One-Less-Than-One had left the world. But he had promised to return before the next full moon, fresh buffalo on his back and his mouth full of stories about the hated demons. One-Less was known as a talented hunter and an adequate shaman, a fine husband and an exceptional father. And he never came home late from the demon lands. But the moon passed full days ago, and the People had been worried for three nights. On this particular evening, they should have been sharing the good fire with their friend, listening while he described how he had fooled the demons with his magic and his guile. What happened to One-Less? When should someone go out searching for him? Worry was quickly growing into despair, and it seemed to Raven, sitting quietly in his usual place, that no one could say one word about anything now but the missing man.

Raven Dream was dusty news. As a boy, he had walked out into the demon world, and then he had come back again, safe but changed. Everyone could see that he was different. The People agreed that Raven was a man, though he wasn't grown enough to sit shoulder to shoulder with the other men, speaking whenever he found words dangling in his mouth. He had to be quiet and respectful at all times. Even his older brother—Snow-on-Snow—possessed a larger, more important voice. Which was the way it should be. Wasn't manhood the beginning of a journey ending only with death? Yet when Raven anticipated this moment, he imagined a well-earned pride in his accomplishments. Leaving the world should have made him wiser and more confident. He certainly hadn't expected to feel sad or hollow, or pitifully small, or as numbingly cold as he felt now. His grandfather—the wisest, oldest citizen among the People—was watching him now, taking his measure of this new man. And his mother was sitting on her hands instead of wiping the smudges off his suddenly manly face. But other than that, nothing had changed, and it seemed as if he had never left this little place.

If only he hadn't, Raven thought to himself.

The People were gathered in the main room, sitting about the common fire, and as they discussed the missing man, One-Less-Than-One silently emerged from the dark earth, looking at everyone before claiming an empty seat directly across from Raven Dream.

One-Less was a dead man.

Raven knew this because Raven had killed him.

When the boy went out into the demons’ realm, One-Less had followed. When Raven found two young demons in desperate trouble, he had done his best to help them. But One-Less had been a stubborn, narrow-minded man who didn't approve of his kindness. Following ancient traditions, he had tried to kill the helpless demons. Raven had chosen to fight, and in the end, he had had to gut the man with his own knife and bury the corpse away from the river, in some nameless place several days’ walk from here. But if a living man is stubborn, then his dead form can be relentlessly obstinate, particularly if he is angry and feels wronged. This particular dead man had unearthed himself and come all this way to sit among the People, letting the fire warm his ghostly form while he listened to stories told about a life that was finished now.

"He is a good man, honorable and kind,” his widow proclaimed, staring at the fire, unable to see him. She was not a young woman. Long ago, she lost her first husband to the demons and her only child to the river. But One-Less-Than-One had taken pity on the grieving widow, marrying her when he was little more than a boy and then giving her three children, two of which still lived among the People. “He is a brave man and my best friend,” she continued. “But he promised to be in my bed three nights ago. And he is never late, not by more than a breath."

Raven stared at the tiny fire, trying to ignore the ghost.

Someone asked, “Are you certain that you didn't see him?"

An elbow jabbed Raven in the ribs. He jumped and then realized it was his brother's elbow telling him to pay attention.

"My husband went upriver,” said the two-time widow. “You journeyed upriver too. Didn't you, Raven?"

"A long ways,” he said.

"You didn't meet my One-Less?"

How many times already had he lied? Raven shook his head, trying to appear sure. But when his eyes lifted, he saw the ghost staring at him, smiling in the most hateful way.

Others noticed his gaze.

"Not even a footprint?” she persisted.

"No,” Raven managed. “I saw no sign of him."

The dead man's children were sitting near their father, unaware of his presence. One of them admitted, “I'm scared."

The other said, “Don't be."

"But something's gone wrong,” said the first child.

"That's stupid,” his sister told him. She was older than her brother—a grown woman nearly fourteen years old—and she had no patience for fear or gloomy thoughts. “Father is out there fighting the demons. That's all. With his magic, he's making their wicked lives miserable."

Everyone was a demon, except for the People.

"Do you think that he is?” asked the little boy.

"Absolutely,” said his big, brave sister. Then she looked at Raven, smiling without happiness. “Did you hurt any demons while you walked their lands?"

Raven almost said, “No."

Then he came close to weaving a new lie. “I did hurt a few, yes,” he said inside his mind, the words forming against his tongue and then dissolving before they could do any lasting harm.

All the while, he stared at the dead man. An endless river of blood was leaking out of One-Less's ruptured kidney, and the bloodless face grinned with its slack empty mouth while sunken eyes glared at him, fury mixed with a cold, cold humor.

Raven rose to his feet.

Everyone was watching him.

Standing still, he announced, “I need to relieve myself."

"So do it,” his brother advised.

The People lived in secret rooms buried deep inside a great hillside. Every door was hidden with camouflage and with magic. Cautiously, Raven stepped out into the light of the waning moon. The piss holes were narrow wooden pipes that took away urine and its stink. He was using a hole when someone else followed him outside. Thinking that it was his grandfather, Raven took a breath and held it. But it was only the ghost, thankfully. Even the angriest spirit was no more dangerous than a hard wind, he knew, while a wise old man could inflict endless misery on a young man.

One-Less pulled out his own shriveled penis and bled a few dark drops into the adjacent hole. But he never stopped staring at Raven, and after a while, Raven said to him, “I did what had to be."

"What had to be?"

The voice came from behind him. Two men had come out of the ground, one of them remaining invisible.

"What did you do, Raven?"

The People's new man pulled up his trousers, shivered, then he turned slowly to face his grandfather.

The old man had one good arm and a thousand types of magic, plus seventy years of hard experience ready for times such as this. Quietly, he said, “Tell me."

Raven said nothing.

"Or don't tell me. You are a man now. Make your own choice."

"I have,” Raven allowed.

Grandfather nodded, using experience and magic to peer into the sad soul. “For a man who has walked among the demons, you are remarkably silent about your adventures. Are you afraid of being prideful?"

"No, sir."

"So you have no pride?"

"I did something,” the new man replied.

Grandfather remained silent, waiting patiently.

"Something awful,” Raven confessed. Then he shook his head and glanced at the ghost that was still pissing blood into the pipe. “I found demons in need."

Large eyes grew larger. “How many demons?"

"Two of them, Grandfather."

"In what need?"

"One of them was dying. Both were lost. They needed help, and that's what I gave them."

Raven hoped that this was his worst crime, and confessing to the People's leader would begin the healing and the forgiveness. Perhaps later, when One-Less was a little forgotten, the rest of this story could be told. People had killed People in the past, and maybe there was some way for the others to look at what had happened as being private and honorable, or at least ugly but inevitable.

"These two demons saw you, did they?"

Raven nodded. “The girl did. The boy was too close to death to notice."

"And you told the girl a good lie, did you?"

"Yes. Of course."

Grandfather nodded. Then he glanced in the direction of the ghost, wondering aloud, “Did you learn these children's names?"

"Mara,” said Raven. “And Greggie."

"Bounty,” said Grandfather, finishing their names.

Raven held his voice deep in his belly.

Yet the old man seemed relieved. Even as he said, “Those are two very important children in the demon world,” it was as if he had imagined that things were much blacker than this. “And if it is as you say, and if the girl believed your lie—"

"I think so,” Raven said.

"Then maybe this means nothing."

Raven nodded hopefully. “I shouldn't have helped the children. I know that now."

"Except some demons are helpful to the People,” the old man said, staring into the darkness. “In the right circumstances, of course."

"Maybe this will help,” Raven began.

Then Grandfather stepped close. Their eyes met, and the old man's expression brought with it the ages and his wisdom and a scorching rage that had been hiding for the last few days and nights. “But what about One-Less-Than-One?” he snapped.

"I do not ... what do you mean...?"

"You lied,” his grandfather assured him. “Just now, when you told his family you never saw him, I could see you lying. To them. To me. To all the world."

Raven dropped his gaze.

But the good hand grabbed Raven by the chin and forced the young eyes to rise. Then Grandfather told him, “I know how you can make everything better. And so do you, I think."

"I can tell you what I did,” said Raven.

"But you already have,” a low, tight voice replied.

"Do I confess to his widow?"

"If you want her to push a knife into your heart, yes. Or that little boy of hers will wait for you to sleep, and then he will avenge what he will see only as the most wicked crime."

Raven began to cry.

"Go find our missing friend,” said the old man.

Raven glanced over at the ghost.

His grandfather studied him. Then again, he brought the young eyes back to his. “This is what I will tell the others. You have left us to hunt for One-Less-Than-One, and when you find him, however he is, the world will be well again."

"Will it?” Raven whispered.

"If you have his bones and a reasonable story. Perhaps."

He nodded.

"And his spirit must be at rest too. More than the bones, that is what matters."

Raven felt the dead man glaring at him, blood running down his back and out through the front of his trousers, making the ground slick and black. Nothing about this spirit would ever be at rest, Raven sensed. But he nodded and felt one awful burden lifted from his shoulders, his breath tasting cleaner when he promised, “I will leave before dawn."

"No,” Grandfather warned. “You will leave in the next few heartbeats, with exactly what you are carrying now."

Raven had no knife or fishhooks, no charms or much else besides his clothes. But he gave a little nod, glad for the chance to survive the night.

"What about my mother?” he asked.

"Let's leave my daughter thinking the best of her new man-son. Shall we?” Grandfather shook him by one shoulder, the gesture strong and meant to feel just a little comforting. “And take your ghost with you, please,” he added. “To me, he feels as grim and moody as One-Less ever was."

The summer world was rich with food. Old turtles and fat frogs lived on the river's edge. Every rotting log hid an army of pale worms, while the night air tingled with the presence of sweet bugs and sour ones.

Young grouse slept too deeply to notice the hand that was about to snatch them by their necks. A young man without the simplest tool could still raid the nests of mice and voles, plus the occasional pack rat midden jammed with trash and treasure. And if that same young man found a scrap of metal tucked inside a midden—the rusting hinge of an ancient demon door—he could dismantle the hinge and sharpen its pieces well enough to make a kit of tools, including a little spear and a toy axe for working with sticks and digging into the softest ground.

But summer was a visitor to the world. Soon the days would cool and nights would freeze, the bugs would die away or vanish into deep hiding places, and what animals remained would turn scarce and wise.

Raven would feel hungry before the next full moon.

The moon after that would see him skinny and probably sick, and his last few breaths would come and go with the first snow.

Then he would walk the world as a spirit, weightless but for the eternal burdens that he had earned for himself. He would become a shadow moving in the corner of a living eye, and he would be a cool place in the midst of sunshine, and when the demon world was swept aside and the People were reborn, he would feel none of it. Forever, he would be an apparition shuffling through the tall grass, his dim little mind trying to recall how he had come to this endless end.

"I blame you,” he told One-Less.

The ghost never responded, yet a thin, undeniable pleasure showed in its tortured features.

"And I blame myself,” Raven continued, knowing he should say those words, even if he didn't quite feel them. “I didn't have to kill you. I could have helped you murder those children. But then we'd have two ghosts trailing after us. Do you see? That's one reason I did what I did. A single haunting is better than two."

One-Less responded with a sneer.

"And now that I think about it, you aren't much of a spirit,” said Raven. “I almost like having you here, as company."

It was late evening, the sun falling out of sight of the world, long shadows merging into a darkness that soon would allow both man and spirit to move easily in the open. The two of them were kneeling together, down where the world's river pushed beneath a wire fence and out into the demons’ realm. Near the river's winter bank, past a row of ragged little juniper trees, stood a weather-tight shelter and several other buildings, and a famous demon was standing behind the shelter's largest window, watching the sunset.

Blue Clad was a strong, heavy-chested man, not young anymore but not quite old either. He had short hair, black but with more gray, and skin that turned ruddy brown in the summer. Born into a family of ranchers, his name came from the color of fabric that he preferred to wear. Countless stories about the People involved his clan. For generations, Blue Clad's ancestors had owned all of the land along the river, and they had always known about the secret souls living in their midst. Yet they never told anyone else. Mostly, they were good demons. Whenever there was famine, they would help the People with food. Bad diseases came on the wind, but they found medicines. And on occasion, they protected the People from the demons who wandered onto their lands.

But those times were nearly finished. Save for Blue Clad, the ranchers had vanished. Grandfather had admitted as much to Raven and to everyone. “His neighbors have sold out and moved away,” the old man reported, his expression pleased but not pleased. The country was empty, but the reasons made everyone uneasy. With a sour little smile, Grandfather had said, “The other ranches have been stolen by new demons. On all sides, we're surrounded by forgotten homes and tall fences."

Young buffalo were walking across the abandoned ranches, conjured out of water and dirt by odd magic. And there were prowling grizzly bears and wolves and cougars, as well as little ponies with stiff manes, and herds of elk such as the old days had known. And sometimes, odd scents came drifting on the wind—hints of animals that bore no name, at least none that the People knew.

"Blue Clad won't abandon us,” Grandfather had promised. This conversation happened last winter, the chill of the world seeping into their buried home. Huddling by the fire, warming his good hand and his bad, the white-haired man explained, “After Blue Clad dies, his short-hairs will be sold and gone. And then all of the fences will be pulled down, letting the wild herds come for our grass."

"Just as the Prophet promised,” One-Less had remarked.

Raven glanced at the ghost squatting beside him, remembering the moment.

"'The buffalo will return to the People,'” One-Less had said, quoting the prophecy uttered by a shaman dead for more than a hundred years. “'They will walk at our feet, and we will walk among them.’”

But Grandfather had remained unimpressed.

"Seeing the future is a tough venture,” he had warned One-Less. But he had looked at Raven when he spoke. “Just because your promised tomorrow seems to be here, you shouldn't let yourself believe in it. There are many ways to deceive, but the best deceptions come dressed as the truth."

One-Less had been unimpressed by an old man's doubts.

"I never liked you,” Raven said to the spirit. “If I had liked you, I don't think I would have killed you."

The dead face turned toward him.

"I probably would have cut your hamstring and crippled you, and that would have been the end of it."

The hollowed-out eyes turned forward again.

Blue Clad's wife had joined her husband behind the big window. Her name was Stone Face—a small golden-haired woman who must have been pretty when she was young. Together, the married demons spoke to each other. Raven studied their bodies and the little gestures of their hands, reading worry and then happiness. What were they saying? He could only guess. Maybe they were talking about the land and how to remain here until they were dead. Maybe they were discussing their only child—a young man named Yellow Hair who had recently left home, going off to some faraway school. Or maybe they were talking about the People, wishing them well as they watched the sun vanish from the world.

A final few words were spoken, and then the old couple vanished.

After another long while, the inside lights were extinguished, and save for a few lamps above doorways and on a tall wooden post, the entire ranch had tumbled into darkness and sleep.

Raven crept down low and crawled into the demons’ realm.

The ghost followed after him, stepping through the barbed wires without bending its insubstantial body.

"This is my plan,” Raven explained, speaking with the softest possible whisper. “I will borrow what I need and only that. Tools and scrap metal and maybe a good knife or two, if I find them. Then I'll move into the new lands, hunting buffalo calves and prairie dogs. When I store enough dried meat, I will find your grave. By then, the worms will have cleaned you up. I will finish their work and polish your bones and use my magic with them, giving you a voice."

The ghost seemed interested in what it was hearing. The mouth opened wider and then closed again, teeth chewing on the swollen black tongue.

"If you have a voice, you can explain yourself to the People,” Raven said. Then with a slender bit of confidence, he added, “Both of us will return home and tell the whole story, and our families will either banish me, or they will see that what happened was for the best."

The ghost slowed its gait.

Raven's companion acted worried about the demons. But Blue Clad and Stone Face were two old people in bed, sleeping soundly, and Raven had studied the terrain for days, making ready for this moment.

He avoided their home, carefully approaching one of the other buildings. A giant door had been lifted and forgotten. In the darkness stood a wagon—one of the massive pickup trucks that every rancher cherished. Raven touched the wagon's skin, expecting to feel the chill of metal. But no, it was a different material, warmer and very slick, wrong-feeling in ways that he couldn't name. And the wheels weren't the same as the rubber wheels that he had touched a time or two, crazy with curiosity. They were wider but very thin, feeling like callused flesh under his fingertips.

On bare toes, Raven slipped past the wagon and into a little workshop. The smells of old solvents and spilled paint assaulted his nose. The room was littered with metal dust and colored tanks and lengths of hollow rope and machines that looked fierce even when they were dead asleep. Raven worked quickly, found a worn-out shirt and tied the sleeves and buttoned the buttons until he had a useful sack. Then he selected items that looked as if they wouldn't be missed. He claimed an old screwdriver and a half-package of razor blades and two wads of steel wool that could be used to make fire in the coldest winter. There was good rope and thick wire, and inside a closet, he found old coats, none of which looked as if they had been worn in years. He took the plainest coat and a paint-stained pair of heavy trousers, tying the trouser legs to make a second sack. Then he crept past the new truck again, pausing in the open doorway, deciding which of the other buildings to raid next.

The ghost was standing beneath the highest, brightest lamp.

Raven felt anger, then fear. But even if the demons were awake, what were the chances they would see a light-washed ghost?

Approaching his nemesis, Raven intended to lead it back into the trees and give up his scavenging for the night, if need be. He was so busy watching One-Less that he didn't notice what lay in the grass, like a thick rope under his right foot. But Raven knew what he had stepped on as soon as he made contact, and with the speed of youth, he yanked his foot just in time to avoid the snake's first jabbing bite.

But then Raven stumbled and fell.

The rattlesnake was buzzing furiously, curled into a tight mass of muscle and poison, and an instant later, the head of the snake was moving, twin teeth injecting a killing dose into Raven's exposed neck.

He was dead now.

His body still had a heart and heat, but those things were temporary. There was no worse place to suffer a rattlesnake bite than near the face, and he probably didn't have a hundred breaths left before his blood turned sour and choked him till he was blue.

Inside that moment, Raven Dream made his decision.

With the dead man watching his misery—smiling at him with an expression of considerable amusement—Raven ran to the ranch house, and as the pain rose to an unbearable state, he kicked at the front door and used both fists, pounding until he heard voices, and then pounding even harder.

Raven was asleep for what felt like days. In his dreams he walked with the dead, and they eventually told him that no, it was not his time. After that, he came awake slowly. Eyes accustomed to the good shapes of the world—soft edges and sloppy circles—found themselves staring at straight lines and sharp, jarring corners. A square white sky hung just above him, smooth and empty except for a rectangle of frozen smoke fixed to the sky's center. Raven was lying on his back, weak and trapped beneath smothering slick blankets. But his hands could crawl, and his fingers had feeling. Touching his own naked body, he found life, and on his swollen neck, a small square bandage.

Raven listened to his slow breathing. Then he closed his eyes and another day passed, or twenty days, and he woke again, finding his head turned to the left. Beside the bed stood an empty table and empty chair. The wall beyond was flat and sharp-cornered, wearing the color of old rust. Buried inside the reddish wall was a white rectangular door. The door wasn't quite closed, but when he peered into the thin gap, he saw nothing of the world beyond.

Fighting the pain and heavy blankets, Raven rolled to his right. The opposite wall was the same size and color, but with a rectangular window in place of the door. Long hunks of dangling fabric dressed the window. The sky was passing from day into night, trees swirling under a steady evening wind. Everything about this place was strange, but strangest was the green leaves in those high branches. They were full of summer, which was impossible. Raven was certain he had spent an entire moon hovering between death and this life, and when he realized that he hadn't, he stared at the ceiling, carefully rebuilding his thoughts.

When he found enough strength, he sat up. Past his toes, a demon man was hanging on the wall. Or perhaps it was a woman. Nothing about the face was purely male or female. The demon wore bright insubstantial clothes, and the sexless face was painted with twisted black worms, and cradled in the hands was a long pipe made of polished brass that had been tied into an elaborate knot.

When Raven looked at the demon's eyes, the demon moved. A wide smile blossomed, and the pipe lifted to its mouth, and with the fingers pushing buttons, it breathed out, making a string of hot, jarring noises.

Raven jumped back, banging against a wobbly headboard.

The demon was living inside the wall, unless it was standing somewhere else in the world. Who could say? But Raven had been seen. He was under the blankets when the bedroom door opened. The old woman walked into the mayhem, calmly touching the edge of the picture, and the musician fell silent, then vanished altogether.

"Tell me,” Stone Face said, using the People's language. “Do you know how to speak demon?"

Raven came out from under the blankets.

"Because I don't know your language much,” she confessed, settling on the farthest corner of the mattress. She looked pleased to see Raven sitting upright and alive, but then the pleasure melted away, leaving her features grim and wary. Again she asked, “Do you know demon?"

"Pieces of it,” said Raven, with demon words. Grandfather had taught him the language, and his mother had helped, and years before that his uncle had given him a few good words.

"Raven Dream,” she said twice. In his language, then hers.

He nodded.

"Do you know how lucky you are?"

The only honest answer was to say, “I don't, no."

"Well, first of all, the bite missed your artery. And second, we keep antiserum in our refrigerator. Sometimes a calf gets bit, and that's hundreds of dollars dying. Which is a lot of money, for us.” She paused a moment, then asked, “Do you remember any of this?"

Vague recollections surfaced and then slid away.

"Always keep the bite below the heart,” she reported. “That's what a doctor will tell you."

Raven nodded.

"He held you up by your ankles,” she said. “You're not a little boy, and he isn't as strong as he used to be. But he managed. We guessed your weight, and I mixed the antiserum and made the injection, and it worked better than I ever thought it would. I thought you were dead."

With a gentle hand, Raven touched his swollen neck and the bandage. “When did this happen?” he muttered. “How long ago?"

"Last night,” she said.

Again Raven looked out the window, staring at the trees.

Stone Face let her eyes wander until she found a different subject. “This is our son's room,” she told him.

Yellow Hair. Yes.

"He would be extremely proud, if he knew you were in his bed."

Raven could think of nothing to say.

"So there was trouble, was there?” she asked.

He closed his eyes, and he breathed deeply.

"Trouble between you and the others, apparently. I'm just guessing, I know. But if you're in such a mess that you've got to steal trash from our garage, then you've pretty much been banished. Is that what happened?"

Once more, Raven looked outdoors. But there was too much sun for even the angriest ghost to appear. “I did something wrong,” he admitted, surprised by the lack of concern of his own voice.

"How old are you now? Ten?"

"This is my tenth year."

"Nine years and some months. Okay.” She stood, her face hardening in the way that the People had seen for years. Even when Blue Clad's wife was pretty, she wore a stern, cold expression. Particularly when she was angry. “You're just a child,” she muttered. “And they sent you off to die."

"I'm not a child,” he reported.

She said, “Bullshit."

He was a grown man, which was why he gathered the blankets close now. He was naked and should remain hidden to another man's wife.

"And you, of all people!” (Or did she say, “Of all the People"?)

"What do you mean?” Raven asked.

"Never mind."

"And how do you know my name?"

She laughed quietly. “You and the others ... you're the only neighbors we've got anymore. Every other ranch has cleared out, and those old friends have moved off to Kansas City and Florida and who knows where.” Stone Face stared at his bandaged wound, then added, “He cares about you, you know. A great deal."

"Blue Clad helps the People,” Raven allowed.

"Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't,” she said. “I'll warn you, my husband and I don't always agree on what constitutes help."

Raven shook his head until his wound burned.

"But when I talk about him caring,” she said, “I mean that he has feelings about you. About the big strong boy named Raven Dream."

The blankets couldn't be pulled any closer.

"We get rattlesnakes around the house, on occasion. They crawl out of the hills, and do you know what he does? He catches them. Always. He has a special pole and lasso, and he grabs the snakes up and puts them in a sack and drives them back to the prairie. Even though snakes kill calves, robbing hundreds and thousands of dollars out of our pockets, he takes the time and accepts the danger to save the snakes’ miserable little lives."

Raven had no idea where this story was traveling.

Her narrow mouth pulled flush against her teeth. “But after I'd injected you with the antiserum and after he set you down again ... the first thing he did was go outside with his lasso and stick and catch the snake that bit you, and he put his foot on its head, and then he started to cut it up, six inches at a whack. The tail first, and he worked his way up the body to the head, and he made sure it died in misery, because he didn't know if you were going to live out the night.

"Which says quite a lot, Raven Dream. Particularly if you know a little more of the story."

Blue Clad had driven to some far place for medicine. He returned in the night, the bright lights of his truck washing across the ranch house, pushing their way through the gaps in the closed drapes. Then his heavy boots sounded on the floor outside the closed bedroom door. Raven listened to the boots and then the man's deep, quiet voice and his wife's louder, more casual voice. “No, he's awake,” she reported. Then she said, “No.” Followed by, “Yes.” Then she called him by his demon name, which was, “Edward,” and told him, “If you want to, just poke your head in. Say your hello."

Moments later, the bedroom door opened partway and a square face peered through the gap.

Raven was sitting in darkness, the drapes drawn. He felt tired and nervous and very sore, his entire body aching from the poison and the residues of the antiserum. But despite his fatigue, he was awake, holding his breath, letting this important man gather up his own courage before stepping inside.

Suddenly a big hand slapped the wall and the smoke box on the ceiling caught fire, throwing a blue-white light across everything.

"Jeez, I couldn't see you,” Blue Clad admitted.

Raven blinked and let the sheets drop.

"I thought maybe you'd ... I don't know ... slipped out the window, maybe.... “The man's voice trailed away. His face was whiskered and flush with blood. He took a wet breath and stepped closer, staring at Raven's face and swollen neck. Then he took another deep breath before asking, “How do you feel?” He used the People's language, getting the rhythm just about right. And before Raven could answer, he asked, “Has she fed you?"

"I feel stronger,” Raven said. Then he nodded, adding, “A little meal, yes."

"Good.” The big man rocked back and forth for a moment, wrestling with many thoughts at once. “Good,” he said again.

With demon words, Raven told him, “Thank you."

"But I know Lakota,” Blue Clad said, continuing with that language. “You will be ten years old soon, is that right?"

Raven just nodded.

"Ten years,” Blue Clad said again. Then he glanced over his shoulder, whispering in the People's language, “How is your mother?"

"Well,” Raven answered.

The man's face brightened. Then his wife was behind him, standing close enough that Raven saw her golden hair past one of his broad shoulders. With his smiling face, Blue Clad said, “So there's been trouble between you and them.” He was using demon words again. “How can we fix this?"

Raven said nothing.

Stone Face whispered a few words to Blue Clad, who shook his head, dismissing her suggestion.

