AS IF IT'S A violation of client/lawyer confidentiality, people generally consider it bad form for editors to write appreciations of the writers they edit. State secrets might be revealed, mistakes made; working relationships can get damaged.

However, since Kate Wilhelm's photograph has appeared under the definition of professionalism in my book -- and has been fixed there for more than a decade -- I felt an exception could be made. I've been hankering to write this piece since I first interviewed for the job of F&SF editor in 1996. You're not going to stop me now.

Besides, by having worked at Bluejay Books and then at St. Martin's Press and now here, I've been in a unique position of reading all the reviews for Kate's books, of hearing many people's thoughts on the woman and her works -- so I think I've got an inkling of just how much her work has meant to people.

I've taken the phone calls from writers who say they owe it all to Kate. I've lunched with editors who complained that the new Kate Wilhelm novel isn't in their favorite series (and by the way, this one editor doesn't really see herself in Barbara Holloway's relationship with her father). I've had top-rank writers ask me sotto voce what strings we need to pull to get SFWA to name her a Grand Master. I've had several writers quote me verbatim the words Kate used when she touched on the key element in their writing while critiquing their work. And I've shared moments with other professionals when they've put aside any suave facades and admitted that one story of Kate's or another brought us to tears.

I like to think this gives me some authority in calling Kate Wilhelm well-loved.

Let me start by confessing that I have not read every work of Ms. Wilhelm's. My hunt for her elusive(n1) third novel, The Nevermore Affair, only recently bore fruit. Other books have sat patiently on the shelf, abiding. There is a strong sense in Kate's work that things have their proper times and places; it does not do to rush, so I do not rush. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang I have not reread; the fourteen-year-old kid who found it at a garage sale in Norwood, New Jersey, expects that it will be better on the next reading, but I can't help feeling that some djinn of my youth might fly away when this particular bottle is unstopped. The proper time will come.

The stories I have read -- two dozen novels out of three, perhaps eighty of a hundred stories -- say a lot about Kate Wilhelm. Her women are not afraid of being smart, not afraid of being themselves, but often they find life kaleidoscoping uncontrollably around them. Her men are strong enough to show their love. Heroes rarely need to use force; villains tend to be people who aren't honest with themselves. Human behavior and the physical world both pose mysteries worth solving. One need not span the globe to find good stories. Kate's characters generally prefer to dig their fingers into the soil they call home, and they like the feel of dirt and hard work. Good food should be savored, life need not be led in quiet desperation, at the highest level of heaven awaits a fresh pot of coffee.

Perhaps you'd like a cup now?

Katie G. Meredith was born in Toledo in 1928 and to her credit, I've never seen her make an attempt to hide this date. She and her brothers and sister grew up in Kentucky. She married fairly young, had two sons with Mr. Wilhelm before the marriage fell apart. Here's her author bio from 1962, when her first novel was published:

Kate Wilhelm wrote this novel between the hours of 9 P.M. and midnight, when her two children were in bed. Cleveland born [sic], she has spent most of her life in Kentucky. She has been an insurance underwriter, long-distance telephone operator and professional model. Her interests include astronomy, spelunking, hypnotism, lapidary work and fishing. At present she lives in Milford, Pennsylvania, where she is at work on her second novel.

The accompanying photo shows a dark-haired woman with startlingly clear eyes looking off-camera with a gaze that might be termed visionary and a trace of a smile on her lips to make Mona Lisa jealous.

You'll note the author bio mentions that she lived in Milford at the time. As many readers of this magazine already know, her home there was a big Victorian house called the Anchorage that she shared with her second husband, a writer and critic by the name of Damon Knight.

The reason so many readers are aware of this fact is because Kate and Damon hosted passels of writing workshops there. I can't recall for certain if they met at a workshop, but as far as the history of science fiction is concerned, they might as well have. By way of writing groups in Milford, in Clarion, Pennsylvania, and eventually in Eugene, Oregon (their home for the past three decades), Kate and Damon have consistently surrounded themselves with vibrant literary communities --they've practically raised contemporary American science fiction.

The Milford days in particular have attained a status approaching myth: the players include most of sf's leading lights (Judith Merril, Virginia Kidd, Ted Sturgeon, et cetera and et cetera). The stories and anecdotes, such as the group-mind incident that inspired More Than Human [recounted by Damon in The Futurians) loom larger than life. Recently I had the privilege of viewing a short film that Ed Emsh made in Milford entitled The Monster from Back Issues. The spoof starred Damon, Algis Budrys, and Ted Cogswell, among others. Viewing it at David Hartwell's house with Emily Pohl-Weary (Judy and Fred's granddaughter) gave me the extra sense of watching an old film of the collective science fiction family.

A few more words about the writing workshops are in order here. In A Pocketful of Stars, Kate wrote about her first workshop experience: she turned in an ambitious story and had it shredded. The man sitting next to her turned in some trivial fluff and got gentle, kid-glove critiques. After the workshop drubbing, Kate went down to the nearby stream and threw rocks at the water as hard as she could, until she realized her fellow workshoppers treated her story firmly because they respected her and felt the story had potential. I recount this incident every time I'm in a workshop and almost every time I speak with someone who has been in a workshop. In fifty years, the anecdote may well be a twentieth-century tale of Hera's entry to Olympus.

Since that first workshop, Kate has hosted hundreds. She and Damon helped Robin Wilson found the Clarion workshops and for more than twenty years they taught the final two weeks. I saw Kate in action once, about ten years ago, and marveled at her ability to analyze a story and gently but firmly bring out the weaknesses in a constructive manner. It is no wonder that writers can quote her twenty years later. It is no wonder that the roster of writers she helped foster includes such luminaries as Kim Stanley Robinson, George Alee Effinger, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Robert Crais, Nicola Griffith, Lucius Shepard, and dozens more. In the year 2000, all four winners of the Nebula Award for fiction were former students of Kate's.

But a great teacher is not necessarily a great writer and it's rare to find both skills in one person, Kate is a lifelong student of the craft of fiction, which probably helps explain the path of her career. She began selling stories to the sf magazines in the mid-1950s and, as the accompanying bibliography shows, was selling rather steadily to a variety of sf magazines. Her first novel, More Bitter Than Death, was a mystery. Clayton Rawson, her editor, said that if she stuck to one genre, Kate would become a bestseller... but Kate told me, "I couldn't do it." Those many interests in her bio notes (which, in truth, only scratched the surface) would take her in too many directions.

Having come to the early work late, I have to admit that I haven't found it as engaging as the joys to come. I was struck by John Campbell's comments to Kate in a 1957 letter:

You have an easy, pleasing and readable style, one that would, moreover, be a marked change in science fiction. However, your stories have rather hazy, gentle motivating forces behind them -- which, while that too is somewhat different in science fiction, is not quite so desirable a difference.

Ah, I thought when I encountered this letter in the first volume of Campbell's letters. Here at once is what she brought to the field initially, and perhaps a reason why the early work doesn't compel me.

With history to show, it's easy to say now that Kate's work didn't blossom until the mid-1960s, when the New Wave opened up the sf field to more experimentation. In particular, an anthology series known as Orbit, edited by none other than Damon Knight, gave her a place to experiment. (I think the fact that many of Kate's stories feature scientists with experiments gone wrong -- or right -- reflects her own interest in testing out new approaches to storytelling.) Kate went on to publish a score of stories in Orbit, including masterpieces like "The Infinity Box," "The Encounter," and the original novella of "Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang," firmly establishing herself as a top-flight writer. Her novels in this period moved away from the more conventional sf elements and began exploring new psychological territory -- books like Margaret and I (pity that John Campbell never got to experience the motivating forces in this one) and Fault Lines went wherever the story took them, regardless of genre conventions.

"The problem with labels," wrote Kate in 1975, introducing The Infinity Box, "is that they all too quickly become eroded; they cannot cope with borderline cases." The borderline cases tend to be the ones that interest Kate, and the deception of appearances is a consistent theme in her books, especially the Barbara Holloway novels.

By the mid-1980s, when I first got to work with her, Kate had started writing the Constance and Charlie mysteries along with romantic comedies such as Oh, Susarmah! and Crazy Time. In 1990, she blended chaos theory with the legal thriller in Death Qualified and had her biggest commercial success to date. (State secrets revealed? Here's one: during the negotiations for Death Qualified, Kate said the reason she'd parted ways with her previous publishers had always been because she wrote a book the editor simply didn't get. I ask you, what's not to get in a novel that's partly a whodunit, partly a courtroom thriller, partly a science fiction novel about chaos? Labels do indeed erode.)

Never one to repeat herself or write the same book over again, Kate surprised everyone when she found that Barbara Holloway, the lawyer heroine of Death Qualified, offered her the best way to tell another story. Here's how Kate described it in 1994:

I was convinced that I had finished with my character Barbara Holloway when I completed the novel Death Qualified, and I was surprised when she kept coming to mind in various scenes for which I had no story. I wasn't even trying to imagine her in a real situation much less a novel again, but there she was, a presence in my mind. One image of her in particular was maddening in its persistence: she was standing on a cliff overlooking a small cove, speaking to the ocean. But I didn't know what she was saying.

Then, while on vacation, I met a young woman who began to talk about her problems with a younger brother who was mistreating her, hitting and slapping her. She had an answer for every suggestion I offered. She can't defend herself; he is much bigger than she is. She can't complain to her parents; they take his side and the attacks become more vicious. She can't leave; her brother and her father would make her mother suffer the consequences. Then she said her father had brutalized her mother for as long as she could remember, and her mother is stuck because she has no place to go, no one she can turn to, and she has no skills to earn a living by herself.

In four months, Kate wrote The Best Defense. The anger that sparked the book does not typify all of Kate's work, but I mention it because it represents the passion that goes into her fiction. People frequently dub Kate Wilhelm a feminist writer because her books often feature strong women characters and often deal with women's issues, but I've never seen Kate as writing to any particular ism. She writes about the things that are important to her; be the subject the over-medication of the mentally ill, a woman's right to choose, or something as "simple" as the matter of love, she brings wisdom and passion to bear in depicting it.

There is also extraordinary intelligence at work in her fiction. One of Kate's mystery novels hinges on the use of the "morning after" abortion drug, RU-486. Half a decade later, I was in an editorial meeting in which a mystery using the same plot element was being touted as the next big commercial thing, and I realized once again how often Kate grasps a new concept, turns it over and around, and holds its flaws up to light before most people have even recognized it for what it is. Small wonder her stories seem to be ahead of their time so frequently -- twenty-five years before "Survivor" hit the TV screens, she practically predicted it in "Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis."

Before I get carried away and take over the bulk of this issue, let me restrain myself to a few more points:

• The role of family in Kate Wilhelm's work is an essay in itself (if not an entire book) -- her portraits and studies of siblings, married couples, and children are assured and perceptive. One critic told me he saw Constance Leidl and Charlie Meiklejohn as stand-ins for Kate and Damon, but I find the resemblances superficial. It's definitely true, however, that family plays a big role in Kate's life as well as in her fiction -- in fact, she collaborated with her son Richard on one book, and note whose work graces the cover of this issue.
• Another state secret: the last part of a story Kate usually writes is the title. People in the sales department at St. Martin's didn't like the title Death Qualified and threatened to rename the book The Butterfly Effect. (These included some of the same people who felt that The Silence of the Lambs was a weak title.) Kate's working title for the novella in this issue was "What Color Were Leif Ericson's Underpants?"
• In high school, Kate took an employment aptitude test that told her she was meant to be an architect. Before you laugh, think of how prominent a role buildings play in novels such as Smart House, The Good Children, and Cambio Bay. If you ever get the feeling that you could find your way around one of the houses in Kate's books, that might be because she draws maps of the major locales for her books while she's working on them.
• At one point, I found myself hard-pressed to identify what literary traditions fostered her fiction -- for someone who is so very widely read, Kate Wilhelm's work strikes me as being very independent. Then I sat on a panel at an sf convention in Ohio in which we discussed what (if anything) characterizes Ohioan fiction. Maureen McHugh and the others (including Ron Sarti and Juanita Coulson) very eloquently summed up the characteristics of what Maureen dubbed "heartland" fiction --modest, independent, suburban fiction that's far more interested in average folks than in supermen. I cited Leigh Brackett and The Long Tomorrow as a prime example...and I find that Kate Wilhelm's work fits in this tradition. Somewhat. Hers is not fiction that can be pigeonholed easily.

