did was sing. She died later that night. Doctor said it was starving did it."

The hall filled with talk and commotion as people came back from their conversations and coffee. Musicians gathered around the microphones. Alma gripped my hands and finally looked up at me. "We never even knew their names," she said. The anguish she had felt more than fifty years earlier was still in her face.

"It's all right," I said. I held her hands tight, trying to give her reassurance. "I'll take care of it."

She cocked her head and stared hard at me, almost as hard as she had stared into the past. "What do you mean?" she asked.

I looked at her and wondered how much to tell her. "I believe in ghosts," I said at last. "I'll talk to her."

"Talk to her." Her voice sounded flat.

"She's here. Still singing. I'll talk to her."

"What good will that do?"

"I think she must have been a relative of mine," I said, "and in my family, we know how to care for our dead."

"Alma?" someone called from below. "You back me up on `Your Cheatin' Heart'?"

"Sure, honey," she said in a distracted voice. She grabbed her cane, left the stage, and went to get her mandolin. We both joined in the music again. Between tunes, though, she was always looking at me.

THE DANCE LASTED until eleven, the dregs of it anyway; people packed up and left in trickles earlier, until at last only Alma and Rose and a guitar player named John and I were left, and the couple who swept the dancing dust off the floor and put away the folding metal chairs.

"Time to go home," John said, "before they kick us out."

I wiped the rosin off Lucia's strings with a bandana I keep in her case for that purpose. I loosened the horse hairs on my bow. John put away his guitar, Rose packed up her banjo, and Alma locked her mandolin in its case. We said good night to the caretakers and left the building amid their invitation to come back next month.

Rose and John went to their cars. Alma stood beside me in the chill night. The motion-sensitive light above the door lit us from behind, but if we stood still long enough, it would switch off again. I waited.

"You got a car, Cyrus?"

"No."

"How'd you get here?"

"Hitched a ride." On a wind.

"You want a ride somewheres else?"

I smiled at her. "I still have business here."

"You believe in ghosts," she said, and then whispered, "I've been so afraid they exist. None of those deaths was quiet, and I've never been able to stop seeing them. Poor little mite. Holding her hand was like holding twigs."

"What I need to do now is private, Alma."

"Don't tell me that," she said. "Don't you tell me to go away with this darkness still in my head. I've lived with it a long time, Cyrus. I am more than ready to let it go."

I sighed. I wondered. Even though she didn't want to go, I could tell her to go, and she would do it. But if the thought of these spirits was troubling her so much, how could I leave her with that darkness? "Wait here," I told Alma, and I went around back of the grange and lifted up into the tree where I had hidden my things.

Mostly I make my own rules, but there are some very strong ones almost all of us follow, and one of them concerns outsiders. I'm not supposed to reveal family secrets if I can help it.

I took my snow crystal out of my knapsack and sat on a branch, holding the crystal in both hands. "Powers and Presences, lead me and guide me," I murmured. "Help me to choose what is right for each person."

"Which are your choices?" whispered a breeze past my ear.

"Here is a spirit that needs a path, and here is a person who has a troubled mind. I would like to help them both if I can."

"Why not?" whispered the wind.

"One is not of our family."

A moment of silence slipped by, and then the whisper came: "In your hands."

I kissed the crystal, tucked it into my pocket, and shrugged into my knapsack. I climbed down the tree, and a good thing, too: Alma was on the ground below, leaning on her cane and looking up. "What were you doing up there?" she asked.

"Praying a little and getting my things," I said, hanging by my arms from the lowest limb, then dropping. I had not swung from a limb in quite that way since I was a boy, and I felt absurd.

"Your things," said Alma. She glanced from my fiddle case, still at the base of the tree, to the knapsack on my back. "Those are all your things?"

I nodded. "Just passing through."

"On your way to where?"

"Everywhere."

"Nowhere," she said.

For a moment I felt a strange sense of vertigo. My dream of the death of the planet unfolded in my mind. Fields of barren ground, dark blasted hills, ice along the edges. How bleak it would be to have no one to look for, no one to talk to, no one to jam with. Why explore when every place was gray and dead?

But this was not my reality. I blinked and looked at Alma. "Everywhere," I said again. Everywhere there were musicians, coffee shops, radio stations, roads; crops in the field, people in cars, animals in forests, crickets and frog choruses and murmuring bees, and the slow rich sound of voices talking on a porch of a summer evening, voices murmuring in a firelit room of a winter's night.

Usually my voice wasn't among them, though. I did a lot of listening and appreciating, but not much sharing.

"Have it your own way," Alma said. "Now what?"

"I'm going back inside as soon as they close it up and leave."

"Just how do you imagine you'll get inside that building? You some kind of burglar?"

I smiled at her.

"I have a key," she said. "I'm on the planning committee. I'll let you in."

"Alma? Alma!" Voices called from the front of the building. They sounded alarmed. "You out here? You all right? Alma!"

"Oh, my car's still there," she muttered. She and her cane walked around to the front of the building. "You go on home, Charlie and Liz. I'll lock up. I've got some thinking to do."

"All right," they said, relief in their voices. Presently a car started and drove off down the road.

"Come on, Cyrus," said Alma and we went back inside Spruce Grange through the front door.

The hall looked unfamiliar and dark with nobody in it but us. Alma went into the coat closet and flipped on banks of lights.

"Can you light the stage?" I asked.

Lights went on above the stage.

It was strange to see this empty place that minutes earlier had been alive with people and dance. My doom dream murmured in my mind.

"What next?" Alma said.

I climbed the stairs to the stage. No clutter of instruments and coats; even the metal chairs were folded and stood against the backdrop.

I listened.

"Some are down in the valley singing..."

I knelt on the bare wood stage. I took my snow crystal from my pocket and placed it on the floor, then slid out of my knapsack and sat back on my heels, looking around.

"Some are down in the valley singing..."

Alma leaned against the stage's edge and watched me.

"What I'm about to do may seem strange to you," I said. "It will not hurt you, but it may frighten you. Are you sure you want to watch?"

"Some are down in the valley singing..."

"It concerns that little girl?"

"I believe it does."

She gripped her cane, hunched her shoulders. "Go ahead."

"Da-a-a-ay is a-breakin' in my soul..."

I took a small, pale green glass plate from my knapsack. I had made it as part of my apprenticeship to the glassblower in Cielito, before I understood the limitations of my being Sign Air -- fire would heed me as much as it did anybody without fire persuasions; I had no skill with it, but still, the plate was a gift of earth and fire, lopsided and thick as it was, and I smiled at it as I did every time I dug it out of its protecting silk. I set it on the stage beside my snow crystal and placed a sprig of desert sage and some dried cedar twigs on it.

I sat and gathered my mind, preparing a version of the "Things Seen and Unseen" chant that would let the invisible attain visibility if it so desired. Usually this chant revealed things whether they wanted to be shown or not, and only for a brief time. I wanted a version that would grant power to the invisible to choose the length of its interaction with light.

When I was satisfied that I had shaped the tool I wanted, I touched fire to the spices on the glass plate. They burned quickly, leaving a smudge of smoke, a signature in the air that smelled of desert starlight and night forest. I addressed Powers and Presences and spoke my chant.

The song stopped.

When I looked up, a young girl stood across from me.

She was slender and hollow-eyed and wore a white shift. She looked just like my little sister Drusilla had at ten, long dark wavy hair almost to her waist, a pale fine-featured face with large gray eyes, slender hands. She was not gaunt the way Alma had described her.

"Presence," I murmured.

Her eyes widened. She touched her chest.

I smiled at her. "Presence," I said again.

"Uncle?" she whispered.

"Cousin," I said. If she had died during World War II, at about ten--she looked perhaps ten, perhaps eleven w then she and I had been born at about the same time.

"I don't understand," whispered the girl. She blinked. She glanced around, saw Alma, who stood there staring at her. Alma dropped her cane. Her right fist pressed against her breastbone, and her left hand gripped her right. Her eyes were wide.

"Gift me a name? Mine is Cyrus Locke," I said.

"Helena Exile," said the girl, still staring at Alma.

Exile! A name taken by those who were cast out from our family, the threads binding them to us cut. She was too young to be exiled; her parents must have been the ones banished. I did not even know which clan place they had come from; it was all old news now, no doubt, though I would have to check with the Powers and other Presences about final disposition.

"Helena," I said. "This is Alma."

Alma stood unmoving, her mouth a little open.

"Alma, are you all right?"

Alma said, "How? How can she be standing there more real than life? She looks much stronger than when I saw her."

Helena's face clouded. "Cousin Cyrus," she said. "Please."

"Cousin." I lifted my hands to her even though I knew she could not touch them. "You are only halfway here. You've been halfway here a long time, fifty years or more. I offer you a chance to choose. Do you wish to go farther away? Do you wish to return?"

"I -- I -- My mother! My father!" She stiffened, her eyes glazing.

"They are gone too. They left before you did. They may be waiting on the other side of shadow, or they may be trapped without a proper unbinding. I will tend to them soon. Just now, let's think about you."

"I don't feel --" She reached across to me and tried to grasp my hands. Hers passed through mine. "Oh!"

Alma gasped as well. I looked at her. She was paper pale. Her eyelids fluttered and she began to sag. I bespoke the air around her to hold her up, worried even as I did so that I was going too far. Ghosts, whether she believed in them or not, were part of her everyday, a conversational coin always being spent. Solid air would be outside her experience. "Breathe deeply," I said to her, and asked air to strengthen and sustain her.

After a moment the color returned to her face. She still looked terrified.

"Alma," I said.

"You -- you're one of those black magic demon sorcerers, aren't you?"

"No." I glanced at Helena, who looked down at her hands, at the glass plate and snow crystal at her feet, at me, and then at Alma. Helena might be confused, but if her parents had raised her with any knowledge of her heritage, she would be able to understand what had happened to her, given time and explanation. Alma, on the other hand

"Demon has nothing to do with what I am," I said.

"Are you evil?"

Sometimes. Regrets still pricked me. "No."

"Let me go."

"Are you all right? You looked like you were going to fall."

"I'm fine," she said, her voice hollow as though she were trying to convince herself.