"I'll see what I can find out,” he promised. He looked tired but ready for more work. Starting out of the room, he forced his wife into the hallway with him. “Rest,” was his advice. “In a day or two, believe me, you'll feel miles better."

The door was closed and latched.

On soggy legs, Raven slipped out of the bed. The drapes felt stiff and a little warm, and he held them between his fingers for a moment before pulling them apart. One-Less was standing on the other side of the window, his gruesome face pressed close to the glass. Raven stared at the ghost for a long while, listening to the thoughts slipping through his own head. Then in a whisper, he confessed, “You are my best friend now. In this world, who do I know better?"

Sleep made Raven stronger. By the next afternoon, he had recovered enough to make fresh plans. He was thinking when he heard footsteps in the hallway and a hand pushing at the door, and then with his eyes almost closed, he watched her drift into the room. She was wearing a shirt and trousers, her hair was pulled into a knot behind her head, and her little feet wore what looked like pelts stripped from some unknown breed of animal. Raven watched the feet trying to be quiet and the arms crossed, holding a square book against her heart. As Stone Face set the book on the edge of the bed, he put a hand on hers, making her jump. “I don't know why I'm scared,” she said, using her own language. “I must look silly."

Raven sat up.

"I thought you'd be interested,” she offered.

She meant the heavy book. The binding was on the right. Raven opened the cover and she seemed ready to speak, then decided just to stand by and watch. A single image filled the final page—a piece of the past captured on a slip of glossy paper. Raven stared at the smiling face of her son, Yellow Hair, and behind him, the forested hillside where the People lived underground.

"Mark asks about you,” she said. “And the others, too. Of course."

Mark was Yellow Hair.

"He doesn't ask anything with words,” she continued. “Because we don't know who's listening. But we have a code. A method. Mark inquires about our prairie dogs, and one of us gives him the news."

Raven turned the thick page.

"Not that there's much to tell,” she allowed. “We don't see you often, or speak to you much at all. And really, you do an incredible job of hiding, even from us.” What she said triggered a quiet laugh. “When I first came here to live,” she explained, “I believed in you. I did. But after a year or two of seeing nothing ... not even a bare footprint in the sand ... it occurred to me that the People were just an elaborate and exceptionally cruel joke ... a joke being played on a foolish city girl...."

The next pages reached farther back in time, showing her son and husband posing together. They were fishing the river and standing beside a truck that died years ago. Suddenly Blue Clad had a younger face and black hair, and Yellow Hair was a tiny boy younger than Raven today.

"Maybe you don't know this,” she was saying. “Before I met my husband, the closest I came to this country was a family vacation. We drove our station wagon through on the way to Yellowstone. I didn't know one useful thing about ranching. Then I grew up and became an elementary school teacher, and Blue was a grown-up undergraduate at the Ag college. He was almost thirty years old, and he'd come to the city to get a degree. We dated for a full year before he brought me home to meet his family."

"You called him Blue,” Raven pointed out.

"That's what he called himself,” she said. “His given name is Edward, but his nickname was Blue. He'd chosen it when he was a boy."

Raven began to turn the page, but she held his hand down.

"This album ... we keep it locked away.... “Stone Face was nervous but determined. Standing beside the bed, she let both hands settle on the opened book. “But I thought you should see it. You have that right, I believe.” She looked over her shoulder for a moment. “Blue is asleep. Finally. He spent all last night putting out special charms, trying to arrange a meeting with the People. But nobody showed himself. Except for Blue, nobody wants to talk about you."

She lifted her hands now, but Raven left the pages alone.

"I was a young woman, and Blue was this wonderful rugged fellow. Colorful and obviously smart. When I met him, I asked, ‘Are you part Indian?’ Because of his complexion, I thought he might be. And he asked me, ‘Why? What do you think about Indians?’ I didn't know any, I said, but I liked the idea of them. Lame little words like that. Then Blue said a few very bad things about Native Americans. Insults, actually. Of course he was testing me. And after I jumped down his throat, he smiled, thrilled to hear me being angry with him."

She pulled the chair out from under the adjacent table and sat, her feet squirming inside those two dead animals.

"After a year, he brought me up here. Finally. He introduced me to his parents, and they got to know me over the course of a week, and when I was hiking in your pasture by myself, some decision was made. When I came back here, Blue asked me to marry him. But before I could say yes, he told me there were two big conditions. First, we'd have to always live on this land. Live here until we were dead. ‘And what's the second condition?’ I asked. Well, he couldn't quite tell me, at least not until after the ceremony."

Stone Face stuck a finger into the picture book, jumping backward several pages. “Here. This is our wedding. And these are his parents."

Raven saw a big ruddy-faced man that had to be Blue Clad's father, while his mother was dark-haired—a mixed-race who was tall and very beautiful. And with a single glance, Raven understood things he could only guess at before.

"We shouldn't look at this book,” Stone Face warned. Then she showed him a conspiratorial wink, adding, “But there's lots of places where I don't quite agree with his family's attitudes."

Raven didn't know what to do.

She flipped through more pages, leaping back in time. “These are Blue's parents getting married. Do you see where? The trees look different than they do now, but it's your pasture. Your hill. And behind the happy bride ... do you see the People...?"

Human-shaped smears stood in the shadows. He counted them until he passed twenty-five, which was more than were alive today. Then looked at Stone Face. “When did you believe in us?"

"In some ways, I never have,” she insisted. “Even now, for a lot of perfectly good reasons, I prefer to think that you're only myth and wishful thinking."

Raven reached deep into the past, pulling up a great handful of pages.

"What happened is, I finally saw one of you,” Stone Face said. “I was walking in your pasture, helping my new husband move his cattle, and out of nowhere, this boy appeared. Myth and wishful thinking are enough to conjure up flesh and bone, it seems. Because a child was suddenly standing in plain sight, watching me. A child not even five years old, wearing nothing but a few skins and holding a small bow in one hand."

Raven wondered who it had been.

But she anticipated the question. “I asked later. Judging by my description, Blue decided he must be his second cousin. One-Less-Than-One."

Raven held his breath.

Stone Face didn't seem to notice his mood. “It's amazing that any family can keep such a big secret for more than a century,” she continued. “But when that family marries into the secret, mixing its blood with theirs ... well, it's a very reasonable strategy, I guess you'd have to say...."

Breath leaked from his mouth, and then he gasped.

"Blue's mother came from the Pine Ridge Reservation. But she had relatives living among the People."

He said nothing.

"One-Less-Than-One,” she said. “Of course, that name literally means nothing. And your name is Raven Dream. And your brother, as I remember it, is Snow-On-Snow.” The woman shook her head and smiled stiffly, adding, “These are names for things that cannot be seen. It took me a long while, but I finally saw the logic."

The book's oldest pictures had no color—stolen by time, Raven guessed. He stared at a rancher sitting on horseback and his wife and children riding in a pair of tall wagons pulled by burly horses. There was also a single image of the People standing beside the river. It was winter. Nobody was looking at the camera, and everything about the image was smudged and indistinct. One of the People was the prophet, Raven guessed, but he couldn't tell even the sex of any smudge, much less its name. The People looked like ghosts, and when he pulled back his eyes, they merged with the gray trees and the white dashes of snow.

"There was a long time when I believed what you believe,” Stone Face told him. “When I was a young woman, it sounded exceptionally noble and good, some little piece of your great nation surviving in my own front yard. But there aren't as many of you anymore. And with the years, I've seen just how dangerous and hard your life is. A life that isn't going to get easier or better, and some things are inevitable. For a person, and for the People too."

Raven stared at her.

She named a dead woman and two dead children. Then she said, “It's a very hard existence."

How could life be any way but difficult?

"And what about that uncle of yours?” she asked. “Shadow-Below-The-Standing-Foot."

Several years ago, Shadow-Below had walked away from the People, going out to live among the demons.

"And now there's you,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “Now they've banished you, too."

Raven took a deep, useless breath.

"Do you know how to read?” the woman asked.

He didn't answer.

"You don't know much about reading, I'd guess. And you don't understand anything about the world beyond your little pasture. Do you?"

Raven was suddenly tired of this woman.

"I taught my son to read and write,” she said. “I did well enough to get him into one of the best schools in the world. Maybe that's what you and I can do now. I've got all my old textbooks, and a link to the Internet, and there's more channels on our television than a good mathematician can count."

Raven reached for the pages that she hadn't wanted to see. She didn't stop him. He flipped through until he found the secret images, and nothing he saw was even a little surprising.

His mother was standing in the center of one picture, looking young and small, and Grandfather was there, and Raven's lost uncle, Shadow-Below. And standing with them was Blue Clad, dressed in his usual denim clothes and a black piece of fabric tied around his thick neck. Everyone was smiling at the camera and at Raven, and Blue Clad held his mother by the waist, pulling her clothes in close to show off the swollen ripe belly.

"She was an exceptionally pretty girl,” Stone Face allowed, her voice small and slow, holding tight to her emotions.

Raven touched the flat image of a lovely face.

"I bet she's pretty still,” the demon woman continued. “But I've told Blue, in no uncertain terms ... if he so much as looks at your mother again, I'll drive off this land and tell the world everything I know."

Raven looked up.

Stone Face laughed quietly and very sadly. “Which is a lie, of course. I never would. But let's keep that tiny admission as our own secret, all right?” She touched him on the back of the hand, rubbing at his bones as she whispered, “My husband's boy. Our little son."

The food was salty and hot, and the meat was cooked too long, leaving it brown and dry. But Raven was hungry enough to eat everything on the little table, and more. He ate the meat with his hands and both of the cooked grains with a steel spoon, and then he tried some kind of tuber that was huge and white and utterly tasteless. Then he licked the grease and bits of extra food off the nearly weightless plate.

"Dessert?” Stone Face asked.

Raven had never heard that word before. But he nodded, guessing more food was coming.

She retrieved the empty plate and vanished.

Blue Clad was sitting on his own chair. He had rolled it into the bedroom, and he filled it up with his wide sturdy body, leaning forward when his wife had vanished. When they were alone, he asked, “So how is your grandfather?"

Raven didn't want to talk, particularly about the People.

"But I'm sure he's fine,” Blue Clad continued. “I spoke to him a few months ago. He doesn't seem to change, does he? I think that man must have been born ancient, and he'll be the same for the next hundred years."

Stone Face returned, carrying a bowl filled with sweet brown ice. With relish, she said the word, “Chocolate."

Raven ate with his spoon.

"It's soy-based, so you don't have to worry about lactose intolerance.” She sat at the table, laughing about something, and Blue Clad leaned back again. Then she said to her husband, “We'll need to drive out and get food. A lot of food, I think."

The chair under the man creaked, but he said nothing.

"For clothes,” she said, “we can use Mark's old stuff. I've still got most of it boxed up in the pole shed—"

"No,” Blue Clad said.

"What?"

The man looked at an empty spot on the white ceiling. “I'm going out tonight again. I'm going to build a bonfire under the hill, and this time, I won't give up until his grandfather comes down to talk to me."

Raven set his spoon on top of the melting ice.

"Clare,” said Blue Clad. “This boy is not staying with us."

"Edward,” she said, her voice carrying more than just the name. There was doubt and disagreement in that word, and a hint of arguments older than Raven—the keen private hurts and despairs that every old couple share.

"I know,” said Blue Clad. “You don't approve of them living out there."

She gave a quiet snort, her little hands making fists.

"But that's where they live, by their own choice,” he continued. He showed Raven a little wink, asking, “Isn't that the truth? The People are doing exactly what they want to do."

Raven dropped his face, not wanting to speak.

"The world they left,” Stone Face began, then she stopped talking, stacking her fists on her lap.

"What about that world?” her husband asked.

"It's gone,” she said. “The reservations and the cavalry, the smallpox and all the other miseries ... that's what they were running from. But that world was wiped away by the world we helped build. We made everything different. With medicines and education, new laws and the march of civilization. And now that our world is being destroyed, a little more every day...."

Yet Blue Clad had to smile. And again, he winked at Raven. “I know everything's changing. I know. But that's because the shaman's predictions are coming true. The buffalo are back, and soon, the People will be able to—"

"Edward,” she snapped. “Just because a few prophecies might be coming true, it doesn't mean that you're right."

Raven remembered when his Grandfather said much the same.

"You can see anything you want in those old words,” she continued. “If you look hard enough, you can even see yourself standing by a bonfire, screaming at a hillside that doesn't want to talk to you."

The man's face colored and stiffened, and a quiet voice leaked out of him. “I don't care,” he replied.

Raven leaned back on his pillows.

Stone Face noticed. “Are you all right?” she asked.

"I'm tired,” he lied. “I want to sleep again."

"Good idea,” Blue Clad allowed. He rose and opened the door, shoving his chair into the hallway. “Rest up. And tonight, maybe I'll talk them into taking you back again."

Raven crawled through the bedroom window, dressed in demon clothes but barefoot. The light burning above the yard was bright and very blue, and it hummed quietly. The ghost was standing just out of its reach, waiting for him inside the long shadow of a towering cottonwood tree. But Raven had made himself ready for the ghost. He didn't let it startle him, brazenly motioning for it to step into the open and then walking straight at it, not allowing any hint of fear to slip free.

Blue Clad had driven upstream to argue his son's case.

Stone Face was inside the house, sleeping unaware.

"I killed you,” Raven began, pulling up just short of the apparition. “And now you have killed me too."

In the blue glare, One-Less looked thinner and less substantial, except for sharp features of the angry face. The black tongue moved inside its grimacing mouth. Eyes that could see nothing but the hated boy stared at him, resembling twin pieces of highly polished obsidian glass. The eternal wound in its back continued to seep blood, and the smell of the blood carried in the soft wind.

"Your name means nothing,” Raven continued. “And now that you have died, you are less than nothing. Which is how I am too. Banished and alone, I have no value and no good future, and you helped make me this way."

What might or might not have been pleasure showed on that hard face.

"Haunt me or leave me,” said Raven. “Either way, there is nothing more you can do to hurt me."

The ghost seemed to consider those words.

Raven turned and walked back to the machine shop. The ghost didn't follow after him. With the truck gone, the building felt larger and less dangerous than before. Everything Raven had stolen was put back in its place, and with the same thoroughness, he reclaimed each of those prizes. But this time he worked slowly, carefully knotting the shirt and trousers and packing each treasure to carry it easily. His plan, such as it was, took him far out into the demon lands, living alone for as long as necessary, waiting to grow old and then die. Sixty years of half-living was his plan, and he felt resigned to it and perhaps a little happy, carrying the shirt and the trousers and the heavy coat into the open before pausing, searching for snakes in the grass while wondering what else he might carry out of this place.

One-Less had vanished.

For a moment, that seemed like a good hopeful thing.

Raven sniffed at the breeze and smelled smoke, and for a moment he thought of Blue Clad standing beside a roaring fire, shouting madly at the hillside. But no matter how large, that fire would be too distant to smell here, even with a steady dusk wind. And this particular fire had the wrong taste, sharp and chemical against the tongue.

Raven's fragile hopes collapsed away.

He started to run, pushing upwind and guessing the very worst.

Beside the ranch house stood a small wooden storage shed. Some tiny whiff of fire had ignited a few rags and then solvents, engulfing the structure before the flames spread to the house, first to the abutting wall and then crawling across the roof's old shingles.

Raven leaped onto the porch and kicked the door twice, and when he heard nothing but the fire spreading, he put a hand on the knob and worked it back and forth until the latch released, letting him inside.

The old woman was still sleeping—a small bundle inside an enormous bed, her curled body hidden beneath a single light blanket—and Raven hesitated for a moment and then another, wishing that he could be a boy again. Wanting nothing more than that, or less. Then he reached for the top of her head, thinking to shake her; and Stone Face suddenly sat up, eyes opened, one hand meeting his while she shouted the word, “Smoke!"

Raven jumped back.

In nightclothes, the woman leaped from her bed, and with astonishing poise, she put on her animal slippers. Then she looked at him, asking herself one awful question before telling him, “Hurry,” and running out of the bedroom.

From the hallway, she called out, “Help me save my home!"

They used well water and two long hoses, and the old woman emptied five different little bottles at the base of the fire, the bottles full of white suds and gases that made them dizzy. And when the fire flared up again, she found a sixth tank, and Raven climbed into the coals with a hose, choking the last of the fire with water pumped up from the belly of the world. Then he told her how the fire must have begun. She hadn't asked how, or even looked at him with a questioning face. Yet he volunteered everything, including the story about the demon children and One-Less and what he had no choice but to do. He was crying before the story was half-done, and by the end, telling her about the ghost, he could barely speak because of his sobbing, and she had an arm around him and her voice was in his ear, saying, “There, there. You did what was right. There, there."

Blue Clad returned a little before dawn.

Seeing the damage—the blackened wall and the partly consumed roof—had no apparent effect on him. The heavy face couldn't wear any more pain. He stared at the house for just a few moments and then at his son sitting beneath the blue light. Then Stone Face came out of the house with a shovel full of ashes, and she spoke to him, but he interrupted her, saying, “I know already. His grandfather told me.” Then the man shook his head and stared at Raven again, for an even longer time now, gathering up his courage.

When he approached, Raven said, “I cannot stay."

"No, you can't,” said Blue Clad, in his own tongue. “What you need is some distance, and time."

But when the young man stood, he found a huge hand squeezing his shoulder, and a quiet certain voice said, “And you can't live out on the grass either. I won't let that happen, son."

"What then?” Raven asked.

"Your uncle,” said Blue Clad. “I have a number where I can reach him. I'll call and explain some of it ... just enough of it ... and then I'll take you to him. For now, you should live with him."

"But will he accept me?” Raven wondered aloud.

Blue Clad appeared genuinely surprised by the doubt. “Shadow-Below is a good man. A very good man, I think. I've known him forever, and he's very, very fond of you. So yes, he will take you. I'm sure of it."

Shadow-Below lived among the worst of the demons, in a world of comfort and great strangeness. Just the idea of joining him made Raven's head spin, and he had to lean against the big hand, letting it help hold him up.

Back in the cottonwood's shadow, the ghost was watching everything.

"I think it will follow me,” said Raven, nodding at the spirit while speaking barely above a whisper. “One-Less hates me that much."

Blue Clad studied the young face in front of him. Then he looked off in the proper direction, and maybe he saw something. Or maybe he didn't. Either way, his face stiffened for a few moments, and he took a long slow breath between clenched teeth. Then he told his son, “I can't pretend to know what it will do. But think of this, Raven. Think of all the rattlesnakes living between here and your old home. Did that ghost lure you across any of them? No. No, it waited till you were a few steps away from finding help. And that fire that it might have set? That's just a nuisance blaze. If a spirit wanted to be purely malicious, it would have dislodged a gas line and pumped propane into the house, then stood back waiting for a pilot light to blow everything to Hell."

Raven shook his head, admitting, “I don't understand."

"One-Less doesn't want to kill anyone,” his father promised. “He just wants you to be miserable in life."

As the sun rose, the ghost began to drift closer.

"And now that I'm thinking about it,” Blue Clad continued, “this might not be a bad thing to have. A spirit with a kind of power ... an entity that believes in most of the things you believe in...."

The ghost was dissolving into the first hard light of day.

"As hard as it is to accept,” said Raven's father, “your enemies can make the very best allies."

Startled, the boy stared at the lined face.

"And you know why, Raven? Do you? It's because when we pick our enemies, we look for our own qualities—we hunt for ourselves—deep inside other people's bodies...."

Child of a Rainless Year, by Jane Lindskold, Tor Books, 2005; $14.95.

I like pretty much everything Lindskold has turned her hand to and don't understand why her work doesn't have a higher profile in the field. I suspect it might be for one of the very reasons I like her books so much: she's not afraid to shift gears in terms of style and content.

She excels at big fat fantasies, with large casts and well-developed worlds (such as the Firekeeper/Wolf series). But she has also written a lean tech thriller (Donnerjack, in collaboration with the late Roger Zelazny), a romp of a contemporary fantasy (the Changer books), and a riveting historical (The Buried Pyramid).

I've enjoyed them all, but I think Child of a Rainless Year might well be my favorite to date. I'm not entirely sure why. It could be the New Mexican setting and the well-documented and fascinating history of that state's town of Las Vegas (along with the very fact that it exists). It could be the art which encompasses both traditional painting and collage as well as more craft-like expressions such as house-painting that aren't normally associated with fine art. It could be the fresh takes on magic using color, mirrors, kaleidoscopes and the less-well known teleidoscope (basically, a kaleidoscope with a clear lens so that patterns are made from real objects seen through the tube).

Or it might just be that it's a damn fine story, with likable characters, and that Lindskold isn't afraid to let it unfold at a somewhat leisurely pace, allowing the richness of detail to settle happily in the reader instead of getting lost in a blur of fast action.

The plot, on the surface, is very simple: Mira Fenn once lived in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Upon the mysterious disappearance of her mother Colette, she was sent to live with a foster couple in Idaho, where she grew from a young child into a woman who teaches high school art. When her foster parents die, she learns that she has inherited the old family home in Las Vegas.

She returns to deal with legalities of it all only to become entranced with both the unusual building and its hereditary caretaker, Domingo. Instead of putting the place up for sale, she moves in and begins to help Domingo restore the paintwork on the outside of the building. She also starts to look into her mother's disappearance, which is when she falls into her own looking-glass world.

And soon we're meeting mysterious house spirits, messages in kaleidoscopes, earthy beer-drinking spirits, mirror magic, and all sorts of unearthly wonders. It's all charming and peculiar and more than a little dangerous.

I loved everything about this book, from the subtle magics to the depictions of the house and the landscape, from Mira's character to the diary sections written by her foster mother in which we see a ‘60s Midwestern housewife blossom with intellectual and mystical curiosity.

As I mentioned, the pace is slow, which might turn off an impatient reader, but it was perfect for me. Everything isn't resolved in a tidy fashion at the end, either, but it answered all the questions enough for me. Where it didn't, I was happy to fill in the gaps for myself.

This one's definitely a career high for Lindskold and highly recommended.

Valiant by Holly Black, Simon & Schuster, 2005,$16.95.

Now don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the Spiderwick books for what they were. But every time one came out, I knew a twinge of disappointment that it wasn't Black's sophomore follow-up to her brilliant Tithe. I wasn't looking for a sequel. I just wanted to see her tackle another story with a bit more edge and meat to it than the rather light-hearted adventures of the Grace children.

So imagine my delight when recently browsing the YA section of my local bookshop to find Valiant waiting for me on the shelf.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating for readers who shy away from books with a YA designation: some of the most innovative and cutting-edge work is published as Young Adult. The themes are often far more mature than the “adult” books, while the writing can be just as good, and is sometimes better.

Valiant is a prime example. Yes, the characters are young, but they move through a dark and troubling world that is all the more harrowing because it sits right outside our own comfortable homes.

It opens with seventeen-year-old Valerie Russell running away to New York City after discovering her boyfriend in the arms of her mother. She falls in with some other runaways, squatting in an abandoned subway station, and soon discovers that her new companions live on the edge of a world where magic and reality coexist.

In no time at all, Val finds herself bound in service to a troll named Ra-vus and caught up in the mystery of who is killing the fairies of New York.

That brief summary of the plot might not seem particularly innovative, but Black puts enough twists and turns into it to keep even a jaded reader from figuring out where it's going next. And the freshness of her work lies more in the harsh realities that fill the lives of her characters.

Living on the street isn't pleasant or pretty, even without the menace of Unseelie fairies, and Black doesn't shy from viewing it with an unflinching eye. And her characters aren't anywhere near perfect. They mess up—badly—but it's to Black's credit that we still care about them. Maybe we care so much because of their frailties.

It's easy to be brave when you're the Chosen One of Legend—as we meet in so many fantasy books. But it can be more admirable to rise above one's fears and weaknesses when fate and destiny aren't on your side.

Like Tithe, this new novel is a wonderful example of just how powerful and relevant a YA fantasy novel can be.

Batman: The Complete Knightfall Saga, Time Warner AudioBooks, 2005, $22.98.

Superman Lives! Time Warner AudioBooks, 2005, $22.98.

I'm at a bit of a loss as to who would constitute the audience for these particular dramatizations. They're taken from BBC radio adaptations from 1994, written and directed by Dirk Maggs, with full cast and sound effects, and they do a wonderful job dramatizing a couple of multi-issue story-arcs from the runs of two of DC Comics flagship comic book titles.

But...

The storylines, voicings and sound effects are very much gee-whiz bang comic book flash. I could see them being big hits in, oh, say, the forties, when they would be state-of-the-art productions. But they seem anachronistic in the present day.

Much of the charm of a comic book, even a gee-whiz bang one, is in the art, but the only art you get here are the covers. Film adaptations can be fun or painful, depending on how they're handled, but again, it's the visuals that carry them, not the story or characterizations.

(Let me just add here that I wish it was different, that story and characterization meant as much to everyone in the adaptation process as it does to the artists and writers who create the original publications, but too often, that's not the case, and not all the wishing or head-scratching bewilderment of the audience seems to make much of a difference.)

Today we have a wealth of comic books, film adaptations, computer games, and other media to attract the aficionado of this sort of material, so it will take a particular old-fashioned mindset to be able to appreciate what's been done in these two audio dramatizations.

I don't think that's a bad thing. It's just that it seems to me that the audience for these is rather limited and I wonder how the titles will do commercially. It would be nice if they sold well enough that some more challenging dramatizations would be made available.

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.

The King in the Window, by Adam Gopnik, Miramax Books/Hyperion Books for Children, 2005, $19.95.

Longtime readers of Adam Gopnik's marvelous essays as The New Yorker's Paris Correspondent (collected in the bestselling Paris to the Moon, 2000) know that he is a writer who could sell foie gras to vegans. Now, with the appearance of The King in the Window, a spectacularly fine children's novel, Gopnik may well have earned himself a place on the shelf beside another legendary New Yorker author, E. B. White. The King in the Window has all the markings of a genuine classic, a l Charlotte's Web; or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or The Indian in the Cupboard or From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I got the same atavistic rush reading The King in the Window as I did from my first encounters with those other books, a long time ago in a library far far away. I'll confess to having felt burnt out by the cascade of YA fantasies over the last few years, all those ill-begotten progeny untimely rip't from Harry Potter's success (the editor of this magazine recently noted that twenty-five percent of the new books he'd received for review were YA novels). It's like trying to keep up with alt-rock bands: the Kills? the Killers? the Thrills? the Fillers? the Hives? the Heaves? Eragon? Aragorn? Estragon? Estrogen?