In that mordant way of his, Barry Malzberg said that he went through a period of reading lots of writers' biographies until he realized they all follow the same pattern: early struggles, followed by a big success, after which there's the long slow descent into despair and substance abuse. There's plenty of truth to this observation, but let's remember too that this romantic model sells books far better than does the story of someone who devotes herself to craft, who favors nurturing to self-destruction, whose drug of choice is caffeine, and who manages to spin out yarns year after year that amuse, enlighten, entertain, and entrance. Such writers might not get the obsessive fascination that belongs to the live-fast-die-young victims, but every now and then, at times like this, we can try to tell writers like Kate Wilhelm just how grateful we are for all the joy they've given us and how much we look forward to the stories yet to come...and we can hope that's enough.

~~~~~~~~

By Gordon Van Gelder

Wilhelm, Katie Gertrude (USA, 1928-)

More Bitter Than Death (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963)
The Clone (with Theodore L. Thomas)(New York: Berkley Publishing
Corp., 1965)
The Nevermore Affair (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1966)
The Killer Thing (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1967)
Let the Fire Fall (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1969)
Year of the Cloud (with Theodore L. Thomas) (New York: Doubleday
& Co., 1970)
Abyss (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1971)
Margaret and I (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1971)
City of Cain (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1974)
The Clewiston Test (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976)
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (New York: Harper & Row, 1976)
Fault Lines (New York: Harper & Row, 1977)
Juniper Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1979)
A Sense of Shadow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1981)
Oh, Susannah! (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1982)
Welcome, Chaos (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1983)
Huysman's Pets (New York: Bluejay Books, 1986)
The Hamlet Trap (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987)
Crazy Time (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988)
The Dark Door (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988)
Smart House (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989)
Cambio Bay [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990)
Sweet, Sweet Poison (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990)
Death Qualified: A Mystery of Chaos (New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1991)
Naming the Flowers (Eugene, OR: Axolotl, 1992)
Seven Kinds of Death (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992)
Justice for Some (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993)
The Best Defense [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994)
Malice Prepense (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996)
The Good Children (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998)
Defense for the Devil (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999)
No Defense (New York: St. Martin's Minotaur, 2000)
The Deepest Water [New York: St. Martin's Minotaur, 2000)
Desperate Measures (New York: St. Martin's Minotaur, 2001)

The Mile-Long Spaceship (New York: Berkley, 1963)
The Downstairs Room and Other Speculative Fiction (New York:
Doubleday & Co., 1968)
The Infinity Box (New York: Harper & Row, 1975)
Somerset Dreams and Other Fictions (New York: Harper & Row, 1978)
Better Than One (with Damon Knight) (Boston: Noreascon II, 1980)
Listen, Listen (Boston: Hougton Mifflin, 1981)
Children of the Wind (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989)
State of Grace (Eugene: Pulphouse, 1991)
And the Angels Sing (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992)
A Flush of Shadows (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995)

The Hills Are Dancing (with Richard Wilhelm) (Minneapolis: Corroborree Press, 1986)

The Casebook of Constance and Charlie, Volume 1 (New York: St. Martin's Minotaur, 1999)

The Casebook of Constance and Charlie, Volume 2 (New York: St. Martin's Minotaur, 2000)

Clarion SF (New York: Berkley Medallion, 1977) Nebula Award Stories 9 (London: Gollancz, 1974 and New York: Harper & Row, 1975)

"The Pint-Size Genie," Fantastic, Oct. 1956

"The Mile-Long Spaceship," Astounding, April 1957

"The Last Threshold," Future Science Fiction, Aug. 1958

"Gift from the Stars," Future Science Fiction, Dec. 1958

"The Trouble with Toys," Future Science Fiction, Feb. 1959

"Project Starlight," Science Fiction Stories, Mar. 1959

"The Ecstasy of It," Fantastic, Apr. 1959

"Android, Kill for Me!" Science Fiction Stories, May 1959

"Murderer's Apprentice," Double-Action Detective Stories, May 1959

"Love and the Stars --Today!" Future, June 1959

"One for the Road," Fantastic Universe, July 1959

"A Is for Automation," Future Science Fiction, Oct. 1959

"Brace Yourself for Mother," Fantastic Universe, Dec. 1959

"It's a Good Trick If...," Amazing Stories, Feb. 1960

"UFObia," Science Fiction Stories, Mar. 1960

"The Living Urn," Science Fiction Stories, May 1960

"When the Moon Was Red," Amazing Stories, Sept. 1960

"A Time to Keep," F&SF, Jan. 1962

"The Man without a Planet," F&SF, July 1962

"Beneficiary," The Saint, Aug. 1962

"The Last Days of the Captain," Amazing Stories, Nov. 1962

"Helps Outpost," The Saint Magazine (British Edition), April 1963

"Andover and the Android," The Mile-Long Spaceship, 1963

"The Apostolic Travelers," The Mile-Long Spaceship, 1963

"Fear Is a Cold Black" The Mile-Long Spaceship, 1963

"Jenny with Wings" The Mile. Long Spaceship, 1963

"No Light in the Window," The Mile. Long Spaceship, 1963

"A Case of Desperation" (vt "The Feel of Desperation"), Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Oct. 1964

"The Man Who Painted Tomorrow," Fantastic, Mar. 1965

"Staras Flonderans," Orbit 1, 1966

"Baby, You Were Great!," Orbit 2, 1967

"Stranger in the House," F&SF, Feb. 1968

"Countdown," The Downstairs Room, 1968

"The Downstairs Room," The Downstairs Room, 1968

"How Many Miles to Babylon?," The Downstairs Room, 1968

"The Most Beautiful Woman in the World," The Downstairs Room, 1968

"Perchance to Dream," The Downstairs Room, 1968

"The Plausible Improbable," The Downstairs Room, 1968

"Sirloin and White Wine," The Downstairs Room, 1968

"Unbirthday Party," The Downstairs Room, 1968

"The Planners," Orbit 3, 1968

"Windsong," Orbit 4, 1968

"Somerset Dreams," Orbit 5, 1969

"The Chosen," Orbit 6, 1970

"A Cold Dark Night with Snow," Orbit 6, 1970

"April Fools' Day Forever," Orbit 7, 1970

"The Encounter," Orbit 8, 1970

"The Infinity Box," Orbit 9, 1971

"The Plastic Abyss," Abyss, 1971

"Where Have You Been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?," Quark 3, 1971

"The Funeral," Again, Dangerous Visions, 1972

"The Fusion Bomb," Orbit 10, 1972

"On the Road to Honeyville," Orbit 11, 1972

"Symbiosis," Cosmopolitan, June 1972

"The Red Canary," Orbit 12, 1973

"Whatever Happened to the Olmecs?," F&SF, Feb. 1973

"The Village," Bad Moon Rising, 1973

"The Scream," Orbit 13, 1974

"A Brother to Dragons, a Companion of Owls," Orbit 14, 1974

"The Hounds," A Shocking Thing, 1974

"Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang," Orbit 15, 1974

"Man of Letters," The Infinity Box, 1975

"The Time Piece," The Infinity Box, 1975

"Planet Story," Epoch, 1975

"Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis," Orbit 18, 1976

"Julian," Analog Yearbook, 1977

"State of Grace," Orbit 19, 1977

"Moongate," Orbit 20, 1978

"Mrs. Bagley Goes to Mars," Somerset Dreams, 1978

"The Winter Beach," Redbook, Sept. 1981

"With Thimbles, with Forks, and Hope," Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Nov. 1981

"The Mind of Medea" (vt "The Promise") Omni, Jan. 1983

"Masterpiece of Love" (vt "The Blue Ladies") Redbook, July 1983

"Sister Angel," Omni, Nov. 1983

"The Book of Ylin," (includes "The Unattended," "The Unheard," and

"The Unwinged"), International Conference on the Fantastic Program Book, 1983

"Strangeness, Charm and Spin," Light Years and Dark, 1984

"O Homo, O Femina, O Tempora," Omni, May 1985

"The Gorgon Field," Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Aug. 1985

"The Dragon Seed," Omni, Dec. 1985

"Never Tell Anyone" (vt "The Great Doors of Silence") Redbook, July 1986

"The Girl Who Fell into the Sky," Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine, Oct. 1986

"Someone Is Watching" (vt "The Loiterer") Redbook, Oct. 1986

"Forever Yours, Anna," Omni, July 1987

"The Disassembler," F&SF, Oct. 1987

"Isosceles," Terry's Universe, 1988

"The Look Alike," Redbook, Oct. 1988

"Children of the Wind," Children of the Wind, 1989

"And the Angels Sing," Omni, May 1990

"The Day of the Sharks," And the Angels Sing, 1992

"Reforming Ellie," Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Dec. 1993

"Bloodletting," Omni, June 1994

"You Never Know," Good Housekeeping, Sept. 1994

"Fox in the Briars," Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Oct. 1994

"I Know What You're Thinking," Asimov's SF, Nov. 1994

"All for One," A Flush of Shadows, 1995

"Torch Song" A Flush of Shadows, 1995

"Christ's Tears," Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Apr. 1996

"Forget Luck," F&SF, Apr. 1996

"Merry Widow," Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine #1, 1996

"The Haunting House," Buried Treasures, 1996

"The Grievance," Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine, Spring 1997

"An Imperfect Gift," Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Aug. 1999

"The Happiest Day of Her Life," F&OSF, Oct./Nov. 1999

"Earth's Blood," F&SF, Oct./Nov. 2000

"Yesterday's Tomorrows," F&SF, Sept. 9.001

Axolotl, April-May 1979

"Only in the context of a totality of the sciences do Jefferson's achievements make sense. This would for instance explain the apparent contradiction of how a man now famed for his contribution to the political sciences... [was also] purportedly the first westerner to fully reconstruct the remains of a prehistoric mammoth. It's more the failing of an over-enthusiastic age than of the man himself that Jefferson seriously believed such antediluvian beasts could have survived until the 1800s in the wilds of the unexplored midwest .... "

IT STARTS WITH THE President of the United States of America, although we should be clear on exactly what kind of gentle man we're discussing here. Sitting behind the Presidential desk (rosewood, as it happens, and very nice too) is a man whom later generations will call a polymath, a statesman-philosopher, a true product of the enlightenment. Oh yes, this particular President is a creator, with a portfolio that begins "We, the people" and works its way up to a big climax from there. He's also a man who distrusts priests of just about every denomination, which explains much of what's about to happen here: he's got a lot of time for the divine, this one, but mere mortal authority figures get his back up like nothing else on God's Earth. Now, we can't be sure that what we're about to see in this room is bona fide true, because the affairs of the President are traditionally left behind closed doors, and there are some rules even we're expected to follow. But we can put the scene together out of the pieces we know. Call it listening at keyholes. Call it history by degrees.

Mr. Jefferson-- Mr. President-- sits behind the aforementioned desk, in front of a vast window that looks out onto a garden of grass and cat's-ears, a garden quite specifically designed so as to in no way resemble the three million square miles of hostile territory beyond it. The light's flooding through the window onto the parquet-and-polish floor, while the President himself is leaning over the books with which he surrounds himself (this being a less literate time, however, "surrounds" makes the number of books involved sound greater than it really is), reaching for his little box of joy. The box is small and off-white, a gift from a visitor whose exact name and purpose Mr. Jefferson can't quite recall: he seems to recollect that it was a woman, probably French (he has no difficulty remembering this, as he's had a head for Frenchwomen ever since a certain remarkable incident in a brothel in Paris...this is another story, and not the only "another story" which will be intercepting us today). History doesn't record what he keeps inside the box, though as we've imagined Mr. Jefferson as a free-thinking nineteenth century gentleman it could be anything from snuff to hashish. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume it's chewing tobacco. Undignified as it may seem.

"It has to be done -- it must be done -- it is our duty," he says, as he starts picking at the box's contents. He talks the way he writes, with far too many hyphens and pauses, and he's addressing the two men standing on the other side of his desk. "If we're to claim these lands for the good of our nation -- if we're to prevent them being overrun by jackals and opportunists w if we're to have room in which to breathe, and not fall upon each other as they do in Europe .... "

Now, it so happens that Mr. Jefferson's domain has recently grown, thanks to a certain land deal which is not only due to increase his running total of United States, but which will also give him vast tracts of what he believes to be lush and verdant farmland, possibly including that mythical easy route to the Pacific. And the two men who now stand in Mr. Jefferson's office, nodding in solemn agreement, will go down in history as the first men to travel into the heart of this new terrain: or the first to take notes anyway, which is the way history works. Their names are, from left to right, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. As expected.

(This is all quite ridiculous, of course. At least one of these men already belongs to the President's inner circle. If Jefferson wants to brief them on their mission, then he's more likely to do it in a cozy drawing room with a bottle of Cognac, swapping stories as Lewis lounges on a chaise longue and Clark leans nonchalantly against the fireplace. But how can we resist imagining it this way? The two of them standing to attention before the Presidential desk, being instructed to journey into the dark heart of the Northwest and bring the land under control. No doubt you're already imagining these two great explorers, these two grizzled veterans of the wilderness, walking into the President's office dressed in furs and racoon-skin hats. We need to believe they're going to step out of the briefing and, without even pausing for breath, stride off into the jungles of uncharted America. Such is history.)

Mr. Jefferson is telling the explorers that nobody can say for sure what they'll find in the Northwestern territories. The French who sold him the land have hardly been forthcoming, and the Indians aren't likely to be much help either. The President expects every form of terrain imaginable, from the tropical to the simply peculiar. He's read the greatest naturalists of the age. He has plans to meet with Alexander yon Humboldt himself. He's even heard the theories of the Englishman Frere, who claims to have found human remains which blatantly defy the book of Genesis, something Mr. Jefferson greatly appreciates. Oh, yes indeed. As an enlightened gentleman, the President knows the terra incognita Lewis and Clark will find is no Biblical wasteland. It's to be an altogether more rational landscape, filled with all the wonders that biology and geology can produce. A new world, untouched by Church dogma, governed only by the laws of Nature and Nature's God.

This is the point when Mr. Jefferson tells Lewis and Clark about the mammoths. Oddly -- seeing as most of this patchwork conversation will be lost to posterity -- the part about the mammoths is the one thing the history books do record.

IT STARTS WITH the President, but in purely chronological terms the briefing in the office isn't the first thing to actually happen. Just look at this landscape, for example. Nothing behind-closed-doors here. The sky's a color which later generations will be unable to imagine as anything other than a kind of paint, a deep blue, a dark blue, that makes the green, green grass look as though it's glaring in the sunlight. The air's fresh, pre-industrial fresh, the kind of fresh you only get once it's been filtered through the lungs of several million herd animals and a couple of dozen Indian tribes (this is as fresh as nature gets, no doubt about it). The grass clings to the slopes, sticks close to the curves of the land, so the green's only broken up by the dirt-paths where animals have left their scents behind them like breadcrumb-trails. And mountains? Oh, there are mountains. Just waiting on the horizon, looking as if they'll always be just waiting on the horizon, wherever you stand on the surface of the Earth. Perfect idyll. Perfect Montana.

Timeless, we'd say. But from the President's point of view, we'd have to call it the past. Months before the briefing of Mr. Lewis and Mr. Clark, the white race has already set foot in the Land of the Shining Mountains.

Here she comes now.

Her name's Lucia Cailloux, and at this moment she's running barefoot through the grass, up the side of a slope which seems to have been put there just to warn travelers that the Rockies will be starting soon, and that they'd better get used to moving uphill. An observer would point out that Lucia -- whose manner of dress is unusually masculine, but then, that's probably what you'd expect from someone who's spent so much time talking to damned heathen Indians -- is technically wearing boots. But that's not how it feels to Lucia. No, she can feel the warm, warm earth between her naked toes, because in her head she's suddenly become an eight-year-old. As a twenty-year-old woman in the service of her government, this is hardly what she's being paid for, but right now her superiors are more than eight thousand miles away and Lucia can't help but feel she's going to get away with it.

You see, right now she believes she's going somewhere. When she was young, she once ran all the way up the Rue Viande, something of an achievement when you've got child-sized legs and no shoes, because the Rue Viande is a perfect slope and the sheer amount of dirt on it (in those days, anyway, before Napoleon started cleaning it all up) made the road feel like mud in the summer. On that day -- running all the way to the tannery, right at the highest point of the street, where the skins were strung up like flags at the top of the world -- the junior Lucia could feel the whole world cracking like glass behind her, with the wind ripping through her dirt-blonde hair and the sheer speed (all of, oh, two miles an hour) tearing at her little dress. And as she headed for the tip of that slope, she knew -- she knew -- she'd look down and see something big and wonderful on the other side, as her reward for running all the way. She knew she'd see the whole world, in all its truth and majesty. The face, if you will, of Nature's God.

She was right, as well. Young Lucia always was a perceptive little witch.

Now the older Lucia, barefoot and booted, knows the same thing. She can quite literally smell it on the wind. At the top of the slope, she stops, so this is the point when we finally see her face in closeup. Dirt-blonde hair ragged around her shoulders, pasty little freckles blistering in the sunlight, the pupils in her big, big eyes getting smaller as she brushes the last few drops of sweat and sunshine away from her forehead. It doesn't really matter whether we're looking at Lucia now or watching the eight-year-old flashback version, because as it turns out her hair's naturally dirt-blonde in color. Twelve years after the Rue Viande, even a clean Lucia looks that way.

Lucia can hear her co-traveler, the Indian, thumping his way up the slope behind her. He calls out to her: "Quelque chose?"

And Lucia calls back: "Tout." (But that's pretty much the last time we'll be hearing her words in their natural spoken tongue.)

So the world spins around us, vertigo-wise, until we can look down on the great grass-covered crater beyond the slope. The dimple in the world, where Nature's God herself has reached down and left a whacking great fingerprint on the landscape. A gentle pit, with slopes of green sunning themselves in the midday heat, letting troughs of rainwater simmer and merge on their skin.

And there at the bottom of it all, the mammoths.

Now Lucia finds herself running again, and for a moment she isn't sure whether it's now her running or then her, until she remembers that on the Rue Viande she never went down the other side of the slope. At the bottom of the basin, the mammoths are grazing. It'd be almost abstract, like seeing drawings of fluffy brown clouds on a painted backdrop, if it weren't for the smell.

(Of course, when the eight-year-old Lucia stood on the other slope, the view was quite different. What she saw was a cartload of corpses, blocking the street while the horseman stopped to flirt with one of the local girls, as if having a cartload of corpses was some kind of aphrodisiac. But then, that was the Revolution for you. C'est la vie, as they say everywhere except Paris.)

That smell's starting to bother Lucia now, because she's remembering the smell of dung on the Rue Viande. She's so busy separating the horse-smell from the mammoth-smell that she doesn't even realize how far inertia's taking her. Gravity drags her to the bottom of the crater, then keeps her going, so before she can think about it she's stumbling over the ridges where the beasts have chewed and trampled away the grass. Pity the poor woman. The second most momentous moment of her life so far, and all she perceives is a series of confusing, ragged-edged images. The red brown blurs that she knows are impossible animals. The smears of green that mark the walls of the crater, plastered with spoor and crushed plants: and is that a baby there, a baby mammoth, a little smudge of hair trying to stick close to its bigger smudge of a mother....?

This is when things get slightly out of hand. It's when Lucia turns, nearly falling arse over tit in the process, and finds herself staring at the absurdly huge shape which is even now bearing down on her. The bull mammoth weighs just over seven tons, not that Lucia will ever know it, and when rising up on its hind legs (as it is now) it must be all of fifteen feet high. When it raises its trunk, and opens its mouth, and flexes its massive lungs, you know it's quite capable of destroying anything that threatens its own stomping ground.

Nonetheless, the first thing Lucia does when faced with this monstrosity is "protect" herself by putting her arms up in front of her face. And they call this the Age of Reason.

There was an Indian. You might have forgotten about him. He's now standing on the crest of the slope, watching the great beast rear up over the woman who's nominally his employer, though as a product of a non-market culture the Indian considers this "employer" business to be a pile of deershit. The Indian's name (for our purposes, anyway) is Broken Nose, which is not, of course, a "real" Indian name. It was given to him by a group of Frenchmen with especially fat faces, and it was earned after a confrontation at a French trading post, during which --predictably -- the Indian broke a French official's nose. The friends of the unfortunate fat-faced man, being typically European, found this amusing. Being very typically European, "Broken Nose" was their idea of irony. It's apparently supposed to sound like an authentic Indian title, although Broken Nose himself considers it just a good excuse to punch future fat-faced men without them being surprised. Besides, his original Shoshoni name was even more embarrassing.

It has to be said, Broken Nose doesn't have a great interest in the aesthetic. Below him are creatures the American settlers would find unbelievable, which would probably trigger a religious spasm in the Catholics or the Jesuits whom Mr. Jefferson distrusts so much. However, Broken Nose simply finds the beasts stupid-looking, wearing thick wool all over their bodies despite the sunshine. Broken Nose is slightly concerned for his "employer," but he's well aware that she can look after herself.

On the first night of the expedition, when Broken Nose and Mademoiselle Cailloux made camp on the trail from Louisiana -- where the Frenchwoman had arrived under the name of "Lucy Pebbles," and bartered for supplies in what sounded to the Indian like a perfect local accent -- the two of them talked at length. Or as much as was possible, anyway, given that Broken Nose had been taught French by men who only needed to prime him for certain tasks. Without any due modesty, Broken Nose showed Mme. Cailloux the scar which had been ritually inflicted across his inner thigh (not by his own tribe, but that's another "another story").

And with less regard for her integrity than Broken Nose would have expected from a European woman, Mme. Cailloux bared her torso from her neck to her waist, revealing a scab left by a bullet which she claimed should have killed her, by all the known laws of Nature and science. This began a discussion about the great wars in Europe, about the little tribal elder called Napoleon and the weapons he could muster: guns like those Mme. Cailloux herself carried, but grown so large that they needed huge boats of their own. Broken Nose asked why the Europeans always insisted on fighting with each other, and that gave the Mademoiselle pause for thought.

"Your people fight, don't they?" she said.

Broken Nose told her that this was indeed the case.

"Then why do you do it?" the woman asked.

The obvious answer was "because you tell us to," naturally, but Broken Nose suspected this was missing the point. The reasons seemed to him to be to do with territory, with possessions, with differences in gods ....

"No," said Mme. Cailloux. "We fight to stop the other tribes becoming whole."

Broken Nose didn't understand that. He still doesn't, although Mme. Cailloux has assured him that he will, before their mission here is complete. That is, if she doesn't get herself killed by the bull-mammoth.

In all probability, it's impossible to describe how it feels to have a mammoth rearing up over you. Maybe it's like the feeling you get when you lie on your back and watch the stars, and for a moment -- just for a moment -- you suddenly realize the true size of what you're staring at, as your brain suddenly forgets to force your usual scale of perception onto things. Maybe. It might be interesting to ask Lucia, even though she has even less conception of the distances of stars than the rest of us (but she's probably wise enough to know that Uranus, the furthest-flung of the seven planets, is seventeen hundred million miles farther away than she'll ever travel).

For the record, the mammoth isn't going to trample her to death. But looking up at the beast now, seeing its great brown-black outline framed against the perfect blue, Lucia feels she's watching the very countenance of Nature's Cod. As with the cart of corpses on the Rue Viande, it's the little details that really bother her. The strands of crushed grass on the bottom of its big round feet. The curve of its maw, the upturned V-shape that she knows could swallow a man, if not whole, then certainly in no more than two mouthfuls. The chips in its tusks, tiny imperfections in arcs of ivory so long that no matter which way she turns her head, she knows she won't be able to see both tips at once. And then there's its breath. Its terrible and ancient mammoth-breath, washing over her as the animal bellows into her face (one of those things Lucia's never considered until now, and which she's sure the academics who study the bones of these beasts have never considered either).

Yes, these are the things Lucia has trouble coping with. So many little creases and flaws, more than she could catalogue in half a lifetime, let alone in the raw seconds she believes she has left. The beast's stubby-but-oh-so-big front legs pedal the air in front of its body, and then it suddenly finds itself falling.

It doesn't push itself forward as it falls. It doesn't, as it were, attack. It drops to the ground in front of Lucia, not on top of her, and the impact would surely crack the Earth open if the ground here weren't so used to the abuse. This is the way a bull-mammoth warns off the opposition. Lucia's realizing that even as she peels her heart from the roof of her mouth and tries to stop herself falling over (noticing, as an incidental detail, that the smell of sweat which is starting to blot out the dung-scent is hers and not the fault of the herd).

The bull-mammoth is exhausted. It's not a creature built for rearing up on its hind legs, and the only conclusion we -- like Lucia -- can reach is that it expects strangers to be so intimidated by its mass that it doesn't actually need to follow up the threat. Having made its point, having bellowed its great beef-heart out, it can't do anything more than stand still and get its breath back. Lungs the size of fat children inflate and deflate, inflate and deflate, under a heavy pelt that must be home to entire empires of insects. From four feet above her head, those huge black eyes are staring down at Lucia, as if the thing's daring her to try anything else.

Easy to call it the face of Nature's God. So big, so blatant, that we can only assume it's been put there for a purpose. Which it has, as Lucia well knows. All animals are there for a purpose. Horses are for riding, pigs are for eating. As far as she's concerned, the mammoths are here as a kind of metaphor. These are political animals, hence Mr. Jefferson's interest.

(You must have been wondering, for example, where this herd originates: woolly skins and elephant-blubber hardly seem to fit in around here. The best explanation we can hope for is that a number of mammoths were once the property of Catherine of Russia, she who was known as "The Great" before some idiot in her court started spreading that God-awful story about the horse. Horse or no horse, Catherine had something of a reputation as a witch...a label applied to most efficient female rulers, it's true, but even before her death there were fabulous and revolting stories about the company she liked to keep, and the animal rites they used to perform. Horses for riding, pigs for eating, trained monkeys for ritual. It's not entirely clear what the link is between the Empress of Russia being a witch and the existence of live mammoths here in what will one day be the State of Montana, although Lucia has heard it said, with maddening vagueness, that one can easily lead to the other. History is full of these logical gaps. Certainly, it's rumored that one such hairy beast was given by Catherine as a gift to George III of England, but that George -- half-crazed brute that he was -- destroyed the thing in a fight with pit dogs without even realizing its value. Lucia is secretly of the opinion that if Russia had given such a gift to the French, they probably would have eaten it.)

But Lucia's mammoth just keeps gasping. It's vulnerable now. With its show of strength over, it's got nothing to protect it but its dignity. Gravity has not been kind to these creatures, which probably explains why they're ripping up the grass on the crater floor when there are so many nice fresh trees just a couple of hundred yards over the rim. So when Lucia takes a step forward, the mammoth doesn't even blink: it's impossible to imagine such a blink being anything but a major task, and taking anything less than an afternoon to complete. From the look on its face, we could almost believe it's indignant.

How can we help but try to read its expression? If the mammoths were put here as metaphors, then we can read them any way we like. It's hard not to find meaning in something that big.

There's a stillness now, Lucia regarding the mammoth, the mammoth regarding Lucia. It's only once Lucia has paid her respects to the silence that she raises her hand. The trunk is close enough to touch, and touch it she does. Her fingers run through the tiny brown hairs, across the leathery old skin, over the wrinkles and the patches of dirt. She almost expects the beast to flinch, or to purr like a cat.

It's vulnerable, anybody can see that. Now, and only now, Lucia gets her one big chance to touch the impossible.

THIS IS WHAT PASSED between Mme. Cailloux and Broken Nose that morning, after they pulled themselves to their feet at dawn and began the final trek to the place of the mammoths:

Mme. Cailloux spoke of a man called Jefferson, the leader of the colonists who lived off in the eastern lands. Mme. Cailloux explained to Broken Nose that her own tribal leader, Napoleon Short-Arse, had agreed to sell a portion of the land to the aforementioned Jefferson (a notion which, like the "employer" idea, Broken Nose finds profoundly stupid).

"We're afraid," said the Mademoiselle. "All of us. Your people. My people."

Broken Nose told her that his people weren't afraid of anything, which was, in his experience, what the French expected to hear from a stupid Indian.

"There's a saying in Europe," Mme. Cailloux went on. "'The other man's grass is always greener.' We fight for territory. We start wars to acquire the other man's land. Why?"

Broken Nose shrugged. "More room. For cattle."

"No," the Frenchwoman told him. "It's because we think...we secretly believe...that the other man's land is a paradise. We start to believe there are great secrets there. Secrets we have to know for ourselves. And when we take the land away from him, and we find there's no paradise there...then we tell ourselves it was the other man's kind of paradise. Not ours. You understand?"

"Your people are stupid," said Broken Nose. (Not entirely true: this is what he believes he said, after the fact, although his training in the French tongue doesn't cover the possibility of him insulting his "employers." In his head, after the fact, he hears the words in his own language.)

"Perhaps," he imagines that Mme. Cailloux said. "But it's a matter of warfare. In war, we attack the enemy's resources. If an enemy has supply lines, we cut them. If an enemy has a better kind of weapon, we rid him of it."

This sounded to Broken Nose like the first sensible thing she'd said.

She went on to explain many things which Broken Nose had either no understanding of or no interest in. She told him, for example, that in the possession of Napoleon Short-Arse there was a length of metal, which purportedly came from a weapon that had been used to cut the flesh of one of the white man's gods "while he hung on the cross," this metal having the power to induce divine visions (of the spirit-world, Broken Nose guessed) in anyone who was scratched by it.

"Imagine such a thing in the power of the Vatican," the Mademoiselle said, although Broken Nose had no idea what marked these Vatican out from any of the other European tribes. "The relic would prove them correct. It would show them to be justified in all their beliefs. Thus would their grass become greener, and their state grow stronger. They might even become whole."

"Whole?" queried Broken Nose.

"I saw the Revolution," replied Mme. Cailloux. "I know what happens when people get what they want. Or when they believe they do."

None of which told Broken Nose anything remotely useful, or even explained the woman's mission to find the mammoths before the land gets passed on to Mr. Jefferson. But now, in what we have to call the present, Broken Nose is trying not to trip over his skin-shod heels as he tumbles down the slope of the crater. Up ahead, he can see Mme. Cailloux, facing the largest of all the mammoths (or is it just the closest?). He can see the woman resting her hand on the monster's trunk, and he can see the beast keeping quite still, something which his fellow Shoshoni would probably take as proof of the foreign witch's powers over the animal kingdom. But Broken Nose has little time for the wonders of nature, and sees her only as being lucky.

He pulls himself to a halt as the ground levels out under his feet, stopping just a few yards from the bulk of the bull-mammoth. Its eyes are fixed on the woman, and it makes pained groaning noises when it breathes. Slowly, and with some reluctance, Mme. Cailloux lowers her hand.

"Tout," she says. (This is the original French, of course, but somehow it makes more sense that way.)

Broken Nose isn't really sure where he should look. It seems disrespectful, somehow, to disturb this union. There they stand, woman and monster, in a communion that would seem almost obscene if it weren't so unlikely. For some reason, Broken Nose remembers a folk tale from his childhood about a father who had an improper relationship with his daughter, and who was swallowed up by the Earth as a punishment. After a few moments more, he speaks.

"The cargo," he says, using a word he's more than familiar with even though it's not entirely the right one. "Our tools .... '

It's then that Mme. Cailloux regains her senses, preternatural or otherwise, and turns away from the beast. The mammoth never blinks, though, and never moves its head. The Mademoiselle looks up toward the top of the slope, presumably remembering the packs which she and Broken Nose have left over the rise, the equipment her own "employers" issued her before transporting her here to the Land of the Shining Mountains. (And just as we imagined Lewis and Clark standing to attention before Jefferson, so Broken Nose imagines Mme. Cailloux standing before Napoleon Short-Arse himself, although he's imagining Napoleon sitting in a position of honor around a roaring fire rather than sitting behind a desk: there is, of course, no Shoshoni word for "furniture.")

So it is that Mme. Cailloux draws away from the mammoth, to begin her slow climb back up the slope, with Broken Nose at her heels. Mme. Cailloux doesn't look back at the mammoth as she walks, something Broken Nose interprets as an almost incestuous shame. And the mammoth doesn't watch her go, simply continuing to stare at the spot where she once stood. So it's left to Broken Nose to glance over his shoulder on the way up the slope, to watch the woolly monster recover its strength after its four seconds' worth of rabid activity, while the rest of the herd-animals go on bellowing and sniffing at each other. He wonders if the bull-mammoth even understands the difference between its human visitors and the other beasts of the wilderness.

"These are Mr. Jefferson's animals," he hears Mme. Cailloux say, halfway up the rise. "They feed on Mr. Jefferson's grass."

He still doesn't know what she's talking about. Broken Nose is starting to feel that even the mammoths understand this mission better than he does, but then again, wouldn't you expect him to think that way? Being Shoshoni, when he uses the mammoths as a metaphor the results aren't particularly literary.

Which leads us back to the President of the United States of America himself, as he sits behind his rosewood desk in his rose-tinted office, picking snuff or hashish or chewing tobacco out of his little carved box. This is some months in what might be called Lucia's future, so Lewis and Clark have in the last few minutes dutifully marched out of the office in their unlikely racoonskin hats. No doubt a kayak is waiting for them outside.

But now Mr. Jefferson's alone with his thoughts, and we can make the usual array of guesses as to what those thoughts might be. The President is hoping that his explorers will bring him back news of a Northwest Passage, a trade route that could turn his republic into an empire almost overnight (not that he wants an empire, as such, but...well, you know how it is). And then, of course, there's the prospect of mammoths. If such things are found, they're sure to be given a place of honor in the new American mythology. He briefly wonders if there's room for a mammoth on the national crest: possibly he can put one in place of the eagle. A beast which proves, by its very nature, that the Church is full of asses and the world runs to the will of the new sciences. Just for a second, for a stupid childish second, he imagines riding the back of such an animal in a parade along Pennsylvania Avenue, celebrating his second -- oh, to hell with precedent, make it his third -- term in office. Jefferson's monsters, that's what the Church would say. He imagines the mammoths' backs being draped in flags, decked out in the red-and-white stripes and the seventeen stars (although the flag which hangs above the window in this particular office only has sixteen, those artisans who handle such things being a little slower than the expansion of the new republic).

All this makes Mr. Jefferson consider the box again. He tries to remember the name of the woman who presented it to him, the well-spoken Mademoiselle who appeared in this very office just a few short months ago, her skins and furs making her look like an Indian coming home from a trek in the great forests. Naturally, it's ludicrous to think that a complete stranger, and such an ill-dressed one, should be allowed to stroll into the Presidential office without even officially presenting herself...but the notion's as hard to resist as all the other things we've seen inside this virtual room. Whether or not the woman did introduce herself, the one thing Mr. Jefferson can remember is what she told him when she placed the little off-white box on his desk.

"Your new world, Monsieur President," she said. Well, maybe she didn't say "mister" in the French style, maybe Jefferson's just remembering it that way because he likes the accent, but the point remains that when he slid the box open he found inside it just a few blades of green, green grass. Mr. Jefferson fails to remember how he responded to this, or even whether he asked his visitor to explain herself: she may well have vanished from his office before he could so much as speak (after all, a mysterious entrance should always be complemented by a mysterious exit).

Here and now, the President believes the contents of the box to have been a kind of message, sent by some agency he has yet to identify. In fact, he's only half-right.

And this is Jefferson's future. More precisely, this is 1805, halfway through Lewis and Clark's two-year excursion into the wildlands, the point at which the two men (and all their followers, though right now they're gloriously irrelevant) finally stumble across a certain indentation in a certain grassland. A crater, if you will. It's here that the two explorers, being consummate outdoorsmen, find trampled ground and traces of spoor which suggest the trail of some grand animal herd. At first they conclude that the Indians have driven their cattle through the area, though this theory falters when they arrive at the bottom of the basin, where the graves have been dug. They assume there are graves here, anyway, given that the ground's been broken from one side of the crater to the other. Now, as not even the Shoshoni would do something as bizarre as grazing their animals on top of their dead t and as a quick search of the area uncovers European shell-casings in the grass -- there's obviously some kind of mystery here.

Sadly, it's not one the explorers feel they have time to solve. Besides, even by this stage they're starting to learn that digging up native graves is a bad move, tactically speaking. There's some discussion about what might be called the "central" grave, the fifteen-foot-long tract of broken earth which, from its size, must surely indicate the last resting place of a great leader (proving to the leader-obsessed white men that the people who performed these burials must have been partly civilized, even though the Shoshoni contingent in the expedition claims not to recognize the style). Lewis and Clark steer well clear, deciding to give the mysterious fallen chief the respect he must surely deserve.

Later, in the oh-so-short years between the end of the expedition and Lewis's highly dubious suicide, the duo will theorize that the site was deliberately desecrated by rogue Frenchmen as some kind of political maneuver. A stampede must have taken place at some point, so the large animals, whatever they may have been, were probably used by the French as weapons of destruction.

Like Jefferson, these people excel at being only partly correct.

And however far into the future we go, Mr. Jefferson, President of the United States of America, fails to understand the significance of any of this. Well, what can we expect? Polymath and philosopher he may be, but he doesn't even understand the significance of the box. The little off-white box which remains in his possession for the rest of his term in office, a gift from one of the very few people who understood exactly what he wanted from his glorious new territory, and knew precisely why he couldn't be allowed to get it. A box Mr. Jefferson might have used for snuff, or hashish, or tobacco, which a Frenchwoman once claimed was all that remained of his virtual paradise, and which just happened to be made out of ivory.