I bespoke air to be air-like again, and Alma shuddered, then bent to retrieve her cane. She limped to the double doors at the far end of the hall, never looking back. When she had closed the doors behind her, I turned to Helena.

"Little cousin," I said. "Flesh has left you. Where do you wish to go next?"

She squatted across from me and stared at me. "I have been so lost," she whispered, "so alone in the darkness."

"Your spirit tied itself to this place."

She looked around. "What is this place?"

"This is a grange hall. A community place where people get together; not usually members of our family, though. There is music here sometimes. You were singing."

"Why am I here?"

"This is where you died, Alma said."

"Alma..."

"Alma found you in the forest and brought you here. She was trying to help you."

"I remember a girl." Her eyes looked inward. "A tall brown girl with twigs in her hair. One of the first strangers I ever saw. I remember her and I don't remember her." She shook her head. "That was after...I -- "

She screamed.

It was a high, huge, sad, chilling sound, a sound that might have echoed across a cold landscape of white and gray, the last sound of life on a dead world. It lasted a good while. The hair on my head and the back of my neck rose, and my skin tingled with goosebumps.

Alma looked in through the doors.

Helena screamed, first with her eyes closed, then with her eyes opened. She stared up at the ceiling and screamed.

She stopped. The ensuing silence lay like a weight on me. She stared at me.

"My parents died!" she yelled.

"Yes."

"They died and left me all alone!"

"Yes."

"I couldn't wake them! Mami! Papa! How could you leave me?"

"They couldn't help it," I said when no other answer came.

"I couldn't let them go, but they weren't there anyway."

"Yes," I said.

"They didn't come back."

"No." I held out my arms to her, wanting to hug her, but how?

Air whispered past my ears.

Air could be solid for me.

"Helena," I murmured, holding out my arms, asking air to be solid where she was in it.

She sobbed and came to me and crawled into my lap, and I put my arms around her, air and light and spirit unbreathed, unfinished. I held her and she cried. Her world had been as bleak as the dead land in my dreams, shorn as it was of all she knew of warmth.

"You don't have to be alone anymore," I told her when her sobs slowed. "You can stay with me, or you can go on and find your parents."

"How can I find them now?" She stirred and pushed away from me. It was strange. It did not feel like a child I held; she was smooth and cool and had no breath or heartbeat. I embraced a weightless stone. She pushed at my arms, and I released her.

She rose and looked at Alma, who had come back and stood against the edge of the stage again. "You were the girl who came?" Helena said.

"Yes," said Alma.

"She was the girl who found me," Helena told me, "and look at her now. She's an old woman. I couldn't even find my parents when they first left their bodies. How can I possibly find them now?" "Where are they buried?" I asked Alma.

"At the little cemetery up the hill behind Ravensville Church. All three together we put them in the ground, under a stone with no name on it. `Mother, Father, Child' was all it said, and the year of their death."

"May we go there now?"

"I can drive," she said.

"Would you?" I spoke to her doubts and fears. Often enough I have spent time with people who have no magic in their lives, and I have done my best to understand how that feels.

There are so many things to be afraid of.

Yet Alma had returned in the middle of Helena's scream, for me the most frightening thing that had happened tonight. It was a sound of despair that came from a place so deep I had not known whether it had an end. I had been afraid I might spend the rest of my life listening to it.

"I will," said Alma.

"Thank you." I looked at Helena. "Are you ready to leave this place? You have been here a long time."

"There's nothing here for me," she said.

I thought of the music and dance earlier that evening. When I died, I might like to haunt a place like this for such a taste of life, friendship, warmth once a month. But Helena had not been awake to any of it.

I looked at the glass plate on the stage, the dusting of gray ash left behind by cedar and sage. I thanked Powers and Presences for help, asked for more, put away my tools and climbed to my feet, picked up my knapsack and my fiddle case. Helena and I went down the stairs together to the floor below.

"I see it," Alma said, staring at us.

I glanced at Helena, then at Alma.

"You are related. Your nose, hers. Your eyes. How can that be? How could you know?"

"Recognition," I said. "In the music."

She frowned. Her eyebrows drew together. "Guess I don't have to understand it to see that it works," she said. "Let's go."

For a moment Helena and I hesitated in the grange's doorway. I watched her, She looked behind her at the stage, confused.

"You've woven yourself into this place," I said.

"Unbind me."

I worked it out in my head, a thread-cutting chant for ties of place. It had to be specific. I don't like unbinding work; too risky, too counter to my impulses to connect. I said this chant for Helena Exile, though, and felt the brief shock of freedom shake her.

I remembered that shock. I had cut myself free of my home place all those years ago, though I didn't realize I was doing it at the time. It had hurt.

ALMA DROVE a big maroon sedan with well-padded white seats. Helena and I got in the back. Alma glanced over her shoulder at us, shook her head, started the car, and drove through the cold December night along back roads that cut through quiet fields, past houses where all the lights were out. Every once in a while Alma shook her head again.

We went through brief patches of forest, then through a little sleeping town that had a general store, a garage/gas pump, and a feed store. Then we came to a white church among trees, its spire pointing to the stars.

Alma turned the car off on a dirt road past the church and we edged up a small forested hill to a graveyard. She stopped the car, turned off the engine and the headlights. We sat there in silence for a little while.

I opened the door and climbed out, my knapsack in my hand. Helena joined me.

The car engine ticked. Somewhere birds chirped and silenced. Gravestones stood in less-than-orderly rows, some new, some old, some ornate, some plain, some with fresh or plastic flowers at their foot, and some embraced by weeds.

Alma emerged. "Not really my favorite place to be at night," she said after a moment.

"There's nothing here will hurt you," I told her. Then I checked. Sometimes the energies surrounding death and the dead can get muddled and enhanced and strange. Much depends on how people relate to their dead, and what the dead plan to do next.

There was no smell of danger in this place.

Alma shuddered. She straightened her shoulders, gripped her cane in one hand and a flashlight in the other, and headed in among the stones. We followed her.

It was a plain stone, not even granite or marble: a rounded rock you might find in a river, and it said just what Alma had told us: MOTHER, FATHER, CHILD 1943.

"Oh," said Helena, holding out open hands, waving them above the ground. "I feel so strange."

I took my snow crystal from my pocket, held it in my right hand. Powers and Presences, help us to find the right way to proceed. May we awaken those who sleep here?

They are here and they do not sleep.

I looked up as Alma dropped her cane and gripped my arm. Two glowing shadows stood beyond the headstone, holding hands.

I said the chant I had said for Helena, "Things Seen and Unseen," modified so that those unseen could become seen for as long as they wished.

The shining shadows darkened, took on weight and hue. A broad man and a narrow woman, he in overalls and an undershirt, she in a calico dress. They had the faces of my cousins.

"Helena! Bright staff" the woman cried, reaching toward us.

"Where have you been?" cried the man, opening his arms. "We've been waiting ages!"

"Mami! Papa!" Helena gave a choked sob and ran to them, was swallowed in their embrace.

Exiles. In death, were they still separated from the rest of us?

People make such separations, something whispered past my ear. Most of us do not.

My dream of a wasteland: a place I had sent myself?

Helena separated from her parents, came back to me. "Cousin Cyrus," she said. "Thank you. Thank you." She rose on tiptoe and kissed my cheek, a cold hard spot of pressure and then release. "Thank you for trying to help me," she whispered to Alma, kissing her too. Alma's fingers dug even deeper into my upper arm.

Helena darted back to her parents. They smiled at us, melted into each other, glowed brighter and brighter, then vanished in a final flare.

"What...happened?" Alma said.

I was not alone on a dead world now. Alma's grip convinced me I was alive and in company. "I guess they knew where they were going after all," I said, "once she came back to them." I felt a strange longing to go home myself, and see my sister and my parents and my cousins and aunts and uncles. Some of the people I had known were no doubt dead now, and some new ones had probably been born. I wanted to make sure the family was still where I had left it.

"I don't mean what happened to them, the--the ghosts--I mean what happened? What happened this whole night? Who the heck are you, anyway?" Alma said. "And what were you talking about when you were saying all those things in that other language?"

People make such separations. Most of us do not.

There was family, and then there was family--all over the place. "I'll buy you coffee at Shari's and we can talk about it," I said, stooping to pick up her cane.