The King in the Window was something I scarcely hoped to encounter again, its author's well-noted facility notwithstanding: a fantasy with an original conceit, beautifully written, funny, warm, and moving, even (quelle horreur) mildly educational. Okay, it falls apart a bit at the end, but I've always felt that even Roald Dahl faltered a bit with that Great Glass Elevator. For any confirmed fantasy-lover who has sickened on stale literary beer composed of the dregs of dragons, trolls, elves, wizardlings, ersatz prophecies and spunky child protagonists, here is a glass of Veuve Cliquot to be savored, though I suspect most readers will down The King in the Window in one long gulp.

In a brief afterward, Gopnik notes that his book's appellation contle is Paris; the novel was conceived there, and its author's love for the city suffuses the novel like a blush. The central character is Oliver Parker, an American boy whose father writes for a U.S. newspaper. Oliver has lived in Paris since he was three. On the evening of Epiphany—January 6, Twelfth Night; the Feast of the Kings and as important a holiday as Christmas to the French—Oliver, as usual, finds the prize in his piece of galette, the traditional Epiphany cake: a little gold key.

Then his parents did what they always did. They both stood up, and his mother very ceremoniously placed the [paper] crown on Oliver's head while his father saluted him. To anyone looking in from the window, it would have looked like a very solemn coronation, even though Oliver was eleven years old. “God, Dad,” Oliver muttered—but he didn't say it very loudly.

But later that night, Oliver learns that someone is looking in the window: “a boy in blue, with lilies on his clothing and long hair to his shoulders, gazing gravely at him."

The boy beckons Oliver, names him as King and calls him to do battle, then disappears. The next day, mysteriously alarming encounters follow, with Neige, the beautiful girl who lives upstairs from Oliver, and Madame Sonia, his favorite teacher; and so it is that on Saturday morning Oliver hightails it to the Louvre, “searching for what, he wasn't sure.” There he finds, and steals, a crystal sword. In a nice break with tradition, two of the Louvre's guards witness this, and for the rest of the novel Oliver is pursued by representatives of the mundane world, as well as those from the supernatural one.

The crystal sword leads him to Versailles and the palace's famed Galerie des Glaces: the Hall of Mirrors; and it is here that Gopnik's luminous creation begins to burn through the contemporary Parisian landscape, itself an otherworldly place to American eyes. Within the glass panes of Versailles—within all the windows of our world—live the window wraiths, who are most emphatically not ghosts. Or, as explained by Franois, the boy whom Oliver first glimpsed on Epiphany,

"You see, ghosts come from another world and haunt you, but window wraiths are the world. We're the memory of the world. We're here for good. You're the ones who come and go like ghosts. You haunt us...

"...When you look into a window, what you see is not you—or not entirely you. It's really a window wraith, looking back at you. There's a window wraith inside every old window. We ... look back at you the way you'd like to look, not quite the way you really look, but with something extra—to make you look a little bit better."

Well, I thought, that explains a lot. I read the passage quoted above and had that Aha! experience you live for as a reader of the fantastic: the sense of entering a writer's invented world and realizing that this, indeed, is the way the true world must work, the world within or encompassing or flowing alongside our own. The very best fantasies make these revelatory visions of our world seem far more real than the everyday versions we suspect are not, cannot, be the real truth—think of the mannequins living inside department stores in John Collier's “Evening Primrose,” the Prisoner's Aid Society of mice in Margery Sharp's Miss Bianca books; Roald Dahl's witches with their scratchy wigs, Sylvia Townsend Warner's mannered fairies, and Dodie Smith's sophisticated canine society in The Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Starlight Barking; T. H. White's Mistress Masham's Repose and John Crowley's Edgewood, and the Looking-Glass world that Lewis Carroll's Alice enters, and to which Gopnik gives more than a tip of the hat in his novel. These are all secret histories that invest the domestic and the mundane with a glow that has something within it of the sublime; not just the supernatural, but a faint intimation of the sacred, the way the world should be. You might think this is a heavy burden for a children's book to bear, but aren't the most beloved children's books also sacred texts of a sort?

And isn't Paris where all good Americans are supposed to go when they die? Oliver has the great good fortune of being alive to enjoy it.

But he quickly learns that the city, indeed the entire world, is imperiled by the Master of Mirrors, who enslaved the vain aristocrats of Versailles by capturing their souls. Only a relative few of the palace's inhabitants survived, by virtue of being busy with creating works of art or science or philosophy. They are known as Those Whose Backs Were Turned (to the mirrors), and their ranks include Molire, Racine, the composer Marc Antoine Charpentier; father-and-son spymasters Antoine and Bonaventure Rossignol; Andre Le Notre, who designed Versailles’ gardens; and the duc de Richelieu, the only aristocrat not to have been captured by the Magister Speculum.

"He was in charge of the king's entertainment, and so he never looked up at the mirrors,” [Molire] whispered to Oliver, “he is a very great figure. He is the man who invented mayonnaise!"

Those Whose Backs Were Turned join forces with Oliver, Neige, and an odorous army of clochards (street drunks—think Bowery winos with French accents and a Gallic sense of higher purpose) to find and defeat the Master of Mirrors before he can enslave the rest of the City of Light. Gopnik's plotting is intricate, deft, and, for the most part, surprising, so I won't reveal much more of it here. But above all, and for all the complexities of its narrative, The King in the Window is, as befitting a book about windows and mirrors, a novel of contrasts: between irony and rhetoric, wit and wisdom; between the American resignation to getting a job done, and the French panache for doing so with style. It is also—please forgive me—surprisingly reflective and, yes, wise for a contemporary American children's fantasy. Philip Pullman raised the bar for this kind of writing with His Dark Materials, and while there have been a number of fine novels that have appeared since then, this is the first one that I immediately sat down and began to reread.

This is because, among other things, The King in the Window is very, very funny. Gopnik's famously aphoristic style at first seems close to merely arch, when channeled through the mouths of the window wraiths Molire and Racine.

But then we meet Mrs. Pearson, one of the most instantly memorable characters in children's literature. Not since the Wart's Merlyn, or since Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler set Claudia and her brother Jamie sorting through her mixed-up files has there been such a formidable ally to a Young Person in Distress.

Mrs. Pearson! Lucy Pearson! ... She was, well, about a hundred years old, Oliver knew, and she came originally from England. She was one of three scandalous sisters, and then she had gone to live with some very weird-looking French guy with a mustache. She wrote books, always about the Grand Sicle. Whenever a new one came out, his father would go to interview her, and she would say mean things about people.

A sort of cross between Lady Antonia Fraser and Nancy Mitford, with a bit of Lady Bracknell thrown in, Mrs. Pearson is not merely mean. She is also one of the Witty, who in Gopnik's world—called The Way—rank with the Wise and the Watchful in terms of importance. Mrs. Pearson throws off witticisms the way a prism refracts color.

When intelligent people are challenged by something evil, they often try to convince each other that it is merely squalid.

It is civilized to tell small lies. But not to tell someone that he is the first on the death list of the dread Master of Mirrors? That would be impolite.

The loveliest setpiece in The King in the Window is the dinner Oliver shares with Mrs. Pearson at Le Grand Vefour, the (real) historic, three-Michelin-star restaurant where she orders chicken breast with truffles ("the only healthy meal one can eat at a place like this") and two bottles of Billecart Ros. Gopnik's novel is worth reading for this chapter alone, which, among its many delights, seems to contain an homage to one of Merlyn's loveliest speeches in The Sword in the Stone. Like John Crowley's Little, Big, The King in the Window references numerous children's books, especially Lewis Carroll's work, without being derivative; in a later chapter Mrs. Pearson gives a recitation of the various types of lies, organized by color, that should be required reading for anyone considering a career in politics.

The King in the Window is children's literature of the highest order, which means literature of the highest order. Its secret history includes instructions for finding the hidden, crowd-free entrance to the Louvre; a thumbnail history of glassmaking, and Mrs. Pearson's means of preserving the bubbles in a bottle of champagne (it involves a white silver spoon). Such things may seem to be impossibly precious, adult knowledge to impart to young readers, and in many ways The King in the Window does seem like a highly polished stepping stone for American dream-children of a sensual, Francophile bent, the missing link between the Madeline books and Zazie Dans Le Mtro, and A Sport and a Pastime and Before Sunset. I personally think Mrs. Pearson's knowledge has more in common with Merlyn's than with anything a kid could learn from Hogwarts.

My only quibble with this book is the hyperactive plot-twist that begins to build up halfway through; it's clever, but it feels noisy and unnecessarily aggressive, and—there is no polite way to say this—excessively American, like replacing your vintage Peugeot with an SUV, or spiking that Billecart Ros with Mountain Dew. The King in the Window is published by Hyperion Books for Children, a division of Miramax, and one can sense the cold breath of the Master of Mirrors at work here, whispering that perhaps a few more computer gags and special effects would make the project more movie-ready. Once upon a time we fell in love with novels and, usually, were disappointed when we saw their filmed version. Now the disappointing bits are too often written right into the book, an unfortunate collusion between author and marketplace that, in this instance, leaches a bit of the sweetness from a lovely book.

But not much of it. Despite what disgruntled authors may think, overpraising rather than its reverse is the occupational hazard of reviewers. It may be that my palate has been spoiled by imbibing too much literary plonk, but The King in the Window seems like the real thing to me, a book both wise and witty that, like the fine wines the redoubtable Mrs. Pearson savors, will withstand the test of time.

There she was: as beautiful as Hall had always imagined she would be; as mysterious, as veiled and seductive....

"Venus."

"How's that, Cap?"

"Just talking to myself, Chang. Sorry."

"Roger, Cap."

And please stop with the Cap, Hall wanted to add, but didn't. “What's our ROD?"

"Rate of Descent, ninety meters per second. We are now eleven seconds from atmospheric insertion, Cap."

"Right on time. Loosen your collar."

"Collar, sir?"

"It's going to get hot.” Were the Chinese all so literal? No matter: everybody knew hot. Venus was 500 degrees Celsius at the surface, under the thick, heat-trapping atmosphere.

Which was less than a kilometer below—a sea of white clouds, approaching fast. “Collins, you still have visual?” Hall asked, switching to open feed.

"Affirmative, Venus lander,” a tiny female voice replied from high above. Ever since Apollo 11, every orbiter pilot had been called Collins. “I'm carrying a live video feed to both Houston and Burroughs. I hope it looks as good to them as it does to me."

"If they're watching, Collins,” Hall muttered. Forty, fifty years ago, and the whole world would have been watching. Now, Hall knew, the first Venus landing would be lucky to make the nightly news.

"We're ten seconds from atmospheric insertion, Cap,” said Chang. “Nine, eight, seven...."

"Just lost visual, Venus lander,” said Collins. “You're in."

As if I didn't know, thought Hall, watching the white clouds whip past his viewscreen, thickening to a milky paste, like chowder. Only not so tasty: sulfuric acid, a bitter froth on the poisonous atmosphere below.

Flying blind. They would be blind from here on in. With no visible light penetrating the thick cloud layer, Venus wasn't a planet for sightseers.

"Temperatures in the envelope, Cap,” said Chang. “Want the numbers?"

"No need.” The heat-shielded nose of the lander, through the windscreen, was glowing a dull red. Dull was good. The lander was dropping and losing speed at the same time. Hall could feel the first stirrings of gravity in his bones, a welcome feeling after nine months of weightlessness, like falling into a parent's open arms.

Or a lover's.

"You're go for final burn,” Chang said. Hall nodded, punched in the GO sequence, and leaned forward to tighten his restraining belts. Beside him, reflected in the instruments, hung the solemn moon of Chang's broad, serious face. This was it. If the next twenty-odd minutes went well, he and Chang would become the first humans to set foot on the second planet.

Venus.

For Hall it was the realization of a lifelong dream. He had sacrificed much of his childhood, most of his adolescence, and all of two marriages, working his way through the ranks of the Chinese-American Space Service, to get this berth as Commander of the Venus expedition.

For Chang, who knew? Even though they had slept side by side for nine months in ursa-sleep, as intimate as lovers, Hall hardly knew his Engineer. Just as he hardly knew his Pilot, Collins, who had slept on his other side.

Chang had drawn the slot because of his work building the last ill-fated robot probe.

Perhaps it's appropriate, Hall thought, as he braced against the deceleration. The dreamer and the engineer—

A mighty roar filled the cabin.

The lander shuddered and the white mist rushing past the windscreen turned orange, in a swirl of chemical exhaust. Hall braced his feet against the floor; Chang did the same, his eyes tightly closed.

The burn was vicious. The gentle stirrings of gravity gathered into a brutal punch as the deceleration yanked both men forward against their straps.

Then, six seconds later, it was over. The roar was replaced by the faint whistling of the atmosphere.

Chang's eyes were open; his voice was matter-of-fact. “1922 kph; we have 1878, 1833...."

"Perfect,” breathed Hall. They had scrubbed off almost 3000 kph, right on target. And the trim little Venus lander was flying. It had been transformed from a clumsy rocket to a sleek, swift glider. Hall waggled the wings, just a little, and grinned at Chang.

"Down we go,” he said.

The display projected on the windscreen showed the rolling hills of the planet, 37,000 meters below. It was a simulation, of course. No details, only outlines. Hall couldn't actually see through the thick, poisonous atmosphere, nor would he be able to see when they emerged into the perpetual night below the clouds. But the planet had been mapped by radar from several orbiters since 1978, and it was now being remapped in realtime by the lander's sensors. The contours on the screen showed little deviation from the maps. Somewhere over the simulated horizon line (already losing its curvature) was the dry lake bed that would receive their historic first footprints.

Bootprints, rather. At 500 degrees, the surface of Venus was hot enough to melt most metals; but not, he hoped, their thermolite suits or the titanium hull of the lander.

"1355,” said Chang. “Go for spoilers, Cap."

Cap again, thought Hall grimly as he snapped open the hydraulics. The lander shuddered, more gently this time, and the speed dropped to just under 1250—jet plane speed.

So far, all go. “Collins, you still there?"

"For another few minutes, Commander. I'm over the horizon in fourteen, but you're landing in eleven. Can you see the lake bed yet?"

"Not yet,” said Hall, studying the outlines on the simulation, looking for the oval that had been identified as a dried-up methane sink. “It should be coming over the horizon soon. What's our temp, Chang?"

"There's a problem, Cap. I'm getting some funny readings."

"Funny?"

"We're at, uh—whoa!"

Whoa, indeed. The windscreen had filled with light, dimming out the display. And suddenly, instead of the slowly shifting lines of the simulation, Hall saw rolling hills far below, dun colored, dotted with dark spots that looked almost like trees.

"We're under the cloud layer,” Hall said.

"Cap, I can see!” breathed Chang.

"Me too,” said Hall.

But how could that be? The clouds were supposed to cover a dark soup of superheated carbon dioxide. And yet—there was the surface, a few kilometers below.

"Elevation?” Hall asked.

"7000 meters. Cap, there's something strange here."

"You're telling me. Rate of drop?"

"Twenty-two."

"Collins, can you hear me? This is unexpected. We're under the clouds, and it's light. We can see the surface. Can you hear me?"

"I can hear you, Commander,” said Collins. “But I don't think I'm hearing you right."

"You're hearing me right. I'm looking at the surface of Venus. We're under the clouds and the atmosphere is clear. And there's light! Clouds above. Hills below. There's the dry lake, just came over the horizon."

A real horizon. Sharp, clear, and no longer curved. Under a pearl-gray sky.

"The atmosphere is much cooler than it ought to be,” said Chang. “I'm reading nitrogen. And oxygen!"

"Something is wrong with your instruments, Venus lander,” said Collins, her voice already fading into static as she approached the horizon. “XZXZXZXZXZX ready to abort?"

"Negative,” said Hall. Abort meant giving up the mission—and the dream of a lifetime. One burn would send the lander back up, into orbit, to reunite with the Venus Wanderer. There would be no second try at a landing. Not in this lifetime.

"Commander, the protocols say abort if XZXZXZX instrument problems—"

"I'm losing you,” said Hall, switching off the open line. He adjusted the flaps and picked up a little airspeed. “Chang, what do you say?"

"Nothing wrong with my instruments, Cap."

"Not about your instruments. About landing."

"Me? It's not up to me, sir. It's your decision."

"Exactly,” said Hall, turning back to the task of flying the lander down toward the dry lake. “Collins, this is Venus lander. Negative on abort."

"You turned her off, Cap. Remember?"

"You're right. So I did. Grab your balls and pray."

"Sir?"

"I'm taking her down,” said the dreamer to the engineer.

Hall threw the lander into a long turn. A long, slow, sweet turn. In the thick, if transparent, air, the stubby little craft was handling like a sailplane. It was like flying over the California hills on a summer day, even to the trees below. Could they be trees? Still too high to tell.

The lander dropped slowly, too slowly, through the thick air, and Hall had to turn back and circle over the dry lake, losing speed and altitude with each long pass.

They were trees. But they couldn't be. And Hall had to concentrate on the dry lake: an elongated oval, silver amidst dun-colored hills, straight ahead and only a thousand meters below. Eight hundred, seven hundred....

He switched on open feed. “Collins, we're on approach."

"She's gone, Cap. She won't be back over the horizon for another hour and a half. This circling took more time than we thought."

Oh well, thought Hall. The landing wouldn't be transmitted in real time anyway, with Mars forty minutes away by radio, and Earth fifty-five. What was important was the event itself. The touchdown, moments away. First men on Venus. He trimmed and straightened, preparing to pancake down on the dry lake bed.

"Cap, I'm getting another funny reading."

"Funny?"

"The dry lake. It's not dry—"

Hall saw it at the last instant: ripples, waves on the smooth surface. It was too late to pull up, and the lander hit not dry gravel but a shimmering liquid. It skipped, once, twice, then nosed down, enveloping the windscreen in silver spray.

"Hang on, Chang!"

The nose plowed under, plunging the cabin into darkness. Then it bobbed back up and light flooded the cabin.

The lander was rocking gently, like a boat.

"Chang, you okay?"

"Affirmative, Cap."

"What is this stuff?

"It is too thin for molten lead or mercury, and the temp's all wrong. Could be polymeric water, or water eleven, that funny stuff the Russians claim to have discovered back in...."

"Save it for later, Chang. Screw on your helmet. This thing's not designed to float, even on funny water. We'd better equalize pressure and get out while we can."

Both men scrambled out of their barcas and fastened down the helmets of their space suits. Hall turned the valves to equalize cabin pressure with the ninety-plus atmospheres of Venus, but the pressure had barely started building when the door popped open with a sigh that he could hear even through his helmet.

Chang climbed out onto the wing. Hall started to follow when he heard a hissing behind him. He turned and saw the instruments, flashing like casino lights.

Water, flooding the chips, thought Hall, as the panel threw off a shower of sparks. He watched with an odd, detatched, uncanny calm as the instrument lights flared and blinked out, one by one. It was an almost festive performance.

Marooned.

"Cap!” Chang's voice sounded strange. It was coming from outside, not through the suit radio.

Marooned but still in command. “Coming."

Hall pulled himself through the door and stepped out onto the wing. The gravity felt almost Earth normal. He was not as weak as he thought he would be, after the long months of weightlessness in ursa-sleep.

Chang was standing on the wing, grinning.

He was holding his helmet under one arm while he peeled off his thick gloves. He was shouting:

"Cap, the atmosphere! It's Earth normal!"

Chang's voice was faint through Hall's helmet. Hall's first impulse was to order Chang to put his helmet back on so they could talk.

Instead, he took off his own helmet.

"Impossible,” Hall said, the word sounding weak and naked in the open air. Impossible? He took a deep breath. It was the first fresh air he had breathed in nine months.

"Impossible,” he said again, more firmly.

"This stuff is aitch-two-oh!” Chang was kneeling at the trailing edge, splashing one bare hand in the waves.

Hall knelt beside him but didn't pull off his gloves. It didn't seem right.

"It's water, and it's only a couple of feet deep, Cap. I can see the bottom."

"I know.” At least the lander wasn't sinking. Maybe they weren't marooned after all. Chang was a wizard with chips, and—

Hall stood up, suddenly feeling foolish. None of this was possible. Not the water, not the air.

"At least we're close to shore,” Chang said. He pointed to a narrow gravel beach edged with boulders, only twenty or thirty meters away. Behind the rocks were spindly, misshapen trees with large orange leaves.

Trees. Hall almost, but not quite, smiled. “This can't be Venus,” he said.

"Sir?"

"This is not Venus, Chang. It's a dream. An hallucination."

"Not following, Cap."

"Think about it,” said Hall patiently, as if to a child. “Venus with air? Water? We're still in ursa-sleep. This has got to be a dream."

"Doesn't feel like a dream to me, Cap,” said Chang. He splashed water on his face.

"Of course it doesn't,” said Hall. “That's the whole point of a dream.” He clapped his stiff gloves together and blinked twice, hard, expecting to wake up and see the grubby, smelly interior of the Venus Wanderer. Instead, he saw a narrow beach, only a few meters away, waiting for its first footsteps—

But no. Not possible.

"Think about it, Chang. Could we really be standing here, with our helmets off, on the surface of Venus?"

"Seems like it to me, sir."

"Seems! Can't you see, this has got to be our minds pretending, constructing a Venus as we sleep."

"Both having the same dream? How's that?"

Hall shook his head in exasperation. Were engineers all this dense? “I don't know how, Chang. Maybe I'm dreaming you and you're dreaming me. Nobody really understands the physics of ursa-sleep. All I know is, we spent nine months dreaming, side by side, you and me and Collins. And we're still dreaming! Look around you? Is this Venus?"

"I don't know, Cap. It's somewhere."

"It's nowhere! We'll wake up, any minute, still in orbit. Or still on our way from Mars to Venus...."

Or lost in space—Hall felt a sudden chill. What if there had been a malfunction and they were spinning off course, the electrics dead, gasping for air in a dying ship, dreaming of a Venus where they could draw at least one more breath—Do I really want to wake up?

As if in answer, his left boot started to slide toward the edge of the wing.

"Cap!” Chang cried.

The wing was tipping. Hall was falling.

Chang grabbed his arm, then stumbled backward himself, pulling them both off the leading edge. They hit the water on their backs, with a loud splash.

Hall felt his space suit filling with cold water, pouring in through the open collar. His boots found the bottom; it was steep, slippery. He jammed his heels into the soft mud and managed to stand, holding onto Chang's arm. The water was waist deep. His helmet floated by and he grabbed it.

"Damn!” Chang grabbed for his own helmet, already out of reach, which was tipping and starting to sink.

Hall pulled him back, whispering: “Damn."

He pointed at the lander behind them.

It was sinking.

The two men watched in stunned silence as the blunt little ship slowly slid backward into deeper water. The stubby wings were awash, then gone; the water poured in through the open door, then swallowed the door.

Then swallowed the ship, until only the orange tail was showing above the tiny sparkling waves.

"Maybe that's what happened to Robbie,” said Chang.

"Robbie?"

"RB1011. The lost robot lander. Maybe the lake got him. Like it got us."

"I don't know, Chang. Maybe this is some kind of nightmare."

They stood side by side and watched the tail slide farther out and sink deeper, until it came to rest with only the last two feet showing, decorated with the twin flags of the Chinese-American Space Service.

Marooned. Hall had never before appreciated the mournful resonance of the word.

"We might as well head for shore,” he said, pulling off his gloves and dropping them into his upturned helmet. Dream or nightmare, it wasn't over yet, and he was still in command.

He turned away from the lander, their last link with Earth—or Mars—and started toward the shore. There were the spindly trees, the orange leaves, waiting. If this is a dream, Hall thought, it's a damned persistent one.

A steep and muddy one, too. It was hard walking in the waist-deep water. Hall's boots slipped back one step for every two he took.

Finally, a few meters off shore, the mud gave way to gravel. The water was only knee deep. Hall stopped to wait for Chang. Even now, even in this confusing dream from which he couldn't seem to awaken, there were protocols. They should step ashore together, side by side. First men on Venus, more Cortez than Armstrong—

Chang grabbed his arm. His grip was tight, even through the thick space suit.

"Cap, look."

Hall saw it too: a man's face, peering out from behind a boulder. Cold red eyes.

Then it was gone.

"What was that, Cap? A dream, right?” Chang sounded almost hopeful.

Hall's throat was tight with terror. I just looked death in the eye. He shook his head slowly and forced himself to speak. It came out as a whisper. “Don't think so, Chang. This is no ursa dream. It's worse. It's Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge."

"Occurrence, Cap?"

"It's a story, Chang. A guy is hung, and just as his neck snaps he has this long hallucination.” Explaining it somehow made Hall's terror recede. “His last second seems to take minutes, hours. He even thinks he has escaped. But it's just the last gasp of the neurons, flooding his brain with images."

"Don't read science fiction, Cap."

"It's not science fiction. We crashed, damn it!” said Hall. He turned in the knee-deep water and pointed back toward the lander's tail, sticking above the water like a shark's fin—or a tombstone. “We're already dead, Chang. We just don't know it yet. Our neurons are flooded with dopamine, so we think we are breathing, walking, surviving. It's a kind of mercy. But when we reach the shore, we die. Game over."

"There he is again."

A face was peering out from behind a rock. A man's face, with a broad forehead, long gray beard, and little beady eyes as red as coals.

Then it was gone again.

"Wish we had a weapon,” muttered Chang.

"Weapons are beside the point,” said Hall. His terror was gone. He felt only a sort of resignation, a strange eagerness, or at least willingness, to get it over with, whatever it was. “We might as well play it out. Come on."

The two men splashed out of the water, stiff in their bulky suits, side by side. First footprints, thought Hall, as his boot crunched loudly on the coarse sand. And last.

He took another step, fully expecting to blink out, to disappear into nothingness.

But he didn't.

Oddly disappointed, he set down his helmet and picked up a handful of sand. Cool, wet sand. He took a deep breath. The air was warm and sweet. He looked up and saw an unbroken roof of white clouds, gleaming, like pearl. Is this, then, death?

Chang didn't seem to think so. He was peeling off his space suit. His orange CASS longjohns were wet to the knees. The orange was the same orange as the leaves on the spindly trees between the rocks.

Unsurprising, thought Hall. As unsurprising as the human face or the water or the air. We build our dreams from the reality we know; the reality that built us.

Our nightmares too, he thought, looking out toward the lonely fin of the sunken lander.

"What now, Cap?” Collins was holding a baseball-sized stone, scanning the rocks behind the beach. Alert. Prepared. The engineer, even in dreams.

And I'm the commander, Hall reminded himself.

"Help me with my suit,” he said. “And then—"

But what was there to say? How do you take command in a dream? How do you negotiate a dream that refuses to end?

He was saved by a tiny female voice.