~~~~~~~~

By Lawrence Miles

"Grass" marks Lawrence Miles's first appearance in our pages, although he notes that he has previously published work in various anthologies, magazines, comic books, and computer games. His recent work includes a board game concerning Imperial Rome and a British TV script. "Grass" ruminates on American history and what might have been...

Ill Met by Moonlight, by Sarah A. Hoyt, Ace Books, 2001, $21.95.

FIRST UP this month is an entertaining historical fantasy by new comer Sarah Hoyt featuring William Shakespeare and Anne "Nan" Hathaway in their twenties.

Ill Met by Moonlight starts out when Will discovers that Nan and their daughter Susannah have been stolen away by the fairies -- a local court already in turmoil.

One member of that court is Quicksilver, able to appear as a man or as a woman named the Lady Silver. He considers himself the rightful heir after the murder of his parents, Oberon and Titania, yet it's his brother Sylvanus who has taken the throne. Worse, to Quicksilver's way of thinking, he believes that Sylvanus had their parents murdered, using a human to do the deed. So it seems right to Quicksilver that he will do the same to rid the court of Sylvanus, and he goes looking for a human equal to the task.

Which is when he meets young Will, pining for his wife and child. Will has tracked them to the fairy court, but while he can see them inside the court, he isn't able to reach them. Quicksilver, in the guise of Lady Silver, forms an alliance with Will and, needless to say, things only go downhill and get more complicated from that point on.

There's a little overwriting in the prose, as can sometimes be the case with a newer writer-- although to be fair, the version I read wasn't the final one that will see print. Nevertheless this is an enjoyable story, full of great bits of historical and fairy lore, with a likeable cast and inventive use of traditional motifs and folklore. Perhaps the most fun, as the plot unfolds, is seeing where Will gets the ideas for the plays he will later come to write.

American Gods, by Neil Gaiman, William Morrow, 2001, $26.

Let's get this out of the way first: I'm sure a large number of Gaiman's fans (who came to his prose by way of his excellent work on The Sandman and other comic book projects) are otherwise unfamiliar with the fantasy field. They'll think that the underlying conceit of American Gods --that immigrants, however unknowingly, brought over with them the beings from folklore and myth who are now living hidden amongst us in North America -- is terribly original. But it's not. We've seen it many times before, admirably handled by everyone from Roger Zelazny to, well, Mark Wagner, creator of the comic Mage.

Now before anyone protests, I know that Gaiman is aware of this as well. One of his characters even talks about something very like it in the book itself, though that character is referring to peoples' lives when he talks about "...the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life."

Fantasy, though older, is often considered to be the mentally disadvantaged younger sibling of science fiction, which prides itself on being "the fiction of ideas." But let's face it, new ideas are far and few between in any sort of fiction these days. The thing that's important is what the author does with an idea, and in that sense Gaiman has done a superb job, proving in the process (if it should be required after such successful books as Neverwhere) that he doesn't need an illustrator to bring his fascinating characters and stories to life.

American Gods is a big, sprawling book that seems to take forever to get to its point, but what a wonderful journey it is to get there. We enter the hidden world of forgotten gods through the viewpoint of a character named Shadow whose life, after three years in prison, seems about to take an upturn. But that wouldn't make much of a story. So in short order, he's released a day or so early from prison because his wife has died, while cuckolding Shadow with his own best friend. The job he was supposed to have (as fitness trainer with said best friend) is now also gone.

Enter Wednesday, a rather enigmatic figure whose true nature we figure out before Shadow, and all too soon poor Shadow is drawn into a struggle between the forgotten gods (brought over to North America by their believers and then abandoned) and the new gods: the gods of technology, of cell phones and the Internet and every other modern contrivance. And along the way he needs to find some meaning and balance to his own life, one that for all its emotional ups and downs it seems he's been living by rote up to this point.

There are few authors who can manage to balance the light and dark aspects of a storyline as effectively as Gaiman does. There are charming, utterly whimsical moments here, and others filled with doom and dread. The mythic characters are earthy and accessible without losing their godlike stature. The plot, while rambling, never strays into uninteresting territories and, more to the point, most of the seeming asides and subplots prove, once we reach the conclusion, to have been necessary to the principal storyline after all.

Another pleasure of reading Gaiman is that he has such a light touch with his prose. One gets the impression that it simply flowed effortlessly from his mind to the book we hold in hand, though that, of course, is one of the hardest tricks to pull off in the business of writing.

It's still early as I write this (the beginning of April), but it wouldn't surprise me if American Gods proves to be the Big Book of this year. It'll certainly be difficult to match in its paradoxical mix of broad scope and small intimacies.

The Quotable Sandman, by Nell Gaiman, Vertigo/DC Comics, 2001, $9.95.

And speaking of The Sandman, five years after the last comic hit the stands, the publishers are still finding new ways to repackage/extend the product. We've had trading cards, resin statues, action figures, stuffed toys, jewelry, watches, an in-depth guide to the series (The Sandman Companion by Hy Bender), a prose sequel of sorts (The Dream Hunters, Gaiman's collaboration with Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano), an ongoing spin-off comic (The Dreaming), an anthology of Sandman stories by other authors, co-edited by Gaiman (The Sandman: Book of Dreams), and even a collection of the covers of the complete run of the original series by Dave McKean (Dust Covers).

Now we have this little gift book, repackaging art from the series with, if I may quote the cover, "memorable lines from the acclaimed series."

Do we really need this? No.

Is it fun to read? Without question. And illuminating, as well.

What gave credibility to The Sandman comic was how so often its small truths and little jewels of consideration and conversation resonated with its readers. A perfect example is how often you'll see a quote from The Sandman in the .SIG file of someone's e-mail.

Now granted, choosing one's own quotes is always more meaningful, but I like the way the art and words in this little book call back entire storylines for me. They range from the whimsical, such as a classic bit of Delirium's stream-of-consciousness:

"Have you ever spent days and days and days making up flavors of ice cream that no one's ever eaten before? Like chicken and telephone ice cream?... Green mouse ice cream was the worst. I didn't like it at all."

To Death's matter-of-fact statement made, perhaps, that much more iconic since in the series she appears as a small, dark-haired, pale-skinned Goth:

"I'm not blessed, or merciful. I'm just me. I've got a job to do, and I do it."

To the matters thought-provoking, as in this conversation at the wake of Dream:

"Nobody died. How can you kill an idea? How can you kill the personification of an action?"

"Then what died? What are you mourning?"

"A...point of view."

No, we don't need this book, but nevertheless, it's fun to have, and pretty as well, in its small size with all the wonderful art from the likes of McKean, Kent Williams, Rick Berry, Charles Vess, Michael Zulli, and too many others to mention them all.

And at the price of a paperback, it's a bargain to boot.