ILLUSTRATION

~~~~~~~~

By Nina Kiriki Hoffman

The comedian George Burns once quipped that "Happiness is having a large, loving caring close-knit family m another city." While many of us would disagree with the sentiment (especially during the holiday season), the thought o/ it resonates with this lovely and haunting story from Nina Hoffman about a lonely traveler.

MUSING ON BOOKS

Rose Daughter, by Robin McKinley, Greenwillow, Sept 1997, $16.

Jovah's Angel, by Sharon Shinn, Ace, May 1997, $13.95.

Dogland, by Will Shetterly, Tot, June 1997, $25.95.

THERE IS something comforting about the shedding of outward appearance, or rather, the disregard of it in favor of interior nobility, that strikes a peculiarly resonant chord in me. That, and redemption through love. It seems fitting, just, an antidote to a world in which being a victim of fashion is a reason for existence and not just a hobby.

It should therefore come as no surprise that one of my favorite books ever is Beauty, authored by Robin McKinley a number of years ago. It is not a book whose details stay with me sharply, but rather a book whose shape and feel remain, and I've returned to it often during the past two decades, finding comfort and pleasure in both things remembered and things forgotten.

I have not, however, returned to it as the author.

Robin McKinley has.

I consider this an astonishing act of bravery. In a world where a trilogy is the ultimate act of selling-out to the nebulous fantasy mainstream, and originality is often more important than handling material well, returning to something you've already undeniably covered once, and unarguably covered well, seems to be asking for trouble.

I've seen authors flinch and turn away from something that, in my not so humble opinion, their hearts were in, for either of the two above reasons. I've seen them jump through hoops to come up with the latest Really Cool special effect, and I've seen them decry trilogies and explain, trip trip tripping over each word, why their works aren't in fact any such thing--although there are three books, in the same universe, that are, well, sequential. I find it embarrassing. It has an effect to me that's not dissimilar from an awkward teenager who can't quite admit that he really likes the school geeks and comes up with all sorts of atrocious reasons for keeping their company in the face of the taunts of his peers.

Not so Robin McKinley.

In her graceful afterward, she offers us both the tale of the genesis of her new book and a slice of her life--inseparable, of course--without apology. She's rewriting, or rather, retelling,, the same story because that story has always been powerful, to her, and it still speaks to her. Twenty years is a long time. Experience changes us, and wisdom adds a certain depth and resignation to our once bright hopes. It changes the way we perceive stories, stippling them with a different light, a different darkness.

It has been a few years since I've read Beauty. I almost went back to read it again first--but it wasn't time yet; I remember those things I love well enough, and I compare the new and the old with the distance of time and filter of experience, which in this case seems particularly fitting. I apologize in advance to Ms. McKinley, because a book should probably be looked at as an artifact in and of itself, and I'm comparing because I can't help but compare. I'm visiting a place I've not been for a while, with a different guide, and. seeing things that I might have passed over with the old one.

So, on to Rose Daughter,

First, there are very few surprises; there were very few surprises in the first book. This is not a contemporary refashioning of an old myth, not a dark, Tanith Lee--like look at the underside or the darkness of the tale. Second, McKinley's writing hand is still incredibly gentle. There are no Evil Sisters here (an invention I always disliked, possibly because in our family I was the oldest and fated by fairy tale to always be the uglier, weaker and more oppressive of the sisters), no family split by bickering greed. And third, there is the rose, there is the beast, and there is a young woman who is willing to make sacrifices to save those things she loves. There is, of course, the just ending.

But there are differences, and one of the strongest is the way every sentence and every occurrence seems infused by magic. Not by the patina of magic, not by that Hollywood flash and dazzle--but by a deeper, older, wilder magic, a subtlety of living things. The first book had magic in theory, as you don't get men turned into beasts, talking invisible people and libraries that bring books from the future (although the library that I remember so fondly is gone, alas), but although all evidence of magic was there, that sense of other that defines magic wasn't.

In Rose Daughter it is. From the opening hint of the scent of roses which comfort a nightmare to the closing page, there is a sense of things we can touch but cannot fully control; things we can change, but not without being changed in our turn.

The cottage which a newly impoverished family repairs to, and repairs, is a wonder of atmosphere, and better, a place around which roses will bloom. In this universe, roses are creatures that require either magic or love to grow. Rather like the story itself.

Beauty's Beauty was a day-dreamer, a woman who loved books and stories and things of the mind: a younger woman's younger woman. Rose Daughter's Beauty is a quiet doer, a woman who falls in love with gardening, who spends her time with dirt under her fingers and her knees in damp soil, working against the grief and shock of loss, and finding that that work is good.

I don't know that the younger McKinley was capable of the shadows and light that strobe this second Beauty's simple, determined efforts, but in this novel it's the effort, the struggle to nurse life along, to bring it out, to make it bloom, that grounds the story.

I will keep this book.

I will reread it, time and again; it has earned its place as one of my odd coterie of bedside companions.

And I will look forward to the day, twenty years from now, when I pick up Robin McKinley's new book, and in it, waking again like a slumbering, glorious beast, if you'll pardon the expression, Beauty and the Beast raises its head again and roars.

Sharon Shinn returns to a world of her own making as well, in Jovah's Angel. It isn't a continuation of the first book, and I felt that minor twinge of disappointment at not returning to greet those characters that I'd become quite fond of. Never mind. Shinn has created a whole new cast of characters, and they have--underpinned as they are by both her graceful prose and her great affection for them--won me over just as thoroughly.

A word. If you haven't read Archangel, there is no reason whatsoever not to read Jovah's Angel. It stands alone. I urge you to read both, of course, but it's not necessary.

Delilah is the Archangel, the angela who has been selected to lead the people of Samaria. She is perfect: beautiful, attractive, charismatic, razor-edge smart about politics. If she has flaws, they are a rather justified pride and a willful belief in her own invulnerability. She is the best. She's been chosen by God. She has no doubts at all.

Alleluia is about as far in the other direction as you can get and still have an angel. Bookish, meek, underconfident, she is pale and ethereal, almost invisible in the light of Delilah's heavenly fire. But she, too, can, be heard by the God.

But when Delilah dares a storm, it breaks her -- by breaking her wing. Crippled, she is summarily dismissed by Jovah, and Alleluia,--or Alleya as she is more comfortably called is chosen to replace her.

Okay; you can get that much information, differently worded, from the back of the book itself. But Shinn and McKinley have, in common, some of the same gentleness, and the same affection, for their characters. Perhaps Delilah's fall is unavoidable--but she doesn't abandon Delilah; rather, she intertwines the fallen Archangel's story with the struggling Archangel's story as the two women grapple with fate, fear and bitterness.

Delilah as a character had no equal in Archangel. She's angry, all right, and she's lost all faith--just as Raphael, in Archangel, did. But instead of descending into destructive madness, she descends into self-destructive bitterness, trapped by her crippling injury and what it's taken from her, but not--perhaps--completely lost. Still, she makes mockery of everything that she once felt herself to be, and she's found singing bawdy songs, and reveling in subtle degradation, in the world's equivalent of a cabaret act.

Maybe she'd be lost entirely--a villain, of a sort--but there's one young man, Noah, who comes to see her because he's hopelessly in love with her. Not the Archangel, but her, what he thinks he sees beneath everything else she's protected herself with. And where she can be cruel to cynics and money mongers and intellects she can't quite bring herself to abuse someone who's so true in intent, and so heartfelt.

Love is a salvation of a type--possibly the only human salvation--if it takes you outside of your own intense self-pity.

The story of Alleya, which is arguably the more important of the two for the sake of the world, and the story of Delilah, cross paths because of Caleb, an engineer friend of Noah's, who is also dumb-struck and awestruck by the angela Alleya. Alleya is pure of heart, humble where Delilah is proud, soft where Delilah is fierce, meek where Delilah is aggressive--but she is never self-righteous, and her admiration for Delilah, her certainty that Delilah was the right angel for the job, is the clearest indicator of how very practical she is. Which is good, because Jovah is only listening to one angel, and at that moment it's Alleya, and if she doesn't figure out why, Samaria is doomed under her reign.

Shinn doesn't humble or elevate either of her two Archangels. There are broad romantic elements here, but there are also subtle character elements that give a cozy book its delightful edges. So far, with me at least, she's three for three, and I am eagerly waiting for her fourth novel, whatever that might turn out to be.

Shetterly's return is not to a world he's created before--but it feels very much to this reader that it's a return to a world he's lived in. You've got to have crossed the threshold between coming-of-age and being of age before you can look back on the truths of childhood--all its awkwardness, all its delights, all its injustices which, writ so large in your life at that time bear significance out of proportion to the events themselves--and see their place in your life so clearly.

This is a wise, wise book, seen through the eyes of a man who has enough of the boy he was then in him--four-year-old Chris, oldest of three children--to give you a glimpse into the wonder and strangeness of a child's fear, a child's magic. The first person narrative is perfectly suited to the vignettes that become the story itself; it wanders in that familiar, comfortable way that a story does when it's told between friends.

Luke H. Nix and his wife Susan travel to Florida at a time when segregation was in force. Susan's afraid of rattlesnakes, and it turns out with damned good reason--but in saving a loved one's life, Luke meets the people who are going to be the crux of his existence: Ethorne, a black man, and Mrs. DeLyon, a Seminole woman who owns the motel, Fountain of Youth.

Luke takes on as help--at a white man's pay--Ethorne and his family, Seth, Mayella, and James. Add to that a young girl--at her age, she can hardly be called a woman--who's willing to do "nigger jobs" for "nigger wages" to support her family because her husband is above that sort of work and she's desperate, and a bigoted man and his wife, and you have the staff of Dogland, a place that will one day--if Luke's plans hold--have one of every acknowledged breed of dogs in existence.

And you have love, forbidden love: love that crosses racial lines and love, hinted at but hampered by viewpoint, that crosses marital lines.

But a child's life is absolutes, and in Dogland, Chris, Little Bit and their baby brother Digger are those children, anchoring the themes of religion, tolerance, hope and success as the visitors to Dogland pass through. We have Nick Lumiere (a play on the name Lucifer), Joe and Mary, sans son, the old Norse gods--none of whom are ever named, and we also have Mrs. DeLyon, who I'd bet money was descended from Galahad's side of the family.

There's just so much in this book, in the racial tensions and the marital tensions, the crises with school bullies and the inevitable fight with very traditional parents--father's the disciplinarian here--that's real that the magic seems an effect of the childhood itself.

You can't read it quickly--well, you can, but it's a waste of a wonderful book's shadows, nooks and crannies. Take time, explore it, return a moment to your own memories of childhood's triumphs and fears.

~~~~~~~~

By MICHELLE WEST

BOOKS

"From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent."

Hello Dolly:

WHAT DIVINE madness led the scientists who "cloned" the first mammal through nuclear transfer from an established cell line to name their firstborn...Dolly? Eager to endear the great unwashed to their little lamb (and, apparently, to honor a country music star), the scientists of the Roslin Institute seemed oblivious to the wicked irony that their cosy, seemingly innocuous name was the diminutive for a human replica--a doll--which did nothing to resolve the confusion of hope and fear that accompanied their breakthrough.

As the usual suspects chewed the media carpet with ever more moral soundbites about the cloning of humans (a favorite bit of blather came from Roslin Institute's own Ian Wilmut, who pronounced that human applications would be "quite inhuman"), a more sincere and perceptive dialogue was evolving in a series of novels written well in advance of Dollydom.

With its precise and provocative title, Michael Marshall Smith's Spares (Bantam, $22.95) confronts the gory glory of cloning; but for Smith, the cultivation of human replacement parts is merely the jumping-off point for a grand cross-genre adventure. Hardboiled narrator Jack Randall is the next century's Mike Hammer, a quixotic gumshoe with a heart of tarnished gold who staggers and shoots his way through a mystery that proves inescapably his own. A certified Mr. Ex (ex-soldier, ex-cop, ex-husband), Randall has fallen from grace to duty at the Farm, where he shepherds and soon liberates a flock of childlike clones who were created to serve as living donors for their wealthy owners. With its futuristic noir and the pursuit of replicants through a third-mall-from-the-sun setting, the opening act of Spares seems uncomfortably close to the motion picture Blade Runner; but Smith is merely warming up. There is remarkable energy and diversity here, and the plot soon spans several novels in its complexity, unraveling into a Vietnam allegory that underscores the pervasive theme of dehumanization. Although it's a curious criticism, Smith's enthusiasm proves the novel's only palpable weakness: his prose is not always tight, not always willing to stop, and its exuberance occasionally overwhelms his characters.