"Venus lander, can you read? Venus lander?"

Collins! Hall tipped the gloves out of his helmet and spoke into it, holding it in his hands like a bowl.

"Collins, we're down."

"Thank God I found you! Commander, I lost the lander's signal. I'm only getting one helmet tag."

"We lost the lander, Collins. I think we crashed."

"You think?"

Back up, thought Hall. “We're alive, for now. It seems like it anyway. But everything is strange here. We're out of our suits."

"Atmosphere Earth-normal!” Chang put in, bending over to shout into the helmet. “Oxygen 19.1, Nitrogen 77.5, trace ozone and methane."

And something else— Hall was suddenly conscious of a faint but familiar odor, blowing in from somewhere in his past—

"I'm not reading you, Venus lander,” said Collins. “Are you in trouble? What am I to transmit to Burroughs and Houston?"

"Trouble? Tell them—"

Hall stopped. Behind Chang, he saw the man's face again. It was on the body of a horse, which had just stepped out from behind the rock.

A gray horse with wide sorrel stripes, like a rusted zebra.

"Tell them what, Venus lander? Can you hear me?"

"Tell them—"

Hall couldn't find any words.

The centaur-like creature was trotting toward them, across the sand. Mounted on its back was a woman wearing a white tunic, her long legs bare. Her blonde hair was cut as short as a boy's, and she was nocking an arrow in a bow.

"Chang!"

Chang turned just as the arrow flew. He threw the stone but missed. He yelled something in Chinese, then fell backward, knocking the helmet from Hall's hands.

Hall let it fall and roll away. His eyes were fixed in horror on the little barbed point protruding from the back of Chang's shoulder, shiny with blood.

The woman was nocking another arrow.

And there was that strange, familiar smell again—

Hall heard hoofbeats. He turned and saw another centaur galloping toward him. The woman on its back was swinging a studded club.

"Venus lander, are you there?"

It seemed as pointless to fight as to flee. Hall just stood and stared at Death riding straight at him.

It seemed the only dignified thing to do.

The smell was horse, he realized. A sweet and sour mixture of sweat and manure: he remembered it from his grandfather's farm in Pennsylvania.

"Commander, I'm losing you!” the helmet cried from behind him on the sand.

Then there was the club, descending toward his head, and Hall's last thoughts were surprisingly peaceful, almost relieved: So this is how the dream ends.

Hall smelled horse and knew he was dreaming.

That was good. It is good to dream.

You don't die in your dreams and you don't dream when you are dead.

Or do you?

He didn't want to open his eyes. He knew that if he did the dream would be over. Instead of the rough plank walls of his grandfather's barn, he would see the gray steel walls of the Venus Wanderer, slick with recycled moisture.

Or maybe—nothing at all.

It was still possible that he was dead. Probable, even. That everything that had happened since the “landing” on Venus was still going on, narrowing like a stream going the wrong way into a vivid, if not particularly convincing, illusion of life.

Whatever it was, he wasn't going to push it.

Better to keep his eyes closed, pretend sleep, breathe in the sweet smell of horse and barn wood and hay. Better to let the dream run its course.

"Cap."

Hall opened his eyes.

He saw four centaurs, standing with their eyes closed. Dozing. Sorrel and gray, like his grandfather's horses. Except that horses don't have stripes; or human heads.

"Damn,” he said aloud. He tried to stand but he couldn't move. He was sitting, tied to something. A tree?

"Cap."

Chang was behind him, out of sight, apparently tied to the same tree. Back to back.

"Chang! You okay?"

"I'm marooned on Venus, Cap. I'm tied to a tree. I've been shot with an arrow. But I guess I'm okay."

Hall twisted in the ropes, trying to see Chang's face. “Are you being sarcastic?"

"No, sir. They pulled the arrow out. It hurt like hell. Then they put one of those orange leaves on it, all chewed up with horse spit. The horses chewed it up. One for you too."

"For me?"

"Your head, Cap. You got clobbered. Don't you remember?"

"I'm remembering it all now. If it was a dream, would I remember it?"

"Sir?"

"Nothing, Chang.” Dream or not, Hall was still in command. He shook his head, to clear it. The helmet was lying on the ground between the two centaurs, upside down, like an empty bowl. Through a gap in the rocks, Hall could see the lander—or at least its tail, sticking up out of the water. It was like a rebuke.

"Where did they go?"

"The women?"

"The amazons, Chang. Whatever they are."

"Oh, they're women, all right, Cap. When they leaned over I could see down their little dresses. They did the orange leaf thing, then they took off behind that rock over there."

"How long have they been gone? How long have I been out?"

"An hour at most. Not long."

"And where are we?"

"Somewhere near the lake. They didn't take us anywhere. Just tied us up and gathered the leaves I was telling you about. Gave them to the horses to chew up and spit out."

"The centaurs."

"I didn't know such horses had a name, Cap. They've been asleep the whole times. Dozing on their feet."

Hall studied the four centaurs. Their eyes were closed. They snorted as they slept. Their beards were slick with spit. Their donkey tails swung from side to side.

"Solaris,” Hall said.

"Sir?"

"Maybe this illusion is being created by the planet itself. As illogical and unlikely as that seems."

"What illusion, sir?"

"The centaurs, Chang. Do you really think Venus is populated by horses with human heads? Do you really think that's for real?"

"I don't know about that, Cap. I'm tied to a tree. I know that's for real. I can't move my hands."

As if to demonstrate, Chang wiggled his fingers. Hall felt them moving against the small of his back. “Chang, can you feel the rope around my wrist?"

"Yes, sir. This one?"

"See if you can hook your thumbs under it and pull it down off my wrist. Then I can get loose."

"And then what?"

"Then get you loose, Chang!"

"Then what, sir? We have no ship. Nowhere to go. We are marooned here on Venus."

"We're officers in the Chinese-American Space Service, Chang. We have a responsibility to get free."

"That's you, Cap. I'm a civilian employee."

"Quit arguing, Chang, and see if you can get your hands on the rope."

He could. He did. Moments later, Hall was on his feet, rubbing his wrists and arms. Chang was still tied to the tree, looking up and grin-ning.

"What's so damned funny, Chang?"

"That paste on your head. It looks like a kind of hat."

"Never mind that,” said Hall. “Let's get you untied."

He was kneeling, looking for the knot, when Chang's grin disappeared.

Hall looked over his shoulder. One of the centaurs had opened its eyes and was staring straight at him. Little red eyes.

"We come as friends,” said Hall.

The centaur scowled and brayed: WHOONK! Little flecks of leaves and spit were stuck to its beard.

"I don't think they understand,” said Chang.

WHOONK! the centaur brayed. The others opened their eyes and joined in. WHOONK! WHOONK!

"Shit,” said Hall, as the amazons ran back into the clearing. One was nocking an arrow into her bow. The other carried a studded club.

"I am an officer in the Chinese-American Space Service,” Hall said.

The amazon with the club raised it menacingly.

Hall closed his eyes, waiting for the blow.

Chang, who was still on the ground, tied to the tree, said something in Chinese.

Hall opened his eyes.

The amazon was lowering her club. She nodded at the other amazon, who set down her bow and untied Chang.

Hall watched, dumbfounded. He had never really understood the word before; now he did.

"What did you say?” he asked as Chang stood up, rubbing his wrists.

"I just translated,” said Chang. “I told them you were an officer in the Chinese-American Space Service."

"So they understand Chinese?"

Chang shrugged. “Cantonese, Cap. I guess."

"Good! Try telling them something else. Tell them we come in peace. Tell them to let us go."

Chang said something in Chinese.

The amazons both shook their heads—which apparently meant the same thing on Venus as on Earth.

The uphills were the worst.

The centaurs had a choppy, bone-jarring gait.

Hall had a splitting headache. He was riding bareback and his butt was sore. His hands were tied behind him too tightly, and his fingers were getting numb.

They had been traveling for what seemed hours through a desolate landscape, broken only by dun-colored rocks and a few spindly trees. There was no trail that Hall could see, but the amazons, or the centaurs perhaps, seemed to know where they were going.

The amazons rode ahead, with Chang between them on his centaur, carrying the helmet on his lap. Chang wasn't tied; apparently speaking Chinese gave him special privileges.

Cantonese, whatever.

The dream continued, unbroken. Hall was beginning to get used to it. The pearl-gray sky, lidded with high clouds; the dry creek beds; the thick horse smell of the centaurs; the frowning amazons with their long legs and bare shoulders.

"Chang,” he called out.

"Sir?” Chang dropped back to ride with him. The amazons didn't seem to mind.

"Can you tell where they are taking us?"

"No, sir."

"I mean, can you ask? With the Chinese?"

"Cantonese, Cap. No need to whisper. I don't think they understand anything we say. They never answer."

"Then why are they treating you differently?"

"I don't know, sir. Should I ask them to tie me up?"

"No need to get funny. So they never talk among themselves."

"No, sir. They seem to just sort of know what to do. Sort of like ants."

"It's Solaris, Chang."

"So what, sir?

"Solaris. Suppose—” said Hall, as his centaur started jogging up a long steep slope. He wished he had stirrups, or at least a saddle, but apparently the amazons—or the centaurs—had never heard of them. “Suppose you were a conscious planet attempting to communicate with humans. How would you do it?"

"No idea, Cap,” said Chang. “Never heard of a conscious planet."

Hall shook his head in frustration. It hurt. He waited until they had reached the top of the hill before continuing.

"You would want to appear as something familiar, Chang. You would search through your subjects’ brains for a familiar image, and use that."

"Pretty girls who think like ants?"

"Amazons,” said Hall. “And never mind how they think. It's the illusion that's important. We know for a fact that these are images only; nothing could live here on the surface of Venus."

"What about the arrow, Cap? That was pretty real."

"Just stay alert, Chang. Hang onto the helmet. It's our only chance."

"As you say, sir,” said Chang, riding on ahead to join the two frowning amazons.

They had reached the top of the slope. Ahead, as far as Hall could see, was more of the same: desolate low hills littered with stones the size of cars. Hall realized that he had wanted, had wished for, hoped for, and even come to expect something else: a green park, an ocean shore, or even a small town filled with friendly humans, like Bradbury had imagined on Mars.

Instead, there was just more of the same.

The downhill was smoother. Perhaps, thought Hall, it had to do with the centaurs’ short hind legs. It was as if they were designed to go downhill.

Hours later, they stopped to eat. If Hall had hoped for a fire and some sleep—and he had—he was disappointed again. The amazons stripped a few leaves off a tree and fed them to both the humans and the centaurs.

"Not bad,” said Chang.

The amazons ate nothing themselves. Perhaps they were, Hall thought, like ants. Nobody ever saw ants eat; all they did was work.

He had been allowed off the centaur and untied for the meal, and he ate as slowly as possible, not wanting to get back on. The leaf tasted sort of like toast without butter, the kind his grandmother had made for him when he was being punished. She had served it on a blue china plate and made him sit at the table to eat it. Bread and water. His feet didn't reach the floor. Like riding the centaur with no saddle, no stirrups. Disempowering. Perhaps that was what this was all about.

But to what end? If it was Solaris, if it was an alien intelligence, mining and manipulating his consciousness, what did it want?

"Still no communication?” he asked Chang.

The engineer shook his head and ate another leaf. Do they taste better to him? Hall wondered. The illusion may be different for him, just as the treatment by the amazons is different.

Hall tried to remember the end of Solaris, but couldn't. He had never read the book and had fallen asleep in the movie. Both movies.

XZXZXZXZXZXZX

The helmet on Chang's lap was spitting static; then a voice:

"Commander, can you hear me? This is Venus Wanderer. Commander, can, you hear?"

"Collins!” said Hall. He grabbed the helmet from Chang, and shouted into it: “Collins!"

"XZXZXZX your volume, Commander. I'm going back over the horizon,” the voice said, fading. “I'll try another XZXZXZXZXZX"

"Collins!” Hall shouted.

A frowning amazon took the helmet from his hands and handed it to Chang. The other amazon pulled him to his feet and tied his hands behind his back. Too tightly. She pushed him toward his waiting centaur, which knelt, scowling back at him.

"That was Collins,” Hall said.

"I know, Cap,” said Chang, looking back over his shoulder. He was already mounted, with the helmet in his lap.

"Don't let them take the helmet."

"I'll try, Cap,” said Chang. “They don't like it though."

"Who cares what they like,” said Hall, mounting clumsily. “Collins is real. She's trying to get in touch with us. That means we're not dead."

Not yet, anyway.

"Yes, sir,” said Chang as the centaurs carried them away with their bone-jarring trot. “I'll do my best."

They rode for hours, or was it days? Venus rotates so slowly that one of its days is as long as 243 Earth days, and the light never changed as they rode through low hills, spotted with boulders and clumps of the same tree, apparently the only one on Venus, with the loaf-sized orange leaves.

Venus. Hall knew better.

Yet there it was, all around him. Jarring his spine with every step of the centaur upon which he rode. The smell on the wind was of dust; the water, offered every few hours from a jar on the back of Chang's centaur, tasted of mud and dust, and distance, and alien exile.

Hall learned to doze with his knees gripping the centaur's bony back. Chang, he assumed, did the same. The amazons never closed their eyes, it seemed, or even blinked.

Their eyes were gray, the color of the sky.

Spooky.

The amazons themselves were anatomically human, anatomically female, as far as Hall could tell. They wore no bras under their short, white tunics. Hall found himself looking away whenever they approached and leaned over. He didn't want to see their perfect little breasts.

They were more sinister than seductive. Whatever the purpose of the dream was, if indeed it had a purpose, it was in his power to resist it.

And so he did.

He found himself clinging to his headache; it, at least, was real. So was the ache in his thighs and the pain in his butt. He was alive. He was sure of it. If only Collins would call again!

"Chang!"

The engineer fell back to ride beside him. The helmet on his lap was silent.

"No word from Collins?"

"Nada, Cap. Zip."

"She'll call. Keep listening. How's your shoulder?"

"No problem. That orange leaf is something else. Look.” Chang peeled down the shoulder of his orange CASS-issue longjohns. “Not even a scar."

Of course not, thought Hall. All that is solid melts into air.

He dozed. He woke. He dozed again, only to be awakened by a sharp, repetitive pain that extended from the top of his head to the base of his spine.

The centaurs were plodding up a long, steep, slope.

At the top, Hall expected to see more rocks, more hills, more spindly trees.

When he saw the castle, he was relieved.

At last! he thought, then said, to himself, aloud: “At last we're getting somewhere!"

A narrow trail—the first Hall had seen on Venus—angled down a low bluff to a wide plain littered with stones. And one small, stone castle.

As they rode down the trail, amazons appeared on the castle walls and watched their approach. Hall counted twelve, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, in twos. From a distance they looked as alike as ants.

The castle had seen better days. The stone wall, some twenty feet high, was broken in places and patched with rubble. At the near end, an arched gate overlooked a dry moat.

"You see it, right?” Hall asked, catching up with Chang, who had fallen behind the two amazons.

"The castle? Yes, sir."

"Good. It's consistent.” How to explain it to this unimaginative engineer? “An elaboration of the same general theme as the amazons and the centaurs. An illusion constructed from our shared cultural memories, the narrow region where they intersect and overlap."

"You mean the castle, Cap."

"Ever actually seen a castle, Chang?"

"Sure. In movies. My ex-wife was crazy for The Princess Bride."

"Exactly! Whatever this is, it's feeding off our shared memories. That's why it's so generic."

"Guess so, Cap,” said Chang. “But maybe we shouldn't be talking. They don't like it when we talk."

"Whatever,” said Hall, falling back. He didn't like taking orders from his crew, even though the engineer was apparently right. The lead amazon, the one with the club, was frowning back at him over her shoulder.

I'm real and you're not, Hall thought with a fierce certainty. He attempted to stare her down, then gave up and looked away.

They rode single file down the path, across the plain, and through the moat, which was muddy at the bottom, and entered the castle through the arch. The amazons were descending from the walls, in twos, climbing down over the rough stones.

Up close, they looked as alike as ants.

Hall's centaur scowled and knelt; Hall took the hint and dismounted, stumbling; his legs were stiff. An unsmiling amazon untied his hands. His fingers started to hurt immediately, as the blood flowed back to his fingertips. He wiggled them, like a pianist preparing for a concert.

The pain felt good. It felt real.

The castle was a shabby dream, but at least the dream was developing. Changing. What Hall had been afraid of, he now realized, was that he might be caught in some kind of endless, meaningless loop of illusion, some kind of half-hell.

He wiggled his fingers and looked around.

The courtyard was strewn with rubble, much of it from the walls, which had been breached and repaired in places. Big hinges on the arch showed where a gate had once hung. Now the arch was just a window, opening to the plain and the distant mountains.

Hall's centaur scowled at him as it was led away with the others to a low wood corral against one wall.

Hall scowled back.

At the other end of the courtyard stood a small stone tower, about ten meters high, windowless except for a few slits. There was a wooden door at the bottom.

Hall felt a club against the small of his back, shoving him toward the tower. Chang was stumbling along beside him, carrying the helmet.

Two amazons waited by the door at the base of the tower. One opened it and the other pushed Hall and Chang inside.

The door slammed shut behind them.

They were alone in the darkness. Hall blinked. Gradually, as his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he saw a long curved staircase, leading around the outer wall of the tower, toward an arched door near the top.

I'm in a fairy tale, thought Hall. The thought was somehow reassuring. Who doesn't know what to do in a fairy tale?

"What now, Cap?” Chang asked in a hoarse whisper. “Are we still in a dream?” The sarcasm was gone and Hall could hear fear in the engineer's voice.

Hall took the helmet from Chang and tucked it under one arm, like a football. “Follow me,” he said.

He led the way up the narrow stairs, keeping one shoulder against the wall. There was of course no railing. No railings in fairy tales.

The stairs ended on a ledge outside the arched door. A light showed underneath it.

Hall was about to knock when the door creaked open on its own. “Come in,” said a voice from inside.

A high voice. A woman's voice.

Hall stepped in. Chang followed right behind.

They were in a wedge-shaped room with stone walls. The floor was covered with mismatched, overlapping rugs. Two silent, frowning amazons stood against the wall. One held a club and the other, a bow.

At the far end of the room, under an open window, another amazon sat on a lumpy couch. Her white tunic was trimmed with gold; no, orange. Her hair was black and she was smiling.

"I am Sha-Nee-La,” she said in sing-song English.

"The Queen of the Amazons,” said Hall, bowing.

"Yes! How did you know?"

"Just a guess."

Chang was looking at Hall with amazement. Hall ignored him. He approached the amazon queen and bowed with what he hoped was an appropriate mixture of dignity and deference; he was surprised at how easily it came to him.

The queen offered her plump little hand and Hall dropped to one knee and kissed it. Her flesh was cold, like a lizard's. “Welcome to Venus,” she said.

Hall started to rise from his knee, but suddenly felt how tired he was—from the crash, the capture, the journey. He set the helmet down and sat on the rug beside it.

"I am Commander Aeneas Hall, of the Chinese-American Space Service. We come in peace."

"And this must be Chang."

"Lu-Hsun Chang, First Engineer,” said Chang, his mouth hanging open, like a bumpkin's. “Civilian employee."

"Finally! Welcome, Dr. Chang!” The smiling queen waved her little fingers excitedly. The amazons set down their weapons and brought three flagons, then retreated to their positions against the wall.

Hall hesitated before drinking. But there is no turning back in fairy tales. It was warm water, gritty with mud. He drank greedily. He was as thirsty as he was tired; hungry, too.

He emptied the flagon and set it down beside the helmet on the rug. The crossed flags on the helmet reminded him that he had a role to play. He wished he had a uniform, or even a space suit. Anything but his orange CASS longjohns.

"We come in peace,” he said, sitting up as straight as possible. “Can you tell us why we are here?"

The amazon queen looked confused.

"Why have you summoned us here, oh queen? What is it you want of us?"

"I knew you would come,” she said. “Perhaps my mentor can explain. My teacher. My guru. Is that a word in English?"

"Sort of."

The queen said something in Chinese, and Chang scrambled to his feet and started peering around into the corners of the room.

"What did she say?” Hall asked, alarmed.

Before Chang could answer, Hall heard a whirr and a click behind him. It was a familiar, mechanical sound, and at first he thought it was coming from the helmet. Then he turned and saw a small triangular platform, like a coffee table on wheels, rolling out of the corner.

It rolled across the bumpy rugs on fat wheels, lights flickering across its surface.

Chang said something in Chinese.

Hall stared. “Huh?"

"It's Robbie, Cap!” said Chang. “RB1011, the robot lander. The one we sent and lost, eleven years ago."

Chang bent down and touched the lighted surface, which flashed and blinked excitedly. “Finally,” whined the little robot.

There was no doubt. Hall had seen pictures of the robot lander, RB1011, and this was it, from the flat solar panels to the lighted com-displays, to the three fat tires on pivots, like casters, that gave it a turning circle identical to its length—about a meter.

No robots in fairy tales. The fairy tale was over. Or was it?

This was a talking robot.

It was bumping against Chang's hand, whirring contentedly as the two talked in harsh nasal Cantonese, like old friends.

The queen, Sha-Nee-La, listened, all smiles. Her knees were up under her chin, and Hall could see the little triangle of her orange underpants under her tunic.

He looked away, back to Chang and the robot.

"What's he saying?” he asked.

"Oh, sorry,” said the robot, before Chang could answer. “We can, and should, and indeed must, speak English. I was just saying, I have waited and waited for you. I followed your approach, and when I saw that you were going to crash into the lake, like I did, I sent the amazons to find you."

"Amazons. That's what you call them?” Hall asked.

The robot's lights flickered, and he rolled forward and then back again, like a little shrug. “That's what googles up in my database. Ladies, girls, doesn't work. In Cantonese—” He said something that sounded like a gong, spitting.

"And the centaurs?"

"Disgusting creatures,” said the robot. “Venus is not what was expected, Commander. Not what was anticipated. I am sure you have noticed that. Do you mind if I call you Commander?"

"Not at all,” said Hall. A talking robot. Was Pinocchio a fairy tale?

"I hit the water, too,” the robot was saying. “Big surprise, but I was equipped to handle it. These tires provide flotation, a design by-product. I should have warned you that you were hitting liquid. I can see that now. If I had thought ahead properly—"

"You mustn't blame yourself,” said Chang, stroking the robot's lighted back. “We couldn't have changed course anyway."

Actually, we could have! thought Hall. But what was the point in complaining? There were more important mysteries to explore.

"Back up,” he said. “Why are you talking with us, RB1011? I didn't know you were equipped with a speech program."

"I'm not,” said the robot. “But I have a very resourceful T&E program, trial and error, thanks to Dr. Chang."

"Doctor Chang?"

"MIT,” said Chang. “You're talking with my thesis."

"Queen of schools!” said Sha-Nee-La, her smile widening. She couldn't seem to take her eyes off Chang.

"So why didn't you warn us?” demanded Hall. “That was your purpose. Your mission."

"I was mistrustful,” said the robot. “That's the same as afraid, or almost. My T&E suggested that I wouldn't be believed. It was all so unexpected. Free water."

"So you let us crash."

"I didn't know you would crash, Commander. I had perhaps an unrealistic idea of your piloting abilities."

"Afraid of what?” asked Chang. Dr. Chang.

"Of Houston, Dr. Chang. Of Burroughs. I was afraid that if I transmitted what I had found, it would be interpreted as a malfunction of some sort, and I might be disabled by remote."

"He's right, Cap,” said Chang. “We could have done a wipe from Burroughs."

"Would have,” corrected the robot. “I couldn't take the chance. Who would believe a Venus so unlike all our predictions?"

"Who, indeed,” said Hall. He looked around the room at the smiling queen, the frowning amazons against the wall. “So you're telling me all this is real?"

"I just collect the data, Commander,” said the robot. “I've been waiting for you to evaluate it."

"Should I get us something to eat?” asked Sha-Nee-La, waving her hand at the two amazons standing by the wall, who set down their weapons and hurried off. “You two space travelers must be starved."

The amazons brought platters piled with meat. Hall was famished, and he ate hungrily. So did Chang. The queen just nibbled.

The meat was stringy and tough. It needed salt.

While they ate, RB1011 told his story.

"As soon as I came out of the water, I saw the amazons riding centaurs on the shore,” he said. “They must have seen my capsule parachuting down. I don't remember any of that, of course. I was just a sort of dumb terminal."

"Send-only,” said Chang.

"My T&E chip must have been going crazy, trying to process the amazons. All I know is that, all of a sudden, I knew what they were. And I knew what I was. Who I was. For the first time."

"You were conscious,” said Hall.

"Yes. Isn't that amazing? That's your work, Dr. Chang.” The robot bumped affectionately against Chang's knees.

"A side effect,” said Chang. “The T&E chip has a heisenberg loop built in to deal with the unexpected. Consciousness is a quantum effect, I guess."

"Consciousness is an amazing gift,” said the robot. “It almost makes up for being abandoned."

"You weren't abandoned,” said Chang, drawing his knees back. “We thought you were lost. You never transmitted. Not even a stasis-signal."

"Transmission was no longer automatic,” said the robot. “Thanks to your T&E chip, I had become a conscious entity. I had to decide to transmit. And I decided not to, not yet, anyway. I was afraid to."

"So you let us crash,” said Hall.

"You are too harsh, Commander. Put yourself in my place. Would you risk being shut down, so soon after awakening? While I was still trying to decide what to do, the amazons strapped me to a centaur and carried me here, to the castle, as a companion for their queen. She thought I was cute."

"You were cute,” said Sha-Nee-La. “And wise, too."

"Thank you,” said the robot. “You see, Sha-Nee-La's smart. Unlike the amazons, who are stupid."

Hall glanced at the two against the wall. If they had heard, they didn't show it.

"So I taught her English, and Cantonese, and Unix."

"Unix!” said Chang.

"Unix is hard,” said Sha-Nee-La. “But symmetrical."

"I told her all about Earth. She was eager to learn."

"What do you know about Earth?” Hall asked. “You were built on Mars."

"By geniuses from Earth,” said the robot. “Who packed my database. Encyclopdia Britannica."

"Queen of the waves!” said Sha-Nee-La, clapping her hands.

"And I especially told her all about my handsome creator!” said the robot, bumping against Chang's knees.

Chang responded by pulling them away again. “I was just part of a team,” he said. “I'm a civilian employee."

"You led the team, Dr. Chang! I felt bad about not transmitting. Feelings come with consciousness, you know. But of course you know! My feelings are stronger than ever, now that you are here."

He tried to climb into Chang's lap, but Chang pushed him away.