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.

~~~~~~~~

By Charles De Lint

MAYBE IT'S just me, but I find it impossible to contemplate the notorious and iconic image of Der Struwwelpeter adorning the cover of Jack Zipes's brilliant, moody Sticks and Stones and not think of Joey Ramone. For those unfamiliar with Struwwelpeter (I will assume everyone recognizes the beloved and equally iconic figure of Joey, dead this Easter at the age of forty-nine), he is the quintessential and terrifying, monstrous Bad Boy, frozen for all time at the front of the classroom while the teacher -- Auden's "terrible rector," perhaps ? --points at him and declaims:

Look at him! There he stands With his nasty hair and hands! See! His nails are never cut: They are grimed as black as soot, While the sloven, I declare Not once this year has combed his hair!

...Anything to me is sweeter Than to see Shock-headed Peter.

Struwwelpeter, translated as Shock-headed Peter or Slovenly Peter, is the most outstanding visual image in the book named for him, a red-clad boy with an immense corona of ragged orange hair, arms and legs akimbo, his hands ending in foot-long clawlike nails. First published in Germany in 1845, Der Struwwelpeter was written by Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann, who had been chagrined to find nothing suitable as a Christmas book for his three-year-old son. As Zipes recounts with a storyteller's deceptively low-key delivery,

"...the more he looked in the Frankfort bookshops, the more discouraged he became. The books were too sentimental, didactic, or boring. So he bought a notebook, composed five stories in verse, and sketched pictures in color."

I can recall reading Struwwelpeter as a child (in English, though it retained the German title): the most perverse aspects of the entire volume were its subtitle -- Merry Stories and Funny Pictures -- and introductory verse, which informs us that only good children will receive this "pretty Picture-Book." Because one glance inside, and you know this is not a pretty Picture-Book at all, but a child's version of Octave Mirbeau's Torture Garden, irresistible and awful and hilarious, the single most powerful children's book I can think of; the literary equivalent of a ticking bomb. Both a parody of popular Victorian children's books promoting good behavior, and itself a tongue-in-cheek guide to proper manners, Struwwelpeter's verses depict the horrors of misbehaving at the dinner table ("Fidgety Phillip"); cruelty to animals ("The Story of Cruel Frederick"); racist bullying ("The Story of the Inky Boys"); not finishing your supper ("The Story of Augustus Who Would Not Have Any Soup"); and best (that is, worst) of all, the book's two most famous cautionary tales, "The Dreadful Story of Harriet and the Matches" and "The Story of Little Suck-A-Thumb."

The copy of Struwwelpeter that I grew up with belonged to my five boy cousins. It had been their father's, and for all I know, his father's; certainly the book was ancient and well-worn. When my brothers and sisters and I visited them, the first thing we would do was race to pull the book out from where it was kept hidden under the bed -- hidden not because it was a forbidden book, but because it was incendiary and frightening. Then we would read it aloud, screaming with laughter at the "pretty pictures" -- Harriet burning to death! Fat Augustus starving to death! Dog Tray biting Cruel Fred's leg! But best of all was "Little Suck-A-Thumb" (since there were several among us who did), with its admonitory Mamma

"'Mind now, Conrad, what I say --Don't suck your thumb while I'm away. The great tall tailor always comes To little boys who suck their thumbs; And ere they know what he's about, He takes his great long scissors out And cuts their thumbs clean off, --and then You know they never grow again.'"

Hapless Conrad, of course, can't resist; and there are few images more mesmerizing than what follows, as "The door flew open, in he ran: The great, long, red-legged scissor-man."

This, of course, was when we screamed -- and laughed -- to the point of hysteria; even the picture of poor Conrad, his thumbless hands dripping blood, was anti-climactic. I have never, to my knowledge, dreamed of the great tall tailor lot sucked my thumb); but to this day I cannot bear an open door in any room where I am sleeping. You can't be too careful.

Jack Zipes devotes only a single chapter to Struwwelpeter in Sticks and Stones, but the wild-haired, anarchic spirit of Slovenly Peter is a ghostly presence in the book nonetheless. Zipes, Professor of German at the University of Minnesota, is perhaps the world's foremost contemporary authority on fairy tales; he has translated the complete fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, edited the indispensable Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, and written works like Don't Bet on the Prince, Should We Burn Babar, and Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry. He is also, importantly, a parent, and much of his rage against the devouring machine that is our commodification of childhood stems from his own experience as a father in the "wilderness" of American society.

All of the nine essays in Zipes's masterly and provocative book deal with the troubling state of children's literature in the United States; its absorption by the Culture Industry and subsequent distribution as product, in the form of toy, movie, TV, music, clothing, computer and gaming tie-ins. This commoditication is ubiquitous and almost certainly unstoppable, except at the most basic grass-roots level ("No, Mommy is not going to take you to the Harry Potter movie!"), and Zipes's refusal to become resigned in the face of this inexorable tide of pure shit is admirable, if a bit exhausting, as is his ambivalent attitude toward children's literature itself.

In Sticks and Stones Zipes is no doubt preaching to the choir, but he's doing it in style -- more than once I found myself thinking of Harry Powell, the demonic preacher played by Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter, who has LOVE tattooed on the fingers of one hand and HATE on the other. Zipes's essays, with titles like "The Cultural Homogenization of American Children," "Why Children's Literature Does Not Exist," and "The Value of Evaluating the Value of Children's Literature," are serious without being humorless, and wonderfully free of the postmodern babblelogue that distinguished much academic writing in the late 1980s and 1990s. The two final essays in the volume, however, because they focus on the particular and not the general, are the most powerful. "The Perverse Delight of Shockheaded Peter" is adapted from Zipes's introduction to the Feral House production of Strawwelpeter,(n1) and contains a compelling analysis of the unforgettable British musical play Shockheaded Peter,(n2) which has played to critical acclaim and SRO crowds in London's West End.

Zipes's attitude toward both the play -- which he terms "a radical psychodrama" -- and the book which inspired it is ambivalent. He sees in Struwwelpeter's perverse appeal "a critical reflection about the desperate manner in which we seek to script and control the painful irrationality and traumas of childhood." What he doesn't stress enough is the power that Struwwelpeter and other disturbing books possess to help children to seize some of that anarchic power for themselves and, one hopes, channel it creatively. There is a remarkable anecdote in Marina Warner's No Go the Bogeyman, in which she recounts finding a copy of Struwwelpeter that had been "vigorously defaced" by a child, the frightening pictures scribbled on, torn out, while

Here and there, clumsy scissor cuts had slashed into the pages, where the blades, too heavy in the child's hand, had closed crookedly, under their own momentum .... On the final endpapers, though, there was the survivor's mocking cry: "Ho Hah!" boldly scrawled across the pages.

That "Ho Hah!" echoes through every act of creative childlike anarchy, from the Three Stooges' nyuck nyuck nyuck to Joey Ramones' ecstatic "Hey Ho Let's Go!" to the eerie, "wild red-haired youth" in Hope Mirrlees's sublime Lud-in-the-Mist, who

would arrive uninvited, and having turned everything topsyturvy with his pranks, would rush from the house, shouting "Ho! Ho! Hob!"

Compared to Shockheaded Peter, Harry Potter has the vitality of a squashed Cheerio. "The Phenomenon of Harry Potter" should (but won't) be the last word on the subject. In it, Zipes points out the sexist, formulaic pieties of J. K. Rowling's books and presents pretty damning evidence that, in the guise of "classic fantasy," the Harry Potter books are in fact that most loathsome of all Christmas gifts, the "good" (meaning "safe") books that threaten or challenge no one; the very eidos of the volume of which it is said, "Well, at least s/he's reading something." [I should say here that I am a parent as well, with two children, and I have read every one of the Harry Potter books aloud. Harry and his chums have always seemed about as remarkable to me as the Hardy Boys, though sporadically funnier.]

Zipes is adamant and unapologetic in his final summing up, that "the Harry Potter books...will certainly help children become functionally literate" and little else. I share his disgust and chagrin, though I may hold out more hope than he does when he states that

children from two to sixteen tend to be indiscriminate readers. This is not to slight their intelligence or taste, but they rarely voice complaints. They read and view what they like .... They will read and look at anything placed in front of them ....

I won't argue with that, having spent thousands of childhood's mornings at the dining table, watching my brothers absorbed in the backs of cereal boxes. But I think that Zipes does not give enough credit here to the enduring omnivorous anarchy of children, even in such culturally endangered pastimes as reading. My nine-year-old has read Harry Potter and every junky Star Wars book he can find, but the book he loves, and rereads, is Daniel Pinkwater's Borgel, a science fiction novel that might have been written by Mel Brooks (another anarchist enjoying a rapturous cultural renaissance). (Note to Prof. Zipes: My son also loved William Mayne's Hob stories.) My daughter really does read everything; Harry Potter vaguely amused and ultimately bored her, as Nancy Drew did, but she adores Diana Wynne Jones.

This is admittedly a very small and unrepresentative cultural sampling, and from one day to the next I have no idea if either of these children will ever read another book. Still, they have access to reading material of every kind, Zipes's litany of "Books, comics, fashion and sports magazines, newspapers, advertisements, dictionaries, textbooks, address books, mail, poster, and signs." Zipes fears that books are too expensive for any but middleclass families; most writers I know are barely working class, yet we manage to scrounge books from tag sales, library sales, the dump (and sometimes even publishers) -- it can be done. What is unconscionable, as Zipes points out, is the collusion between schools and corporations in "sponsoring" efforts such as the Scholastic "Book" Club, where much of what is offered to children --Goosebumps books, Harry Potter diaries, those interminable girl's series books is no better than a literary Happy Meal.

Still, children survive. Most parents have seen how a toddler can graze, seemingly indiscriminately, on food, yet against all odds manage to eat a balanced diet; older kids can, I think, do much the same with books --but the table (or library) has to hold more than junk food. Here is where librarians and teachers are supposed to come in, of course: but ultimately librarians and teachers are -- well, not useless, but auxiliary. What we need is for PARENTS TO READ, AND NOT JUST STEPHEN KING AND OPRAH'S CLUB SELECTIONS. And I know for a fact that most of you (well, maybe not you reading this now, but everyone else) DON'T read. I know it because I see you at school, I walk with you, I'm related to you -- and you don't read at all.

You ought to be ashamed.

So I have a modest proposal for every parent out there. Go out and buy, not Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but Slovenly Peter (or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or The Chocolate War, or Borgel, or Ella Enchanted, or The Giver, or...) and -- read it yourself.

If it offends you or disturbs you, good; if it makes you laugh, even better. Then, when you're finished, give it to your kids (the younger the better) and see what happens.

Because if you don't, that terrible long-legged tailor will come for them -- only this time it's not their thumbs he's after. It's their minds.

Ho Hah!

Poor Hans Christian Andersen! From portraits and period accounts related in Jackie Wullschlager's excellent new biography, Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller, Andersen looked like Shockheaded Peter, or maybe Dickens's Uriah Heep -- tall, ungainly, storklike, with a demeanor that veered uncomfortably between childlike arrogance and bourgeois obsequiousness. The son of a shoemaker father and an illiterate mother, Andersen may not ever have achieved the physical beauty of his most famous creation, The Ugly Duckling, but he did manage by the end of his life (he died in 1875, at the age of seventy) to win the friendship and approbation of princes, queens, duchesses, artists, writers, composers, and--needless to say -- children everywhere. Wullschlager gives a complete and immensely readable accounting of Andersen's life, from his impoverished childhood to his success as Europe's first and foremost creator of original fairy tales. Along the way she provides cogent commentary on the relationship between Andersen's early years, in the rural Danish village of Odense, mostly unchanged since medieval times, and his often unhappy residence in the unrelentlessly bourgeois, modern city Copenhagen, where Andersen -- like his Little Mermaid--was never quite accepted or recognized as he longed to be. Like much of his work, Andersen's life was intensely melancholy and informed by a profound sense of aloneness: he was a bisexual who lacked the courage, or emotional language, to act upon his desires; famous himself, he was famously in love with the singer Jenny Lind, perhaps the first modern celebrity; he tormented himself for decades over the refusal of a staunchly heterosexual and supremely tactless male friend to permit Andersen to address him by the familiar "Du" rather than the formal "De."

Yet he was also well-traveled, urbane, in demand with royalty and seemingly every major cultural figure of his day. Wullschlager draws on Andersen's journals, letters, and contemporary accounts, as well as the formidable body of work Andersen produced, not just the fairy tales but novels, poems, travelogues -- a prodigious amount of material. Throughout, Andersen's work appears to have sprung directly from his life, lively and green, as though conjured from dry grass. One is left at the end with a vivid portrait of a difficult, sad man, surrounded but not overwhelmed by the vast, many-colored army of his creations.

Finally, we have the substantial Treasury of the Fantastic: Romanticism to Early Twentieth Century Literature. In fact the Treasury is a hefty compilation of forty-odd fantastic stories and poems, all in the public domain. Some of the works are fantasy -- "The Golden Key," "The Griffin and the Minor Canon;" some supernatural -- "Carmilla," "Casting the Runes," "The Ghost Ship;" some Haute Literature Edith Wharton's "The Eyes," Virginia Woolf's "A Haunted House." As a collection it's pretty great who's going to argue with Dunsany's "The Sword of Welleran," E. Nesbit's delightful "The Book of Beasts," "The Bottle Imp" or "The Yellow Wallpaper"? I do however wonder if we need even one more collection that includes "The Monkey's Paw" and "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," but then I'm old-fashioned.

The editors, David Sandner and Jacob Weisman, have done a fine job and a service to humanity in bringing these all together, relatively inexpensively and handsomely produced in one volume. Should there be a second edition, however (and I hope there will be), they would make a more unassailable bid for posterity by including even the most rudimentary bibliographical information pertaining to these treasured texts; the lack of same is, I must say, regrettable to the extreme.

(n1) in addition to Zipes's scholarly introduction, the 1999 edition published by Feral House includes a facsimile of the 1915 American edition of Slovenly Peter; "Struwwelhitler," the famous British WWII parody; and Sarita Vendetta's disturbing and very adult interpretation of Struwwelpeter.

(n2)I was fortunate enough to have seen Shockheaded Peter in London earlier this year; it has also toured extensively in the U.S. If the opportunity presents itself, see it; if not, the CD of the original music by The Tiger Lilies is available online at Shockheadedpeter.com.

~~~~~~~~

By Elizabeth Hand

ORBITAL SENSORS DETECTED the nanobloom just after sunrise. Within seconds, automated plasma burns had cauterized the site, less than one hundred kilo meters from Hancock Dome. Overflying puffballs poured forth a stream of scrubbers designed to lock in on hydrocarbons and free oxygen. Maps of Kindred IV were redrawn to include the bloom as a warning to prospectors and surveyors.

Ten seconds later, greenwipers were called in.

The suborbital burn squeezed a headache from Krzysztof Nowak's sinuses. He closed his eyes, let his suit's autodoc equalize pressure and goose the humidity up a few percent. By the time the transport had crested its parabolic course and begun its accelerated fall back to the rocks of Kindred IV, the rebellion in his sinuses had been successfully quelled.

A smooth pattern of retros guided the transport in a sharp curve through a sandstorm. Clear of the storm, the pilot set out the circular quarantine course. Krz checked his filaments: clear to the left, clear to the right, clear to the apex that would drop from the transport's belly once all of the greenwipers had made their jumps.

His suit's subliminals, keyed to reinforce and focus, purred in his ear: Humanity has proved that it cannot live in the green. Domes save both us and what we would destroy. A taste of green is the first taste of mortality.

GO, flashed the light above his bay, and Krzysztof jumped.

Thirty seconds to ground. Krzysztof's heads-up displayed the unfolding filaments of the containment hemi, anchored every hundred meters by a greenwiper in full dress. Bezel to his left, Morgan to his right, and in front and below the seared rock and sand that marked the area of the bloom.

Nobody had told Krzysztof what to expect. Any one of a dozen organized groups could pull off a terraforming bloom; the suit's processors had categorized more than a million separate nanos and attributed them to different cells. He had time to wonder which signature would light up in the heads-up retinal display, time to wonder why the greenies kept trying, time to think about the end of his shift, time to savor the whiskey he would drink and visualize the face of the woman who would keep him company that night.

His boots punched through Kindred's crust of frozen sand, settling shin-deep in the ashy lithosphere. The filaments began to grow, thickening and twining into an invisible spiderweb designed to catch molecular flies. Krzysztof released the flight locks and engaged his suit's joint servos. He deployed his plasma nozzle. Samplers darted into the thin carbon-dioxide atmosphere and returned with captured nanos, invisible enemy soldiers that under scanning would yield their secrets. Processors profiled the interlopers, came back with the verdict:

Viriditas.

"Big leagues," Krzysztof breathed. Confirmation came from Bezel and Morgan even as puffballs settled into the gaps between filaments, clouding the atmosphere with scrubbers known to be effective against Viriditas nanos.

Forty seconds after touchdown, the containment hemi was complete. Krzysztof stepped back from the gleaming surface. The storm cell loomed to the north, rolling down on them from the Kellerman Massif. Krzysztof blew his distributed network, surrounding himself with a ten-thousand-cubic-meter fog of sensors. A few stray Viriditas nanos showed up on the screens and were quickly annihilated by scrubbers.

All according to plan, Krzysztof thought. He tongued his mike. "Hemi complete. Fog deployed. Nowak on station. Report counter-clock."

The litany of names settled his nerves: Morgan, Greenwell, Bemelman, Okafor, on around the circle until Zeke Bezel completed the two-kilometer perimeter of greenwipers. All fogged, all on station. Command back in the Dome would have a hard time finding something to bitch about.

Off to Krz's right, plasma flared. "Who?" he barked.

His heads-up turned orange. Lemelin's position flared green, and at the same time Tig Okafor's voice burst across the link.

"Green outside the hemi!"

A dozen voices at once: "Burn!"

"Can't!" Tig's voice too high, wavering. "It's inside Reggie's suit!"

Krz slaved Tig's camera. He could not credit what he saw.

Leaves were curling from the faceplate of Rejean Lemelin's suit.

"Burn, Tig," he said steadily. "Burn now."

Plasma flared, and the sandstorm was on them.

THIRTY-SIX HOURS later, Krzysztof read the reports from his pallet in the Dome hospital. The foam treatments were doing wonders for his lungs; in another week he'd be able to resume his duties. Lemelin, Okafor, Bemelman, and Ross wouldn't be so lucky.

Four lost, Krz thought. Bloomed.

This was a new tactic for Viriditas. They had never before attacked greenwipers, never encoded anything that would be a threat to human life of any political persuasion. Had it been a mistake? Had one of their nanos errored, locked on the wrong target? There were other groups of greenies that wouldn't shed any tears over four greenwipers, but Viriditas professed a love of all life and demanded that life be given a chance to flourish wherever ingenuity or technology could give it root. If they had undertaken an attack like this, they weren't Viriditas any more.

He tapped the terminal, flitting past a relief map of Kindred IV, pocked with containment hemis that varied in size from a hundred meters to nearly seven kilometers. Thirty-seven times Krzysztof Nowak had been part of the team that stabilized those hemis, which would hold their seal for ten years in good weather. By that time, isolation from light and heat would have killed off the greenie nanos inside, and mopup teams could go through with plasmas again to make sure.

Thirty-seven times. He'd seen tiny plants blooming in hundred-degree-below-zero temperatures; huge flowers vainly turning toward the dim disk of Kindred, four hundred million kilometers away, before flaring into ash in the glare of plasma discharge; a dozen varieties of lichen and algae creeping their inevitable ways over gray rocks that had never known the touch of Life. Every time Krzysztof had stood firm, had burned and fogged and sealed, had made sure that the only green on Kindred IV grew in hydroponic vats and artistic mantelpiece vases.

He believed in the Paradox: Green gave life, but the first taste of green was the first taste of mortality. Man had been cast out of the Garden, and to build another Garden was to foreordain another Fall.

Doctor Grello entered Krzysztof's room. "Officer Nowak," he said. "Breathing the local gases again, I see."

"Well enough," Krz said. "I can get out of here."

Grello perused the display connected to Krz's monitors. "So it seems," he said eventually. "We'll keep a colony working in your lungs, cleaning scar tissue out of your alveoli, and before you leave the hospital you'll need to be green-screened."

"How's the rest of the detail?" Krz asked. When Grello hesitated, he added, "I already know four of my people were bloomed. Give me some good news about the ones who survived."

"I wish I had good news." Grello made a notation on Krz's monitor. "The truth is, you're the only one who has survived this long."

Nineteen? Nineteen greenwipers, bloomed by Viriditas nanos?

Why wasn't this on the nets?

"Every other member of your detail suffered fatal blooms within twenty-four hours of your deployment. Apparently this new nano can break the sampler containment. Either it attacks the sampler's wiring or," the doctor cleared his throat, "or it propagates itself as information along a suit's processor circuits and, er, reinstantiates in the human epidermis."

Krz couldn't speak. A nano that could write itself into information and transform back into matter?

"That last bit is speculation," Grello said, as if saying that would make Krz forget he'd said it.

"Was it Viriditas? This new bug?"

"All of the signatures recovered were of Viriditas bugs," Grello said. "To this point, however, we haven't been able to type the fatal. It rewrites itself faster than our processors can track, and we can't crack its propagation algorithm."

Krz took a few moments to absorb all this. He sat up, looked at himself. Wondered when he would see the first patches of green on his skin.

"How long do I have?" he asked Grello.

Grello could only shrug. "I don't even know how long I have," he said evenly. "We can't tell if the nano is propagating in the hospital, or in any of the staff who treated members of your detail. It appears to be completely gone, but normal quarantine procedures clearly wouldn't work with a bug that can propagate as pure information. For this reason, the loss of your detail and news of this new nano have been withheld."

"Nobody knows?"

"Nobody who isn't a greenwiper or military authority, except for a very few people in this hospital." Grello poked at Krz's monitor again, then turned it off. "You can go. Like I said, there's no point in quarantining you if this nano propagates the way we think it does. You've been placed on paid leave until this is resolved. Be informed that your discretion is of paramount importance in maintaining order in Hancock Dome. You will be physically restrained if you speak of this to anyone."

It was an open secret in Hancock Dome that a small percentage of its population held heretical views. In an ostentatious display of respect for individual rights, this group's greenie sympathies were tolerated as long as they remained purely sentiment. To ensure that belief could not translate into action, suspected greenies were prevented from any occupations that brought them into controlling contact with nanotech. Periodically, too, their homes were searched and all technical gear more sophisticated than the average twentieth-century microchip confiscated. No great outrage accompanied this abrogation of civil liberties: greenie sympathies, the popular thinking went, had as a natural consequence technological deprivation. Possession of unlicensed nanoengineering equipment was grounds for transportation to Kindred VI-17, a tiny asteroid nearly two billion kilometers from its star.

In this way, the Hermetic divines who governed Hancock Dome provided an outlet for the inevitable greenie yearnings that arose in a domed population. Human beings' sinful urges, they reasoned, were not limited to sexual license and blasphemy, and just as a certain number of venereal and verbal transgressions had to be tolerated in the name of civil order, a degree of understanding was called for when considering greenies. Scarcely three generations removed from the colonizing voyage, Hancock's nineteen thousand citizens were prone to fits of nostalgia for such features of Earth as sky, ocean, and prairie. To unsympathetically crush such impulses would display a certain lack of mercy, especially since Earth itself was no longer fit for anything but domed habitation. The greenies' dreams were doomed to be just that.

Thus it was that Krzysztof Nowak, veteran greenwiper and citizen of Hermetic Society-founded Hancock Dome, could find himself in a tavern whose walls were adorned with sky- and seascapes, with animated frescoes of animal herds and mountain climbers, with detailed portraits of wildflowers and flying birds. What am I doing here? He had to close his eyes and weather a wave of doorframe-clutching agoraphobia before he could find a seat at the bar and order whiskey and beer.

The whiskey hit him like a slow-motion orgasm, the beer like the chill of sweat evaporating from his skin. He'd had nothing to drink in nearly three days. The bartender set him up again, and Krz took a discreet look around, avoiding the nauseating pictures and settling briefly on each of the tavern's other patrons. The left corner of his mouth curled into a wry half-grin: none of the greenie women were likely to give him the hero treatment every greenwiper became accustomed to from the female population at large. But he wasn't here to be treated like a hero. He was here because someone here had answers to questions he couldn't ask anywhere else. Krz downed the second whiskey and waited.

It took longer than he'd expected, but after twenty minutes or so a long-jawed woman with bruise-colored eyes and a vidstar cascade of curly hair sat down at his left. "Hey, greenwiper," she said.

Krz nodded. He lifted a hand and the bartender refilled his glass. "Whatever she wants too," Krz said, inclining his head toward his new companion.

"Funny thing," the woman said.