The moral and ethical quandaries of human cloning are ratcheted toward the metaphysical plane in The Genesis Code (Fawcett Columbine, $24.95), a spy-fi thriller by the pseudonymous John Case that barely survives its disingenuous prelude (in which a priest must disclose a profound secret to the church hierarchy but not to the reader, since it is the linchpin of the plot). Astute readers will soon guess the details, which involve a series of mother/ child murders and a fertility clinic whose founder once tested Catholic relies for authenticity. The prose is strong and the machinations clever, but what is frankly astonishing is Case's failure to explore the spiritual underpinning of his plot. The result is a textbook thriller, one of those prototypical page-turners that runs like a finely tuned machine: all momentum and no soul.

Case could learn much from the sparse yet intense wordwork of M. John Harrison, whose Signs of Life (St. Martin's Press, $21.95) is a delicate and quietly desperate story of the doomed love affair between a worldly courier (and sometime disposer of medical waste) and a beautiful younger woman whose fantasies of flight mask a pained urging for transformation.

A defining myth of nineties fantasy is that body alchemy is the palliative for the mundane: modern primitivism as spiritual Tylenol. In Signs of Life, Harrison considers DNA as the imperfect clay of transformation, the opportunity for human flesh to, adopt the characteristics of other species; but he offers no airy-faery optimism, finding queasy parallels between DNA-enhanced cosmetic surgery and the dumping of toxic waste. His stance is far from reactionary: Our actions, Harrison reminds us, have moral consequences that often differ from their moral causes. We live in a world that is littered with the detritus of good ideas and even better intentions. Signs of Life is thus far more than a cautionary tale; it is a critique of the exaltation of symbolic change--whether pierced eyebrow or scientific breakthrough--and the mindset that confuses revolution with evolution.

Those unfamiliar with Harrison's prodigy might grasp, however inaccurately, at "Ballardian" as descriptive shorthand for the Obsessive apocalypticism in Signs of Life; but Harrison is like J.G. Ballard only in his defiant originality. Indeed, Ballard's latest, Cocaine Nights (HarperCollins/Flamingo, £16.99), is a disturbing retirement gothic that echoes, if anyone, Shirley Jackson. At its heart is a dire take on the fatal blessing of social conformity: humanity as the stuff of tour groups and shopping malls, a grand experiment in behavioral conditioning--or, indeed, psychological cloning. When the club manager at a tony Spanish coastal resort is charged with murder and proves unrepentant, his naive brother seeks to pierce the veil of sunshine and the blase but finds himself slowly but surely taking his brother's path to perdition. Ballard's sardonic narrative transforms sun, sand, and savoury into the rotting castle of the fin de siecle psyche, and the sense of inevitability creates a splendid anti-mystery in which crime is the solution: "Politics is over...it doesn't touch the imagination any longer. Religions emerged too early in human evolution--they set up symbols that people took literally, and they're as dead as a line of totem poles. Religions should have come later, when the human race begins to near its end. Sadly, crime is the only spur that rouses us."

The mythology of transformation is dealt another cruel, and yet comic, blow in Jonathan Coe's The House of Sleep (Viking UK, £16.99). Coe, an intoxicatingly inventive writer, penned the delightful "Old Dark House" homage What A Carve Up! (based on the eponymous 1961 Sidney James/Kenneth Connor film and issued in the U.S. as The Winshaw Legacy), and his structural conceits are deft and refreshing. With its odd-numbered chapters set in 1983-84 and even-numbered chapters set in 1996, The House of Sleep is a twisted inversion of "Big Chill" nostalgia, a then-and-now tapestry of the lives of university chums and lovers whose abiding tie is sleep. Their former school residence houses a sleep research clinic, and it is here, at the intersection of dreams and reality, that even identity is at risk.

Mirage by F. Paul Wilson and Matthew J. Costello (Warner, $23) follows a similar trajectory, deepening the medical inquiry from sleep into coma in what could be read as an extended allegory on clueless postmodernism. What is "cloned" in these pages is human consciousness and memory: An experimental project (a benevolent one, for a change) allows the mapping of a person's "memoryscape" via computer, offering scientists a virtual reality of literal and symbolic imagery for analysis and interaction. When a researcher's twin sister is found comatose and dying, the technology is the only apparent solution, but memory and reality soon collide, and layers of illusion--the mirage of memory and its manipulation--are revealed. This is high entertainment, and one of the more inventive medical thrillers to come along in years.

Goodbye Dolly:

The birthing of that little lamb in Scotland also signals an apocalyptic urgency, one that takes its themes beyond the cautionary and into the eschatological. The millennial timing is part of the passion, of course, but consider the ironic evocation of the biblical: The lamb is symbolic throughout the Testaments, and notably in the delirious Revelation of St. John. What, indeed, should we make of a vision that claims "I saw a lamb standing as if it had been slain"? If the crucial mythic resonance of cloning is that of meddling with the scheme of things, then inevitably we must consider the wages of our sin.

The pall of armageddon descends upon the human and animal kingdoms in Mayra Montero's elegant In the Palm of Darkness (translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman, HarperCollins, $21). This bleak and genuinely horrific novel entwines the stories of an American herpetologist and his native guide as they scour the Haitian highlands in search of the grenouille du sang, one of the several species of frogs that have disappeared in the waning years of the Twentieth Century. What the two men discover, among tales of violence and voodoo, is a more profound erasure of the dignity and purpose of life--and of death.

Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis (Farrar Straus and Giroux, $23) was published with outlandish hubbub ("a first novel like no other...the most arresting and brilliant fictional debut of 1997") but without a nod to its roots: the novel is very much like others, including a first novel called Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus and, more specifically, The Island of Dr. Moreau. Bakis's premise is enticing: One fine day in 2008, Manhattan is visited by a parade of well-dressed canines who talk, have hands, walk on their hind legs and promptly check in at the Plaza Hotel. The story of their genesis and genocide is elaborated in epistolary prose that meanders preciously toward a doggystyle "Masque of the Red Death." The "monsters" are the legacy of a visionary' vivisectionist, and their curious aristocracy--they sip tea, pen operas, and finally construct a castle on the Lower East Side--is a facade; soon they succumb to a strange and suicidal malady that is an unthinkable regression to brutality (which, like their obsession with culture and ritual, is depicted as human in character). Bakis cannot be blamed for publishing hype, but her style is mannered to the point of a creepy fashion statement, striving mightily to suggest that she has something important to say when she merely has something important to repeat.

Far more successful as fantasy and parable is Elizabeth Hand's powerful and affecting Glimmering (HarperPrism, $22). The novel is a high-risk maneuver, proposing an alternate history of the nineties that concludes with a bang in 1999, when our mathematically challenged population intends to celebrate the century's end, and the Millennium, on a December 31 that is one year early. Hand's mirrorworld is clouded with despair, the aftermath of manmade and natural disasters that seem to signal The End: "What they had all been waiting for, consciously or not--the whip coming down, the other shoe dropping, the sound of sixteen hooves beating measured and far off upon the tarmac, still distant but not for long. The sound of something chipping at the earth as though it were an egg; the sound of the fabric of the century being torn."

It is a world infected by science, and through its shadows walk Jack Finnegan, dilettante of that dying artform known as the written word, and Christian rock star Trip Marlowe, each seeking an evermore elusive element of life: meaning.

The often overrated art of "worldbuilding" is a staple ,of fantasy, part of the generic hustle that serves too many writers as the means of escape from (or avoidance of) reality. But Hand's reinvention of the 1990s is an astonishment, an exquisite and extended metaphor intended to bring focus to millennial America: In these pages she wrestles with the relentless agonies of the soul in overload; government through multinational enterprise and media manipulation; the primacy of image over substance, sex over senses, life over living. Ironically, she offers, as an aside, the DNA-based cosmetic surgery that is crucial to Signs of Life; and she also proposes a mass media "clone" -- an "icon" -- by which the public image of a motion picture or rock star is given electronic life, the ultimate MTV video puppet. Imagery, she reminds us, is not identity; and it is our relentless pursuit of the external that is our doom.

Glimmering is a brooding elegy, but within its funereal shroud is a moving story of life in the midst of death that is a worthy bookend to Clive Barker's Sacrament (1996). Those who would criticize its dour musings (preferring, no doubt, the vapid fantasyland of happy endings) are unwilling to accept the healing power of darkness or to acknowledge that most elegant of ironies: The best fiction is that which offers truth.