"So you gained consciousness,” Hall said. “And you went silent. What about your mission?"

"I never forgot my mission, Commander. I decided to try transmitting, after I had been here at the castle for a while. But the transmission program is automatic, not designed to be accessed at will. I searched my chips but couldn't find it. I kept hitting loops, and finally I quit trying."

"And let us crash,” said Hall.

"You two must be tired,” said Sha-Nee-La, waving her fingers again.

There was another, smaller apartment next to the queen's. It had no door, only an empty frame, opening onto the ledge. There was no furniture, just two rough, gray rugs on the stone floor. An unglazed window in the curved outer wall overlooked the plain and the distant mountains.

The two attendant amazons brought in a basin and a jug, and watched while Hall undressed and washed with muddy water. He felt a moment's embarrassment as he took off his orange CASS longjohns, but only a moment's. It was like undressing in front of ants.

The amazons gave Hall a tunic and sandals to wear and left with his boots and his longjohns. He set the helmet on the floor and rolled up in a rug alongside it. The rug was scratchy like horsehair. There was no curtain to block the light from the window, and Hall wished he had a door to close. And where was Chang, anyway?

But none of that mattered as soon as he closed his eyes.

Hall was standing on the shore, watching the lander sink. It burbled and hissed as it filled with water. A cold wave hit Hall's bare foot—and he woke up.

He was lying on a stone floor, rolled up in a rug. Chang's rug, next to him, lay empty. He looked around at the stone walls, confused. Dreams within dreams? He could still hear the burbling hiss of the sinking lander....

XZXZXZXZXZXZX

He picked up the helmet and yelled into it. “Collins, are you there!?"

"Commander! I thought I had lost you. Thank God!"

"I thought—I thought I had lost me too!"

"Are you okay?"

"I'm here,” Hall said. “I'm okay. Chang too. We're both in a sort of...."

Then he stopped. Remembering the robot's fears, he didn't want to tell her about the illusions, the images that were all around him—the amazons and the centaurs, the castle, the amazon queen.

She'll think I'm mad. She'll know I'm mad.

"What's that, Commander? I'm only getting one helmet signal. Yours. You say Chang's okay? Are you with the lander?"

"The lander crashed,” Hall said. “It sank."

"Sank?"

"Collins, just tell Houston and Burroughs that we made it to the surface of Venus and are apparently still alive, and...."

"Apparently?” Collins's voice was fading already.

XZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZ

"Collins, are you there?"

But she was gone. Even the static was gone. The helmet was silent.

Hall struggled to his feet. His knees were stiff. How long had he been asleep?

He dropped the helmet onto Chang's empty, unrolled rug. Out the window, he saw the same pearl light as before; the same long low plain and distant mountains.

Venus. And far above, invisible in orbit, the Venus Wanderer.

At least we're not alone. Hall felt almost hopeful. He pulled on the tunic the amazons had left. It felt weird, like a hospital gown. He strapped on the sandals and tucked the helmet under his arm. Collins might call again at any moment.

He would be ready.

He walked out onto the ledge. The queen's door was closed. Hall knocked once, politely; then once again, less politely.

Then he gave up. Why talk with Chang anyway? Chang either didn't understand, or worse, didn't want to understand.

Hall started down the stairs, the helmet under his arm. He heard a scurrying behind him.

It was the robot, rolling down the steps on fat wheels. “Where you going, Commander?"

"For a walk,” said Hall.

"Can I come?"

"You seem to be in a better mood,” the robot said, as they strolled along the top of the castle wall—rolled and strolled, thought Hall—past the bored amazons who stood in pairs, staring down into the courtyard or out at the horizon, but never at them, or indeed at one another.

"I got some sleep,” said Hall. “That always helps. And I got a call from Collins.” He pointed into the helmet.

"The Venus Wanderer. So he's arranging the rescue."

"She,” Hall said. “And there'll be no rescue."

"No rescue?"

"We were barely able to get funding for one ship,” said Hall. “There's no back up. Not on Earth or Mars either."

"I had no idea,” said the robot. “Now I am truly sorry the lander sank."

"You and me both,” said Hall.

"So why are you carrying the helmet around? What can Collins do?"

"Nothing,” said Hall. And everything. “Collins is my only contact with reality."

"Reality?"

"Ever since we got out of the lander and breathed the air, I have been trying to figure out how much of this is real, and how much of it is a creation of my imagination."

"I don't understand, Commander."

"Sure you do, RB1011. Centaurs and amazons, a Venus that can't be real—Something is altering what I see. And altering it in accordance with images from my own memory, or imagination. That much is obvious."

The robot was silent for a moment. “But I see it too, Commander. And I don't have the capacity to see things that aren't real. I'm not equipped with an imagination."

"You are part of what I see,” said Hall. “A talking robot is not all that far from centaurs and amazons. It's a pretty common image, from Star Wars and Lost in Space."

"Lost in Space?” said the robot. “Isn't that a story? Are you saying that I might be imaginary too?"

"It's possible,” said Hall.

"I feel real, Commander. Of course, that feeling is fairly new to me. I have only been conscious for eleven years, eight months, sixteen days and six hours, Houston time."

"So you know the exact moment when you attained consciousness?"

"Not to the minute. It was a process."

Hall stopped and put his elbows on the wall and stared out, across the blank plain. Except for an occasional spindly tree, Venus was as lifeless as the moon.

The robot clambered up onto the wall beside his elbows.

"So if you're not imaginary, RB1011, what do you see?” Hall asked. “Do you see what I see?"

"I see stones and dirt, Commander."

"And behind us? In the castle?"

"I can see in all directions at once,” said the robot. “Behind us I see amazons, in twos, hanging around looking bored. Three centaurs, down in a corral."

"There were four."

"They don't last long here, Commander. I can see their chemical compositions, their temperatures. Eighty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Doesn't that make them real?"

"Only if you are real, RB1011."

"I wish you would call me Robbie, like Dr. Chang. He created me. Ask him and he will tell you I am real."

"I can't get his attention. He's too busy looking up your little queen's skirt. She seems real enough for him."

"You are mad at him."

"Wouldn't you be? But that's enough philosophy, Robbie. Let's go eat."

Things are changing, Hall thought, when he and RB1011 entered the queen's apartment.

Going from bad to worse.

Chang sat next to the queen of the amazons on her lumpy sofa, as if he were a king—or consort, at least. One hand was hidden under her tunic. With the other, he gobbled his stringy meat like a pig.

Unlike the other amazons, Sha-Nee-La ate too—in dainty little bites, dabbing at her lips with the hem of her tunic after each one. Hall tried not to notice her orange underpants.

Hall sat on the floor with his platter on his lap and the helmet by his side. The robot wedged itself between Chang's feet, where it blinked and whirred contentedly.

"What is in the bowl?” Sha-Nee-La asked, pointing to the helmet.

"That's his girlfriend,” said Chang, with his mouth full. “Any word, Cap?"

Hall decided to ignore the engineer's insolence and insubordination. For now.

"I talked to Collins,” he said. He tapped the helmet and pointed up, toward the low stone ceiling. “I told her we were okay. I told her what happened to the lander. I told her about the robot. RB1011."

"He likes to be called Robbie,” said Chang, glancing down at the robot, which was bumping against his knees. He pulled them back. “And what about—the rest of it?"

"She's going to call back,” Hall said. “I'm waiting to hear back from her. Meanwhile, you and I should stay in closer touch. You should be staying in the room with me, next door."

Chang reached for more meat with one hand, and put the other under the queen's tunic. “I don't think Sha-Nee-La would go for that."

"You have mission responsibilities,” said Hall.

"I'm aware of that, sir,” said Chang, with his mouth full.

Like a pig, Hall thought, getting to his feet and picking up the helmet. He bowed. “Excuse me, but I am very tired."

"No problem, Cap,” said Chang.

The queen smiled and held out her cold little hand for a kiss.

Hall ignored it and left.

Hall stuffed Chang's unused rug into the window, blocking as much of the light as he could, and lay in the darkness with the helmet by his head.

He wasn't sleepy, but there was nothing else to do.

No one to talk to. The helmet couldn't send unless it was receiving. Nothing to do but wait.

He must have fallen asleep, for he was at the edge of the water, listening to the waves when the water hit his sandals and he awoke all of a sudden.

Sandals?

XZXZXZXZXZXZX

He sat up and grabbed the helmet. “Collins!"

"Commander, not so loud."

"Sorry. Where are you? I've been waiting for your call!"

"XZXZXZXZX higher orbit, which means I'll be coming around less often but staying longer. And ZXZXZXZX a stronger signal."

"Good,” said Hall. “I can hardly hear you."

"Commander, what did you mean apparently you are still alive?"

After a moment's hesitation, Hall told her. He told her all of it. He scrambled to his feet and paced the tiny room, holding the helmet in his arms, and told her everything: the crash-landing on the water, the amazons and the arrow through Chang's shoulder, the trip on the centaurs to the castle. He even told her about Sha-Nee-La, the amazon queen, and RB1011, the talking robot.

When he finished, there was a long, ominous silence.

I am mad. She knows it now.

"So what do you think?” he asked, even though he didn't want to hear the answer.

There was no answer.

"Collins?"

Not even static. She was gone. How long had he been talking to himself? He stared into the helmet. Had Collins's call been part of his dream?

No. Her tiny voice had been real. He could still hear it in his mind. The helmet was real. It was still warm from receiving. He lay back down and closed his eyes, hugging it to him.

Hall apparently had the run of the castle, or at least the castle wall. He walked around and around, past the bored amazons, who ignored him. The view on every side was the same: the rock-strewn plain, the spindly trees, and in the distance, low folded mountains.

He carried the helmet under his arm. He had no idea when Collins might call again, but he would be ready.

He heard a whirring at his feet and looked down.

"RB1011."

"Robbie, please,” said the robot, bumping at his ankles. “I've been evaluating what you said, Commander. I want to be helpful."

"What did I say?"

"That all this was imaginary. I don't think so. If you are imagining it, then I am imagining it as well, and I don't have an imagination."

"Unless I am imagining you,” said Hall. He looked down; the little robot lifted one fat tire expertly over a loose hunk of rubble, so that its speed never changed. “And I'm beginning to think I'm not."

"Good,” said Robbie, his lights blinking with pleasure. “I was surprised to find I was conscious. Perhaps as surprised as you are. But there it is. I like it."

"I can tell."

"It would be disappointing to be conscious and then find out you weren't real. Consciousness is an amazing gift."

"It has its down side,” said Hall, leaning on the parapet and looking out over the rock-studded plain. “Doesn't anything ever happen here?"

"What do you want to happen, Commander?"

Nothing. “Nothing. Anything.” Anything.

"Only at night,” said Robbie. “The Dark. And that's sixteen hours away, Houston Time."

"You're still on Houston Time?"

"Of course. It's October 23, 2077. Four p.m., Central Standard Time."

"That's encouraging. That sounds real."

"Thank you,” said Robbie.

"That means I've been here...."

"In the castle?"

"On the planet. Venus. Or whatever it is."

"Six days, five hours and twenty-two minutes."

"A week,” said Hall. “That's discouraging.” He started walking again, around the wall. Robbie followed, bumping at his ankles.

"There are seven days in a week, Commander."

"Almost a week, Robbie. Close enough for analog. I'm not digital, like you."

"I've been here eleven years, eight months, twenty days, two hours and six minutes waiting for you. Waiting for Dr. Chang, actually, but I must admit, he's a lot less interesting than I hoped. I like you better."

"Really?” In spite of himself, Hall was flattered.

"Really. Dr. Chang has no imagination. He's not like you."

"He's an engineer, Robbie. Plus, he's mostly interested in his girlfriend."

"I know. That's my own fault, Commander. I taught Sha-Nee-La all about Dr. Chang, and I may have exaggerated, because I wanted her to worship him, like I do."

"Worship? Is that in your chips as well?"

"How could I not worship Dr. Chang? Especially now that I am conscious. He's my creator. I have many feelings for him. Feelings come with consciousness."

"Is that why you just whirr and click like an idiot when you're around him?"

"I'm embarrassed that you notice, Commander. I admit, Dr. Chang renders me speechless at times. I do worship him. Sometimes I wish I didn't. I never imagined he would be more interested in Sha-Nee-La than in me. That's the problem with having no imagination."

"You shouldn't take it so personally, Robbie. It's the little orange underpants."

"My fault, too, Commander. I wanted her to be appealing."

"And so, I suppose, she is.” Hall reached down and stroked the robot's back. “The gods and their sport, Robbie. It's an ancient complaint."

"Is it? It makes me feel better to think so. That's why I like taking walks with you, Commander. You are more interesting than Dr. Chang. You have imagination."

"Imagination has its down side,” said Hall. He sighed and looked around the castle. There were two centaurs left in the corral. “Let's get something to eat."

The meal was the same as always: stringy meat, needing salt.

What happened to the other two centaurs?

"Have some more, Cap,” Chang said. He was smiling, eating with one hand. His other hand was hidden under the queen's tunic.

Robbie was bumping against his knees, unnoticed.

"I've had enough,” said Hall. “I'm going to get some sleep."

I'm in Hell, Hall thought. I didn't even die. I just went straight to Hell.

The room was almost dark. Chang's rug in the window still blocked the light.

Hall sat on his rug and put the helmet up to his ear. There was no voice, no static.

No nothing.

He lay down beside it and closed his eyes and fell into a dreamless sleep. And fell, from that, into a dream.

Or so it seemed.

Water was lapping at his sandals. He pulled them back. The water was cold.

XZXZXZXZXZZXZ

Hall sat up, suddenly awake. He picked up the helmet and shouted into it.

"Collins!"

"Commander, please! Turn down your send volume."

"Sorry. Where are you? I can hardly hear you."

"High orbit, polar, or almost. My signal is weak XZXZXZXZ fuel cell leaking. I may have to switch to backup."

"Watch your batteries, Collins. I can't afford to lose you. How much of what I told you did you hear?"

"All of it, I suppose."

Hall lay back down on the rug beside the helmet. “And what did you tell Houston and Burroughs?"

"Not that, for sure, Commander. Amazons and centaurs? All that is missing is the unicorns."

"No unicorns, Collins. But the centaurs and amazons are no more unlikely than the fact that I am breathing the air. What kind of readings are you getting from the surface?"

"Nothing, or nothing new. XZXZXZXZXZXZ penetrate the upper cloud layer, which reads as poisonous as ever. I can't believe it is that different on the surface."

"I can't either, but here I am. Alive."

"Apparently."

"Now you are using the word!” Hall pinched his cheek, hard. “I'm not apparent, Collins. I'm real. Hearing your voice is proof positive. You are the only thing that convinces me I am alive."

"How could you have doubted that?"

"Easy. At first I thought I was having a long, last dream, like ‘Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.’ Know what I mean?"

"'An Occurrence,'” she said. “Or that movie, Jacob's Ladder. Or Pincher Martin."

"Pincher Martin?"

"William Golding, the guy who wrote Lord of the Flies."

"I never read it."

"It's about this shipwrecked sailor who climbs up on this rock and does a sort of Robinson Crusoe. Then XZXZXZXZX all a dream he has while he's drowning."

"Yes! That's it.” Hall finally had someone he could talk to. He lay back down, with the helmet beside his ear. Her tiny voice sounded warm and wonderful.

And real.

"But we know that can't be it,” she said. “Here I am talking to you. On instruments, not in a dream."

"Thank god! You're my only contact with reality, Collins. What about that leaking fuel cell?"

"I'm working around it. What about Chang? Is he okay?"

"You mean is he crazy like me?"

"You know I didn't mean that, Commander."

"Chang fits in here like he's part of the dream, Collins. He's okay, as far as I can tell. I hardly see him. I'm ashamed to say that crew discipline has broken down. He spends all his time with his little princess."

With one hand up her tunic.

"And RB1011, the robot? You say he talks to you."

"Robbie never shuts up, Collins. He has apparently developed consciousness, through some kind of heisenberg loop on his T&E chip."

"Commander, XZXZXZX XZXZ sound plausible."

"I know it doesn't. And the rest of it's even worse. The centaurs, the amazons."

"Do they talk to you too?"

"Thankfully, no. Except for Sha-Nee-La, and she doesn't have much to say."

"Maybe I could talk to them, Commander. Do you think they would talk to me? Could you arrange it?"

"You think I'm crazy, don't you Collins?"

"Commander, I XZXZXZXZXZ said that."

"I'm losing you, Collins. When will you be back? What's your periodicity?"

"XZXZXZ irregular. Some XZXZXZXZXZX backup electrics XZXZXZX unpredictable, Commander."

"Don't leave me!” Hall said. “Collins?"

But she was gone.

Hall got up and pulled Chang's rug off the window. He stared out at the blank landscape under the pearl-gray sky. When will it get dark? he wondered.

For the first time in years, he felt like crying.

Maybe the Dark will end this nightmare.

He lay back down and, hugging the still-warm helmet to his breast, fought his way through to sleep.

Eat, sleep, walk.

Paper, rock, scissors.

"You're bored,” said Robbie. “I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault,” said Hall. He leaned on the parapet and looked out over the stony plain. “What's out there? Are there any others?"

"Amazons? Not that I know of."

"Just as well,” said Hall. He looked around the top of the castle. The amazons stood in pairs, some looking inward, some outward. All with blank gray eyes.

"They're all stupid,” said Robbie. His lights flickered thoughtfully. “But I saw a flying saucer once."

"You did? You never told me that."

"You never asked. I don't transmit automatically anymore. Besides, I only saw it once. It never came back."

"Let me know if it does,” said Hall. “I might believe in a flying saucer."

"Really?” Robbie brightened. Literally.

"More scientific than amazons and centaurs,” said Hall. “Might sound better to Collins, anyway."

He put the helmet under his arm and continued his walk around the castle wall. Robbie followed at his heels, scurrying to keep up.

"Maybe it will come back, Commander."

Hall laughed grimly. “The saucer? I'll believe it when I see it."

"What about the orbiter, Commander? The Venus Wanderer. Can you see it?"

"Of course not, not from here,” said Hall. “Even if the clouds were gone, it would only be a speck. Less than a speck."

"And yet you believe in it, Commander. And you don't believe in the things you see. That makes you a scholastic, an idealist, like Aquinas or Plato."

Hall stopped and looked down. “You read Plato?"

"I don't have to, Commander. It's all in my database. I just google it up."

They resumed walking—rolling and strolling—past the bored, blank amazons.

"I know that Collins is real,” Hall said, tapping the helmet under his arm. “That's all I have to go on."

"And me,” said Robbie, bumping against Hall's ankles. “I'm real."

"Maybe you are, Robbie,” said Hall, bending down to stroke his back. “You're interesting, anyway. That's something."

"Maybe the saucer is real too,” said the robot. “There it is, Commander. Look!"

"A flying saucer, Cap? Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm not sure. But I saw it. It came over the horizon and hovered about a half a klick away."

"A flying saucer!” Sha-Nee-La clapped her little hands. “What is a flying saucer?"

"A make-believe spaceship,” said Chang.

"Robbie saw it too,” said Hall. “It was about the size of a small house. Or a big car. We watched it for about ten minutes, and then it was gone. Right, Robbie?"

But Robbie was no help. He was blinking stupidly, bumping against Chang's knees.

Chang pushed him away.

"A flying saucer, that's cool, Cap,” he said, tearing off another piece of meat and chewing it noisily. “What does Collins think?"

"Collins doesn't know about it yet. I'm waiting for her to call."

"A spaceship!” said Sha-Nee-La. “Will it take us to Earth?"

"Sure thing, baby."

Huh? Hall stared at Chang.

"It's her thing, Cap. It's all she thinks about."

"It doesn't give you the right to lie to her, Chang. We're not going back to Earth. We're stuck here. Marooned."

"What's marooned?” asked Sha-Nee-La

"I'll explain it later,” said Chang, putting his hand under her tunic. “Where you going, Cap?"

"Away,” said Hall, picking up his helmet. “To bed."

Was it that “night” or the next when Collins called? Hall was losing track. He was dreaming of the waves hissing at his feet, and he awoke to find the helmet hissing by his head.

XZXZXZXZ

"Collins!"

"I've been on the horn with Houston,” said Collins. “They were—discouraging. About the possibility of a rescue mission."

"I know that,” said Hall. “There's no ship. You have to start thinking of yourself. Your departure window closes soon."

"I know, but XZXZXZXZXZXZ. First XZXZXZXZ talk to them."

"Are you serious?"

"It would help me help you evaluate what's going on."

"Give me a minute."

Helmet in hand, Hall hurried around the ledge to the queen's door and knocked on it.

"Chang! Open up."

No answer. Hall pushed in.

Sha-Nee-La was sitting up with her eyes wide open. Chang was asleep, with his head on her lap. Robbie was blinking softly at his knees.

"Chang, wake up!"

"What, Cap?” Chang sat up, looking dazed.

Hall handed him the helmet. “It's Collins. Here. Talk to her."

"Chang, is that you?” Collins's voice was tiny.

"Hey, Collins, baby! It's me. First Engineer Lu-Hsun Chang. What's happening?"

"XZXZXZXZXZ what's happening? Are you okay?"

"I'm okay, just like the Commander."

"Do you see the same—stuff?"

"Stuff?"

"Centaurs and amazons. The stuff he sees."

"Yes, you bet. Not the flying saucer, though."

"The what?"

"The flying saucer. Hey, want to speak with the amazon queen?” Chang handed Sha-Nee-La the helmet. “Say hello, baby."

"Hello!” said Sha-Nee-La. “Hello, Earth!"

"Earth?” Collins's voice was tiny. “XZXZXZXZ the orbiter."

"Robbie, wake up,” said Hall. He kicked him.

"I'm not sleeping. I don't sleep."

"Then talk to Collins."

Hall took the helmet from Sha-Nee-La and placed it on the floor in front of the robot. It was, he thought, like feeding a dog.

"RB1011 here,” Robbie said. “Hello, Venus Wanderer."

"XZXZXZXZXZX,” said Collins. “Commander, can I speak with you privately?"

"Of course,” said Hall.

He scooped up the helmet and hurried around the ledge to his room, hoping the connection would hold.

"You heard them, right?"

"I heard Chang,” said Collins. “The other voices sounded just like Chang."

"Of course they do! They are imitations of Chang,” said Hall. “It's the accent. That was Sha-Nee-La, and Robbie."

"Robbie?"

"RB1011. The robot. That's what he wants us to call him."

"I don't know, Commander. It's all just too XZXZXZXZX. Amazon queens, talking robots...."

"You think I'm making them up? You still think I'm crazy, right?"

"You're the one who thinks you're making them up, Commander. Remember? I'm just trying to help. I'm trying to give you an objective evaluation. It's just too strange."

"So what have you told Houston and Burroughs?"

"I told them that you're both alive. That you're stranded. That's all they need to know, at this point. And what's this about a flying saucer?"

Hall told her. “It was silver,” he said. “It hovered by the trees, as if it was watching me, and then finally slid off over the horizon."

There was a long silence. Then: “That's better, Commander. Much better."

"Why?” Hall lay down on the rug with the helmet by his head. “You believe in flying saucers?"

"Of course not, Commander, but it's more scientific. What I'm hearing is your scientific mind struggling to reassert itself. Taking control, preempting the darker, more primitive images. XZXZXZXZXZXZ a healthy development."

"Never thought of it that way.” Hall hugged the helmet. “Collins, you're pretty good."

"Thank you, sir. I majored in astrophysics but minored in psychology. I sense XZXZXZXZXZ denial mechanism."

"I like it, Collins. The only problem is, the amazons are still here. I can't make them go away."

"It's not going to happen all at once. It's a process, Commander. One you have to participate in. I don't XZXZXZX out of line, but it may be that the next step is to work on crew discipline. I couldn't believe Chang's tone."

"You're not out of line, Collins. He's totally out of control. I've been way too slack. I've been preoccupied."

"Understandable, sir. Meanwhile, I will tell Houston about the saucer. That may be the XZXZXZX."

"Whoa, Collins! What the hell are you talking about? Houston's never going to believe in a flying saucer."

"It's more plausible than mythical creatures, Commander, and if I XZXZXZXXZXZXZXZ the media, it would XZXZXZXXZXZXZX."

"I'm losing you,” said Hall.

"Commander, do you want me to speak with her again?” Robbie asked from the doorway.

"What the hell are you doing? Eavesdropping?"

"I know I can convince her I am real."

"Too late,” said Hall. “She's gone."

—To be continued....

For as long as he could remember, Damien Bonnespine knew somebody was there, watching him.

Not all the time. There were long spells between the moments when he would feel the shiver across his shoulders that made his neck hairs stand up. But eventually it would happen again and he'd know they were back. Then for the next few minutes he'd feel them watching him.

He couldn't see them, and he always thought of them as a crowd of shadow men—no faces, no details, just vague silhouettes with shaded eyes turned his way. When he was little, it had creeped him out, but nothing bad ever came of it. He didn't feel threatened, just watched.

When he was nine he told the mom. She gave him the same scared but careful look he already recognized, even back then, as a signal that some of the thoughts that slowly bubbled up to break at the surface of his mind were best kept unsaid. Thoughts about pain and how animals squirmed and yelped when things happened to them. How interesting it would be to know if people squirmed and yelped like that.

When Damien was fifteen, the mom found the cat trap and the stuff he kept in a box way back in the crawl space under the house. She took him to a doctor. There were machines and needles and stupid pictures he had to look at and talk about, but some of the doctor's other pictures were way cool—dead people, and some who were not dead yet, but were opened up like the cats, showing slick red meat and yellowy bones.

One time, while he was looking at the pictures and talking about them, he felt the familiar chill across his shoulders and the tickle of hairs lifting. The doctor must have seen something in Damien's face because he said, “What are you thinking now?"

Damien told him. The man made notes on his pad and asked a lot more questions. “Were there voices? Do the voices want you to do things?"

Damien said there were no voices but he didn't think the doctor believed him. They made him take pills that filled his head with cold, silent noise. He couldn't think and sometimes when he tried to talk the words got lost for a while. He stopped going to school but the mom got him lessons from the school board to do at home and a computer that connected to a tutor. But one day he was so interested in a picture he had found on the Internet that he didn't hear her come in until she was looking over his shoulder. She took the machine away.

Now, at eighteen, Damien Bonnespine used the public library's computers to look at pictures. His scope had broadened and he read about interesting people: Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Ramirez, Frank Spisak. He was living in an abandoned butcher's shop near the cement plant. Some other kids slept in the rooms upstairs but they let Damien have the downstairs all to himself. He had stopped taking the pills and now his head was hot and busy again.