Krz looked at her, drank beer. "What's your name?" he asked.

"Alice. You're Krzysztof."

"The joy of reputation," Krz said.

Alice smiled slightly. "Funny thing," she said again.

Krz raised an eyebrow.

"Well, six blooms in the past twenty-four hours. That's a lot, isn't it ?"

Krz's eyebrow stayed raised. Six was a lot, if it was true.

"And one of Hancock's finest greenwipers drinking in a greenie bar while blooms mar the surface of our dear dead Kindred IV. That seems odd," Alice mused.

You don't know the half of it, Krz wanted to say. You could be a bloom waiting to happen, and the nanos that would do it might be just electrical impulses in your brain. I suppose that is odd.

He killed the third whiskey, chased it with what was left of the second beer. The bartender appeared again, and as Krz sipped at the fresh beer he had a sudden urge to go to church. I shouldn't be here with greenies, he thought. I got the answer I was looking for.

"I have to go," he said.

He thought she'd protest, but she stood. "Thanks for the beer," she said. "I'll be around when you come back."

He needed a dose of reassurance, a dose of uncomplicated belief. There was a church offering hourly teaching near the puffball staging hangars. Krz arrived just as a gowned Hermetic divine was beginning her homily.

"Humankind," she began, her freckled face young and earnest, "was given dominion over the Earth. No; we were commanded to dominion. And on Earth we tried to assume it. What happened? We equated knowledge with dominion, and because of knowledge we fell.

"Now, you can believe that literally happened, or you can believe that it's a parable. Either way, we realize that at some point in human history we left off ensuring our own survival and set about endangering the survival of every other living thing. And what did we discover? Only that we depended on those things for our own survival, and that when we began bringing Earth's ecosystem down around our ambitious ears we began the process of our own destruction as well.

"But we were commanded to dominion! Whether the command was divine or just our genome finding its voice, we responded. We strove to dominate until we destroyed everything that was intended as our dominion. So what is the lesson? What are we to understand from the collapse of the Earth that gave us life? The lesson is that life will not be dominated. Life demands slippage, variation, rebellion, and if we examine ourselves we will understand that the urge to dominion is as much a part of us as the urge to feed and the urge to procreate. From this comes the Paradox: green gave us life, but it also commanded our deaths because our urge to dominion inevitably entailed our own destruction. Man has been cast out of the Garden, and to build another Garden is to foreordain another Fall. The first taste of green is the first taste of mortality.

"And so we came here. Kindred IV had never known life when we arrived, and outside the Dome it still does not. Here we can live as humans were meant to live; here we can spread and command our environment; here we can fill a vacuum, not destabilize a system that requires our absence for its survival.

"Here we can obey the command we have been given."

The divine stopped, and smiled beatifically. Krzysztof realized he was the sole member of her audience. A moment later he realized she was a holo.

"You look troubled," the holodivine said, her smile fading into an expression of tender concern.

All Krz could do was repeat her words: "Life will not be dominated," he said. "How do we know that we won't wake up one morning and find out that the grapevines in the vats can live outside the dome?"

"There's no atmosphere on Kindred IV," the divine said comfortingly. "No soil, no water. Nothing can survive here without us. This is dominion. Here we can achieve dominion without extinction."

Life will not be dominated, Krz thought. The Viriditas nanos that he was sure he carried, were they alive? "This is my problem," he said. "If the greenies can create life on this planet, isn't that the purest form of dominion? To create life where there was none? To demand life in a lifeless world?"

"But this is to demand self-destruction," she countered. "What if the greenies were to terraform Kindred IV? Wouldn't we then set about destroying it just as we did Earth? Have we changed so much from our great-great-great-great-grandparents? Are we not human, and does not to be human mean to seek dominion?"

Thirty-seven times I have sought dominion over greenie nanos, Krz thought. Thirty-seven times I eradicated them. Creation and destruction: this is dominion.

And if all creation is self-destruction, then all we can do is destroy.

KRZYSZTOF NOWAK walked with ferrocrete under the soles of his boots, artificial light in his eyes, steel and glass walling him off from vacuum. Hancock Dome was nine kilometers across and two hundred meters high at its apex. Half a dozen smaller hemispheres surrounded it, nearly as high but much smaller in diameter. He walked past the subterranean passages that led to these outer domes, with their manufacturing, energy, and maintenance facilities; he walked past the long blocks of greenhouses and hydroponic farms; he walked past chapels and offices and apartment blocks and training facilities and when Kindred's pallid disk was just breaking the horizon he walked through the door of the greenie bar he'd left the night before.

"Explain something to me," he said to Alice, who was still sitting at the bar. She was alone except for the bartender, who had a shot and a beer waiting when Krz sat down.

Alice shifted on her stool, facing him. "I'll explain what I can."

"Was it part of the plan to have me wander in here?"

"Well, there aren't that many places you could have gone," she said.

"Did you know I would go to chapel?"

The whiskey made Krz's eyes water. Alice reached out, touched him on the shoulder.

"We know nothing," she said. "But we are guessing fight more and more often."

Krz worked on his beer for a minute or so.

"When will I bloom?" he asked her. Like Doctor Grello, all she could do was shrug.

Greenwipers enjoyed the same forbearance that characterized the old Vatican's attitude toward Crusaders. They defended civilization, and their excesses were glossed over. So when Dome authorities discovered Krzysztof Nowak stupidly drunk near a puffball hangar, they put him in an autotaxi home rather than charging him with conduct unbecoming or disorderly. His supervisors, although surprised that he'd been drinking in a greenie bar, wrote it off after the bartender reported that he hadn't said anything to anybody he shouldn't have. Alice they already knew about, and were waiting for her to disclose connections, allegiances, covert machinations.

The greenwiper authorities did not know how far the nanos circulating in Krz's system had propagated. They had debated eliminating him and the entire hospital staff, but had come to the conclusion that such action would likely endanger Hancock Dome's ability to sustain itself. Then they had debated eliminating only Krzysztof, but decided against partial quarantine measures since the more radical course of action was so uncertain. If Officer Nowak was alive, he might teach them something. Dead, he was only muck for the hydroponic vats.

What Doctor Grello had speculated, his superiors knew without having to learn it from Krzysztof. The Viriditas nanos were unlike any they had seen before. They could write themselves into pure information, employing neurons and inorganic circuitry with equal facility, and reinstantiate on command.

They were organic.

And they would bloom.

"After what you told me last night," Krz said to Alice, "I tried to steal a puffball."

"You shouldn't drink so much," she said.

He looked up through the dome at the stars. Where was Earth? I need a sense of origins, Krz thought. "They probably know I'm talking to you," he said.

She nodded. "But they don't know what the nanos will do. They're expecting me to give away something, but I don't know either, so they're waiting for me to find out something I shouldn't."

"I haven't really changed my mind, you know," he said. "I still believe in the Paradox."

"You can believe what you want. That won't change what's true."

"What is true?"

"We can't close ourselves off. We're strangling in here, Krz. Humans need to be out in air and light and heat and moisture. We need green things that don't do what we tell them. You know what happens in a closed system, and it doesn't get any more closed than Hancock Dome."

Entropy, Krz thought. And these nanos, pure information, are at war with it. So easy to believe. I carry information. Information will kill me. Entropy will kill me. To build another Garden is to preordain another Fall. All creation is destruction.

That night he did not drink.

When Krzysztof Nowak succeeded in stealing a puffball, he streaked along Kindred IV's equator. The Viriditas nanos leaped from his brain to the puffball's processors, instructing them to manufacture and deploy a fogged array. Some of these immediately began breaking down the puffball's exhaust, freeing oxygen and bonding the complex molecules into heavy groups that fell to Kindred's surface. There other nanos were at work: freeing still more oxygen and nitrogen, creating hydrocarbon chains from minerals in Kindred's rocky crust, constructing anaerobic bacteria that would begin grinding rocks into soil. Crystals began to form on the surface, glittering weakly in Kindred's distant glow.

Krzysztof's theft had been anticipated. The Hermetic authorities in Hancock Dome, knowing the battle lost, waited sixty seconds in the hope that Krzysztof would contact the greenie traitor who had doomed the Hermetic community on Kindred IV. If that traitor could be rooted out, the discovery would be worth the sacrifice of Hancock, indeed of Kindred IV itself. During that sixty seconds, Krzysztof traveled thirty-three kilometers, trailing nanos in a widening plume across Kindred IV's lithosphere. When that time had elapsed with no signal being sent, plasma strikes vaporized the stolen puffball and sterilized the surface halt a kilometer on either side of the puffball's flight path. Every greenwiper in Hancock Dome was deployed without being told what they were up against, and every one of them bloomed within ninety seconds of sampling the distributed nanos. The puffballs accompanying them began distributing Viriditas nanos rather than scrubbers; another forty-seven square kilometers was contaminated before plasma strikes destroyed the nanojacked puffballs and dying greenwipers.

While authorities in Hancock Dome debated courses of action, nanos quietly attacked Krz's ashes, breaking the oxygen free and rearranging the carbon and hydrogen left behind.

Alice grieved. For Krzysztof, certainly, but more tot an ideal. No, ideals: hers and those of the Hermetics who had founded Hancock Dome. Four hundred and twenty greenwipers dead. They bloomed with new life, but.

Viriditas had sworn itself to life. Alice had known about these new nanos, about the breakthrough that allowed the nano to remember its identity as it transcribed itself into information. She had agreed that such a development was the logical manifestation of the dual principle that information was fundamental to the universe, and that the ultimate goal of the universe was life. She had agreed that the deployment of the new nanos was necessary to counter the living death of Hermeticism.

But she had never agreed that the projected loss of life was justified. How could she, when Viriditas had been founded on the principle that life must be propagated, that life was the single invaluable thing in the universe and that it must never be sacrificed?

She had once received a message that offered a rationale for this action. It referred to an old Christian story, the parable of the sower. Some seeds fall on rocky ground, some among weeds, some where it is too hot. These were the nineteen greenwipers in Krz's detail. Each bloomed too early. But Krzysztof Nowak was fertile, and grew, and was fruitful and multiplied.

On the scale of history, what did it matter that one colony failed? What would it matter if a terraformed Kindred IV failed as well? What mattered was that someday it would succeed. Someday humankind would find a way to taste the green, and that taste would not curdle with mortality on the tongue.

But four hundred and twenty greenwipers dead today, she thought. History does not matter today. What matters today is that the Hermets were right. Viriditas tasted green and sowed death.

She was thinking this when the Hermetic authorities arrested her.

"Life will not be dominated," she told her accusers. "You're right about that."

Was this nano designed on Kindred IV? they asked her.

She did not know.

Was Viriditas behind the nano, or had someone else used their known signatures as a screen?

The question gave her pause. Having never actually met or spoken with the designers, she did not know.

If we survive the bloom, they told her, you will be transported.

She understood. "I have a statement," she said.

They indicated that she was to proceed.

"The greenwipers, dedicated to the eradication of life, have themselves been eradicated," she began, the words already feeling dead on her tongue. "This is a great tragedy because human lives were lost, but in this loss a balance has begun to be restored. I do not know who created this nano, and I do not know what their ultimate goals are, but I believe that this nano embodies the pure principle of life. Life respects no boundaries. It travels across oceans and across space; why should it not traverse the boundary between matter and energy? Why should life not be information instead of only transmit it?

"Life respects no ideals. Viriditas's ideals lie in the ashes of dead greenwipers, and Hermetic ideals failed when life escaped their containment domes."

Enough, they said.