ILLUSTRATION

~~~~~~~~

By DOUGLAS E. WINTER

NIGHT OF THE FIREFLIES

AT JUST AFTER NINE ON A warm midsummer night, Raymond Hollis dotted a final "i," crossed two "t's" with a single flourish, and set aside, along with his antique ballpoint pen, the work of half a lifetime. Sighing, he lifted the final page, turned it facedown atop the manuscript, and squared the edges. Then he sat for a moment, gazing pensively into his dim study. Beside him, atop a bookcase stuffed with crumbling aromatic volumes, a small lamp burned, on the desk, six fireflies battered at the walls of a plastic jar.

Hollis let his gaze wander to the open window. More fireflies -- dozens of them -- whirled and eddied there, tracing oddly formal patterns in the dark. Occasionally, one bumped against the screen, staring in at him.

"Telephone, please," Hollis said.

Circuits chittered and hummed. A watery column of light dropped from the ceiling. "What number, please?"

"Oh, anyone. Anyone who would be interested."

Silence. The house was immune to irony, it clothed and fed him, would sing to him or rock him gently to sleep if he wished, but it could do nothing more. Nothing that mattered.

"What number, please?"

Hollis spoke the number aloud.

The light flickered. Instantaneous connections fell into place. A phone uttered its cicada rattle, and then a face appeared, three-dimensional in the column of light.

"Done," Hollis said. "Blake, it's done."

"Done? Really done?"

"That's right. After all these years..."

"How does it feel?"

Wonderingly, Hollis said, "I...don't know." Then: "Would you like to see it?"

"I can be there in thirty minutes."

The light flickered and deliquesced. Hollis gazed at the manuscript for a moment; then he lifted the jar of fireflies and started down the hall. He paused at the door to his second office, the one where he made his living -- a bright space with terminal and chair and shining liquid crystal walls -- and thought of the work that awaited him: images and sound bites and snippets of disembodied text to be arranged and indexed into the web of other such fragments, themselves arranged and indexed by other such men in other such rooms in a thousand different places around the world.

Hollis turned away.

At the front door, he stepped outside. The moonlit dark murmured with. air conditioning and the thousand rustles of mechanical mice, grooming lush grass. In the neighboring houses, remote on immaculate squares of green, blind windows flickered with phantoms from the liquid crystal walls.

The neighborhood -- the street, the houses, the lawns themselves-projected a bland identity. It was the miracle of the age that geography -- language, culture -- no longer mattered. Turn on the wails in Spain, in Australia, in Nairobi, and navigate the same scrolling nets of information as your neighbors in Brazil and Romania and Japan. Jump on the web in the city of angels and jump off in Addis Ababa -- it was all the same web.

But tonight -- Hollis gasped -- tonight, magic!

Fireflies w not dozens, not hundreds, but thousands! w spun and danced in those oddly inevitable patterns. They glimmered and flickered and traced bright paths against the night. Gazing at them, Hollis remembered slipping swiftly through warm summer nights, hands outstretched to trap the bright insects in a mason jar, beacons for the haunted boyhood (lark. Lightning bugs he had called them then, and the notion still appealed to him -- tiny insects, translucent bellies aflame with summer fury. Bottled lightning. Magic.

"Go on," he said as he peeled back the plastic lid. One by one the fireflies hurled themselves into that stiff quadrille. A single insect lingered on the lip of the jug, delicate antennae reading the air. Hollis nudged it with his index finger. The firefly winked furiously, rocketing before his face to disappear amid the thousand flaring sparks.

Hollis sighed, thinking of Blake.

They had met at a party years ago. While the rest of the party -- the rest of the world -- gathered entranced before the walls -- the stunning new four-way liquid crystal walls with their illusion of depth, of reality -- Hollis and Blake had retreated to the fastness of the porch and there, like fellow spies long sought for in a hostile land, exchanged their tokens of recognition.

"I've often seen a cat without a grin --" Blake had said.

"-- but a grin without a cat!" Hollis had responded.

And then, together: "It's the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!"

The two men paused for a moment, breathless, afraid to believe.

"No," Hollis had whispered.

"Yes," Blake said. "Yes, yes, yes!" He capered and danced, crying, "During the whole of a dull, dark, and --"

"-- soundless day in the autumn of the year!"

"It is the flag of my disposition --"

"-- of hopeful green stuff woven!"

Blake said, "It was the worst of times," and Hollis had shouted aloud, "Oh, no it was the best of times," and swept the other man into a delighted embrace. For it was, it was the best of times. After a lifetime of looking for a fellow book-lover in a world that had no use for books -- in a world that watched and listened and surfed the endless cybernetic wave -- Hollis at last had found a friend who read.

Remembering` he felt a small frisson of that old joy.

Just then a shiny mechanical beetle slid noiselessly down the street and stopped before Hollis's house. Blake. Hollis trembled, full to bursting with a life's enthusiasm, anxious to share it at last. He wanted to shout aloud, to sound his barbaric yawp across the rooftops of the world and wake his neighbors up!

Then the beetle's moonlit carapace slid aside, and his heart went cold within him.

Two men came to him across the grass: Blake, squat as a fireplug, and another man, tall and cadaverously thin, with praying mantis grace. Moonlight collected on the stranger's wide shoulders and flashed from his grinning ivory teeth. His eyes burned in the shadow of his fedora.

Hollis gasped as if gut-punched. The plastic jug slid from his nerveless fingers.

"Blake?" he said.

Through the spinning motes of the fireflies, Blake came to him, followed by the thin man.

"Blake? You were supposed -- that is -- I thought you would come alone."

Still Blake said nothing. A breeze lilted through the night, hurrying the grass blade by blade before it, like a long wave rolling endlessly to shore. In the windows of the nearby houses, the liquid crystal phantoms gyrated and threw out grasping fingers. Fireflies carved hieroglyphs in the air, flickering trails that burned with strange significance. The air smelled of oil and polished steel.

The two men paused where he stood before his open door. The breeze seized the plastic jug and tumbled it away.

"What is it?" Hollis said. "Blake?"

"Shall we step inside?" the stranger said, his voice reedy and passionless, with a core of iron.

They stepped in. None of them bothered to shut the door. The living room was an alien place to Hollis. He recognized nothing about it. The night had followed them in.

"Blake," Hollis whispered and the word died on his lips. It trailed into the night, dissipating, remote as the cry of a hunted beast across a moonlit hill.

But stalwart Blake said nothing.

Hollis drifted away from the two men, the thin stranger and the old friend -- his only friend -- become a stranger now, silhouetted against the moonlight in his wide-standing door.

"What do you want?" Hollis said.

"Are you Raymond Hollis?"

"I should be asking who you are. What gives you the right to come in here like this? Blake --"

The thin stranger looked at Blake. "Is this the man?"

"Yes."

"Mr. Hollis, if you'll come with us."

Hollis did not move. He stood in the center of the room, surrounded by the liquid crystal walls, their surfaces silvery and inert.

"Where? Why?"

"Mr. Hollis, please."

"Why?"

"What is the First Principle, Mr. Hollis?"

Hollis had another flash from his childhood, his rote recital of the principles in a chill and shining classroom. But the words would not come to his lips.

Quietly, as if explaining something to a recalcitrant child, the thin man said: "Democracy, Mr. Hollis, that is the First Principle. And democracy means always having the right to choose."

"But I haven't..."

"How have you passed your nights these last years?"

"I -- writing. Blake, please..."

But Blake's silent shade was retreating down the hall, toward the study.

"Writing, Mr. Hollis?"

"Writing -- just writing."

"And what did you write?"

"A story, a novel --"

"In that story -- that novel w who decides what happens, Mr. Hollis? Who decides how things come out?"

"I do. It's what I do, I'm a writer."

"A content provider, Mr. Hollis."

Hollis thought of his long days indexing the countless snippets of music and speech and text that flowed to him through the walls. All those billion fragments sewn together in an endless web, every fragment a bridge to everywhere and nowhere, journeys without destination, guided by no shaping artist's hand. The men and women and children, the fathers and mothers, the sons and daughters who day and night gazed transfixed into the liquid crystal walls -- let them choose. Let them navigate their own journeys, a million unknown ways, guided by a million idiosyncratic interests. No place anymore for a story to be told, the First Principle decreed.

"Yes," he whispered, "but a writer, too."

"What gives you the right ? Why should you choose what direction the story should take?"

"Alone, in private, I have sought no reader."

The thin man threw back his head. A thin cry erupted from his throat, and now through the open door the fireflies came pouring -- more fireflies than Hollis had ever seen or imagined, whirling and spinning, abdomens glitteringly alight in their endless cotillion. They swarmed about the thin man, alighting by the thousands upon his outflung arms and hands, his face and neck, the brim of his fedora -- everywhere --until the black oval of his mouth alone remained, an inky vacuum in the pulsing glare, giving vent to that eerie and accusing cry. Once again, Hollis had that sense of angular hieroglyphs, bright with a significance that still defied him, carved into the darkling air.

Hollis staggered back as the liquid crystal walls boiled to life, drowning the moon-splashed room with double, treble, endlessly replicating images of his own worried face. Through the distorting plastic lens of the firefly jar he had placed on his desk, Hollis watched himself set aside the antique ballpoint pen; through the intervening mesh of window screen studied his own pensive gaze into the light-starved study; in a spinning vertiginous flash saw himself standing before his door, his face looming down, magnified and distorted as the harvest moon by the firefly camera circling by -- a spinning kaleidoscope of images. From a dozen firefly angles, he witnessed the damning moment, his crime. Again and again, from each of the surrounding walls, he saw himself lean forward and speak the words into the phone's flickering column of light --

Would you like to see it?

Would you like to see it?

Would you like to see it?

Blake, he thought. I trusted you --

A single firefly barreled past him, mesmerized by the thin man's pulsing form. Hollis's hand shot out and closed around the winking insect, crushing it. Then, in the glare of that strange pulsing light, he leaned forward to study the remains scattered piecemeal across his tremulous palm. His breath caught in his throat as all at once the significance of those glowing hieroglyphs, that queerly automated dance, came clear: shiny cogs and gears spilled from the creature's shattered thorax; the extruding lens of a single camera eye stared up at him, bound to the wreckage by a shining filament of wire.

The thin man's piercing cry fell to silence. The lurid walls flickered into gray. The cloud of fireflies funneled away as they had come -- out the open door and into the moonlit sky.

And then they came for him, the thin man with his predatory grace, Blake like an apparition from the darkened hallway, the manuscript folded carefully against his breast. Gentle hands, but resolute, closed about his arms.

"No, please," he said as they led him across the lawn.

But they turned upon him their flat, affectless eyes, saying nothing, and for the second time that night, caught the scents of oil and polished steel. Summer wind tore at the pages of his manuscript as the translucent carapace of the beetle slid into place above him. And then they were speeding silently away. Hollis glanced back, but all the houses looked the same. The fireflies were gone and nothing moved but a single scrap of paper, rising and twisting in the moonlit dark before the wind harried it away.

~~~~~~~~

By Dale Bailey

Technology continues hurtling us into the future as fast as it can --faster than many of us would like. Here Dale Bailey takes a moment to imagine poetically what that future might hold for some of the people who have paved its way.

THE SINGING THING

Here's a story about a woman you might call the salt of the earth, and about the strange object she found within the earth (and what she then found within herself).