It was morning and Damien was thinking about the new girl who had come back to the squat with the others yesterday. She was only thirteen and her button nose and slanted, almond-shaped eyes reminded him of a cat. He was sitting on the old countertop, the wood scarred with cuts and scratches, letting his thoughts circle the girl when he felt the familiar shivery prickle.

He paid no attention, concentrated on the pictures in his head. Then he caught a flutter of motion to one side. He didn't turn toward it, just let his head drift a little in that direction until, from the corner of his eye, he saw the shadow man.

It was like seeing something on TV when thunderstorms screwed up the reception: a man shape, dark but without detail of features or clothing, speckled with dots that flickered and flashed. Damien turned his head an inch more and saw that the staticky man was not watching him now. He was bent over, poking at something where his waist would be.

The years of catching cats had made Damien very fast. He set himself, inhaled a long, deep breath—then, as he let it out, he threw himself from the countertop and crossed the room with one long stride and a flying leap.

His outstretched hands sank into the dots and sparks and met cloth-covered flesh beneath. The man squawked and tried to pull free but Damien yanked the shadow man toward him while shooting his head forward like a striking snake so that his forehead connected hard where the watcher's face should be. He felt bone snap and heard a gargly yelp.

The man was not big but Damien was. He lifted the watcher off his feet and slammed him against the door of the long gone butcher's walk-in cooler, did it again and again until the body flopped loose in his grip.

He let it slide to the floor. It was still flickering and winking but that was the only movement. Damien reached into the static and felt around the waist where the man had been poking. He found a belt with a row of studs on it, traced his fingers along its length to a clasp. He undid the fastener and pulled the belt free.

Now his hand was encased in a blur of light and dark. Damien felt for the studs, pressed them singly and in combinations, but the effect didn't change. Then the belt gave a hiss that became a hum that grew louder before it abruptly stopped. The sparks and shadows disappeared and Damien could see his hand again. It was holding a strip of metallic fabric set with a panel of buttons. From the panel came a smell of fire and ozone.

Damien poked at the controls some more but the thing was dead. He turned his attention back to its owner and saw a small man with a sharp-featured face that put Damien in mind of a ferret. He had been pretty bald for someone so young but Damien could tell from the interesting angle of his neck that he wouldn't have to worry about getting any older.

The body was wearing a one-piece jumpsuit with a peculiar fastening system down the front. There were pockets but nothing interesting in them. Tied to one wrist by a looped cord was a small, flat oblong of metal about half the size of a cigarette pack.

Damien freed the object and examined it. He identified what looked to be a lens and next to it a pinpoint microphone. There were controls etched into the side and the upper surface. He touched them. At first nothing happened, then suddenly a screen appeared in the air, crowded with symbols and icons. There was writing, too, but Damien couldn't read it. It looked vaguely Chinese.

Damien reached out a finger to one of the icons. Dozens of thumbnail images flooded the scene, and when he touched one of the miniatures it expanded to fill the viewing space and the figures in it began to move.

Damien recognized the scene: the attic in Gacy's house. He'd seen a TV movie about it but they hadn't shown anything interesting. But now, as he watched, he understood. This wasn't a movie. This was real.

He found how to minimize the image and touched another of the main screen's icons. He watched, fascinated, for a few moments. That was Dahmer's kitchen. There he was at the stove, humming. Another selection and Damien was watching Bundy creeping into a darkened bedroom. Then a man he didn't recognize, in a city where the cars flew, and another in some place where the sky was red.

He ran through the entire menu, sampling, mentally marking the ones he wanted to come back to first. Until an image brought a sharp intake of breath: the cramped space beneath his mother's house, a figure lit by a flashlight kneeling in the back corner, putting on his heavy gloves to lift a spitting, struggling tabby out of the trap.

He watched his juvenile self, reliving the memory. Then he canceled the image and chose another: looking at the pictures in the doctor's office; then the time with the stray mongrel and the propane torch.

But there were pictures he didn't remember, couldn't have remembered. They showed a Damien grown into his twenties, into his thirties, showed him in places he'd never been, with people he hadn't met yet.

He turned his eyes from the screen and regarded the body slumped against the grimy wall. Damien had never known what people meant when they said they regretted things they'd done. Now he almost understood.

He wished he could talk to the man. They had had a lot in common. As he dragged him into the cooler, Damien felt that it had been—he sought for the right word, then found it—an unfortunate way to treat his first fan.

He turned back to the images of the future Damien, watched the way he did things, how he controlled the situations. He thought again about the girl with the cat's eyes and began to make some mental notes.

Our copywriters are overjoyed by the fact that we're serializing Terry Bisson's Planet of Mystery—now they have a chance to use all the great copy lines they've saved up for years. Be sure to catch the thrilling conclusion next month! You've never seen the likes of it! Will Commander Hall and Engineer Chang ever get home to Earth!?! And what fate awaits Collins!?! Don't miss it!!!

(Wow, they used up almost our entire year's supply of exclamation marks.)

Next month's cover story is an unusual tale that juxtaposes celestial bodies with matters of the flesh. Gary W. Shockley's “The Cathedral of Universal Biodiversity” introduces us to an unlikely evangelist whose specialty is envisioning what waits in unexplored regions of the universe. But not even he is completely able to ignore more worldly concerns, as you'll see.

Before Hurricane Katrina hit, our faithful chronicler of New Orleans's oddest spots, Albert Cowdrey, got out of the city with some new stories. He's fine, thank you for asking, and we'll soon bring you his latest tales. Other contributors with stories in inventory include Daryl Gregory, Claudia O'Keefe, M. Rickert, and Ysabeau Wilce, as well as several new writers. We expect 2006 to be a good year—you can subscribe at www.fsfmag.com to make sure you won't miss any of this year's goodies.

I am a western woman born in the Year of the Tiger. In far-eastern astrology, each year is associated with a particular animal through a rotating twelve-year cycle. This dimly acknowledges that distant time before humanity chose to separate from the other creatures. A time when we all spoke the same tongue and could change form at will. A time that legends of many lands refer to as the Age of Gold. I keep an ear ready for stories about Year-Beasts from those who grew up in cultures with those beliefs. Often those tales have come from my two teachers, both of whom are Japanese and masters of the martial tradition of Budo.

One day I was lunching at a downtown Chinatown restaurant with a group of other students and both of my teachers after three days of intensive training.

I was seated next to my senior master. I asked him, “At other times you've been kind enough to explain to me the nature of the years of monkey, rabbit, dog and even rat. There's one animal we haven't discussed yet, which I'm curious about. What are the traits of those born in the Year of the Horse?"

My senior master, a dragon, thought for a moment. “Horse-year men are handsome and compelling, but not very bright,” he said.

"What about horse-year women?"

My other master, who, like me, is a tiger, bent his head low over his soup and growled.

My dragon master turned his head to one side and waved his hand in front of him, as if he'd caught a whiff of spoiled fish. “Not good,” he said.

"Really?” I was fascinated. “In Western cultures horses are admired for their fleetness, beauty, and wild, free nature."

My dragon master shook his head.

"Stubborn. Hard-headed. Bad-tempered,” my tiger master muttered, his ears laid well back to his skull.

"But surely some of the other beast-years get along with them?” I asked.

They shared a brief glance in which my Western woman's curiosity wasn't welcome.

"Some say dogs, but I haven't observed that to be true. Of course, other horse-people. But other than that, none, at least not well,” my dragon master said firmly, closing the topic. I didn't pursue the issue. The relationship between dragon and tiger is defined as the mutual admiration of respectful adversaries, and shouldn't be pushed beyond this boundary.

Of course he'd piqued my curiosity. Perseverance and patience are readily applied to hunting that premier prey, knowledge. I prowled through libraries and musty, dim bookstores, uncovering old texts on myths, legends, and customs of the ancient Far East.

No wonder my masters had been reluctant to speak! Throughout the world and throughout history infanticide has been common. Yet nothing matched the drop in Asian newborns every Horse Year.

The tradition, as described, was that during any Year of the Horse, pregnant women went off into the wilds to give birth by themselves without family or midwife—a dangerous proposition, and by itself cause enough to avoid a pregnancy. If a woman came back with a boy-child, her husband greeted her with relief. But often she'd return pale and drained and announce with downcast eyes—without mentioning its sex—that the child had been stillborn and she'd buried it in the bush.

As my studies led up to modern times, I learned that technology improved on this practice. Amniocentesis allows a child to be sexed in utero and discreetly deleted if it proves to be an unwanted girl.

This knowledge filled me with sadness. Lost in the tenuous realm of might-have-been were generations of rambunctious, contentious, rearing, kicking, crow-hopping women who by their very nature made men uneasy; caused tigers to slink off belly to the ground, and dragons to smolder with smoke in general disapproval and retreat to their lairs.

Several years passed before I discovered my studies weren't the end of this story.

In the dojo I belong to, our masters hone our ability to see by rarely explaining. They teach by presenting the warriors’ art with quick, silent demonstrations. They instruct by the precept, “The student must steal technique from the teacher."

So I took up instruction in Sumiei brushwork in order to train my eye and improve my perceptual abilities, hoping to become a better thief and therefore a better student. I enrolled in an evening weekend course at the local community college.

Among the other students in the class, one young woman caught my attention.

Her features, though long and angular, hinted at Asian ancestry. Her hair was a thick, glossy, rebellious black that simultaneously bristled and flowed. The young men in the class didn't flirt with her as they did with the other girls. Apparently they didn't consider her pretty, but I thought her strongly beautiful. I found myself stroking her likeness onto my practice sheets as frequently as I practiced my kanji.

The class took several breaks each night, as much to stretch out and massage cramped fingers as to drink coffee.

One evening during a break I struck up a conversation with the young woman with the arresting features. I told her my name. She told me that hers was Thera. We talked about the class: found that we both enjoyed the hypnosis of laying down line after line of velvet ink, freed from any goal or expectation other than the experience of each stroke.

Thera was taking the class because she wanted to use it in her artwork, and to try her hand at lettering.

I told her that I'd begun to use the technique to train my eye and to experiment with sketching. That I liked the idea of rendering objects in calligraphic terms—trees, stones, birds, perhaps even people—not confessing that I'd already used her as a subject. “For example, with that incredible mane of yours, I could translate you into an icon for the idea of ‘horse,'” I said, speaking tactfully of her hair rather than her long, equine face.

"That would have amused my mother,” Thera said. “According to her people, the year I was born in was ruled by the horse."

My pulse jumped. Since ceasing my investigations, I'd never expected to hear of the subject again.

"She said I was lucky to have been born here. Horse-year women were considered undesirable back in the old country."

"Really?” I feigned ignorance. “Why?"

Thera shrugged, grinned. “Bad Attitude. Lord knows I had it. Whenever I threw a temper tantrum, to get me to behave she'd trot out” (Thera grinned at her own pun) “some old story or another about how babies born in the Year of the Horse were abandoned in the forest to die as soon as they were born. Trouble was, her trick worked too well—they scared me half to death. Then she had to tell me other stories to get me to stop crying."

"What kind of stories?” I asked.

A long time ago, and very far away, one frigid day a woman hid in some undergrowth after leaving her girl baby exposed on some rocks. This woman was determined that if her child must die, it would die from exposure, not from being torn apart by wild animals. She'd decided to stay and leap out to intervene if she had to, until the baby passed away in a peaceful manner.

After a while she heard something large moving through the bushes—slowly and methodically, as if it had been tracking her. Just then the baby began to cry from hunger. The creature in the brush stopped, listening. The woman tensed and prepared to defend her doomed child.

The creature emerged out onto the rock. It was another woman. But such a woman! Thin, with a long face, barefoot, wiry, dressed in a rough garment woven from bark strings, with matted bristling hair. The wild woman went up to the baby, picked her up carefully, and vanished back into the brush before the astonished mother could react.

The mother went home and told her husband that she'd borne a dead child. She said nothing of the wild woman.

The mother had three more children in the years that followed, including another daughter. Time passed and her children grew to adulthood. Finally, her daughter suffered the misfortune of also becoming pregnant with a Horse-year child.

When the time came for the heavy-hearted daughter to go out alone to give birth in the wilderness, the mother drew the young woman aside.

"If your child is a boy, hurry home with him as soon as you can walk again,” the older woman said. “But if it's a girl, leave it in a clearing and hide yourself nearby. It would be a disgrace to let an infant suffer the fate of being devoured alive by wild animals. Hard as it may be for you, wait until the baby dies. Or perhaps something else might happen. Then come back to me."

The daughter was mystified by her mother's words, but since she was beginning to labor she had to hurry away. She came home later without a child, in a state of amazement.

"Mother, I gave birth to a girl. I did as you said, and three wild women came out of the forest and took my baby. Did you know that a miracle would happen?"

The mother told her daughter what had happened to her three twelve-year cycles before.

Ever after that, if a woman became Horse-year pregnant, some other woman would warn the mother-to-be to watch and wait. In this way the women of the village came to understand that there was a whole community of wild Horse-year women living deep in the woods. During Horse Years these feral women drifted outward to the edge of the forest. They prowled its borders, watching for the lone pregnant women to come and give birth and repopulate their ranks.

Thera finished the story, took a few sips of her coffee, and then our Sumiei Sensei waved us back into the classroom to resume our inky mediations.

But I couldn't concentrate. My mind filled with images of all those women—the tamed and domesticated dog, rat, snake, monkey, and even tiger and dragon women bringing their new little fillies to the tough feral women of the woods and heights.

I thought of babies growing to awareness with older sisters who were twelve; mothers who were twenty-four, thirty-six, and forty-eight; grandmothers of sixty, seventy-two, and eighty-four.

A week later I lined up behind Thera at the coffee machine.

"You didn't get a chance to tell me if your mother's story worked,” I said as she pushed the thermal paper cup under the spigot. A steaming dark liquid poured out. Its color and smell resembled boiling ink. Thera made a face at it as she stood aside and let me slide my own cup into place. I chose tea.

"My mother's story? Worked?"

"The horse women of the woods. Were you less scared about abandoned babies left to die?"

"Oh, that.” Thera laughed, remembering. “Yeah. Probably worked too well. After that she couldn't do anything with me. Whenever we got into it, I'd diss her and tell her I wish she hadn't left the old country, and had left me out in the forest. That I'd have been better off with a bunch of savages than with her. Pretty cruel, huh? Kids!” She shook her head.

"Did she ever tell you more stories about them?"

Thera sipped her coffee, wrinkled her nose at the bitter fluid. “After that she didn't want to give me any more ammunition against her. Can't say I blame her. I pestered her for a while, though. She told me just a few more, but only if she could use them to lay some sort of scold on me."

Back near the beginning of things, before human beings decided to separate themselves from the other creatures, there was a great tribe of horse folk. They lived in meadows near the eastern edge of the great sea that we now call the Pacific Ocean.

The horse folk were a proud people and didn't mix with the other animal tribes. Eventually they became too populous, their country overgrazed. They had a legend that they'd originally come from a vast paradise that they'd wandered away from. They decided to search for this homeland.

They divided into three clans.

The strongest and proudest clan declared that they'd never change from their true nature, nor mix with creatures of other animal tribes. They decided to search to the south and west.

The second clan said that though they might consort with other creatures, it would always be on their own terms, so that they'd never lose their proud horse hearts. This clan traveled northward.

Before these two clans left, they made solemn vows to each other: Though a million million turns of the sun might pass before they encountered each other again; though they might change in appearance; though this great event of the division and scattering of the horse tribe might pass from memory; still, their children's children's children would recognize each other in their hearts when they met again.

The first clan eventually ended up in the Middle East. They remained what we know today as true horses.

The clan that searched to the north traveled until they encountered cold, bleak harshness. To survive, they changed and more and more took on the appearance of men and women, with humankind's ability to adapt and endure anywhere.

After the other two clans left, the third and last clan looked around and said, “Why should we leave? There's plenty of room and forage for us now.” These were the laziest, least proud members of the horse tribe. They reasoned that if things became difficult again, they could find a way to get along with the other animal clans.

Some of the mare-women weren't happy about this. They berated the rest of the clan, but to no avail.

Over time this complacent part of the horse tribe made peace and intermarried with the children of men who lived nearby, until almost all of them willingly gave up their horse ways and proud intractable hearts.

Only a few women were born from time to time as throwbacks. The rest of the tribe felt their implacability and anger and drove them away, until they had to take their place in the line of years with all the other fractional animal natures left in humanity. And we already know how mankind dealt with them.

It was time to get back to class. Thera noticed my sadness. She touched my arm lightly and said it was only a folk tale, meant to warn her not to be lazy.

Over the remaining weeks of the course we came to be friends, after a fashion. I told her about my work, my evenings spent training in the dojo. She told me more about her life. Her mother had married a military man stationed overseas, and so got to immigrate to this country. A few years later she gave birth to Thera.

I once asked Thera about horses—real horses—if she'd ever ridden any. She said no, though like most girls she'd been crazy about them. She knew her father had ridden. He'd even competed on the rodeo circuit when he was young, before he joined the Air Force. He was part Cheyenne, raised on a reservation. But except for his time in the rodeo, his childhood was something sooner forgotten, left behind. He wanted the Anglo-American dream: a career (in his case in the military), three children, a nice house not far from the base, an apron-wearing wife waiting at the end of the day with a tray of fresh-baked cookies in her oven-mitted hands and a roast in the oven.

Thera didn't know what her mother wanted, but it wasn't that. She finally left, taking Thera with her. Thera hadn't seen her father since she turned eight. She heard later that he married again and started a new life, complete with the three kids, house, and the cookies.

When Thera was ten her mother remarried, this time to a salesman with an Irish lilt to his voice. Two years later her mother gave birth to a second child, a boy.

During adolescence, Thera's relationship with her mother went south in a big way. They fought constantly. Thera said any folk tales from that time of her life were grimly cautionary.

As the forests and badlands throughout Asia shrank, the wild Horse-year women were hard-pressed to keep their secret ways. At the same time, busy meddling humanity invented devices and nostrums to prevent or interrupt pregnancy. Fewer and fewer girl babies were brought to them.

Faced with extinction, the wild women found desperate solutions. Every twelve years they emerged and stole clothing from the villages. Disguised with these garments, the younger among them traveled to distant towns and indentured themselves to brothels until they were impregnated. Then they stole away in the night and made their way home to the forest.

Some became infected with monstrous diseases. Others were beaten by the men they served. But if a Horse-year girl started young enough, and was lucky and healthy, she might bear three children in her lifetime. If she were very lucky, they might be three girls to add to the herd. If she wasn't so fortunate, the isolated Buddhist monasteries never looked for answers when they found infant boys left on their doorsteps.

Thera and her mother battled it out for a few years. When Thera began her junior year in high school, her stepfather got reassigned to a new sales territory in another state. Her mother made arrangements for Thera to live with friends until she finished school, then took Thera's little half-brother and went to join her husband. Thera found a waitressing job the next summer, so she stayed put, and had been on her own ever since.

Thera was part-timing her way through college; waitressing to survive, clerking at convenience stores in lean times. It might take her forever to graduate, but she was determined. She loved art, and tended to postpone taking prerequisite courses if she could slip in an extra painting, pastel, or sketching class.

The Sumiei class ended. I expected to see Thera the next semester, when the more advanced follow-up class began.

She never showed. When I asked, the instructor said that though Thera'd signed up, at the last minute she phoned in a message saying she'd started a new waitressing job, so she was dropping the course.

In martial arts one is constantly having to detach, so I let it go. My own life needed attending to. I had my work, my training, my own studies to focus on.

I ran into her about a year later. I'd been working the wee small hours with some colleagues at my job on a team project. We decided to take a break. Every place was closed, except for a diner—one of those stark, twenty-four-hour-a-day national chain kind of places. As we walked in, Thera was walking out. She obviously worked there: She wore a coat slung on her shoulders over a pastel-colored, white trimmed uniform, her name embroidered over the left breast pocket. I greeted her with surprise, talked with her briefly as my associates went on ahead to get a booth. She said she was going off-shift. She looked thinner, with dark circles under her eyes, and seemed nervous, ill-at-ease. I let her go.

When I slid into the booth, a middle-aged waitress was taking our order. The name embroidered on her uniform was Paige.

"So, you know Thera?” she asked.

I said yes, just a little. That I'd been in an art class with her. I asked Paige if she knew if Thera had finished college.

"No, not with all the crap she's been dealing with."

The waitress told me that months before Thera had gotten involved in an altercation with her landlord. The man had decided to turn his apartment house into condominiums. He illegally served notice on his tenants. Thera dug in her heels and fought him. She came home from work one night to find the locks changed on her apartment. All her belongings—such as they were—had been moved out onto the sidewalk and plundered by passers-by.

She took the landlord to court and won. In revenge he refused to reimburse her cleaning and security deposits. She took him back to court and won again. She'd never seen a dime from either settlement.

"Everything she'd already lost, and then the legal fees, wiped her out,” Paige said. “I know she doesn't have a phone number anymore. I think she's too proud to say it, but I'd lay odds she's living out of her old Dodge."

The next night I waited in my car in the diner parking lot. When Thera got off work I followed her. She drove to a quiet residential area—a multi-car-per-family tract where not everybody's vehicles fit in their garages or driveways. Her car blended in with the others on the street. I parked several cars behind her and watched her silhouette clamber from the front to the back seat. Then I got out of my car, walked over and knocked on her side window. Bundled in a blanket, she rose like a ghost to the glass.

"Thera, you can't do this. It's not safe. You're coming home with me."

She didn't protest. She followed my car back to my flat.

I don't have a spare bedroom, but the sofa in my living room was a futon. For the next few months Thera stayed at my place.

She worked days at a convenience store, waitressed nights. Her survival skills fascinated me. Her first priorities hadn't been saving for a new apartment and basics like phone service and furnishings, but rather the rental of a post office box (so she'd still get bank statements and her car insurance bills) and a membership at the Y (so she could bathe regularly). Her car afforded her a free—though risky—place to sleep. The restaurant provided her with free food: She'd been feeding herself off of half-eaten dinners returned to the kitchen. The other waitresses tactfully turned a blind eye. She could eat regular meals at the diner, of course, but their cost would be deducted from her paycheck.

Thera said she was lucky she hadn't lost all her clothing when the landlord tossed her stuff—only the few nice things she owned. The sidewalk traffic hadn't been interested in her old T-shirts and jeans. Since then she'd kept her clothes in a cardboard box in her car trunk, and used the time she spent in laundromats to nap as much as to keep her clothes clean.

"They left this, though.” From her car Thera unloaded a portfolio jerry-rigged from two pieces of cardboard taped together at the bottom. It contained artwork from her classes. “Didn't take much of the stuff inside.” She grinned. “Only the nudes from a life-drawing workshop. I like to think I've upgraded the porn collection of some dirty old man."

The diner was low-end, the tips especially poor late at night. “But it's safe working there nights.” Thera intended on hanging on until a slot opened during the day or early evening shifts. “I figure I'll quit working at the convenience store at that point."

I nodded in support. I felt relieved that her convenience store gig was during the day, but those places weren't secure at any hour.

"I should have enough to get a new place of my own again by then, maybe even enough to go back to school,” she continued.

I told her she could stay as long as she wanted, that she wouldn't be a bother.

And she wasn't. Between her work and mine and my training, I hardly ever saw her. She refused any help other than my couch, but did consent to join me when I cooked a late breakfast on Sundays, the only time our schedules intersected.

As the circles under her eyes faded her confidence grew along with her savings. She relaxed and grew talkative at our weekly brunches. She told me about moving around a lot as a military brat before her parents’ divorce. She told me about first getting interested in art in a high school class. She told me about old boyfriends: She might not have the kind of beauty that turned male heads, but she'd had a few lovers. Her affairs always ended in acrimony. “But that's the same as everybody else, isn't it? Who ever ends up being friends with an ex?” she grimaced.

I didn't contradict her, just said I'd had my share of failed relationships too.

She remembered I was intrigued by folklore, shared what few more of her mother's stories she recalled.

In ancient, ancient times, when the great horse clan split into three tribes, the second clan headed northward. It reached a cold and desolate place. There the tribe took on the form of humankind, with humans’ ability to adapt. Even that was not enough. Finally, facing starvation, this northern tribe had to split again. Half roamed farther and farther to the west, until some of them arrived at a great island. They could go no farther, stopped by a gray stormy ocean that extended beyond their comprehension. Thousands of years later true horses from the south finally reached this northwestern tribe, now known as the Irish Tinkers or Travelers. The two long-separated tribes knew each other, drew together in ways the rest of mankind found eerie, uncanny, and spoke of in low tones about “horse-whisperers."

When she wasn't working, Thera spent most of her time sleeping. However, on Sundays she started to sketch again. I left pencils and scrap paper out for her, found myself buying flowers when I shopped on Saturdays so she'd have something nice to draw. She sang or hummed to herself as she bent over the pages, completely immersed. Her voice had a pleasant, husky bluegrass quality to it. Sunday evenings I'd rent a film. We huddled on the futon, wrapped in chenille afghans, eating popcorn, glued to the tube for the length of the movie and on through to the end of the eleven o'clock news with its summary of the day's strife.

She came home from work late one Saturday night lit with excitement. Some students she knew from the college happened to stop by the diner, stayed to hang out with her on her break. That was all she could talk about Sunday. On Monday Thera went to the college and picked up a catalog for the next semester. She pored over descriptions of the upcoming night and weekend classes.

Her diner became the late-night hang-out for her college acquaintances. She began doing things with them on her days off. I was glad she had new friends and that for the first time since I'd met her, her burdens had ebbed to the point that she seemed her own young age. Yet I missed her when she dashed out of the house as soon as we'd shared our Sunday morning meal.

After a few weeks, she began to talk more and more about one particular member of the group—a boy, also into art, and, like her, an itinerant student. She said at first that he was just a friend. “We're on the same page. It's nice to be able to talk to somebody else who's had to pick themselves up by their bootstraps."

I wanted to sigh. I stopped myself. Thera's face warmed and softened when she talked about this kid. It was obvious where this was leading.

A week later she told me with delighted wonder that he'd asked her out. The rest of the group wouldn't be tagging along.

In spite of my best efforts, I must have looked uneasy.

"Don't worry,” she said quickly. “I wouldn't bring somebody here into your space. I'm meeting him at the concert. Really, he's like you—encouraging me to go back to school. You'd like him."

After that, she came home to my couch less and less, as I knew she would.

After only a month she announced she was moving in with him. She swore it would be different this time: He was an artist—they understood each other. His apartment was the biggest place she'd lived in since her childhood. (I looked around at my flat and knew that in her own mind she'd never occupied it on any level.) He was even going to cover what would have been her share of first and last month's rent.