Outside Hancock Dome, nanos worked their way into Kindred IV's crust. They extracted and isolated, purified and combined. They propagated, and Kindred IV came to life.

~~~~~~~~

By Alex Irvine

In the past two years, Alex Irvine has regaled us with a science-fictional vision of ancient Egypt, a glimpse of immortality in the near future, and a contemporary ghost story. Now he takes us into the future for an interesting look at the old man-vs.-nature conflict.

THE CUSTOMS INSPECTOR'S eyes narrowed when Jonathan got on the line with his two suitcases. He pointed. Jonathan groaned silently.

"Me?" he asked.

The official's finger didn't waver.

Jonathan sighed. He went and put his suitcases on the long table and opened them. There was of course no way to hide the assault rifle, the ammo, the bayonet.

The customs inspector, seeing them, nodded: As he had thought. His hand went out, palm up, which meant, in every country, Your passport.

Jonathan produced his passport.

The inspector flipped through it, compared the photograph in it with Jonathan, looking at first one, then the other, back and forth.

They made it hard for you. Oh, they were quick enough to take your money and promise you thrills, but in their hearts they despised you. When they should have been despising themselves. Wasn't this whole thing their idea to begin with?

Jonathan wasn't doing anything wrong. He had paid: six months' salary up front, and another six in installments, at twelve percent. It was practically like taking out a mortgage.

The customs inspector returned the passport and gestured to a booth at the far end of the long table. Won't even talk to me, Jonathan thought. He took his suitcases and proceeded to the booth.

The official in the booth examined his passport, did the same careful back-and-forth between face and photograph, and asked: "Mayhem Tours ?"

Jonathan rolled his eyes. Of course it was Mayhem Tours. Did they take him for a terrorist?

"Yes," he said, "I'm with Mayhem."

"Tour receipt and authorization, please."

Jonathan gave the official his receipt and authorization, thinking, This is harassment. Thinking also, goddamn Frenchies.

They weren't French, although they talked through their noses in this postage-stamp country. They also wore berets. But the signs in the airport weren't in French; they were an impossible mix of letters, a lot of j's and i's so close together, they blurred: you couldn't be sure where the dots went. The guidebooks all advised, Use English.

"Thank you, Mr. Cobb." The official in the booth returned the papers, handed Jonathan a couple of brochures, and waved him on.

Jonathan glanced at the brochures. One was museums and galleries; the other, what the traveler should know about sexually transmitted diseases. At least that wasn't going to be a problem: he wasn't planning on raping. Women made him uneasy.

No, he was here to take a human life. He had read a couple of books on the subject. The tremendous rush you got. Nothing like it for sweeping away the dust and cobwebs. He had been sitting at a desk for more than ten years now, going over other people's numbers, correcting mistakes, breathing office air: he needed sweeping.

For a weekday, there was very little traffic going into the city. Had their population been affected already, or were the citizens just keeping a low profile? The cabby didn't seem nervous, didn't look over his shoulder once, though Jonathan could have blown his brains out at any time, or opened his throat with the bayonet.

The bayonet was razor-sharp. You could slice paper with it while the paper was failing free. Jonathan hadn't actually done that himself but saw a demonstration once.

He looked up at the clouds. The city was like a park, it was so quiet. He opened his window, listened for the sound of shooting. Didn't hear it.

At the hotel, the man at the desk, plump and sporting a little pointy Frenchie mustache, asked if Jonathan was with Mayhem Tours.

Is it written on my face? Jonathan thought. Well, but probably no one came here anymore, except tourists like him, after the new laws.

He realized he had butterflies in his stomach. The books all said you got over that after the first kill. He hoped so.

In his room, he unpacked and went through the rifle manual again. He assembled his weapon quickly, held it, sighted down it, rested his trigger finger gently on the trigger. Remembering the rules from his lessons, like, Don't flinch, lean into it. The rifle was an R720 Eckheim, recoilless, top of the line, warm in his hands, smelling of gun oil.

"Pow," he whispered, the stock to his cheek, picturing a fat man in a bowler throwing up his arms and failing in a slow cinematic spray of red.

But first he should get something to eat, have a cup of coffee. The caffeine would steady him. His stomach was upset. Air travel did that: the change in air pressure, the bumps and dips when the plane descended.

He went looking for a sandwich place, found one around the corner. It was open but empty. The aproned sandwich maker and the capped waitress watched Jonathan while he sat and read the English half of the menu. There was some crusted food on the menu, and on the table a dead fly, feet up.

"I'll have a prune Danish and a coffee," Jonathan finally said. "Milk, please, not cream."

The waitress didn't move.

From the other side of the counter, the sandwich man asked, in a guttural accent, "Where is your gun?" The question echoed in the shop.

Jonathan didn't have a snappy answer. He said, "I haven't started yet. I just got off the plane."

Maybe he should start with the goddamn sandwich man. Pow, and down goes the guy in his apron, flailing like a windmill amid clattering crockery.

They stared at him as the wall clock ticked. He got up at last and left, beating a retreat, blushing. He was very hungry, getting one of those hunger headaches.

The people here were biting the hand that fed them. Or nipping it. Millions of dollars must be coming in from tourism now. Pouring into their treasury. Jonathan didn't even want to think what he had paid for his five days. It wasn't to look at a lot of stupid Frenchie museums and galleries.

He walked several blocks, passed a department store window filled with mannequins. One was a button-eyed male in a tweed hunting jacket and hunter's hat holding a shotgun stylishly in the crook of his arm.

There seemed to be no restaurants or coffee shops in this direction. It was mostly office buildings. Jonathan turned back, his stomach rumbling.

The restaurant lounge at the hotel was ridiculously expensive and smelled of furniture polish. A lot of dark oak, fake, and a fake hearth. You knew the food would be a disaster. He went in anyway, and it was, the steak tasteless and full of gristle.

Disgusted, he went to his room and lay down for a while. Then he got up and armed himself, read through the rifle manual one more time, took a deep breath, and called a cab.

He decided to try one of the nightspots recommended in the guidebook. It turned out to be around the corner. The cabby overcharged, but Jonathan couldn't prove it, still unfamiliar with the exchange rate.

At the nightspot, his heart pounded so much that he missed when he shot at a lady on the stairs. She wore a spotted fur stole and was chic. The report made the people start, and a few folks even hit the deck -- but a second later everyone was back in position and acting nonchalant. No one looked at Jonathan.

Jonathan guessed that if this establishment was in the guidebook and on the recommended list, then they must be on sitting-duck duty here. Probably they all had maximum insurance policies, the benificiary parts filled out carefully.

They're laughing at me, Jonathan thought. He ordered a drink, a double scotch. Tried to sip it, but drank it down, too nervous to sip.

"Another?" asked the bartender. His accent was oily.

Jonathan shook his head no. With any more alcohol in his system, he wouldn't be able to hit a thing.

He took out his billfold, paid, overtipped -- too many bills came out of the wallet, but he couldn't take them back, with the bartender looking on. Jonathan left in such a hurry that he forgot his rifle and had to return for it. Thank God no one said, "You forgot your rifle."

In the street he saw the chic lady leaving the nightspot with her escort. He followed, hurried after them, saw them turn a corner into an alley. When they stopped midway down it, seeing him, he took aim. The man backed up against a brick wall and spread his arms, as victims do in the movies. Jonathan, so he wouldn't miss this time, didn't blink, squeezed the trigger easy, with a slow exhale, like taking an important picture for an album.

"Wait. Don't," blurted the woman. "He has an old mother."

"So do I," said Jonathan. His mother was recently widowed, in a new retirement village now in South Carolina, along with a lot of toothless codgers. He fired once, twice. The bangs shattered the air, as in a genuine shootout. The man buckled but didn't drop. Stood again. Jesus Christ, wasn't hit.

Ears humming, Jonathan could hardly believe it. Had someone put blanks in his gun?

No, the man was hit in the hand. Biting his lower lip, he pulled out a handkerchief. Then the woman was binding the man's hand with the handkerchief. The handkerchief turned dark. Had to be blood, though you couldn't see the color in the alley.

"Are you okay?" asked Jonathan.

The man nodded. He was shaking.

Jonathan wondered how he could have missed at such close range. Must be jet lag. He should have waited a full day before starting. Some people advised that, but each day was so expensive. You wanted to make every minute count.

He could dispatch both the man and the woman with his bayonet. Two or three hard thrusts apiece ought to do it. You had to put your shoulder into the thrust and follow through. Jonathan remembered his bayonet instructor's saying that over and over. It's like the swing in golf. But the two stood side by side at the wall, pathetically cringing together in the middle of the night. Maybe they were brother and sister.

Jonathan walked away, not caring what they thought. The scotch and the excitement of almost taking a life made him feel better. Almost human.

Back in his room, he realized he was exhausted, so he turned in. He slept like a log.

In the morning, he went down and was told that the hotel didn't serve breakfast.

"Where can I get breakfast?" he asked.

The man at the desk shrugged a Frenchie shrug and made a moue, his pointed mustache turned up at the ends.

Jonathan raised his gun to blow away the twit. There was nothing in the rules that protected hotel employees.

The maitre d' or manager didn't even blink, though the muzzle of the weapon was inches from his forehead. The man assumed an expression of weary contempt.

"Killing me, Mr. Cobb," he said in a dental accent, "will only disrupt the service to you during your stay here."

"The service sucks," said Jonathan.

The manager raised one eyebrow. "Surely you cannot mean that, Mr. Cobb. Your room is spotless, your bed has the finest linen. We are three stars."

Jonathan tightened his grip on the rifle, clenched his teeth, and tried to look berserk or on the brink.

The manager countered that with a cold stare. Jonathan realized, sighing, that every day this short Frenchie must stare down dozens of armed and authorized tourists. He gave it up and went out into the overcast morning, thinking of omelets and English muffins.

According to the newspapers, there were more hungry people than ever in Europe today, starving multitudes, because of the crash and depression. Nations had to be creative, or they'd sink with the rest into famine.

Hence, for example, Mayhem Tours.

What do we have to offer, ladies and gentlemen? An experience you cannot get at home, at least not without running the risk of paying for it with many years, possibly life, in prison. On our soil you pay only in dollars, all major credit cards accepted.

Open season on persons of every age, every size, both sexes. The only exception, and you'll understand this: emergency personnel, such as ambulance drivers and firemen. And, of course, our gendarmes. Who will do everything they can, we promise, to stay out of your way.

Jonathan headed in a direction different from the one yesterday. It was chilly. He should have put on a sweater. There was practically no traffic, and only a few pedestrians. One was a rigid man with a beard, standing at a corner like an advertising dummy.

Jonathan heard the distant crackle of gunfire. On the next block, he shot an old woman across the street. She crumpled but was only playing dead, you could tell from the way she hit the pavement. She was probably chuckling into the gutter.

He fired at a car going past, a red vintage Mazda. A side window on the car shattered. The sound of tinkling glass was satisfying. But the car didn't swerve, the driver kept going, obviously practiced and moving much too fast for Jonathan to shoot out the tires.

He came to a shoe store and went inside, rifle raised. The salesman threw up both hands. Jonathan shot and got the man square in the chest. The man was knocked back against the wall and brought several boxes of shoes down on top of him when he fell. The avalanche of shoe boxes and shoes on the body was a nice touch.

Jonathan blew out air, pictured himself saying to a bunch of silent men in a bar back in St. Louis, "Sure, I've killed a man. Nothing to it."

He was about to leave the store, but something wasn't right. With a foot he moved aside a few of the boxes. No blood anywhere, not a drop.

The man was holding his breath.

"I could have sworn I got you,' Jonathan said.

The man sat up. "You did. I'm wearing protection, a vest." He touched his chest, grimaced.

"A vest against bullets that can penetrate armor?"

"It's special mesh, triple-layer, very expensive. Even so," the man said with a lopsided smile, "I'll have one hell of a bruise."

"I would have thought... I don't know, that living here, you'd be resigned. Show a little fatalism. And your family collects on the insurance, don't they?"

The shoe salesman shook his head and got up with a grunt. "The premiums are prohibitive," he said. "As you might expect. You know insurance companies. Anyway, my wife doesn't need a few hundred thousand, she needs me. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis last month. It started with vision problems, blackouts. She's only twenty-five."

"That's too bad." Jonathan had had a cousin with MS. Jack. Elsie's son.

"They give her a few years," said the man. "We went shopping for a wheelchair a week ago. And she used to ski, was athletic, proud of her body. It's difficult."

Jonathan remembered his cousin at a Christmas party: the slurred speech, the drooping head.

"You wouldn't be interested in a pair of shoes?" asked the shoe man.

"No."

"We have a special sale on Mephistos. Twenty percent off. We have a special arrangement with them."

"Thanks, but I'm traveling light. No room in my suitcases, with the gun and all. I didn't come to shop."

The shoe man nodded.

Jonathan left and continued on. At an intersection he saw another tourist. The man was carrying a really fancy weapon. Was that a Digby 400? Way beyond Jonathan's pocketbook. Jonathan had never even held one of those. The glossy, understated ads in the New Yorker didn't reveal the price.

The tourist smiled, waved, came over, hand outstretched. "Hi. Name's Mackenzie. Gordon Mackenzie. My friends call me Gordie."

A strong hand. He was the cheerful, healthy type, probably a CEO enjoying a golden parachute.

Mackenzie pointed, and Jonathan looked. Several hundred feet down the avenue was an overturned school bus.

"Did that myself," Mackenzie said, giving Jonathan a moment or two to take in the exploit. "With this." Patting his Digby 400.

Jonathan gave a polite whistle.

"I took out at least a dozen of them, maybe more," said the tourist. "High-school age, though they don't call it high school here. I forget what they call it."

"Something like gymnasium," said Jonathan, remembering that from a crossword puzzle.

"Caught like rats in a trap," said Mackenzie. "Barn barn." The teeth in his smile were white and even; his eyes twinkled. With a white beard he would have made a perfect Santa Claus. "Not one kid got away."

"Really," said Jonathan.

"I say a dozen, but I wasn't counting," added Mackenzie. "I was too damned excited to count."

"Something to tell at home."

"You bet," said Gordie Mackenzie. "Wish I had taped it. Didn't think of that. Look me up." He gave Jonathan his card. Jonathan gave him his.

They shook hands, wished each other good hunting, and went their separate ways.

Jonathan came to a residential area, a poor neighborhood. In the middle of it was a complex of large gray buildings. The row of emotionless windows said hospital.

He thought, with a flash of inspiration: There are cafeterias in hospitals. He hadn't had breakfast yet.

At the top of the steps was a door that young men and women in labcoats were going in and out of, hands in their pockets, so they had to be interns. He went there, entered, asked a nurse or receptionist how to get to the cafeteria -- but a Chinese doctor in the hallway beckoned strenuously.

"Me?" Jonathan asked.

"Yes, hurry," said the doctor.

Jonathan followed him at a trot, to a room where a few people were on the floor, entangled and kicking. It was an emergency, clearly, but what kind?

The man on the bottom had his tongue impossibly far out, and his eyes were two pink marbles. It was a madman. The other three or four men were interns (or orderlies) trying to restrain him. Not doing a very good job.

"You want me to put him out of his misery?" Jonathan asked, thinking of mad dogs. Why would the doctor need him, if not for the rifle and bayonet?

I finally get to kill somebody, he thought.

"No, no," said the doctor, holding up a syringe. "We must give an injection. We are not enough. He is too strong. You must help us."

The madman, like all madmen, had tremendous strength. Already one of the interns was unconscious. Another stood off to a side, clasping a bitten hand.

Jonathan propped his gun in a comer, got down, and helped keep the madman relatively immobile while the doctor swabbed an arm with an alcohol-soaked cottonball and then put in the long needle.

"Ooo, ooo," said the madman.

"Don't be a baby," Jonathan gritted in his ear as they all straggled. "It's only a needle."

"Excellent," cried the doctor. "You have made him quieter. This is remarkable."

And because Jonathan's presence for some reason had a calming effect, he was asked to stay while the patient underwent the therapy that had been scheduled for him.

They stripped the madman down to his gray underwear and put him in a deep aluminum-and-porcelain tub filled with water. The madman kept trying to stand up, but then finally sat.

Jonathan got his shoes wet from the splashing. His sleeves up to his elbows were soaked.

The tub had pipes coming out of it, and there were big circular meters on the pipes, like plumbing from the nineteenth century. Evidently this country, despite the tourism, was still too poor to afford modern medical equipment.

"Ooo, ooo," the madman said, twitching, only his disheveled head above water now.

The current was going through him.

Jonathan, feeling that he was watching something private and maybe indecent, turned away and started to leave. But the madman reached out unexpectedly, grabbed his hand, and wouldn't let go.

"How touching," observed the Chinese doctor.

Jonathan could feel some of the electricity through the madman, and it wasn't pleasant. He twitched a little himself, as if he had had too much caffeine. It was hard to take a full breath.

Thank God I'm not insane, thought Jonathan. To have to sit for hours in a giant tub with electrodes clipped to your big toes. Or stare at the wall of your cell all day in a haze of drugs and eat mush instead of regular food.

Suddenly the madman choked, writhed, went rigid, and the doctor swore under his breath. Had something gone wrong? Did a fuse blow?

The doctor leaned over the patient, his jet-black hair dipping in the water. "A seizure!" he hissed.

They had to pull the man out and do CPR on the cracked brown linoleum floor -- that is, Jonathan had to do it, because the doctor didn't even know CPR, that's how backward they were here. Fortunately he remembered most of it, from the course he had taken twice, evenings, in a public library when he was a graduate student in Passaic.

He took it because his father had died of a heart attack when Jonathan was fifteen, right in the living room, while the whole family watched. A lot of people took CPR because of things like that.

Some memories were etched into your brain forever. The heels digging into the rug. The last convulsion, the long, shuddering sigh as the soul left the body.

After an interminable time Jonathan obtained a pulse in the madman's neck. He raised the madman's feet and counted breaths.

They made a tremendous fuss over this in the hospital. Jonathan wanted to go to the cafeteria, wherever it was, and get some breakfast in him, but people kept shaking his hand and saying in different accents that he was a hero and the mayor would give him a medal.

But he knew they were really laughing at him, because of the irony of it. Almost as if they had planned the whole thing like a practical joke, to make a fool of him, after the money he had shelled out.

And he kept wanting to weep -- that was the worst of it -- because he had got the heart beating again and the lungs working. Maybe this was how you felt when you brought a baby into the world, if you were a pediatrician or paramedic.

A person couldn't help crying, from the relief of it, after being in such intimate proximity with life and death.

Mainly, though, he wanted to get away from these Frenchie people, so he could go off in a corner somewhere and blow his nose and compose himself. But they wouldn't let him. They made it worse, clapping him on the back and embracing him and kissing him on both cheeks as he wept.

"You saved a life. You saved a life."

Rubbing his nose in it heartlessly.

~~~~~~~~

By Michael Kandel

Summertime being vacation time, we thought we'd give you a getaway suggestion--admittedly, one that's perverse and rather macabre--compliments of Michael Kandel. Mr. Kandel is a renowned editor, writer, and translator whose last appearance in our pages was "Hooking Up" in our August 1999 issue. He says that after a long 'vacation' of his own--otherwise known as jury duty for a murder trial--he looks forward eagerly to returning to work and life as usual.

BEFORE Star Wars there was Hidden Fortress, a film by Akira Kurosawa that provided the source material for George Lucas's epic fanboy treat. Thus it's only fair that an Asian epic of sorts, the best pure entertainment in recent years, cops a few Lucasoid licks on its way to becoming a girl power version of the trilogy. Perhaps it's sheer coincidence that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon revolves about the story of a beautiful princess, Jen (Ziyi Zhang), manipulated by a Darth Vaderesque female, Jade Fox (Peipei Chang); in love with Lo, a rascally outlaw (Chen Chang); tutored by Jedi-like soul warrior Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat); and given Yoda love by Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh). True, a great many fantasies contain variations on these elements. But there are a number of clues, such as a bar scene with a distinctly Star Wars-ish feel, that lead me to believe this is no coincidence.

Similarities aside, however, Dragon stands in relation to Lucas's work as man does to the amoeba. Whereas Star Wars was all teenage whizbang gosharootie, Dragon manages to jam the essence of the original trilogy (minus, thankfully, any reference to club-wielding teddy bears) into slightly less than two hours, and replaces Lucas's juvenile humor with soulfulness and martial artistry taken to the level of ballet. It was director Ang Lee's (The Ice Storm, Ride with the Devil) stated intention to create an homage to the B-quality Chinese sword fantasies he watched as a child, films whose cultural niche was similar to that of our 1940s and '50s westerns. This tradition, previously dominated by pictures laden with cheap effects that effected a burlesque of Chinese opera, has undergone a renaissance in recent years with the production of such films as Storm Riders and A Man Called Hero, big budget Hong Kong releases with special effects that rival those of The Matrix and featuring Ekin Cheng and Aaron Kwok, a pair of young actors verging on superstar status in the world of Asian cinema. Riders tells the story of the emperor of the "Martial Arts World" (veteran Japanese heavy, Sonny Chiba), the greatest swordsman of his time, who kills two great warriors and raises their sons as his own. The sons (Kwok and Cheng) have a falling out over the affections of the emperor's daughter, but unite in the end to defeat the evil emperor. The story is a marvel of complexity, tracking -- in addition to the main thread -- the fates of such characters as an oracular monk who pals around with a god disguised as a monkey, and a villager who cuts off his sword arm so it can replace the missing arm of one of the heroes. The magical duels, of which there are many, put to shame anything along these lines done to date by Hollywood -- of special note is the final conflict which takes place in the "Sword Grave," a plot of malignant earth in which the emperor plants the living swords of his numerous victims.

Hero marks a stylistic evolution of the genre, utilizing a nonlinear narrative that cuts back and forth between China and America during the mid- and late-nineteenth century. The storyline of the movie is so complex, it would take a separate review to do it justice; but put succinctly, it is a generational saga involving father-and-son warriors and the resolution in America of enmities that began years before in China, treating of the exploitation of Chinese immigrants both by Americans and by their own people. The set pieces include an attack by magical shadows on the streets of Manhattan, a performance of traditional Chinese dance that masks the rescue of oppressed railroad workers, and a tremendous duel with magic and swords that takes place atop the Statue of Liberty. Until Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon happened along, this film established the high water mark for the Chinese version of high fantasy.

Both the aforementioned films are plotted hyperkinetically, with lots of twists and turns and subplots, and characters who often are not what they originally appear to be. Dragon, relatively speaking, eschews complexity of this sort and uses two love stories to ground the action of the movie. One of these threads involves the unconsummated love between Li Mu Bai and Yu Shu Lien, both of whom have rejected their personal desires in order to follow the path of duty and honor. The second thread treats of the volatile relationship between the bratty, rebellious Princess Jen and the outlaw Lo. This simplicity of story, so at variance with the convoluted structures of traditional sword flicks, may be the factor that has caused many Asians to dismiss the film as being aimed at a white audience. (Of course, if one accepts this assumption as true, it would logically follow that George Lucas's target audience for Star Wars was the Far East.) Another element that separates Dragon from its cousins is its loving attention to setting -- not since Lawrence of Arabia have the story and landscape of a film heavy on action been so thoroughly intertwined (indeed, during Dragon's wonderful desert sequences, Oscar-winning cinematographer Peter Pau incorporates a number of visual quotes from David Lean's masterpiece); however, in Dragon there is a great variety of landscape, and setting is used to reflect the characters' moods rather than, as is the case in Lawrence, to frame them. Then, too, there is the character of Princess Jen -- she seems more contemporary riot grrrl than Ching Dynasty princess, willing to rebel against her life of privilege in order to seek personal freedom. But what ultimately elevates Dragon to the status of a masterpiece of its genre are the stunning fight sequences, most achieved not through wire work, as is customary in Hong Kong and in American films like The Matrix, but with the deft usage of CGI graphics. The initial sequence in which Yu Shu Lien chases the thief who has stolen the magical Jade Sword over the rooftops is likely to go down as one of the signature moments in the history of the cinema. It is the theft of the Jade Sword by a masked thief that ignites the plot, uniting Li Mu Bai -- whose sword it is -- and Yu Shu Lien in a hunt for the culprit, who turns out to be Princess Jen. The princess is being manipulated by the wizardly Jade Fox, who craves the sword for herself and is an old enemy of Li Mu Bai, having killed his teacher in the martial arts. Yu Shu Lien strives to lead Jen onto the path of virtue, but following a duel between the two and a flashback sequence that reprises the inception of the love affair between the princess and the outlaw, Jen runs away. The pursuit of the princess and Jade Fox's attempts to shape events so as to bring down her old enemy, Li Mu Bai, comprise the remainder of the plot, but at the heart of the movie is the somber resolution of the relationship between Yu Shu Lien and Li Mu Bai, and its effect on Jen who, finally come to sober maturity by film's end, is then faced with a choice between love and a life of royal duty.

In most sword flicks, the acting is generally (to be kind) broad, but the actors in Dragon manage to raise the bar. Chow Yun-Fat's screen presence is as always possessed of enormous gravitas and Michelle Yeoh, the real star of the film, turns in an astonishingly subtle performance as Li Mu Bai's forlorn love and Jen's mentor. That Julia Roberts, an actress whose talents are best suited to commercials touting aids for vaginal dryness, should win an Oscar while Yeoh is left off the short list is a monumental idiocy of which only the Academy is capable. The mixture of rage, grief (over the death of Li Mu Bai), and compassion that Yeoh wordlessly conveys in her brief confrontation with Jen toward the end of the movie is stunning. I have read a few critiques that describe her acting in Dragon as flat, but that, simply put, is ridiculous. The large part of her emotionality is externalized, announced by her actions, her gestures, and that is quite a difficult trick to pull off. For my mind, Yeoh's take on Yu Shu Lien is the most completely realized action performance I've seen for a couple of decades.

Looking back over the list of Hollywood's entries in the field of high fantasy films, a list that inspires shuddery flashbacks to experiences such as Ladyhawke, Willow, Dragon-heart, Conan the Barbarian, Legend, The Sword and the Sorcerer, and Dungeons and Dragons (wherein the formerly redoubtable Jeremy Irons takes what may wind up being an irredeemable step into cinematic irrelevance), it's hard to come up with even one movie that belongs in the same league with those covered by this review, not to mention others that spring to mind: Heroic Trio (also featuring Michelle Yeoh); Wang Kar-wai's existentialist revision of the genre, Ashes of Time; Tsui Hark's Chinese Ghost Story; and Zu, Warriors of the Magic Mountain, to name but a few. Neff Jordan's The Company of Wolves is a borderline qualifier. And if we extend the parameters of the genre a bit so as to include films like Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, then we might add a few contenders; but otherwise the view is bleak. Perhaps the release of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings will overcome this lack, but it is nonetheless curious that, given their technical and acting resources, and the wealth of source material available, the studios have failed the genre to such a resounding degree. It may be that American filmmakers have no great feel for a tradition that does not mirror their own country's traditions. This said, one wonders why no one has yet tried to make a film from Stephen King's Dark Tower series (a chronicle that first saw light in F&PSF), which retells The Song of Roland from the standpoint of a mythical gunslinger, a purely American icon.