IT'S NOT EVERY DAY YOU are hoeing sweet taters out of the dirt when you hear one commence to moan. Oh, some will say my hair's white as salt nowadays, and figure, old woman like me has been farming under this Alabama sun too long. They'd say it's melted my brains into a runny-puddle, like store-bought ice cream. Well, it ain't. Folks think life's all about science, and medicine, books and such. Not all of it, though.

You listen. It happened like this.

I was fourteen when I married Ezra, a cotton farmer three times my age and not a bit of the child in him. I was not a happy bride, for I soon learned Ezra had married for a help-mate and not a wife. Evenings, he'd light a fire to chase the chill of the coming dark, but it never warmed me. I scrubbed my hands before every blaze he built, but it was flame without heat, light and smoke only, like love without wanting.

I wished I had Ma to counsel me, but she died before we wed. Hers was a hard life, but she found pleasure with her hands. Ma, see, was a potter. For her, pots rose true and strong. Sometimes we'd hear singing as she worked her wheel, but she'd say it wasn't her, that she was just letting loose the sound already in the clay. It was a gift she had, that singing thing.

After she died and I married, Daddy gave me her old wheel. Sometimes I sneaked out to Ezra's barn to spin it, but it was no use. My pots flopped and fell. Ezra didn't like my potting; I was a wife now, he said, and I'd have to help him and stop playing patty-cakes with mud. I tried not to miss what I didn't have, thinking if I worked hard at the land, we'd make a good life.

That first summer of our married life passed quick, and by fall, Ezra made ready to take our cotton to sell in town. "More rain's coming," he said one morning. He stopped to scrape a clod of mud off his boot. "You better dig them sweet taters before they rot."

He could make me feel like a fool. Still, lots of men sold goods in town this time of year, and I hoped he'd buy me a card of silver buttons while he was there. I'd been wanting them for a dress I sewed.

The day he was to go, I wrapped up a biscuit and poured some of Daisy's milk in a jar. Daisy didn't give like she should, but we couldn't afford another cow. He'd stop at a boarding house for supper and not be home till the next night.

I watched him ride off without a backward glance for me, then tied on my bonnet and set out to the tater patch. It was an Indian summer morning` poplars dropping leaves, squirrels gnawing twigs heavy with acorns. I knelt down and stabbed my tater fork in the ground, twisting it to rip out the taters' roots. I like sweet taters, all orangey inside, and after a while I started humming and forgetting any sadness. Clouds parted and sun came out, blistering my neck. Then it began to heat up. Sweat puckered my gown under my arms. Mockingbird had been singing with me from the trees, but he quit like it got too hot to sing.

A cloud rolled over the sun, giving it an odd look. Sun turned into a sunflower, black cloud in the middle like the flower's eye, and rays shooting out all around. I stood up, wiping sweat from my face with my gown-tail. Wind came up, nice breeze. Nobody around, so I lifted my skirts, let that air blow up my drawers, and while I was standing there, skirt to my waist, I heard a low moan.

Well, I dropped my skirt, whirled around. Squinted up against that sunflower sun, figuring it was the mockingbird wailing. But no, I saw him flap wings and fly away. And I heard that moaning sound again.

"Ezra?" I called, but nobody answered. "Who goes? Make yourself known." Nobody spoke. Just wind, whistling low. That blighted cloud kept its hold on the sun's face, rays shot out brighter, like it was pinching the sun's nose, and the moan came again, louder.

Hair prickled on my arms. I was scared. I was young and didn't know then that the scariest things you'll face in this life ain't usually boogie-men. "Who goes?" I hollered again, louder. I picked up my tater fork, held it above my head like I'd strike out. "Come out, wherever you're hiding."

"Here," somebody moaned.

"Where?" I saw nobody.

"Down here."

It was coming from below my feet. I dropped to my knees, laid my ear to the ground. It couldn't be, but it was. The ground was moaning. "Help me," it cried.

I scrambled aside from where I'd been digging, raked through the dirt, seeing nothing but the very tip-end of a tater, the pointy part, and I scratched dirt from around it.

"That's it," moaned the voice. "Loose this dirt, where I can breathe."

"Somebody under there? Who are you?"

"Ohhh, I'm a pitiful thing. Loose me, won't you?"

Well, I didn't know what I had dug up. Had somebody buried a man in my tater patch, trying to kill him, and I'd come along just in time? I chopped with my hoe.

"Stop!" it screamed. "That sharp thing is killing me! Dig me out gentle!"

I was shaking now, my heart thumping till I could feel the throb in my fingers, but I couldn't let somebody die down there in the dirt, could I? So I dug easy but quick, scraping with my fingers, uncovering --what? The toe of a shoe? A hat? How was it living, under heaps of dirt?

I got a piece uncovered big enough to wrap my hands around, and it looked like some kind of root, more turnip than tater. I grabbed hold and pulled with all my might.

"Stop!" it screamed again. "Can't you see I am stuck down here, woman? You are about to pull my head off!"

Panting, I sat down. "Is this your head?" I prodded with my fork.

"Ouch." It groaned. "You're hurting me."

"How'd you get in such a mess? How are you living down there, all covered up?"

It sniffed. "They put me here. Buried me."

Something awful began to dawn on me. "Who put you there? Nothing can live buried, without air." It said nothing.

"What are you?" I stuck my fork into the ground like I was done. "I ain't digging till you tell me who you are, and how you came here."

It sighed, a deep, sorrowful sound that heaved the dirt a little. "I'm Legion," it said.

"Have mercy!" I scrambled to my feet.

"Don't be scared. Don't run off, I won't hurt you. Can't, don't you see? I'm all buried. Please. I'm in a pitiful way."

It touched me, that voice. Like a child's.

"Please," it pleaded. "Just a little more digging."

"Are you telling me," I kneeled down beside the hole, "that you are a devil?"

A sassy tone come into its voice. "There's only one devil."

"Well. I've heard of Legion, and evil spirits being driven out of a boy into swine. Made them pigs mad, drove 'em over a cliff into the sea. So maybe you are a demon. But that killed all the demons, drowned 'em in the water."

It was quiet for a minute. Then the voice came again, bragging. "Everybody thinks we can't swim."

I held my reeling head. "I'm dreaming. Hallucinating mad, out here in the hot sun."

It was quiet in my tater patch, just Legion sobbing every once in a while under the dirt, and me watching sweat bead off my face and splat onto my skirt. "So if you got run off a cliff inside a pig how'd you end up in my taters?"

"It took years," it said, eager. "I've been lots of places. Last time I got cast out into this dirt. Now burying's different from water. Can't get out where you can't move, so I've been here many years, hoping rain and wind would wear it down and release me, like mountains rise out of the earth."

"But you ain't any mountain, and I don't think a decent woman should set something like you loose, do you?"

It considered. "I'm not bad anymore. I've been thinking for a long time. Moles have tunneled past me, raised their babies and moved on. Corn's tasseled above me, left roots and stalks to rot in the ground. I've seen seeds sprout, busting hard shells toward the sun. I want to come out, too, to go up in the air and the sun, with all that's living, and if it takes being good to do it, I'll do it. Please, wouldn't you set one of your own loose, if you could?"

Now that was the thing to say, and it knew it. Started me thinking about having to put Ma in that dirt, and how I did wish she was with me in the light and air.

"I'm even changing my name," it babbled on. "Not 'Legion' no more. Leon. Ain't that fine?"

I shook my head.

"Please," it coaxed. "I'll show you how good I can be. Name something you want, anything, and I'll do it. Only uncover my ears, at least."

"Tempting is sin."

"It ain't tempting. It'd be thanking you, for giving a poor, reformed creature another chance." I said nothing. "I'll show you," it promised, "how I've turned. That cow you've got? Daisy?"

This gave me pause. "How'd you know my cow, demon?"

"Leon," it snapped. Then its voice got honey-slick again. "She's been by. I feel her hoofbeats through the ground, hear you call her. Now I know she don't give much milk, so what if she gave more? No, she'll give cream." He was excited now, chattering. "You can sell it in town, help make a living."

I thought on this a spell. It did seem harmless enough. "And what do I have to do for you?"

"Why, nothing," it said, surprised. "'Cept, just uncover me to my ears. Then maybe you'll come and see me again tomorrow."

That wouldn't hurt that I could see, so I scraped with my hands till I got the head out. And lo and behold, it looked like a man, yet none I'd ever seen. Its face was round as a new moon, yet blank somehow, a slate you could make a mark on. It blinked, big tears welling up.

"Oh," it said, "I'm so grateful. You'll see, that cow'll squirt pure cream for you in the morning. What a kindness you've done. Just come back tomorrow, won't your"

I carried my basket of taters on my hip and headed home, promising nothing, not sure whether I'd done good or bad this day. Let Ezra worry with it when he come home, I figured. I had clothes to scrub. I was through with demons.

Ezra didn't come home that night, of course, and when I woke next morning, I thought I'd had a crazy dream. "Too much sun," I told the cat that lived off the mice in our barn when I went to milk Daisy. "Ezra'd lock me in the mad-house." I scooted a stool beside Daisy's warm hide. Her breath was a cloud in the cold air. I pinched her teat between my fingers and squirted milk into my tin bucket, whssh, whssh.

Then I stopped. It got quiet. Pigeons fluttered in the rafters over my head. Cat dived for something in the hay, missed, come up sneezing from the hay-seed. A ray of sun stabbed through a crack in the roof above us, lit up Cat's black fur. She come over to me and I felt of her hair, all warm where the light had been playing. "Cat," I said, "do you suppose?" I dipped my finger into the bucket and touched it to my lips. It was pure cream.

So I was digging up a demon in my sweet potato patch.

I carried my cream to the kitchen, filled me a jelly jar and Cat a saucer and sat down to drink. She drank all of hers, too, then sat cleaning her whiskers, studying me with slanty green eyes.

She came over to rub against my shin. "That was a treat," I warned. "Don't count on it every day, for you are no fancy-cat." She hopped into my lap and balled herself up for a nap, like she didn't believe a word of it.