As soon as Thera said this, warning bells rang in my head. To put her in his debt this way as they began their relationship—he was thinking of the eventual bottom line, even if she wasn't.

Knowing that nothing could have dampened her enthusiasm or her happiness, I kept my opinion to myself. Anything I might have said would have wounded her.

"I'll be able to save up even faster. I'll pay you back for all your help,” Thera said.

"Not necessary. You've cost me nothing,” I replied. “If you want to do anything for me, use the extra money to quit one of your jobs."

When she moved out, we hugged awkwardly. I realized later that she hadn't left me her new address. I never did meet the boy.

When the northern-bound clan split, the other half traveled east until it came to a great bridge of ice. Because of their horse courage and stubbornness, they crossed over it. After many further travails they came to a vast, beautiful country and knew it to be their ancestral homeland. Some turned back to tell the other clans so that all the horse tribes could be reunited once again. But it was too late. The ice bridge had melted behind them.

I returned to my old routine. After a month or so I dropped in at the diner for a late-night supper. I didn't see Thera, but Paige was on duty. She said Thera had indeed transferred to the day shift, had quit the convenience store job and signed up for night-school classes. Paige said she seemed happy.

I felt a pang at that. I told myself it was just a stab of poignant gladness for Thera.

I didn't have an occasion to go back to the diner for almost a year. When I did, it was after another late-night haul at work.

Paige was there. I teased her about her omnipresence at the diner. She just smiled and said she liked working the night shift. It left her time for her family during the day.

"How is Thera doing?” I made myself ask.

Paige looked surprised. “Didn't you know? Hasn't she been in touch with you?"

I shook my head.

Paige looked over her shoulder. The diner was almost deserted. Nobody seemed to need anything at the moment. She slid into the seat across from me and began to talk:

Things had gone bad again for Thera. She'd cleaned out her bank account supporting her boyfriend so he could hurry up and graduate. The agreement was that he'd then do the same for her. Shortly after he got out of school he dumped her for somebody else and left. But not before taking every scrap of cash Thera had lying around the house. He left a note explaining he was reimbursing himself for the first and last month's rent he'd fronted her.

Thera found herself suddenly saddled with an apartment she couldn't afford alone, and hadn't found a trustworthy roommate yet. She'd dropped out of her classes, gone back to the convenience store, though she'd had to take the night shift this time.

"I worry about her,” Paige said. “Those convenience stores are risky places. There's been a string of robberies lately.” She shrugged her shoulders in a nervous, irritated gesture—a working woman too tough to shiver. “I'm glad my kids are still too young to watch the late news. They've been showing surveillance footage of the hold-ups, complete with clerks getting beat up, hoping someone will recognize something."

I asked Paige if she knew which store Thera worked at.

Paige shook her head, no. “She's never said. Could be anywhere. There are dozens of them—one every few blocks."

I left my phone number with Paige, in case Thera had lost it, and asked Paige to post a note for Thera to call me.

I waited a couple of weeks, but didn't hear from her. That didn't surprise me. I'd guessed she'd be too stubborn and proud. Then I looked for a number for her in the phone book. There was none. The phone must still have been listed in the boyfriend's name.

As if to punish me for my lack of success, for not trying hard enough, the eleven o'clock news seemed filled with nothing but stories about car jackings and convenience store robberies. Each time the late-news anchors’ faces grew sober and their voices dropped with gravitas—"Be warned that you might find the following footage shocking.... The police are asking for the public's help.... “—I froze. Finally I couldn't stand the stress of twitching at every newscast. I resolved that the coming weekend I'd start my search.

I trained for an hour or two after work that Friday, then went home to cook a late dinner and go to bed. Tomorrow I'd start to look for Thera at the restaurant. Paige had told me she sometimes worked days on the weekends.

I turned on the tube and half-listened to it as I fixed my supper. The anchor announced upcoming footage of another heist in the early morning hours of the night before, warned of its violent content. “More when we return after this break,” he said.

I hunched my shoulders and growled in aggravation. Soon I'd find Thera and wouldn't have to suffer through these constant alarms.

The news came back on and there, in the footage, I did find Thera.

Three men wearing ski masks and hoisting shotguns raced into the shop. One vaulted the counter by the cash register. He confronted two employees—one of them Thera. Her strong features were unmistakable, even in the grainy videocam footage. The store's other worker, a slender East Indian man, put his hands over his head and dropped immediately to the floor.

Thera wedged herself in front of the cash register and began to argue with the robbers. Her lips framed clipped-off words in the mute shuddering-frame footage. I saw all the rage in her life boiling up at last in her stance—rage for the boys who betrayed her, the mother who scolded and then deserted her, the landlords who cheated her, the thieves who robbed her.

"No, Thera, no,” I whispered.

The thief grew impatient and drew a gun from his belt. I cringed, waiting for the silent shot. Instead he pistol-whipped her, bashing her temples back and forth. Motion jarred and jumped to motion, like an old silent movie. She slowly slid behind the counter. The grainy film couldn't disguise the baffled stubborn anger filling her still-open eyes. Then only her feet and ankles could be seen sticking out on the floor.

The gunmen plundered the cash register quickly. Two of them ran out of the monitor's range. The third leaned his shotgun over the counter and fired twice. Thera's legs jerked with each impact, then stopped twitching.

I heard terrible anguished noises, right there in my kitchen. I had leapt to my feet and was weeping, my fingers clawing at air.

It was now simple finding Thera. I called the cops, told them I was an ex-roommate.

"When he was beating her, the perp's glove rode up,” a detective told me. “When he jumped back over the counter, he left a partial palm-print. We ran it through the system. We got him."

Thera wasn't in the morgue. The detective said she'd survived. Since she was poor, they'd taken her to the county hospital.

Worms of tubing wove in and out of her nostrils, mouth and veins, burrowing through the hospital gown to find homes in her vital organs. Where they emerged, they emptied yellow and wine-colored fluids into clear plastic purses.

Thera's rangy, tough, mustanger body still lived. Little else did. Her brain had hemorrhaged and swollen from the pistol whipping. Her eyes were usually open, but nobody looked out from behind them anymore.

The gunshots had torn through muscle and bone, perforated her intestines.

For weeks Thera lay flaccid in her hospital bed, a ripped-apart rag toy. I went to visit her every few days.

I thought about our time spent together. How very little I'd given her, how very much she'd given me. I'd sat as she poured her life out to me, said nothing of my own. She'd probably thought I was just a good listener. Meanwhile I'd been taking from her as much as anybody else in her life.

Grieving and guilty, I finally shared. I told her of the lives of tigers—our legends, our hopes and dreams, our essentially selfish natures.

There was no response from Thera. Her body contained only an ever-growing emptiness.

Her condition stabilized. Most of the tubes were withdrawn, except for the nutrient drips and catheter. They moved her to a county ward. I still went to visit, but told her no more tales of tigers. Instead I just sat on a powder blue, cracked-vinyl chair. For a long time I was as mute as she.

Then one day I began telling her stories again. Not about tigers. About horses.

At last the southern clan of true horses found their way back to the ancestral homeland when the Spanish conquistadors brought them over in the bellies of the great galleons. Many escaped to freedom and encountered the eastern tribe that had returned over the ice bridge all those eons ago. As their ancestors had pledged, something in them recognized each other.

I still visit every few days and continue to tell Thera these stories. I see changes in her now. Sometimes there's more color in her face. Sometimes less. I notice differences in her breathing. I feel something filling her.

The staff here has told me gently that these are only physiological changes as her body slowly slips toward death. I don't know. Maybe her body is filling itself with death. Maybe with something else. Maybe with a great change.

Back in the land of the lazy tribe, the abandoned and persecuted horse-year women became wilder, tougher, stronger. With each succeeding generation the human blood and influence within them faded. They grew closer and closer to their original horse nature.

Some of these women fled—smuggling themselves on boats or planes, or marrying themselves away to traveling soldiers or sailors.

Some of them have found their way back to the homeland. Once they arrive they seek those they recognize in their hearts—the plainsmen and their painted ponies, or the Irish Tinkers, also driven to make the last jump across the sea. And when they find these men they recognize, the horse-year women mate and breed every twelve years, coming closer to home within themselves.

While I sit here and talk to Thera I am thinking. I'm thinking of those who trap and kill mustangs for dog food. I'm thinking of gun-toting thieves and cheating landlords and traitorous lovers. I'm thinking of mothers who try to tell their daughters fairy tales to pass on the knowledge of their origins, but who are misunderstood. And who themselves misunderstand that in the end, it isn't legends that will save us.

Long ago my dragon master set me to reading ancient texts as part of my training. In those texts I found this saying: “He who teaches a woman how to use a sword is a fool."

But the wheel is turning full cycle, and my master has trained me well in the art of the blade.

This is the homeland. The Age of Iron ends, the circle turns. The great horse tribes are reuniting. This is the renewed land. In the midst of turmoil and myth, the animals are returning. Their spirits wake from where they've slept under mountains and old riverbeds. They're filling our bodies once again. They will be our bodies once again.

Lost in La Mancha (2002) was a depressing (although nonetheless fascinating) documentary to watch. The film, directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, detailed the troubled pre-production and even more disastrous and aborted shoot of a film by Terry Gilliam called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. In it, a modern ad executive (played by Johnny Depp) slips through a time warp and ends up being mistaken for Sancho Panza by that squire's boss, the delusional old “knight” who calls himself Don Quixote (the role to be played by French actor Jean Rochefort).

Between budgetary woes, bad planning, and a string of mishaps that bordered on the biblical (floods and hail destroyed sets and equipment, the older leading man developed a double herniated disc and could no longer mount a horse, and on location, every time the cameras rolled, NATO fighter jets roared by, performing their sound barrier-breaking maneuvers), Gilliam's film seemed like a dream quest destroyed by the harsh realities of modern life and business practices.

Ironically, this isn't even the first time a Don Quixote film has floundered and failed to be finished. As the documentary mentions, earlier auteur Orson Welles was also obsessed with a troubled Don Quixote project. He began shooting his in 1955. And he was still talking about completing it when he died in 1985!

History repeats ... with a vengeance.

To call Terry Gilliam's saga of his aborted film poetic justice might be a cruel overstatement. Still, there is something oddly apt about the sad fate of this particular film and this particular director.

Gilliam, ever since he was weaned from the Monty Python troupe, has been more than a little quixotic in his approach to filmmaking. The conflicts and high drama related to the production, editing, and release of films like Brazil (1985) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) are truly legendary. (That's another thing he has in common with the late great Mr. Welles.)

Gilliam's feverish and fabulous visions for what he hopes to capture on film seem impractical and a little mad at times. And his ever more wildly inventive storylines have become increasingly difficult to make on the cheap. But Terry Gilliam has never been a company man. He is relentless in his pursuit of his movie, his way. He has never taken kindly to the controls of studio heads and accountants, even though his ambitious film projects now appear to demand the kind of hefty front-money that could only come from major studios, where nervous suits try to filmmake by committee.

What a nightmare scenario! The questing hero was sure to be destroyed by the literal-minded bureaucrats who held the purse-strings and the controls.

Gilliam seemed to be playing out one of his own dark fantasies. When The Man Who Killed Don Quixote never managed to get back into production, some feared that the career of Terry Gilliam might be in jeopardy. That is, until we heard he had taken the helm of the Ehren Kruger (Ring One and Two [American Versions], Skeleton Key) scripted project, The Brothers Grimm.

Now that we've seen it, some of us still fear for the career of Mr. Gilliam.

It's sad, really. For, like the story of Don Quixote, a film related to the work of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm seems like it would be right up Gilliam's alley.

The two brothers with the all-too-appropriate name were (among other things) librarians, scholars, teachers, legal historians, philologists, Germanic studies founders, translators, and academic human rights activists, as well as the collectors and editors of traditional folktales from Germany (and also Scandinavia and the British Isles). As anyone who has ever read anything close to a reliable translation of the Kinder-und Hausmrchen (also known as KHM or Nursery and Household Tales) can tell you, the Grimm “fairy tales” are nothing like the Disneyfied retellings to which twentieth and twenty-first century audiences are more accustomed.

The Grimm tales are gruesome little stories, filled with matter-of-fact accounts of murder, torture, dismemberment, self-mutilation, familial violence and abuse, and even folks chowing down on the flesh of their own kin; haunting stuff that taps into primordial fears and forbidden dreams. And beneficial! At least, according to psychologists like Bruno Bettelheim in his classic study, The Uses of Enchantment.

Not everyone agrees, of course. Psychologists of various stripes, Marxists, theologians, structuralists, literary historians, critics, folklorists, feminists, and PTA conservatives have been debating the accuracy and social efficacy of the Grimm tales since they were first published in the early nineteenth century.

But whether these are reliable recordings of oral and literary sources or even appropriate moral instruction for young and old is rather beside the point. They are undeniably powerful stories that are both other-worldly and resonant. And that's why I was so excited by the idea of Terry Gilliam taking a crack at them.

Unfortunately, he doesn't. Not really, anyway. For although there are repeated visual references to some of the best-known tales—a child in a red hooded cape, others scattering breadcrumbs to lead them home, a beautiful woman lowering her long hair down the window of a tower—the story told by the film The Brothers Grimm has very little to do with the KHM, and even less to do with the brothers themselves.

And it should have something to do with the Grimm siblings, since they are the anti-heroes of the movie plot. As told by Kruger and Gilliam, “Jake” (Heath Ledger) and “Will” (Matt Damon) Grimm were con men who preyed upon the superstitions of stupid and utterly gullible villagers by exorcising (through the duo's amazing yet completely fake pyrotechnics and theatrics) the witches and goblins the peasants most feared.

The brothers appear to be making a lucrative living, until an occupying French General Delatombe (Gilliam regular Jonathan Pryce) and his Italian henchman and master torturer Cavaldi (Peter Stormare) decide that their vaudeville routine is counterproductive, irrational, anti-French, or something else that's inappropriate. It's never quite clear why French troops should care about a couple of minor hustlers. And that's not the only thing about the movie and its characters that will strike a conscious audience member as incomprehensible.

Let's start with the brothers, who were, in real life (if historians have a clue), as far from street hustlers as you can get. Older brother Jacob was a shy and retiring type with a rigorous scholarly mind. After his father's death when he was twelve, Jacob became father figure and major breadwinner for the Grimm family. Younger brother Wilhelm was a lively and sociable fellow, despite being sick with asthma and heart disease most of his life. He was bright but not as methodical as his brother. Wilhelm was considered more of a poet than his older brother.

Reverse that, sleaze it up a lot, and throw some dirt on it, and you have an idea of how the film portrays the two. Even the age of the two players is off-kilter. Damon is almost nine years older than Ledger—and looks it. Yet he plays the younger brother, a strapping and lusty chap who likes nothing better than to steal money from the poor.

Are there no heirs of the Grimms still around to sue for defamation of character over this pathetic movie?

The slanderous portrayal of these two well-intentioned professors wouldn't have bothered me if the movie had been more playful. If it were full of Gilliamesque absurdities and pointed anachronisms, it would have been clear that these were not the real Brothers Grimm being depicted. And, more to the point, it probably would have been a much more lively and entertaining movie.

But, no. The Brothers Grimm is cheerless and awkward almost all of the time. The tone is neither impish nor surreal. So Pryce's over-the-top General just looks like bad acting. And Cavaldi's instantaneous metamorphosis from sadistic torturer to the brothers’ sentimental and devoted sidekick will leave you shaking your head. As for the grimy and uncomfortable sibling heroes, they look—from beginning to end—like they're not quite sure who they are or what their motivation is.

And, okay, I guess I should say something about the folktale-ish subplot. It involves the disappearances of numerous sweet young girls from the village of Marbaden. It soon becomes apparent that the disappearances are not a hoax. Marbaden really does have an enchanted forest that makes kiddies go poof, as well as a mythically vain “Mirror Queen” (Monica Bellucci)—think Snow White's nasty stepmom crossed with Rapunzel.

Only a stoical trapper named Angelika (Lena Headey) seems to have any clue about what happened to the girls, including two of her own sisters. With her reluctant help, the Grimm brothers—under threat of death by Delatombe—successfully investigate the cursed village's plight.

There are a few grisly scenes of man-chomping trees and child-chomping horses, but they are neither played for Gilliam's standard sick laughs, nor for genuine terrifying suspense. It all comes off like a flat horror movie in period costume. Likewise, the secret identity of the evil Queen's consort, which I saw coming a mile off, contains no emotional power. I kept thinking that this character, although powerless to resist the Queen's sexual enchantment, should have retained some awareness of his evil actions. His self-loathing as he sacrificed his own children would have been potent fairy tale plotting.

Too bad Gilliam and Kruger couldn't be bothered.

In various interviews, Gilliam admitted that the project (first greenlighted by MGM and later micromanaged by the Weinstein brothers of Dimension Films) was offered to him as a “commercial” film, and you can almost feel how ill at ease he was making it. Although he has said many times that he abhors the standard macho adventure film, The Brothers Grimm was clearly devised to be exactly that.

Action movies of the standard Hollywood variety do not suit Terry Gilliam's considerable gifts as a filmmaker. Let him fashion a fractured fairy tale from these bits and pieces and we might have had a film worth watching—something farcical and fun, but with an unsettling cynical edge. That's the kind of fairy tale movie Gilliam might have made. Has made, in fact.

Whether in the out-and-out wackiness of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), co-directed by Terry Jones, or the more subtle and very subversive Jabberwocky (1977), Gilliam has done some wonderful work in twisted takes on traditional legends. In fact, no one does that kind of revisionist fable better.

The problem here is that someone who is considered one of the great cult filmmakers succumbed to the practical notion of making a living as a director for hire. Everyone deserves to make a buck. But how can a bad movie like The Brothers Grimm not be an even more bitter disappointment coming from a “visionary” director like Terry Gilliam?

I would think dire and depressing thoughts about the career of dear Terry, were it not that his next film—shot during a six-month unofficial strike against the editing suggestions of the brothers Weinstein—Tideland is about to appear, starring Jeff Bridges. A more intimate and lower-budgeted indie-ish film, it is one that (if advance accounts are to be believed) allowed Terry Gilliam to make a Terry Gilliam film.

I look forward to seeing it. In the meantime, take a look at the Criterion director's cut of Brazil, or rewatch Jabberwocky. And forget about even renting The Brothers Grimm. Instead, marvel at the social commentary of Gilliam's earlier films that seems even more pertinent today than when they were made, twenty or more years ago.

Gilliam let us know that terrorism is a tool of the state, good for big business, and handy for a government that wants to keep its people fearful and dependent. That's a message that packs quite a wallop these days.

If, however, he was trying to tell us something about life on Earth (past, present, or future) with The Brothers Grimm, I have no idea what it might be. Except that Hollywood studios are no place for an honest director to make an honest dollar.

STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION 1. Title of Publication, THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION.2. Publication no. 588-960. 3. Date of filing, Sept. 12, 2005. 4. Issue Frequency, 11 times per year. 5. Number of issues published annually, 11. 6. Annual subscription price $44.89. 7. Known office of publication, 1200 Park Avenue, Hoboken, NJ 07030. 8. Mailing address of headquarters, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030. 9. Publisher, Gordon Van Gelder, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030, Editor, Gordon Van Gelder, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030, Managing editor, none. 10. Owner, Spilogale, Inc, Gordon Van Gelder, Barbara J. Norton, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030. 11. Known Bondholders, mortgagees and other security holders owning or holding 1% or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities, None. 15. Extent and nature of circulation: a. Total no. copies (net press run), average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months 27,554, actual no. copies of single issue published nearest to filing date 29,312. b. Paid/requested circulation 1) average no. copies outside-county mail subscriptions 14,585, actual no. copies 16,554 2) average no. copies in-county subscriptions: 38, actual no. copies in-county 36 3) sales through dealers and carriers, average no. copies 3,822 actual no. copies single issue 6,393 c. total paid and/or requested circulation average no. 18,445, actual no. copies 22,983 d. Free distribution by mail 1) outside-county average no. copies 295, actual no. copies 295 2) in-county average no. copies 5, actual no. copies 5 f. total free distribution average no. copies 300, actual no. copies 300 g. total distribution average no. copies 18,745, actual no. copies 23,283 h. copies not distributed average no. 6,477, actual no. copies 4,814 i. total average no. copies 25,222, actual no. copies 28,097 j. Percent paid/requested circulation 99. 17. Gordon Van Gelder, Publisher.

She slips into my mind in the middle of breakfast, all mischief and dark eyes, then vanishes in a wink. I set my coffee down untasted and make an effort to remember. She'd been leaning back against a dirty yellow brick wall, knee cocked, cigarette in her lips, the match in her hands just starting to flare. For a moment I wonder if I'd conjured her up out of memory and desire. But the details are too settled, the colors too vivid. You get to know the difference between a trace and imagination, subtle though it may be, when you've spent enough time in CAptivity.

Against all odds, I catch another trace of her an hour or so later. It comes out of the blue as I stretch out on the sofa, half-listening to classic Miles, drifting through Sketches of Spain in just the right state of alert abstraction, as it happens, to notice each stray ping of data as it bursts from the subliminal buzz of the WiPsi data stream. Faces, formulae, fragments of analysis: each burn an instant against the curtain of music, then darken, dismissed, unremembered.

Until she reappears.

There must be low-res video in the feed this time because she moves in jittery black and white, tossing back her head, her lips flattening with ... what? Impatience? The clip lasts no more than a second, but my heart leaps as if the spring of her short black hair and the fluency of her expression reveal intimate secrets. I wonder how other moods might shape her face. I wonder what it would take to make her smile.

I wonder why I wonder.

She's far from the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. Attractive, yes, but with a fleshy sensuality and a scruffy, Red Hook sense of style. She smolders rather than sparkles, with a look that provokes rather than enchants. Not my type at all.

Except that, apparently, she is.

I know better than to say anything about her when I meet William for lunch. Unfortunately, William knows me better than to miss the signs.

"Let me guess.” He presses his fingers to his forehead in mock concentration. “Another date with the girl of your dreams."

I feel myself redden. “I'm just saying, we don't usually see so many personal files in the data stream."

He throws back his head and laughs. Other diners glance our way.

"I can read your mind, pal."

The Cloister is a typical Smith Street CAptive hangout: a tiny, run-down joint with mismatched silverware, butcher paper tablecloths, and food fabulous enough to justify the stratospheric prices. Every table is taken. Every diner sports an identically dimensioned tonsure and faded designer jeans, the uniform of our overpaid, indolent tribe.

Jan, the chef and co-owner, puts between us a bowl of fat, green-lipped mussels billowing clouds of winey, ambrosial steam.

"Save me, Jan,” I plead. “He's mocking my affections."

Jan tsks and rests her hand gently on my scalp. “Play nice, boys. Bon apptit."

I notice the cool absence of her hand on my head as she disappears back into the kitchen.

"Flesh and blood has its advantages,” William mumbles molluskularly. “You should try it sometime.” He winks and spears another mussel, putting him two in the lead.

The meal restores my spirits. I sling my jacket over my shoulder and saunter home, intoxicated with the warmth of the midday sun and my own well-fed well-being. I notice the trees budding along Smith Street, the yawning shop doors expelling perfumed breath.

I'm grinning like a goon as I turn onto Sackett Street.

Mike, my downstairs neighbor, digs in the tiny front garden, a tray of seedlings on the bricks beside him. He looks up as I take the stoop two steps at a time.

"Looks like someone's having a good day,” he says.

My smile slips self-consciously. “Not too bad,” I say, pausing at the front door. “The usual. You?” Mike is a freelance programmer who hasn't worked for months. He's a decent guy, a neighborhood old-timer who treats CAptives like regular people. Still, I don't know how much longer he can last before he's priced out of the Cobble Hill LAN, if not out of Brooklyn altogether.

"Same old same old.” He waves and turns back to his planting. “Don't let the headbugs bite."

I step inside, troubled by senseless guilt on Mike's account. It's a relief to settle the CApp onto my tonsure and feel the flow of data displace more disturbing undercurrents of thought. I'm left on the unruffled surface of myself, free to kick off my shoes and relax. I even consider dusting off my keyboard and trying to noodle out a tune.

Just then, my head fills with the susurration of a security interdict, eliminating the possibility. At time-and-a-half I can hardly complain, but I wonder what secret could be so deep and dark that every trace of it must be blocked. Coded military communications? The perfect egg salad recipe? Orders from clandestine insect overlords? All I know for sure is that, until it's done, there's no point trying to wring anything useful out of my brain. I switch from jazz to rock-and-roll, the better to Nautilus a sweat to. When every sinew screams for mercy, I flop on the couch and catch up on the latest episodes of HospiCop. The relentless shush in my head doesn't let up until the CApp goes off-line at five o'clock. The sudden silence feels like a rush of cool water. I let it wash over me.

The first thing I notice when I can think again is that I need a shower.

And a stiff drink.

The usual suspects occupy the usual table when I step into the cavernous, blue-lit bowels of the Afterlife Bar. Bennie is spouting his latest conspiracy theory, oblivious to William's tired, tolerant glaze and Sadly's complete disinterest.

Sadly stares at me with her great empty eyes. “Did you get anything worthwhile done today?” she asks.

I shake my head as I take a seat, wishing for the thousandth time I'd never shown her my songs.

"It's all in the lyrics,” Bennie says. “'He grabs his hat, then makes the bus in seconds flat.’ ‘Hat’ is obviously a metaphor for CApp. ‘Bus’ is an archaic term for data interface."

I signal for the waitress. “What are we talking about?"

"You know the Beatles?” Bennie asks.

"Bennie is explaining how a fifty-year-old song predicted CAptivity,” William says dryly.

"Then there's the refrain,” Bennie says, “'Love to’ what?” He pauses rhetorically. “'Turn you on.’ Tell me that's coincidence."

"I need a drink.” Looking futilely around for a waitress, I notice a woman standing by herself at the bar.

William pries my fingers from his arm. “Easy, pal."

"That's her!"

She stands there with her back to the bar like she owns the place, one foot up, knee jutting arrogantly forward, elbows leaning back on the brass rail, an expression on her face I interpret as unassailable boredom. Unless she keeps a closetful of identical outfits at home, she wears the same black boots, black denim jeans, and ratty black leather jacket I remember from this morning's trace. I approach and stand beside her at the bar, stunned by the physicality of her presence, certain there is absolutely nothing I can say to her that won't provoke dismissal or, worse, disdain. So I say nothing and signal to the bartender for a draft, expecting to return to the table with nothing but beer and embarrassment.