It's inevitable that Dragon, what with its financial success, will spawn imitations...and then again, maybe not. If the strikes threatened by the Writer's and Screen Actors' Guilds go forward, the studios will be unable to obey their cretinous instincts for quite some time, and instead of having to watch shabby imitations, we will be afflicted with shelf-sitting films that the tasteless arbiters of Hollywood culture decided were not good enough to distribute. Given the average quality of product in release, this prospect borders on the obscene. Some of these films (most horribly and imminently notable, the racing movie Driven, starring Sly Stallone) are already coming off the shelves, and God only knows what gems of high fantasy have been gathering dust in studio archives. Could we be in store for another giddy romp with that cheesy crescent-moon-headed devil guy in Legend 2? Will Daughter of Ladyhawke lay an enormous egg (I like Drew Barrymore for the part -- she could pass for Rutger Hauer's outside child)? Might Schwarzenegget return as Conan the Right Wing Intellectual? Will Kull kum again? Far better to stay at home and rewatch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or any one of a number of other good Asian fantasy flicks than to risk the soul-death brought on by viewing one too many rotten displays of celluloid witch-mages, overgrown iguanas, and urping trolls who resemble Ernest Borgnine emerging from a mud bath. But whether or not the strikes occur, until some consciousness-changing event occurs to influence the tendencies of American high fantasy films, the marquee of any theater showing such woeful efforts as we have become accustomed to should not bother listing the title of the movie, but spell out instead the cliche that has been stated explicitly or implicitly in so many less than magnificent literary fantasies: Abandon Hope Ail Ye Who Enter Here.

~~~~~~~~

By Lucius Shepard

EDWARDS WAS THE ONLY tourist off the cruise space ship. This was neither the year nor the season for Alcenor. Trendy people went to the Rim Worlds. Those with a taste for adventure tried out Hotar or Leni, primitive planets with plenty of flora and fauna and little or no civilization. Food lovers went to Gastor IV, where skilled chefs turn the local produce into delicious concoctions. Lovers went to the twin moons of Askenai. Only those crazed by loss and grief went to Alcenor.

After he cleared customs and immigration at Alcenor, Edwards saw, in the Hall of Arrivals, gigantic mirrors showing typical sights from some of Alcenor's tourist zones. There was Roppo, an island in the south Sclemerian Sea, green and lush and famous for its white sand beaches, its many restaurants, and its underwater grottoes, where, in scuba gear, you could meet the Osculti, an intelligent underwater race long resident on the planet. You might even take tea with them in a watery interzone, since the Osculti are famous for their hospitality.

This was not what Edwards had come for, however. He was not here to sightsee, not until and unless he could do so with Elena. But Elena was dead, and all that remained of her was her image, captured in the old hand mirror that she had been looking into just before death came to her suddenly, that last day of her life on Earth.

On Earth, death is irrevocable. But in Alcenor, Edwards had been told, it was sometimes reversible -- especially if a mirror had been involved at the time of passing. You couldn't return to your body: but you could pass into a mirror, there to live indefinitely.

The people of Alcenor were the great scientists of mirrors, and unusual effects were possible with mirrors here. This was due to the somewhat different properties of matter locally, to say nothing of a slightly different space-time setup.

Others have written extensively about these matters. Edwards had only a layman's interest .... No, not even that. All he wanted was his Elena back, or to rejoin her, and he didn't care how the thing was managed. Science or magic, it mattered not to him as long as he got the result he sought.

It was inevitable that he met Lobo immediately alter clearing customs. Lobe was loitering in the hall of arrivals, a tall, sandy-haired young man with the look of a street arab. He was there to meet new arrivals, find them hotel rooms, recommend restaurants, and suggest other services.

Spotting the tags on his luggage, Lobe came up to Edwards, and addressed him with the jaunty insouciance of his breed.

"You want a woman, am I right? Sir, you've come to the right planet and the gods of fortune have steered you to the right man, tot I have respectful contact with many ladies of surprising loveliness and unassailable virtue. The particular one I have in mind for you, honored sir, has secondary sexual characteristics of a universally approved type and has been saving herself for an Earthman of a certain right sort, exactly which sort to be left up to my own judgment. In my view, sir, you are that man. There is no money involved in this, though you might like to buy the lady a nice dinner at a reasonable price, perhaps a bedroom banquet as we call it, catered by my cousin, Tomas of The Frying Pan --"

Edwards had been waiting for a break in this non-stop flow of specious sounding verbiage. Now, disregarding manners, he broke in anyhow.

"No, no, no!" he said. "I do not want a woman!"

Lobo raised sandy eyebrows. "A boy? Or perhaps a creature of an entirely different species from your own? We have a guest race here in Alcenor who are famed for their pulchritude, even though it does take some getting used to .... "

"I'm not interested!" Edwards cried. "I only want my Elena!"

Trying to understand, Lobo said, "This Elena -- did you by chance bring her with you ?"

Edwards nodded. He opened his backpack and took out a large narrow leather case, zipped it open and showed, nesting in it, a small silver-backed mirror.

"I have her here," Edwards said. "This is what she looked at last."

Lobo nodded in instant comprehension. "So she still lives in the mirror!"

"Not on Earth," Edwards said. "But perhaps here in Alcenor --"

"On Alcenor," Lobo said, "anything is possible -- as long as it involves mirrors."

"So I have heard," Edwards said.

"As it turns out, I can help you," Lobo said. "You are very lucky to have met me."

"You can bring her back to life yourself?"

"No. But I know someone who can."

Edwards took a room for a week in a smart but modestly priced hotel recommended by Lobo. Once alone in his room, he unpacked, propped the mirror up at the dressing table, and sat down to write a letter to Elena.

He told her that he had never realized how lonely life could be without her, how unsatisfying, how bleak. He said that he knew he hadn't always been good toward her, and, especially toward the end, had been impatient, insulting, even violent. All that was over now, he assured her. It had been a temporary madness, brought on by too much love, not a deficiency of it. As proof, she should consider the steps he was taking to rejoin her. He ended by writing that he had every expectation of meeting her again very soon.

The letter completed, he held it up to the mirror, waiting until he was sure the mirror had absorbed it. Then he carefully packed away the letter and the mirror, and went to bed.

Finally Lobo came to him. "I have the perfect person! Come, we need to talk to her at once, before she leaves town again."

"Where is she going that's so important?"

"Mirrors in different parts of our planet have different properties. Elia has vowed to study them all, to penetrate to the deepest secrets of mirrors, to bring out the full properties of mirrors whether by the white light of science or the black light of mysticism."

THE NEXT DAY, Lobo brought him to meet Elia, a witch woman skilled in all aspects of mirrors. Elia lived alone in furnished rooms in one of the poorer quarters that had sprung up around the spaceport. She was a tall, grave woman. She listened to Edwards's request, examined the mirror, and said she thought something could be done. Elena could not be resuscitated from the mirror. That was beyond the present abilities of anyone on Alcenor. But Edwards could, with suitable preparation, enter the mirror himself, and, living, rejoin the living Elena.

There would be a charge in money, of course, payable in advance; and another, perhaps graver cost in that he would have to give up his current, corporeal life, which would cease the moment he entered the mirror.

Edward said he was well content. Elia said she needed to do some work on the mirror, to peel off some of the images that had accumulated on it since Elena's death, so as to facilitate Edwards's passage.

The next day, Lobo came around to see how Elia was doing.

"So how is it going?" Lobo asked.

"All right. A few of the images are a little tenacious. I'm having difficulty peeling them away. Nothing I can't handle, however. But this whole thing is a little puzzling."

"Why do you say that?"

"This woman, this Elena -- you say he loves her very much?"

"Very much! That is why he has come all the way to Alcenor -- to be with her again."

"That's what I thought. It's the puzzling part."

"Could you explain further?"

"If he loves her so much," Elia said. "Why did he kill her?"

"What are you talking about?"

"His image is right there in the mirror with hers. It's the last image made on Earth. It shows Edwards strangling her."

"You are sure of this?"

"You can see for yourself. I have set up the image in a copy mirror."

"No, don't bother showing me. I take your word for it."

"And what about the other man.?"

"I know nothing about another man."

"There is another man in the mirror," Elia said. "From the scenes I have peeled, she appears to have loved him, too."

"Damnation! What happened to the other man?"

"He appears to have been killed, too. Someone shot him with a handgun."

"Who?"

"Our client, Edwards, I suppose. But the mirror does not reveal this. This other man is in the mirror, too."

"Well .... It is none of our business."

"I agree. Edwards is our client, and we are neither the police nor the moral authorities. There is perhaps a perfectly reasonable explanation for what happened. But I shall have to ask him a few questions."

"I don't understand why."

"First, to ascertain whether, in light of what I have seen, he still wants to go into the mirror. And secondly, to secure our payment before he does so."

"You said yourself we are not the moral authorities."

"It presents a personal moral problem. You should never have brought this man here!"

"You told me to bring customers. You yourself advised me to work the spaceport."

"But I thought you would use a little discretion, a little judgment."

"What does it matter what you thought? You and I wanted income, and we have it now."

"But also a problem."

"Consider the problem the price you pay for the income."

"And what about my moral dilemma?"

"If it bothers you so badly, you can always tell him to go away."

"No, I can't do that, either. I am bound by the vows to my profession to continue this thing once I have accepted the assignment. I shall have to take it up with Edwards."

"Saw that, did you?" Edwards said after Elia told him what she had seen in the mirror. "Well, it was all a misunderstanding. I never meant to hurt Elena. I love her! It's just that I have a violent temper. But I have it under control now. When I see her, I can explain everything. She will understand. She has always understood me, always loved me."

"So you still want to go into the mirror to join her?"

"More than ever!"

"And it makes no difference that there is another man there?"

"What are you talking about?"

"I saw another man in the mirror. A man who had died violently."

"Yes, of course. That would be Rodgers."

"And he presents no problem for you?"

"Rodgers was a mistake," Edwards said.

Elia nodded.

"He shouldn't have been there in the first place. In Elena's apartment, I mean. Pestering her. Confusing her. If he had gone quietly away, as I told him to, all that unpleasantness could have been avoided."

"But he did not go away."

"No, he did not. He said he loved her. And the silly girl thought for a while she was in love with him." Edwards laughed. "As if she could ever love anyone but me! We were made for each other, Elena and I, and we both said so, back in the wonderful days at the start of our relationship."

"I see," Elia said.

"I told her then that I was a serious person. I was a person who loved once and forever. I told her I would always love her, in this world and in the next. I didn't know about mirrors then, but of course I meant in any mirror world, too. She said she loved me the same way. But time passed, there was the matter of my violence, there was Rodgers with his blandishments, and she became confused."

"I understand," Elia said. "But do you think that now, especially in light of you having killed her, that her feelings for you will be the same?"

"I am sure of it. If she had killed me, I would forgive her and continue to love her. I can expect no less of her."

"Your love is very noble," Elia said. "But what about this Rodgers? Will not his being there prove an impediment?"

"An unimportant one," Edwards said. "I killed him once. If necessary, I'll do it again. Nothing will stand in the way of my love!"

"I think I understand it all now," Elia said.

Edwards got to his feet. He was a very large man. The expression on his face was not pleasant as he said, "You are going to put me into the mirror, aren't you?"

"There is no doubt of that," Elia said. "There is merely the matter of payment to take care of first."

Edwards pulled out his billfold and began to lay out large denomination bills in Alcensor currency. After a while, Elia held up her hand. "That is enough."

"I can give more."

"No. This is quite enough. We will put you into the mirror this evening, after I have made a few final arrangements."

"You won't disappoint me now?" Edwards said.

"You will not be disappointed."

THAT EVENING, in front of the mirror, Edwards followed Elia's instructions and felt his body collapse behind him. He had a moment of panic as his life seemed to slide away. Then he was in the mirror.

The first thing he noted was that he still seemed to be in his body. He grasped his forearm. He could feel himself, he was solid, real. Perhaps he was only an image now, but to himself and to other images he was real. He looked around. He remembered this room. It was the room in which he had seen Elena for the last time, back on Earth. And now he would see her again. He turned quickly t He had caught a glimpse of someone -- Elena! Yes, it was her!

She was standing in a mirrored doorway, and she was smiling at him.

"Elena, darling," he said. "I'm so sorry I killed you. Believe me, it won't happen again."

She was still smiling, but she didn't answer. He had never seen her look so beautiful. He walked toward her. There she was, just inside a mirrored doorway. He passed through the doorway himself. "Elena?"

She was just a little ahead of him. He passed through another doorway, and another beyond that. There seemed to be a lot of doorways around here, and standing in each of them was Elena, smiling at him.

"Playing games with me?" he asked. "Never mind, there are a lot of doors here, but I have a lot of time. I will find you, my darling, I promise you that." He moved on, following Elena's image, into the deeper complications of the maze.

Afterward, Lobo asked Elia how she knew Edwards would go into the mirror maze, the small mirrored box with its endless reflected passageways that she had put into view on a small table behind Edwards.

"I baited it," Elia said. "With this." She showed him a small mirror. Lobo looked at the image of a beautiful young girl.

"She was younger then," Elia said. "This image must be from before she met Edwards. I pulled this from the mirror."

"You put that image in the maze?"

"Precisely. I couldn't leave Edwards in the mirror to terrorize those two young people.'

Lobo considered, watching the tiny figure of Edwards moving through the mirrored rooms. "Can he ever get out?'

Elia shook her head. "A true mirror maze has an entrance but no exit.'

Lobo whistled softly to himself. "So he is to wander there forever."

"Or until something finds him."

Lobo looked at her quizzically.

"Mirror mazes are uncanny places. They can generate the unexpected. But even wandering in a maze cannot go on forever."

"But what if Elena and the other man go into the maze themselves?"

"Against some eventualities there is no prevention. If either or both of them go into the maze, we can only say they will get what is coming to them."

"You play rough," Lobo said, a note of admiration in his voice.

"Rough but fair. And now, my young friend, it is time to split the money."

~~~~~~~~

By Robert Sheckley

The mirror reflects, but it also reverses. Robert Sheckley's new story has several interesting twists and turns of its own...

THE HUMAN CONDITION can be summed up in a drop of blood.

Show me a teaspoon of blood and I will reveal to thee the ineffable nature of the cosmos, naked and squirming.

Squirming. Funny how the truth always seems to do that when you shine a light on it.

A man came to my door one afternoon, back when I lived on a rambling farm in Eastern Washington. He was sniffing around, poking into things best left...unpoked. A man with a flashlight, you might say.

Of course, I knew who he was and what he was doing there long before he arrived with his hat in one hand and phony story in the other.

Claimed he was a state property assessor, did the big genial man. Indeed, he was a massive fellow -- thick blunt fingers clutching corroborative documents and lumpy from all the abuse he had subjected them to in the military; he draped an ill-tailored tweed jacket and insufferable slacks over his ponderous frame. This had the effect of making him look like a man who should have been on a beach with a sun visor and a metal detector. The man wore a big smile under his griseous beard. This smile frightened people, which is exactly why he used it most of the time, and also, because it frightened people, he spoke slowly, in a big, heavy voice that sounded as if it emerged from a cast-iron barrel. He smelled of cologne and three-in-one oil.

I could have whispered to him that the cologne came from a fancy emerald-colored bottle his wife had purchased for him as a birthday present; that he carried the bottle in his travel bag and sprit, zed himself whenever he was on the road and in too great a hurry, or simply too hungover to take a shower. He preferred scotch, did my strapping visitor. I could have mentioned several other notable items in this patent leather travel bag -- a roll of electrical tape, brass knuckles, voltmeter, police issue handcuffs, a micro-recorder, a pocket camera, disposable latex gloves, lockpicks, a carpet cutter, flashlight, an empty aspirin bottle, toothpaste, a half roll of antacid tablets, hemorrhoid suppositories and a stained road map of Washington State. The bag was far away on the front seat of his rented sedan, which he had carefully parked up the winding dirt driveway under a sprawling locust tree. Wisely, he had decided to reconnoiter the area before knocking on the door. The oil smell emanated from a lubricated and expertly maintained thirty-eight-caliber revolver stowed in his left-hand jacket pocket. The pistol had not been fired in three and a half years. The man did not normally carry a gun on the job, but in my case, he had opted for discretion. It occurred to him that I might be dangerous.

I could have told him all these things and that he was correct in his assumptions, but it did not amuse me to do so. Besides, despite his bulk he looked pretty fast, and ! was tired. Winter makes me lazy. It makes me torpid.

But

Rap, rap! Against the peeling frame of the screen door. He did not strike the frame with anything approaching true force; nonetheless, he used a trifle more vigor than the occasion required. This was how he did things -- whether conducting a sensitive inquiry, bracing a recalcitrant witness, or ordering the prawns at La Steakhouse. He was a water buffalo floundering into the middle of a situation, seizing command and dominating by virtue of his presence.

I made him wait longer than was necessary -- to the same degree as his assault on my door was designed to set the tone and mood -- although not too long, because sometimes my anticipatory juices outwrestle my subtler nature. I was an old man, and thus tended to move in a deliberate mode anyway. This saddened me; I was afraid he might not catch my little joke.

But

I came to the door, blinking in the strong light as I regarded him through the filtering mesh. Of course, I permitted a suitable quaver to surface when I asked after his business. That was when the big man smiled and rumbled a string of lies about being the land assessor and a few sundries that I never paid attention to, lost as I was in watching his mouth, his hands, and the curious way his barrel chest lifted and fell under the crumpled suit.

He gave me a name; something unimaginative gleaned from a shoe box, or like so. The identity on his State of Washington Private Investigator's License read Murphy Connell. He had been an investigator for eleven years; worked for himself, married, with two children -- a boy who played football at the University of Washington, and a girl who had transferred to Rhode Island to pursue a degree in graphic design -- and was the owner of a heavy-set Rottweiler named Hellestrae, after his favorite linesman. The identification was in his wallet, which filled an inner pocket of the bad coat, wedged in front of an ancient pack of Pall-Malls. The big man had picked up the habit when he was stationed in the Philippines, but seldom smoked anymore. He kept them around because sure as a stud hound lifts its leg to piss, the minute he left home without a pack, the craving would pounce on him hammer and tongs. He was not prone to self-analysis, this big man, yet it amused him after a wry sense that he had crushed an addiction only to be haunted by its vengeful ghost.

Yes, I remembered his call from earlier that morning. He was certainly welcome to ramble about the property and have a gander for Uncle Sam. I told him to come in and rest his feet while I fixed a pot of tea--unless he preferred a nip of the ole gin? No, tea would be lovely. Lovely? It delighted me in an arcane fashion that such a phrase would uproot from his tongue -- sort of like a gravel truck dumping water lilies and butterflies. I boiled tea with these hands gnarled unto dead madrona, and I took my sweet time. Mr. Connell moved quietly, though that really didn't matter, nothing is hidden from these ears. I listened while he sifted through a few of the papers on the coffee table -- nothing of consequence there, my large one -- and efficiently riffled the books and National Geographics on the sagging shelf that I had meant to fix for a while. His eyes were quick, albeit in a different sense than most people understand the word. They were quick in the sense that a straight line is quick, no waste, no second-guessing, thorough and methodical. Once scrutinized and done. Quick.

I returned in seven minutes with the tea steeping in twin mugs. He had tossed the dim living room and was wondering how to distract me for a go at the upstairs -- or the cellar. I knew better than to make it blatantly simple; he was the suspicious type, and if his wind got up too soon .... Well, that would diminish my chance to savor our time together. Christmas, this was Christmas, or rather, the approximation of that holiday, which fills children to the brim with stars and song. But Christmas is not truly the thing, is it now? That sublime void of giddy anticipation of the gaily wrapped packages contains the first, and dare I say, righteous spirit of Christmas. Shucking the presents of their skin is a separate pleasure altogether.

But

Mr. Connell sat in the huge stuffed La-Z-Boy with springs poking him in the buttocks. It was the only chair in the room that I trusted to keep him off the floor, and it cawed when he settled his bulk into its embrace. Let me say that our man was not an actor. Even after I sat him down and placed the mug in his fist, those accipitrine eyes darted and sliced from shadowed comer to mysterious nook, offput by the cloying feel of the room -- and why not ? It was a touch creepy, what with the occasional creak of a timber, the low squeak of a settling foundation, the way everything was cast under a counterchange pattern of dark and light. I would have been nervous in his shoes; he was looking into murders most foul, after all. Pardon me, murder is a sensational word; television will be the ruin of my fleeting measure of proportion if the world keeps spinning a few more revolutions. Disappearances is what I should have said. Thirty of them. Thirty that good Mr. Connell knew of, at least. There were more, many more, but this is astray from the subject.

We looked at each other for a time. Me, smacking my lips over toothless gums and blowing on the tea -- it was too damned hot, as usual! He, pretending to sip, but not really doing so on the off chance that I was the crazed maniac that he sought, and had poisoned it. A good idea, even though I had not done anything like that. Since he was pretending to accept my hospitality, I pretended to look at his forged documents, smacking and fumbling with some glasses that would have driven me blind if I wore them for any span of time, and muttered monosyllabic exclamations to indicate my confusion and ultimate verification of the presumed authenticity of his papers. One quick call to the Bureau of Land Management would have sent him fleeing as the charlatan I knew he was. I ignored the opportunity.

Mr. Connell was definitely not an actor. His small talk was clumsy, as if he couldn't decide the proper way to crack me. I feigned a hearing impairment and that was cruel, though amusing. Inside of ten minutes the mechanism of his logic had all save rejected the possibility of my involvement in those disappearances. No surprise there -- he operated on intuition; peripheral logic, as his wife often called it. I failed the test of instinct. Half blind, weak, pallid as a starfish grounded. Decrepit would not be completely unkind. I was failing him. Yet the room, the house, the brittle fold of plain beyond the window interrupted by a blot of ramshackle structure that was the barn, invoked his disquiet. It worried him, this trail of missing persons -- vague pattern; they were hitchhikers, salesmen, several state troopers, missionaries, prostitutes, you name it. Both sexes, all ages and descriptions, with a single thread to bind them. They disappeared around my humble farm. The Federal Bureau of Investigation dropped by once, three years before the incident with Mr. Connell. I did not play with them. Winter had yet to make me torpid and weak. They left with nothing, suspecting nothing.

However, it was a close thing, that inconvenient visit. That convinced me the hour was nigh ....