I flung her off. "Shoo! I got no time for the likes of you." I slung the rest of the cream out the door, into a patch of violets growing by the steps, and wiped out my jar at the sink. Cat clawed to go out, and when I opened the door to let her, I saw what I couldn't believe. Them violets was blooming, and here it was fall, the flowers as wide across as your thumb is long, heart-shaped, and blue. Some of that cream had coated the leaves like candle wax and dripped slow onto the ground, like the plants was crying tears.

It was noon before I got up my nerve to go back to the taters. Part of me was excited as a child with a birthday cake, part of me scared I was messing with something I didn't know about. Part of me was thinking, shovel more dirt on top of that thing, make him put Daisy back like she was, and part of me was remembering how I heard of Egyptian princesses so rich they bathed in cream. If he can make a cow give cream, I wondered, what else can he do?

When I came to my tater patch, I saw my demon laying there half-dug up, like a rock in a field. "You back?" it called, happy as a lover to see me. "Did you enjoy your cream?"

I stood over it, arms crossed over my chest, hardening my heart. "Plain folks don't need cream ever day."

"Then sell it. Pocket that money and surprise Ezra." He sighed. "He works so hard. Now will you set me loose?"

Well, I knew I had to be careful of what I was about to do. "Slow down a minute. How am I to know you're not tricking me, that I'm not setting sin loose on the world by digging you up?"

"Oh, sin's already loose. Think on it. It's living that sets sin loose. Ain't a newborn baby the most sinless thing you know? Then it gets to be a child that heaves a stone through a storefront window to steal a penny candy, or a woman that lies with another's husband, and by the time a man or woman's old and their backs are stooped and twisted, so are their hearts. No, living brings out sin. Preachers credit such as me way too much for evil."

Meadowlark on a far-off fence post started to sing. I sat on the ground and sifted dirt through my fingers, thinking. Dirt was full of shiny mica, like scales some silvery snake had shed. "You see?" asked Leon. "You'd be doing no harm. Uncover me a little more, see if you don't like me."

"Maybe if you would do me another favor."

Its lips turned up in a pretty smile. "Name it."

I looked toward the horizon, where I'd see Ezra coming home. "You could make Ezra buy those buttons I've been wanting."

"Is that all?" laughed my demon. "Why wait till he comes home?" When he spoke again, his voice was a whisper. "Put your hands to your collar. Don't look. Touch. Run your fingers down your shirt-front, slow."

I touched my collar. The little broke button that I knew was there, the one that pricked the hollow of my throat every time I bent over, was gone. I felt a new button, smooth as ice, damp as dew. I slid my hands down my shirt, both hands. Shivers run over me. What had he done? "I'm afraid to look," I cried.

"Just feel," said he. "You don't have to look."

I slid my hands low, lower, closed my eyes. Seed pearl buttons? I wondered.

"Plucked out of oysters' throats," he said, as if I'd spoken aloud.

I squeezed my eyes shut tight, rubbed up and down my shirt. Heat rose from me, shimmered in the air around me, like wheat waves in wind.

"Ain't you pretty? Ezra counts such a waste, don't he? But you'll turn his head when he sees you." He hummed a song I didn't recognize.

Old women say the devil sings church hymns backwards, and I stopped, scared. "But what'll I tell Ezra when he asks where these come from?"

"Why, say you found 'em." He slanted his eyes like Cat, looked at me sideways. "Ain't it true, you've found what you need?"

I couldn't speak, yet he kept talking. His voice came out of the trees all around me, like wind, whispering down, blowing, a strange and singing sound, but his lips quit moving. "Just like I hear Daisy's hoofs above me, I hear your heartbeats. Ezra doesn't give what you need, does he?"

I clapped my hands over my ears, squeezed shut my eyes, but he sang on. "There's Indians, some say, who fish with their own flesh. Cut strips of skin for bait in winter, when they can't find any other. Their arms and legs are pocked and puckered, their scars, wrinkled hollows. They do it to feed their families, they use up themselves, until they scrape the bone."

"I'm a good wife," I cried.

"You are," said he.

I slumped to the ground, dragged my shaking fingers through the dirt. "Reckon you can do lots of things, Mr. Leon. Do me one last thing, before I get my shovel. You see, Ma's buried in the ground, like you. What would you say to raising her up, as long as we are doing one another such favors?"

He clucked his tongue, smiling, and this time his lips moved. "Raising the dead, my, my. You've got me mixed up with Someone Else. I would if I could, of course. But I can do something about that potter's wheel you love so much." He stopped smiling, looked hard at me, his eyes glinting silver as that mica in the dirt. "Now dig me up."

He said this like he was commanding me to do it, when all he'd said before was so pretty and sweet. And I wanted to do it, I confess. Sunflower sun come back out, steam spewed from the earth. Sweat ran under my arms. I opened my mouth to say, "No," but nothing came out.

"Fetch a shovel," he said.

There was nothing to do but do it. I ran and grabbed a shovel and dug, him giving orders all the while, like I had no choice. I worked till I uncovered his hands, and then he started digging with me, pulling himself up, freeing one leg and then another, climbing out of his pit. His clothes were moldy and worn. Dirt caked his bare feet. Panting, he stretched out on the ground and closed his eyes, and I lay down beside him, my dress wet with sweat, fingernails broken from clawing, eyes gritty with sand.

Then he turned to me and smiled. He fingered those seed pearl buttons on my shirt, pulled gently and the threads broke, tumbling them into his hands. He opened his mouth and put one pearl on his tongue. When he leaned toward me, I heard the singing again. It was like he had tasted something sweeter than I'd ever known and wanted to share it with me, and, grateful, I took what he offered.

A WHISTLING WIND stirred me from a sleepless dream I'd fallen into. My demon was standing over me, and I jumped and clutched my clothes about me. "Where are you going?" I asked, teeth chattering, cold. "Look." He pointed behind me. I turned. On the horizon, the sun had spilt its yoke like a fertile chicken's egg, bleeding onto the road below it. Ezra's wagon was coming down that road, a shadow against the red. "Go to your barn," he said.

I scrambled to my feet. "Ma's wheel?"

He smiled and pointed to the barn. I pelted for it, threw aside the bolt that held the door and dropped to my knees beside the wheel. A lump of clay lay there, and I pressed my hands in it. And as I knelt there, my sweat melted that clay and the wheel began to spin. Faster and faster it spun, and the clay wasn't cold and slick anymore, but warm, like a living thing, like the heat of my hands was in it, and it wrapped around my fingers, forming over me. Shapes rose from it, the finest pots you'll ever see, and other things, things I didn't know and couldn't name, shapes that spun and shifted until they lifted off my wheel and whirled in the air before me. And in their dancing and whirling, the plate under my hands spinning, my hands gliding over the wet and slippery clay, I heard a voice, my voice, begin to sing.

Ezra said he found me sitting on the hay beside the wheel, all manner of strange and twisted forms of clay beside me. It seemed a long time since he'd come down the road, but he said he'd just seen me run to the barn. "Are you hurt?" he asked. He shoved one of the clay creatures with his boot, but it only rocked back and forth in the hay and did not budge. "What's this?" He stooped to pick up a pot as twisted as a snail's shell. "These pots won't hold."

I looked about me, and saw what I had done. "You're wrong," I said. "They'll hold."

That autumn passed to winter, then spring, and another summer. Once, only once, I tried to tell Ezra about what had happened, but his face went hard as the ground he plowed, and he said he didn't want to hear a foolish tale I'd dreamed.

So, friends, this is what you must know. Ezra chided me no more about potting. Every day I went back to that old wheel, and soon my pots lined the wails of the barn and filled every shelf in the house. I stacked pots between the beds of larkspur and rows of collards, and underneath the pecan trees growing along the road. People passing stopped to look, but no one bought. It did not matter to me. Ezra said my pots looked unnatural, but he left them alone. He left me alone. Aloneness rose in me over the years, strong as sap in spring, but it was not loneliness. I knew then it didn't matter, nor would it again, how cold Ezra lived his life beside me. Life's heat and fire was inside me. It had always been. I'd found my singing thing.

~~~~~~~~

By Lynn B. Coulter

Section: FILMS

TOUCHED BY AN... ALIEN

I HOPE THAT it's not heresy to admit in these pages, but I've al ways loved mystery fiction. The appeal is certainly easy to fathom. Traditional mystery stories comfort us because, although they admit that life is full of puzzling and frightening phenomena, they manage to explain it all away by the final page. Whodunnit./That's the main problem- and (in books and movies, anyway quite solvable. The whys are sometimes a little harder to elucidate. But when the sleuth bothers to delve into motivations, they can usually reduce even the most "diabolical" plot to a few very human emotions: love, hate, jealousy, greed, and ambition. There are no Great Mysteries for a detective, only a series of small ones.

Not so in well-crafted science fiction and fantasy, books or film. (Which is why I feel such affection for this genre.) The concepts that must be understood, and the challenges that must be faced, go well beyond ordinary human experience. And, for that very reason, sf makes us question the meaning of our "humanity" beyond the limits of this small world.

2001 accomplished this. So did earlier classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still. And that's why I have feared the obscene success of Independence Day. That loud, self-important, yet mindless megahit was sure to inform much of the cinema we will see during this sf boom we are entering. And what a sad waste that would be.

But, perhaps I was being overly pessimistic. Because this past summer's megahit in which Will Smith once again saved the planet from alien threat, Men in Black, was actually considerably better than ID4. At least it meant to be silly. And there was a spark of creativity (and even a touch of genuine irony) behind its humor and action. I also liked the fact that the aliens weren't inherently evil. Their agendas and their personalities were as varied as those of their oblivious hosts on this way-station, Earth.

But, as much as I enjoyed the absurdity of Men in Black, I couldn't help but wish for a science fiction film that wasn't driven by gimmickry, creature design, and fiery fx. I wanted to see an sf film do what sf was designed to do --- provoke a thought, or two, or three. That's Why I welcomed the appearance of Contact-- a story that dared to put a little science back into science fiction.

This tale of radio (and, eventually, personal)communication with intelligent life from elsewhere in the universe was originally written in 1980 by Carl Sagan and his partner/wife, Ann Druyan, as a movie treatment. But their story's path to the screen was even rockier than little Sojourner's ramble on the surface of Mars. First, despite the enthusiastic sponsorship of Lynda Obst, the story languished in development hell for a few years. Then, in 1985, Sagan transformed it into a successful novel. Then, it fell back into the realm of Burbank beelzebubs for a few more years, with dozens of screenwriters taking a crack at Hollywoodizing Sagan's complex story. The film was finally greenlighted in 1993, with a screenplay by Michael Goldenberg [Bed of Roses), to be helmed by Mad Max's George Miller.

Miller was eventually canned -- some say for being more visionary than pragmatic about the project -- as director. Then, Robert Zemeckis [of Back to the Future, ...Roger Rabbit, and, of course, Forrest Gump fame) was put in charge. More tweaking of the screenplay ensued, with final writing credits going to Goldenberg and lames V. Hart (Hook, Brain Stoker's Dracula).

Finally, in the summer of 1997 (six months too late for Carl Sagan to live to see it), Contact, the movie, premiered. And it was, at long last, a science fiction film that encouraged its audience to think a few Big Thoughts. Just not Big enough.

For, as is almost always the case when scores of Hollywood types whittle and fiddle with a challenging story, the Warner Brothers team that brought us this Contact significantly compromised the speculative force of Carl Sagan's original story, by trying to make sure its content and its heroine threatened no one.

Regarding the hero of Contact, a SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) radio astronomer named Dr. Eleanor Arroway, casting was most certainly not the problem. The filmmakers have been quoted as saying that they couldn't imagine anyone but Jodie Foster in the role of the questing scientist. In their case, those words are just flackery. Still, I'd have to agree.

There are plenty of youngish women in Hollywood who could have convinced us of their enthusiasm for the task of listening for transmissions from beyond. But there are practically none who actually seem like they're smart enough for the job. (And writing that makes me sadder than I can say.) Foster is a Yale-educated woman in real life, but that matters less than the seriousness and intellect she displays as both a performer and a person.

Foster has a rigorous mind and a resolute will. That makes her perfect to play Sagan's Ellie. But it makes her over-qualified to play Robert Zemeckis's lead.

For the movie Contact's Dr. Eleanor Arroway is a bit of a lost soul who seems to be using the search for alien cultures as an excuse to try to re-connect with her long-dead Daddy (David Morse). This is established in an early sequence of heavy-handed foreshadowing calculated to tug every heartstring in the audience. A nine-year-old Ellie (played well by Bastard Out of Carolina's Jena Malone) copes with her widowed father's sudden death by calling out for him on her ham radio. She is left in bereft silence.

There's nothing actually wrong with the scene. Except that it's a cheap shot that has little relation to Sagan's novel. Although the novel's Ellie does lose the man she believes to be her father at a young age, she still has a mother (with whom she has classic mother-daughter angst) and a "stepfather" who inadvertently spurs her girlish scientific ambition with his maladroit at.. tempts to steer her toward a more feminine life.

The "motherless child"/orphan is a Hollywood cliche, designed to artificially inflate the sympathy of the audience. But Ellie, as played by the redoubtable Foster, doesn't need to be piteous for us to be on her side. And she doesn't need some deep-seated emotional loss to motivate her to achieve in the field of science.

But the men who made this movie didn't trust us to like a capable, adventurous, intellectual woman. So they made Ellie pathetic, and then they made her powerless.

Time and again, their adult Ellie has her thunder stolen by her Machiavellian former administrator, David Drumlin (Tom Skerritt). Now, Dr. Arroway might have had to put up with Drumlin's abuse and cooptation when she worked under him at the Arecibo observatory. But years after they part company, and long after she has found private funding for her research, why, oh why, would she let Drumlin horn in when she discovers a transmission emanating from the vicinity of Vega? And why would she continue to let this man try to steal her glory and ruin her chances to be a space pioneer?

The answer is, she wouldn't.

Women in the science and technology fields certainly don't have it easy, even now. But it's doubtful that Arroway real-life counterparts like astrophysicist Jill Tarter, the director of the major SETI program called Project Phoenix, or Donna Shirley, the head of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, achieved what they did by letting men walk all over them and their dreams.

And, played by a intrepid actor like Jodie Foster, it's hard to believe that Ellie Arroway would be such a wimp, either. She suffers in silence, and waits for the fates or other men to come to her rescue. Luckily for her, they do. Drumlin is killed in a terrorist attack. And a filthy-rich Howard Hughes-style bizarro named Hadden (John Hurt) comes through with big bucks and extravagant technology whenever she needs it. And as for emotional support, how about a sexy new-age Billy Graham? Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey) was dumped by Ellie after a one-night-stand years earlier, but that doesn't keep him from showing up, repeatedly, in times of crisis, to gaze soulfully into her eyes, and offer her a homespun homily or a ride into the sunset.

Ellie would be nowhere without her Daddy Warbucks and her hunky holyman. And her dependence on male championship is certainly exacerbated by her segregation from other accomplished women. In Sagan's novel, the President of the United States is a woman, drawn to the integrity and smarts of Dr. Arroway. (In the movie, the president is played by...Bill Clinton, in an unfortunate and jarring Gumpism.) The only woman politico in the film is a presidential advisor played by Angela Bassett -- in another role that wastes her incredible talents. And when they finally get a chance for a quiet conversation together, what do these two female movers and shakers talk about? Why, where Ellie can shop for an alluring dress, of course.

But Ellie is isolated in an even more insidious manner, as a space explorer. In Sagan's novel, the building of the costly spacecraft/time-travel device, based on an alien manual, is a global effort. And when astronauts are chosen for the first mission to our faraway friends, it is a crew of five, from all around the globe, who climb on board. (These include, I might add, another top woman scientist and friend of Ellie's from India.

On Planet Zemeckis, however, the trip to Vega is an American mission. And Ellie, when she goes, goes alone.

More evidence of Hollywood's insufferable cultural jingoism? Undoubtedly. And also of our need to see everything in terms of the individual. (Collective action is just not the stuff of the major studio flick.) But in the case of Ellie Arroway, the filmmakers had other motivations for isolating and weakening her. Theological motivations, of all things.

And of all the compromises of Sagan's stow, it is this one that offended me the most. For the touchy-feely spirituality that the screenwriters superimpose upon this tale of intergalactic detente is a total subversion of Sagan's original intent.

Carl Sagan always acknowledged the sincerity of many "religious" people, and he recognized the psychological need behind world faiths. He was, nonetheless, an agnostic who saw religion as a dangerous and repressive commodity that was too often an enemy of science. (See his 1996 book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.)

In a recent interview published in the Los Angeles Times, Jodie Foster spoke of how much she enjoyed her conversations with Carl Sagan during preproduction and the shooting of Contact. He told her his ideas of the "god of the gaps." We humans, Sagan believed, had filled in our gaps of knowledge "with the word `God.' Why do birds fly? We don't know, God must be there." But as science has allowed us to fill in those gaps, "[t]he big question is where does God go?"

That is the $64 thousand question. And Carl Sagan's answer, never stated baldly, but easy enough to pick up from his speeches and writings, understandably threatened those involved in fundamentalist faiths. God was immaterial to him. And he saw "blind faith" as a great danger.

That message is there in the pages of Contact, as well as many of his other works. But you'd never know it from the Warner Brothers version of his story. Here, Sagan's agnostic Ellie seems to go through some odd cosmic conversion, in which she learns the value of blind faith.

During an Inquisition to decide who will be the sole emissary to our neighbors in the great beyond, Ellie flunks the questions about her religious faith. Set up by Palmer, she admits to finding a belief in God to be irrelevant to space exploration, and so loses her shot at being America's space ambassador.

At the time, it's unclear whether the movie believes that this is a deficiency on her part or not. But her reasons for concluding that science/knowledge is the only religion worth having are given far less screen time than the expediency and piety of those (including her earnest former lover) who would chastise her about the inevitability of God. (I liked the quoted statistic about 95% of the earth's population being believers. Whoever made that count is obviously including those of us who worship trees, volcanoes, chocolate chip cookies, and Xena: Warrior Princess.)

I will admit that the movie does lightly point up some extremes in modem religion. But a walk-on cultist terrorist, and Rob Lowe's cameo as a Ralph Reed-style Christian right-winger, are mere passing images. They don't stay with the viewer the way McConaughey's appealing leading-man pieties do. And they can't hold a votive candle to the crypto-religious impact of Ellie's meeting; with her "alien" radio-pal.

After the dastardly Drumlin is offed, and Ellie gets her chance to zip through a wormhole to another world, she finds herself, somewhere in the Lyra neighborhood, at an illusionary tropical paradise of white sand and blue sky and crystal water. There she converses with a creature in the physical form of her beloved father. But the beatific David Morse is portrayed as such a kindly, glowing figure, it is almost as if Ellie is looking into the face of God.

Yea, verily I say unto you, that seems to be what Zemeckis and his writers are implying: A close encounter of the transformative, divine kind has been visited upon our heroine. And when the skeptics back home in the U.S. accuse her of perpetrating a hoax, her beef-cake evangelist boyfriend is right there to back her up. "I, for one, believe her," he proclaims to the press.

As for Ellie, she defends herself by advising Congress that some things just have to be taken on faith.

So much for the scientific method!

The compromising of Sagan's female hero, the total Americanization of his global approach to interplanetary encounter, and the overly sentimental, Touched by an Angel overtones superimposed on his story to make it more uplifting and less controversial to America's moviegoing masses, annoyed me no end. But I'd rather watch a wrong-headed attempt to make an intelligent movie than a finely crafted example of utterly idiotic trash, any day.

And so would a lot of other people. Watching Contact was fun, but it was equally enjoyable to stop in at some of the film newsgroups in the weeks following the movie's release and read the ongoing debates. Some were about unimportant details like the use of rotary phones at the Arecibo bungalows. But many were about important issues relating to astrophysics, space politics, and spirituality.

It seems like a long time since a Hollywood science fiction film actually set people to thinking. It makes for a pleasant change. And if it turns into a trend, no one will be happier than I.

At the very least, the movie Contact may motivate a few more people to pick up the books of the late Carl Sagan. If it does, then the filmmakers will have accomplished something truly worthwhile.

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By KATHI MAIO