The tea grew cold. It was late in the year, so dying afternoon sunlight had a tendency to slant, trees were shorn of their glory, crooked branches casting crooked shadows. The breeze nipped and the fields were damp. I mentioned that he was going to ruin his shoes if he went tramping out there; he thanked me and said he'd be careful. I watched him stomp around, doing his terrible acting job, trying to convince me that he was checking the value of my property, or whatever the hell he had said when I wasn't listening.

Speaking of shadows...I glanced at mine, spread out across the hood of the requisite '59 Chevrolet squatting between the barn and the house. Ah, perfectly normal, if disfigured by the warp of light.

A majority of the things I might tell are secrets. Therefore, I shall not reveal them whole and glistening. Also, some things are kept from me, discomfiting as that particular truth may be. The vanished people; I know what occurred, but not why. To be brutally accurate, in several cases I cannot say that I saw what happened; however, my guesswork is as good as anyone else's. There was a brief moment, back and back again in some murky prehistory of my refined consciousness, when I possessed the hubris to imagine a measure of self-determination in this progress through existence. The Rough Beast Slouching toward Bethlehem of its own accord. If leashed, then by its own device, certainly. Foolish me.

Scientists claim that there is a scheme to the vicious Tree of Life, one thing eats another and excretes the matter another being requires to sustain its spark so that it might be eaten by another which excretes the matter required to sustain the spark -- And like so. Lightning does not strike with random intent, oceans do not heave and toss, axes do not ring in the tulgy wood or bells in church towers by accident. As a famous man once said, there are no accidents 'round here.

Jerk the strings and watch us dance. I could say more on that subject; indeed, I might fill a pocketbook with that pearl of wisdom, but later is better.

Mr. Connell slouched in from the field-- picking about for graves, by chance? -- resembling the rough beast I mentioned earlier. He was flushed; irritation and residual alcohol poisoning in equal parts. I asked him how he was doing, and he grunted a perfunctory comment.

Could he possibly take a closer look at the barn? It would affect the overall property value and like that...I smiled and shrugged and offered to show him the way. Watch your step, I warned him, it wouldn't do for a government man to trip over some piece of equipment and end up suing the dirt from under my feet, ha, ha.

This made him nervous all over again. Why? Two years before this visit, I could have said with confidence. He would have been mine to read forward and back. By then, I was losing my strength. I was stuck in his boat, stranded with peripheral logic for sails. Mr. Connell sweated all the time; this was different. Fear musk is distinctive, any predator will tell you that. The fear musk superseded the powerful cologne and the stale odor of whiskey leaching from his pores.

To the barn. Cavernous. Gloom, dust, clathrose awnings of spent silk, scrabbling mice. Heavy textures of mold, of rust, decaying straw. I hobbled with the grace of a lame crow, yet Mr. Connell contrived to lag at my heel. Cold in the barn, thus his left hand delved into a pocket and lingered there. What was he thinking? Partially that I was too old, unless...unless an accomplice lurked in one of the places his methodical gaze was barred from. He thought of the house; upstairs, or the cellar. Wrong on both counts. Maybe his research was faulty -- what if I actually possessed a living relative? Now would be a hell of a time to discover that mistake! Mr. Connell thought as an animal does -- a deer hardly requires proof from its stippled ears, its soft eyes, or quivering nose to justify the uneasiness of one often hunted. Animals understand that life is death. This is not a conscious fact, rather a fact imprinted upon every colliding cell. Mr. Connell thought like an animal; unfortunately, he was trapped in the electrochemical web of cognition, wherein curiosity leads into temptation, temptation leads into fear, and fear is considered an impulse to be mastered. He came into the barn against the muffled imprecations of his lizard brain. Curiosity did not kill the cat all by itself.

His relentless eyes adjusted by rapid degrees, fastening upon a mass of sea-green tarpaulin gone velvet in the subterranean illume. This sequestered mass reared above the exposed gulf of loft, nearly brushing the venerable center-beam, inexpressive in its obscured context, though immense and bounded by that gravid force to founding dirt. Mr. Connell's heartbeat accelerated, spurred by a trickling dose of primordial dread. Being a laconic and linear man, he asked me what was under that great tarp.

I showed my gums, grasping a corner of that shroud with a knotted hand. One twitch to part the curtain of enigma and reveal my portrait of divinity. A sculpture of the magnificent shape of God. Oh, admittedly it was a shallow rendering of that which cannot be named; but art is not relative to perfection in any tangible sense. It is our coarse antennae trembling blindly as it traces the form of Origin, tastes the ephemeral glue welding us, yearning after the secret of ineluctable evolution, and wonders what this transformation will mean. In my mind, here was the best kind of art -- the kind hoarded by rich and jealous collectors in their locked galleries. Hidden from the eyes of the heathen masses, waiting to be shared with the ripe few.

The rustle of polyurethane sloughing from the Face of Creation; a metaphor to frame the abrupt molting bloom of my deep insides. There, a shadow twisted on the floor; my shadow, but not me any more than a butterfly is the chrysalis from whence it emerges. Yet, I wanted to see the end of this!

Mr. Connell looked upon the construct born of that yearning for truth slithering at the root of my intellect. He teetered as if swaying on the brink of a chasm. He beheld shuddering lines that a fleshly tongue is witless to describe, except perhaps in spurts of impression --prolongated, splayed at angles, an obliquangular mass of smeared and clotted material, glaucous clay dredged from an old and abiding coomb where earthly veins dangle and fell waters drip as the sculpture dripped, milky-lucent starshine in the cryptic barn, an intumescent hulk rent from the floss of a carnival mirror. Togaze fully on this idol was to feel the gray matter quake inside its case and reject what the moist perceptions thought to feed it.

I cannot explain, nor must an artist defend his work or elucidate in such a way the reeling audience can fathom, brutes that they are. Besides, I was not feeling quite myself when I molded it from the morass of mindless imperative. Like a nocturnal flower, I Become, and after that the scope of human perception is reduced and bound in fluids nameless and profane. There are memories, but their clarity is the clarity of a love for the womb, warmth, and lightless swimming. Fragmented happiness soon absorbed in the shuffle of the churning world and forgotten.

Mr. Connell did not comment directly. Speech was impossible. He uttered an inarticulate sound, yarding at the lump of cold metal in his pocket -- his crucifix against the looming presence of evil. Note that I refrain from scoffing at the existence of evil. The word is a simple name for a complex idea, an idea far outstripping the feeble equipment of sapient life. It is nothing to laugh at. As for my investigator, I like to remember him that way -- frozen in a rictus of anguish at wisdom gamed too late. Imagine that instant as the poor insect falls into the pitcher plant. He was an Ice-Age hunter trapped in the gelid bosom of a glacier. It was final for him.

I reached out to touch his craggy visage

My perceptions flickered, shuttering so swiftly that I could not discern precise details of what occurred to big Mr. Connell. Suffice to say what was done to him was...incomprehensible. And horrible, I suppose most people would think. Not that I could agree with their value judgment. I suffered the throes of blossoming. It tends to affect my reasoning. The ordeal exhausted me, yet another sign.

Mr. Connell vanished like the others before him, but he was the last. After that, I left the farm and traveled north. Winter was on the world. Time for summer things to sleep.

I only mention this anecdote because it's the same thing every time; in one variation or another. Come the villagers with their pitchforks and torches, only to find the castle empty, the nemesis gone back to the shadowlands. Lumbered off to the great cocoon of slumber and regeneration.

In dreams I swim as I did back when the oceans were warm and empty. There I am, floating inside a vast membrane, innocent of coherent thought, guided by impulses to movement, sustenance, and copulation. Those are dim memories; easy to assume them to be the fabrications of loneliness or delusion. Until you recall these are human frailties. Interesting that I always return to the soup of origins, whether in dreams or substance. Every piece of terrestrial life emerged from that steaming gulf. The elder organisms yet dwell in those depths, some hiding in the fields of microbes, mindless as jellyfish; others lumbering and feeding on what hapless forms they capture. Once, according to the dreams, I was one of those latter things. Except, I am uncertain if that was ever my true spawning ground.

In fairness, I do not ponder the circumstance of my being as much as logic would presume. My physiology is to thank, perhaps. There come interludes -- a month, a year, centuries, or more -- and I simply am, untroubled by the questions of purpose. I seek my pleasures, I revel in their comforts. The ocean is just the ocean, a cigar is just a cigar. That is the state of Becoming.

Bliss is ephemeral; true for anyone, or anything. The oceans have been decimated several times in the last billion years. Sterile water in a clay bowl. Life returned unbidden on each occasion. The world slumbers, twitches and transforms. From the jelly, lizards crawled around the fetid swamps eating one another and dying, and being replaced by something else. Again, again, again, until you reach the inevitable conclusion of skyrises, nuclear submarines, orbiting satellites, and Homo sapiens formicating the Earth. God swipes His Hand across Creation, it changes shape and thrives. A cycle, indeed a cycle, and not a pleasant one if you are cursed with a brain and the wonder of what the cosmic gloaming shall hold for you.

Then there is me. Like the old song, the more things change, the more I stay the same.

When the oceans perished, I slept and later flopped on golden shores, glaring up at strange constellations, but my contemplation was a drowsy process and bore no fruit. When the lizards perished, I went into the sea and slept, and later wore the flesh and fur of warm-blooded creatures. When ice chilled and continents drifted together with dire results, I went into the sea and slept through the cataclysm. Later, I wore the skins of animals and struck flint to make fire and glared up at the stars and named them in a language I don't have the trick of anymore. Men built their idols, and I joined them in their squalid celebrations, lulled by flames and roasting flesh; for I was one with them, even if the thoughts stirring in my mind seemed peculiar, and hearkened to the sediment of dark forms long neglected. I stabbed animals with a spear and mated when the need was pressing. I hated my enemies and loved my friends and wore the values of the tribe without the impetus of subterfuge. I was a man. And for great periods that is all I was. At night I regarded the flickering lights in the sky and when I dreamed, it occurred to me exactly what the truth was. For a while I evaded the consequences of my nature. Time is longer than a person made from blood and tissue could hope to imagine. Ask God; distractions are important.

But

Memories, memories. Long ago in a cave on the side of a famous mountain in the Old World. Most men lived in huts and cabins or stone fortresses. Only wise men chose to inhabit caves, and I went to visit one of them. A monk revered for his sagacity and especially for his knowledge of the gods in their myriad incarnations. I stayed with the wizened holy man for a cycle of the pocked and pitted moon. We drank bitter tea; we smoked psychedelic plants and read from crumbling tomes scriven with quaint drawings of deities and demons. It was disappointing t I could not be any of these things, yet there was little doubt he and I were different as a fish is from a stone. The monk was the first of them to notice. I did not concern myself. In those days my power was irresistible; let me but wave my hand and so mote it be. If I desired a thought from a passing mind, I plucked it fresh as sweet fruit from a budding branch. If I fancied a soothing rain, the firmament would split and sunder. If I hungered, flesh would prostrate itself before me...unless I fancied a pursuit. Then it would bound and hide, or stand and bare teeth or rippling steel, or suffocate my patience with tears, oaths, pleas. But in the end, I had my flesh. That the monk guessed what I strove to submerge, as much from myself as the world at large, did not alarm me. It was the questions that pecked at my waking thoughts, crept into my slumberous phantasms. Annoying questions.

Stark recollection of a time predating the slow glide of eons in the primeval brine. The images would alight unasked; I would glimpse the red truth of my condition. Purple dust and niveous spiral galaxy, a plain of hyaline rock broken by pyrgoidal clusters ringed in fire, temperatures sliding a groove betwixt boiling and freezing. The sweet huff of methane in my bellowing lungs, sunrise so blinding it would have seared the eyes from any living creature...and I knew there were memories layered behind and beyond, inaccessible to the human perception that I wore as a workman wears boots, gloves, and warding mantle. To see these visions in their nakedness would boggle and baffle, or rive the sanity from my fragile intellect, surely as a hot breath douses a candle. Ah, but there were memories; a phantom chain endless as the coil of chemicals comprising the mortal genome, fused to the limits of calculation

I try not to think too much. I try not to think too much about the buried things, anyhow. Better to consider the cycle that binds me in its thrall. For my deeds there is a season -- spring, summer, autumn and winter. Each time I change it becomes clearer what precisely maintains its pattern. That I am a fragment of something much larger is obvious. The monk was the first to grasp it. There was a story he mentioned --how the priests prayed to their gods, good and bad, to look upon men and bestow their munificent blessings. They even prayed to terrible Shiva the Destroyer, who slept in his celestial palace. They prayed because to slight Shiva in their supplication was to risk his not inconsiderable fury. Yet, the priests knew if Shiva opened his eye and gazed upon the world it would be destroyed,

But

In the spring, I walk with the others of my kindred shell, nagged by fullness unsubstantiated. In the summer, I see my shadow change, change and then I learn to blossom and suckle the pleasurable nectar from all I survey. Nail me to a cross, burn me in a fire. A legend will rise up from the ashes. Invent stories to frighten your children, sacrifice tender young virgins to placate my concupiscent urge. Revile me in your temples, call upon Almighty God to throw me down. No good, no good. How could He see you if not for me? How could He hear thy lament, or smell thy sadness.? Or taste thee.?

In the autumn, like a slow, heavy tide, purpose resurges, and I remember what the seasons portend. A wane of the power, a dwindling reserve of strength. Like a malign flower that flourishes in tropical heat, I wither before the advance of frost, and blacken and die, my seeds buried in the muck at the bottom of the ocean to survive the cruel winter. I know what I am. I understand the purpose.

I left the farm and disappeared. One more name on the ominous list haunting law enforcement offices in seventeen states. I vanished myself to the Bering Coast -- a simple feat for anyone who wants to try. An old man alone on a plane; no one cared. They never do.

There is an old native ghost town on a stretch of desolate beach. Quonset huts with windows shattered or boarded. Grains of snow slither in past open doors when the frigid wind gusts along, moaning through the abandoned FAA towers colored navy gray and rust. The federal government transplanted the villagers to new homes thirteen miles up the beach.

I don't see anyone when I leave the shack I have appropriated and climb the cliffs to regard the sea. The sea being rumpled, a dark scaly hide marred by plates of thickening ice. Individual islets today, a solid sheet in a few weeks, extending to the horizon. Or forever. I watch the stars as twilight slips down from the sky, a painless veil pricked with beads and sparks. Unfriendly stars. Eventually I return to the shack. It takes me a very long time -- I am an old, old man. My shuffle and panting breath are not part of the theater. The shack waits and I light a kerosene lamp and huddle by the Bunsen burner to thaw these antiquitous bones. I do not hunger much this late in the autumn of my cycle, and nobody is misfortunate enough to happen by, so I eschew sustenance another day.

The radio is old too. Scratchy voice from a station in Nome recites the national news -- I pay a lot of attention to this when my time draws nigh, looking for a sign, a symbol of tribulations to come -- the United Nations is bombing some impoverished country into submission, war criminals from Bosnia are apprehended in Peru. A satellite orbiting Mars has gone off-line, but NASA is quick to reassure the investors that all is routine, in Ethiopia famine is tilling people under by the thousands, an explosion caused a plane to crash into the Atlantic, labor unions are threatening a crippling strike, a bizarre computer virus is hamstringing two major corporations and so on and on. The news is never good, and I am not sure if there is anything I wanted to hear.

I close my rheumy eyes and see a tinsel and sequined probe driving out, out beyond the cold chunk of Pluto. A stone tossed into a bottomless pool, trailing bubbles. I see cabalists hunched over their ciphers, Catholics on their knees before the effigy of Christ, biologists with scalpels and microscopes, astronomers with their mighty lenses pointed at the sky, atheists, and philosophers with fingers pointed at themselves. Military men stroke the cool bulk of their latest killing weapon and feel a touch closer to peace. I see men caressing the crystal and wire and silicon of the machines that tell them what to believe about the laws of physics, the number to slay chaos in its den. I see housewives scrambling to pick the kids up from soccer practice, a child on the porch gazing up, and up, to regard the same piece of sky glimmering in my window. He wonders what is up there, he wonders if there is a monster under his bed. No monsters there, instead they lurk at school, at church, in his uncle's squamous brain. Everyone is looking for the answer. They do not want to find the answer, trust me. Unfortunately, the answer will find them. Life -- it's like one of those unpleasant nature documentaries. To be the cameraman instead of the subjects, eh?

Ah, my skin warns me that it is almost the season. I dreamed for a while, but I do not recall the content. The radio is dead, faint drone from the ancient speaker. The kerosene wick has burned to cinders. A flash from the emerald-colored bottle catches my eye; full of cologne. I seldom indulge in cosmetics; the color attracted me and I brought it here. I am a creature of habit. When my affectations of evolution decay, habit remains steadfast.

Dark outside on the wintry beach. Sunrise is well off and may not come again. The frozen pebbles crackle beneath my heels as I stagger toward the canvas of obsidian water, leaving strange and unsteady tracks on the skeletal shore. There is a mounting sense of urgency building. Mine, or the Other's? I strip my clothes as I go, and end up on the cusp of the sea naked and shriveled. The stars are feral. They shudder -- a ripple is spreading across the heavens and the stars are dancing wildly in the pulsating wake. A fulgence that should not be seen begins to seep from the widening fissure. Here is a grand and terrible happening to write of on the wall of a cave ....

God opening His Eye to behold the world and all its little works.

I have seen this before. Let others marvel in my place, if they dare. My work is done, now to sleep. When I mount from the occluded depths what will I behold? What will be my clay and how shall I be given to mold it? I slip into the welcoming flank of the sea and allow the current to tug my shell out and down into the abyssal night. It isn't really as cold as I feared. Thoughts are fleeting as the bubbles and the light. The shell begins to flake, to peel, to crumble, and soon I will wriggle free of this fragile vessel.

But

One final kernel of wisdom gained through the abomination of time and service. A pearl to leave gleaming upon this empty shore; safely assured that no one shall come by to retrieve it and puzzle over the contradiction. Men are afraid of the devil, but there is no devil, just me, and I do as I am bid. It is God who should turn their bowels to soup. Whatever God is, He, or It, created us for amusement. It's too obvious. Just as He created the prehistoric sharks, the dinosaurs, and the humble mechanism that is a crocodile. And Venus flytraps, and black widow spiders, and human beings, lust as He created a world where every organism Survives by rending a weaker organism. Where procreation is an imperative, a leech's sedative against agony and death and disease that accompany the sticky congress of mating. A sticky world, because God dwells in a dark and humid place. A world of appetite, for God is ever hungry. I know, because I am His Mouth.

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By Laird Barron

Laird Barton was born in Palmer, Alaska, and raised on a remote wilderness parcel. Once a professional Iditarod competitor, he is a writer nowadays, with fiction and verse appearing in many online journals. He lives in Seattle, where he studies such topics as ancient warfare and medieval diplomacy. He is currently at work on a novel entitled The Stratagem of Coils. Around these parts, the year 2001 has not brought as many science fiction stories as we'd like, but we've had a bumper crop of horror tales. What follows is one of the creepiest we've seen.

OUT OF print for fifteen years, Edward Whittemorets Jerusalem Quartet (1979-1986) is an essential part of Fantasy's shadow cabinet, a government-in-exile. Surely m some parallel universe, Sinai Tapestry, Jerusalem Poker, Nile Shadows, and Jericho Mosaic constitute more than just a loyal opposition.

Whittemore wedded the tradition of the American tall tale and the Arabian Nights to nothing less than History itself. In the process, he created a unique tapestry of absurdly tragic, larger-than-life characters who, placed against the backdrop of historical events, appear life-size. However, despite the complexity of the Quartet's many interrelated stories, the narrative always returns to the exploits of a man named Stem. The idealistic Stem tries to use his wealth to bring peace to the Middle East but ends his days running guns.

In the most ambitious book, Jerusalem Poker, the plot is driven by the amazing conceit of a twelve-year poker game (1921-1933) for control of the Holy City. A man who may or may not be seven thousand years old and a thirty-three-volume study of Levantine sex also feature prominently.

Whittemore's Jerusalem Quartet -- especially Sinai Tapestry and Jerusalem Poker -- displays an almost unparalleled scope and sense of invention. Some blame Whittemore's obscurity on a stubborn refusal to use quotation marks for dialogue; others, on spurious comparisons to Thomas Pynchon. Regardless, readers who discover The Quartet and Whittemore's first novel, Quin's Shanghai Circus, will delight in the author's fertile imagination and subversive sense of humor.

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By Jeff VanderMeer