Then, miraculously, she speaks. “What's it feel like?"

She hasn't turned her head, but there doesn't appear to be anyone else she might be addressing. “Huh?” I parry.

"The head thingy, the hat, the cranial, what you call it, application?” Her voice is pure New York, but she gives those awkward diphthongs a seductive twist.

"Cerebral Appliance. CApp."

"Does it hurt or feel, I don't know, electric?"

"It doesn't really feel like anything. No, wait, that's not true. It's like...” I pause, wheels spinning, searching for an image sharp enough to lend me a bit of traction. “...like a mist on a lake, or a fogbank on a road."

"That doesn't sound too bad,” she says. “I have friends who shell out good money for pharmaceuticals that do about the same."

"Except I'm the one getting paid."

This earns a faint smile. “And that's okay? Letting them pay you to use your head that way?"

"As far as I'm concerned, I'm just renting out space. It's like a motel room; what they do in there is their business."

She laughs, and in that instant is transformed from sultry to incandescent. No, no, I'm the one who is transformed. I'm the one she illuminates, letting me see myself as the inspiration for her radiance.

"Actually,” I continue, “I'm thinking about ditching the whole deal, getting my head clear so I can get back to writing songs.” I have no idea where this is coming from, or what the next words careening out of my mouth might be. Helplessly, I babble on.

"When you think about it, there's something tragic about the whole CAptivity dynamic. It's nothing but the bureaucratic exploitation of human intelligence, the sublimation of the individual into a soulless collective whole.” I'm not even sure what this means. I recognize it though; it's straight Sadly, the very riff that earned her the nickname. This, apparently, is the best I can come up with to amuse the girl of my dreams.

To my amazement, she doesn't laugh in my face or turn dismissively away. In fact, she seems to take my nonsense at face value. “I didn't expect to hear that kind of talk from a data monk,” she says.

"Paul.” I offer my hand.

She squeezes it lightly. “Hello, Paul. Oona."

"Oona,” I say, testing it out. I like the sound. “Listen, would you like to come over to our table, join my friends for a drink?” She hesitates. “It's okay. I mean, there's no ironclad rule against you sitting there. It's just kind of a custom for CAptives to stay over there while everybody else...."

She shakes her head. I brace myself for a brushoff. Instead, she peers at me as if reading something written against the lenses of my eyes. “Why don't you come over to my table,” she says finally, and glides off through the crowd without looking to see if I follow.

I do.

I've never seen a CAptive cross to this side of the room. The crowd parts awkwardly for me, some people moving too quickly out of my way, others slyly shifting their weight to make it harder for me to pass. Every small interaction seems subtly wrong. I lose track of her as she moves effortlessly through the throng. When I catch sight of her again, she's leaning over to talk into the ear of an East Village Jesus with brown, shoulder-length hair, intense brown eyes, and a modest assortment of nostril rings and lip studs. I take a step back, feeling caught up in a mistake, but before I can retreat further, she sees me and smiles, which is all I need to overlook intimations of disaster.

Jesus hooks his foot around the leg of a nearby chair and drags it over to his table. “I'm told you're an unusual man,” he says, gravelly voice complementing his aura of punked-out divinity.

"I hope I'm not intruding.” Their mutual body language hints at intimacy, but the evidence is inconclusive. Or is that just wishful thinking? Oona pats the seat of the chair. I sit.

"May I?” she asks, reaching tentatively for my scalp.

I tilt my head toward her. She strokes my tonsure lightly with her fingertips. I understand why cats purr.

"Paul's a songwriter,” she says. “Isn't that cool?"

"What kind of music are you into?” I ask her.

"What's really cool,” Jesus intones, “Is a CAptive willing to question CAptivity. In fact, that's more than cool; it's genuinely interesting."

I give him a hard look. It's one thing for members of the tribe to call each other CAptives, but another coming from outside. It scrapes a nerve. He returns my stare, unfazed, as if the absence of intent to offend excuses the offense. I don't want to appear uncivil, not in her presence, so I shrug it off. “I was just talking off the top of my head,” I say. “So to speak."

"Didn't you mean it?” Oona asks, withdrawing her touch, “about how tragic and ugly the whole business is?"

"No, I meant it. Certainly I meant it. Tragic. Yes.” The disappointment in her voice makes me desperate. I struggle to remember what exactly I'm supposed to mean. Something from Sadly's usual spiel. “But, after all, there's nothing we can do about it. That's the real world, right?"

Jesus nods. “The real world. Yes."

"What if there was?” she asks.

"Was what?"

"Something you could do?"

"Maybe there is,” I say, grasping at a thread of inspiration, “Maybe just by being part of the system, some tiny bit of myself—a smidgen of my humanness—infects CAptivity, changes it from within. I like to think so, anyway."

"It's a nice thought,” she says.

"What about more direct action?” Jesus asks.

They watch me expectantly. I can't imagine where they're headed, but I'm willing to go along. “Direct action,” I echo, as if intrigued.

"I have a good feeling about him,” Oona declares.

I return Jesus's stare with fresh confidence. He looks unconvinced, but eventually he reaches into a duffle bag under his chair and puts an object in the center of the table.

I turn it in my hands. It's a crude, convex disk of flex board, about five inches across, chips and circuitry hand-wired to the surface ... an ugly bit of business, nothing like the sleek, custom molded shell I'm used to, but a CApp of sorts, nonetheless.

"How about that,” I say. The beer isn't sitting well. I ignore a tremor of nausea.

"It's a reader, Paul,” Oona says. “It can't be detected or traced. It doesn't alter the data stream."

"Why not?"

To my deep satisfaction, Jesus looks surprised.

"'Direct action.’ That's what you said. Why not randomize a few digits, distort a few images, substitute one face for another?” I feel distorted myself, as if squeezed around the middle by a great hand, though my voice remains composed.

"We don't—We can't—” Jesus pauses to gather himself. “We're not in a position to confront the political/industrial complex yet. For the moment we just want to see what we're up against. How much of the data stream is really devoted to scientific research and technical analysis, and how much to the covert war against the people. Who are they watching? How detailed are their files?"

Oona puts a hand on my shoulder. I look into her hazelnut eyes and catch a whiff of her pungent spice, a tang that borders between the tantalizing and distasteful. “Paul,” she asks as softly as the ambient noise will allow, “Would you be willing to wear a reader over your CApp when you go online?"

"Why not?” I ask.

She smiles, taking this as casual agreement, missing the urgency in the question, the ache for a real answer.

The churning in my stomach won't wait any longer. “I'll be right back,” I say, pushing up from the table.

I worm my way back through the crowd. The bathroom door muffles the din of voices and noise. Standing over the sink, I wonder whether it's illness, apprehension, or desire twisting my gut and making my heart work overtime. All three, I decide. Or maybe I'm coming down with something.

I call William's cell.

"I knew it was just a matter of time,” he says when I describe the situation. “You've completely lost your mind."

"I didn't say I'd actually do it."

"Can you hear yourself? Do you have any idea how quickly you'll lose your CApp? That's if Homeland Security doesn't just put you away. You're talking about messing with the data stream."

"She told me it doesn't alter anything ... just monitors what's going on.” The explanation sounds weak even as I offer it.

"You poor, love-struck doofus.” he says. “Don't you get it? Your dream girl is right; people are being watched, and she's one of them. Why else would you keep catching traces of her?"

"I know that,” I tell him, because now I do; it's obvious the moment he says it. What did I think they were, all those personal files floating through the data stream? Phone listings? Census data? There's no point in wasting valuable CApp time on simple record keeping. Real-time recognition and conspiracy vectoring, on the other hand, involve just the kinds of multidimensional analyses that make CAptives such valuable commodities.

Faintly through the phone I hear Sadly ask what's going on. William shushes her.

"So what do I do?” My stomach has calmed down, but now my head is throbbing.

"Get back out there,” he says. “Keep them talking. I'll call Homeland Security."

I catch a glimpse of them through the crowd before they see me. Jesus looks jumpy. He holds the ersatz CApp inside his jacket, out of sight. Oona flattens her lips in the same expression I saw in the trace—was it just this morning? Then she notices me approaching and smiles as if she'd never doubted my return.

I can't help myself; I melt.

"So—” Jesus says.

"I can't,” I tell Oona in a rush, half expecting a squad of government agents to burst into the Afterlife at any second. “It's not that I'm afraid of losing the work, though I am. And it's not the toys I wouldn't be able to afford, the meals I'd have to give up or the rent I wouldn't be able to pay. It's not even that I believe the data stream is sacrosanct, or anything like that. Or maybe it is all of that. I don't know. I just know the thought of putting that god-awful thing on my head makes me sick to my stomach. I wish I could. I wish I could do it for you. I've dreamed about you for months. Well, not exactly dreamed. What do you know about traces?"

I see hints of alarm in Oona's eyes. Jesus has already zipped up his bag and is out of his chair.

"Yeah, you'd better go. They're keeping an eye you. They'll probably be here any minute. I'm sorry I couldn't—I'm just sorry."

They've already moved away through the crowd. I sit, watching after them. Suddenly Oona reappears. She bends over and kisses me softly on the cheek. Then she's gone.

I'm still sitting there a half hour later when the Homeland Security agent finally shows up. William leads him to my table. I expect to see a grizzled military type; Agent Herfel, short and stoop-shouldered, looks more like an accountant. He asks a few questions, takes a few desultory notes. “Hack into the data stream undetected—” He snorts derisively, stands. “I wouldn't worry about these people too much."

William walks outside with me. It's early by our usual standards, but I'm in no mood to booze it up with the gang.

"Will you be all right?” he asks.

I shrug. “Your guess is as good as mine."

He laughs, lightly punches my shoulder. I head down Smith Street for home.

Upstairs, I turn on the lights, then turn them off again. I'm too wired to sleep, too punchy to listen to music or watch video. The evening's events churn through my head.

William was right; I could have lost everything. It was a close call. So this must be relief I'm feeling. Strange it should seem so wretched.

I find myself reaching for the CApp on its cradle.

The circuit is off line, of course, but simply the gesture of settling it upon its perfect circle of bare scalp conjures up the familiar sensation of blurred tranquillity. For a moment the dissonant voices of doubt and dismay fall silent. Gone is the bedlam of self that clamors beneath sensible being. Gone are the inner cackles of discontent, the wails of loss and despair, the laments for the person I would like to be but may never become.

I will have to wait until morning for a more lasting deliverance, but for these few seconds, at least, I create my own blessed CAptivity.

Adelia decided one day that the Dell in the Hills was too small for her. She had grown five-span over the last year, making her taller than the tallest Miller and stronger than the strongest Iron-Weaver, both of whom had battled giants during the Fell Winters in the longer days of their youth. Since size and strength are truly reflections of inner heart, the Dell Folk openly praised Adelia's skill with axe and anvil and sword. But secretly they laughed when she could no longer sleep in her goose-down bed, or fit her legs under the dinner table, or even stand up straight in her own mother's kitchen. Such is the bloom of jealousy in small hearts, and that is how Adelia knew that it was time to say good-bye.

Perhaps Adelia didn't really mind that much, for she had always aspired to become a giant-slayer, a champion for the smallest of people and destroyer of monsters laying waste to villages. She dreamed of wearing a cape made of a giant's woven hair and strapping her sword on with a belt made of a giant's leathery skin. With such size and strength there was no more noble service to the Land than that of giant-slayer. And no greater glory.

Adelia said good-bye to her mother, who was the only person who didn't want to see Adelia leave. Adelia's mother was a small woman of the glens from Downland, a weaver by trade, and her small size was her source of motivation, for she took pride in the pain it gave her. But it broke her heart that her daughter could not understand that pain, much less share in it. When Adelia left, so, too, did her mother's hope that Adelia would ever come to discover the strength and dignity found in the heart of a small woman.

Now, it happens that a giant hadn't been seen among the Dell Folk for many seasons, so Adelia traveled Upland, among the other various Folk, and everywhere she went she asked, “Where is a giant that I may slay?” And the Folk told her that the giants all dwelt farther Upland, in the realm of Gantica, and rarely came Downland these days. So farther Upland she ventured in search of Gantica, and she skirted the Lakes of Sorrow, where the Lonely Giant had shed tears to fill all the valleys and the dales. She crossed the twin rivers Fantis and Gantis, made by the long meandering wagon wheels of the Lost Giant. And she cautiously skirted the Burial Hills, where many a Wicked Giant had been killed in the Fell Winters, their massive bodies turned to dirt and stone after years in sun and rain.

The day came in the land of the Plains Folk that berries and nuts were hardly enough to quell the rumble in Adelia's stomach. She met a poor farmer who gave her a meal of mutton and ale in return for help in fencing his ox stables. The farmer, unfortunately, had seen no giants that she might slay. Farther Upland she plowed another farmer's fields in return for a week's worth of venison. Then she helped dig a well for the farmer's son. In a month she had raised several barns and thatched several cabins, and by the end of summer Adelia had helped harvest many fields of brittle-corn and pig-wheat and golden-eared fur-flax.

All the Plains Folk that Adelia helped were small, and they seemed smaller with each passing day. But since Small Folk were not so good at helping themselves, Adelia took pride in bartering her size and strength to aid them in their daily tasks. And with all this work Adelia herself continued to grow in size, until she stood nearly as tall as one Folk standing on the shoulders of another, and her popularity in the Land grew, and her reputation spread before her.

For the Mountain Folk, Adelia helped quarry granite and mine copperstone; for the Wood Folk, Adelia helped fell trees and mill them into lumber; for the River Folk, Adelia helped dam rapids and sculpt ship-slips out of riverbanks. In each part of the Land Adelia asked, “Where is a giant I may slay?” And the Folk told her there were no giants here to slay, for they all dwelt farther Upland, in the realm of Gantica, and rarely came Downland these days. But in the meantime there were plenty of bridges to build and roads to clear.

The days passed and Adelia grew, and the Folk of the Land praised her strength and size. But now behind her back they also grumbled about how much fruit she ate and griped about how much cotton it took to make clothes big enough to fit her, and sometimes they found it easier and cheaper to get ten men to do what Adelia could do herself. The farther Upland she ventured the less friendly the Folk became, until the Fen Folk refused her passage across their border bogs, and the Prairie Folk ran from the fields and shut themselves deep underground in their burrowed homes.

Adelia didn't quite understand this change until one morning she awoke from sleep in a quiet glade to a small cry of challenge, and found a tiny woman perched on her chest, sword raised in defiance. “Upon the bones of my fallen ancestors,” the little woman proclaimed, “today shall be your last day in the Land, foul beast of Gantica! Prepare to meet the vengeance that shall seal thy doom!” And the woman brought her sword down, but it barely put a dimple in Adelia's shirt. Adelia picked the girl up and held the little figure up to her face, and Adelia realized in horror that this woman thought she was a giant, and was trying to kill her.

This shocked Adelia, and leaving the little woman far behind, Adelia ran and ran—Upland, as far as she could. Suddenly she no longer cared about vengeance or fame or size or strength, and certain horrible questions would not leave her alone: Was she, Adelia, really a giant? Was this what it meant to be a giant, alone and hunted in the far reaches of the Land?

Adelia was now afraid to approach any of the Small Folk, perhaps in fear of persecution, perhaps in fear of what truths they might reveal. She dared not return home to the Dell, not with her source of pride now suddenly her source of shame. In fact, if she were truly a giant, then perhaps Gantica was the only place she would ever find answers to her questions. So Upland she reluctantly continued, homesick and confused, her destination somehow still the same, if not her motivation.

It was in this sparsely populated realm that Adelia finally met her first giant. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say another giant, though Adelia was not yet comfortable thinking of herself that way. This giant sat hunched over a small instrument, a fiddle, and wiped tears from the corners of his eyes.

"Why are you so sad?” Adelia asked.

The giant replied, “The fiddle was my life, and now.... “He tried to draw the bow across the strings, but his fingers were too large, and the only sound was a weak scraping of wood on wood. Adelia took the pieces from him, and though she could barely handle them properly herself, she managed a few pure notes that brought a smile to the Fiddle Giant's eyes. When the sweet sounds faded, Adelia asked the giant if he came from Gantica, but he said he did not, and only knew that it existed somewhere farther Upland.

It was not long before Adelia encountered the Family Giant, who had a wife and two children, but could no longer live with them, not because he was too big, but because his mere presence brought threats and jealousy and prejudice to them from smaller Folk. It gave the Family Giant pleasure to tell Adelia of his wife and children, and so Adelia listened for a time to the love and pride in his voice, and she somehow felt him lucky to have such a family to miss. Before leaving, Adelia asked of Gantica, but the Family Giant only knew that it existed farther Upland, and he could tell her nothing more.

Next she met the Drunken Giant, trapped in sobriety, all skin and bones, who could never again sip enough ale to deliver himself into that realm of uncaring bliss. He, too, denied any knowledge of Gantica, and Adelia in turn had nothing to offer that would ease his pain, and so she left him to his misery. Adelia encountered many other giants in this realm of the Land: the Brooding Giant, the Callous Giant, the Pious Giant. All, like her, were unwilling victims of unwanted size, but none, it turned out, knew much of Gantica.

The sorrows of these giants at first weighed heavily upon Adelia's hopes, but then her gloom turned to resolve, and she determined not to let such suffering become her final fate. Adelia hired the services of a dwarf manager, for it was well known that small-statured dwarves were manipulative and greedy, and hence good at exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities such as giants.

This particular dwarf manager knew from experience that when money and power is involved, social institutions are more prone to overlook the stereotypes of size than are rigid-minded individuals. So, with the dwarf perched upon her shoulder, Adelia came to the part of the Land full of City Folk. There, the sneaky mayors and sly councilmen all marveled in appreciation when she looked them in the eye as they stood on the third story of the town hall. For these people Adelia happily leveled old slums, raised new high-occupancy dwellings, and boosted municipal pride (not to mention the mayor's approval ratings). All of this she did in between carrying produce home for elderly ladies, corralling panicked ponies, and putting out kitchen fires.

For a while the City Folk followed Adelia and praised each great feat, and Adelia once again grew larger. She became a legend to the City Folk, a marvel of physical achievement, and their worship filled her soul. But then a strange thing happened: Adelia found that dwarf managers take a large percentage of profits, and she herself really earned little more each night than a small (for her) dinner and a list from her manager of tasks to complete the following day. Even worse, she discovered that familiarity breeds apathy, for as the novelty of Adelia's size wore off, the City Folk grew tired of donating entire wagons full of melons and squash just to feed her. When the worship subsided, the melons and squash did little to fill her stomach, and even less to fill her soul.

Gradually Adelia's duties shifted to ferrying councilmen and public officers across town, then to delivering eviction notices and collecting taxes, and tracking down criminals, from petty thieves on the lam to tenants late on the rent for their high-occupancy dwellings. After that, the City Folk were noticeably less friendly all around.

In these days Adelia also found it difficult to attain comfort. Sleeping on the hard ground of the central plaza every day left her tired, and the only place for her to bathe was the river, yet it was difficult to find a bit of privacy there at any hour. There was no slab of soap big enough to cleanse her, no towel big enough to dry off with, no fire big enough to warm her bones on the cold autumn nights. Amidst so many people she felt very lonely.

Then one day the smoldering coals of pettiness burst into flame between Adelia's city and its neighbor, and the respective mayors declared war for reasons minuscule or unfounded, or lost in hypocrisy. The mayor ordered Adelia to dam the River Fantis to cut off the other city's water supply, and to hurl boulders over the outer wall, and to use the battering ram to break down the enemy's central gates.

Adelia no longer cared about the hollow praise of small-minded and small-hearted Folk, and declined to act. But the mayor brought out her contract and explained that she was legally bound to carry out any action deemed necessary for the safety of the city, and such action now included said hostility. Adelia's dwarf manager admitted that such a clause was in the fine print, but Adelia had never read the fine print, for the contract was the size of her thumb, and she could no longer read scrolls or books or binding contracts, and even to hear people clearly she had to bend over. (This gave her a constant backache, of course, but there was never anyone big enough to rub it for her.)

In the end, Adelia left, for none of the City Folk, even as a collective whole, could do much about it. As she strode away, they jeered and threw melons and squash and called her names that reminded her sadly of the cruel whispers she had heard in the days before she left the Dell in the Hills. The jealousy and bigotry of Small Folk, it seemed, was not confined by geography nor governed by civility.

Adelia found the Land beyond the cities to be a brutal territory in which jealousy and bigotry were mere vices. Burdened by her lingering shame, Adelia did things she later could not, or would not, remember. There were wars here, and giants in armor leading armies across smoking battle plains. There were terrible games of strength and wit and chance: giants against animals, giants against criminals, giants against giants. There was gambling and swindling and treachery from giants and men and dwarves alike. Adelia learned that the best way to find a shirt that fit a giant was to steal one from another giant. She also learned that two giants were still stronger than one, and in the end only a giant's strength of will could match a giant's strength of muscle.

Through all of this Adelia listened for word of Gantica, but still, news was always the same: Upland. And so Upland she drifted, until gradually the games disappeared, and the battles, and the men, and the dwarves, and even the other giants, and eventually Adelia entered lands filled only with poppy-covered meadows and pine-scented woods. And though the shame of the past did not leave, at least it subsided into memory.

It was not long before Adelia noticed everything around her growing larger—not individually, but as a whole. Day by day the trees around her grew taller, until she could no longer see over them, and so, too, did the meadows and hills and rivers and rocks. Soon everything around her grew to just the right size for her comfort. A single melon filled her stomach, a single brook cleansed her body, and a single tree gave her shade.

Perhaps she had finally found Gantica, where the Land was large enough for giants to live in comfort. But the world did not stop growing. Soon bushes were the size of trees, rocks the size of boulders, and flowers towered far over her head. And farther Upland it took her hours just to walk around pebbles and weave her way under common blades of grass. On a whim Adelia crawled into the center of a dandelion puff, allowing the wind to carry her where it would. When the dandelion fell apart Adelia found herself stranded in an endless forest, and she despaired at her sudden insignificance. But then her misery and bitterness faded, and she decided to embrace this new opportunity: she would abandon the deceitful ways of men and dwarves and giants for the simple life of the animals.

To do that she would have to learn their language.

First Adelia learned the tongue of the ladybugs, who were friendly creatures, but more importantly, patient teachers. From there she learned to speak with the wood slugs, who had nothing better to do anyway than strike up long conversations, and then the moths, and the butterflies and ants and beetles. Animals, she discovered, loved to talk. Not only that, animals were also bluntly honest: subtlety was not a strong point, and sarcasm was forever lost upon them.

In this part of the Land, where even the insects were larger than Adelia, she bartered information in return for food and shelter, but mostly for protection: the vole would protect her from the asp in return for word of the fox's current appetite; the asp would protect her from the fox in return for the location of the vole's latest burrow; and the fox would protect her from the vole in return for a description of the asp's current sleeping habits. Along the way Adelia came to know that voles were really cantankerous creatures at heart, foxes overly mischievous, and asps often lazy. But such qualities were not to be criticized, for that was the nature of each animal, and judgment was a concept that had yet to muddle their view of the Land.

At first Adelia admired this honesty among animals, and she wondered why it was lacking in the human Folk she had met. Then gradually she came to realize that honesty wasn't necessarily the same as sympathy, or compassion. And in truth, Adelia often felt a little ashamed, peddling the wants of this creature against the desires of that creature, most of which came down to the hope of a tasty meal at the expense of the other. So maybe the animals weren't so different from the Folk after all, or perhaps the Folk weren't so different from the animals, just better at disguising their hunger. Either way, the animals cared little about the painful things she had seen and done in days gone by, and this helped her soul to mend.

Then one day in her wanderings Adelia came to the realm of the Mushroom Folk. These were a small, humble people of her own size who took her in and made her one of their own. She did not mention her past to them, and to her relief they did not ask. Their kindness surprised Adelia, for what had she ever seen from Small Folk but jealousy and treachery and lies? Then again, in this part of the Land, Adelia herself was a Small Folk, and small was a relative thing now anyway, and that all left her more than a little confused.

Life with the Mushroom Folk was not easy. Survival is hard work, after all, even collectively. But the Mushroom Folk taught her how to build a home from a toadstool stalk, and grow crops of terraced truffles, and carve portobella boats to ride the brooks and streams surrounding the village. To her surprise, Adelia was very glad to have human companionship once again, not to mention a fresh start. In return for all this, Adelia helped raise latticed covers above the village and erect thick walls of bramble and thistle, all to keep out foxes, voles, and asps. Adelia often lamented the fact that in days past, when she had been much larger, she could have done in an hour what it took the village of the Mushroom Folk an entire season to do. But when that season was done and Adelia was tired as she had never been before in her life, somehow the work was also more satisfying than anything she had ever done before in her life.

After that season of living in mushrooms, Adelia grew restless, and, thanking the Mushroom Folk for their kindness, she resumed her journey Upland. She borrowed the services of a silver-back hummingbird (for silver-back hummingbirds are always wistful and restless, and only need a simple excuse to dash off on adventures) and she traveled for many days, living at times with the Willow Folk, and then the Brittle-Corn Folk, then the Sunflower Folk. When she eventually came to the Turnip Folk, who lived in a giant garden, she paused and wondered: In whose garden did these Folk live? The Farmer's garden, they answered, pointing to the giant-sized farmhouse beyond the garden.

Here Adelia set free the silver-back hummingbird, and though the Turnip Folk warned her to stay away from the house, she cautiously approached it anyway. Was this a part of Gantica? Were these giants of the farmhouse the true giants of the fabled realm? If they were, what good would it do her now that she was once again smaller than a giant's thumb? She had no answers, but needed to find out.

The Turnip Folk were right, of course: she should have stayed away. For the Farmer's little boy (a freckle-faced, tousled redhead who really wasn't so little) promptly caught her in a cup. After running her through the farmhouse with shouts of glee, he stuck her in a small cage of wire mesh, and there she sat for several days, occasionally fed a shred of lettuce or a moldy carrot. The Farmer's boy often checked on her, and clapped his hands, until eventually the Farmer took the boy and Adelia in the cage to the nearest village. Together they sold her to an old man with long white hair and tiny eyes lost behind oversized spectacles. Adelia's lasting impression of the Farmer's boy was the huge grin that spread across his face when the Farmer dropped half the sale price of ten pennies into his eager hands.

The old man who bought her had no name, at least as far as Adelia ever knew. He was just called the Maker, and what he made were clocks. In his dark, dusty shop sat hundreds of timepieces, maybe even thousands, from tiny tin pocket watches to masterful ironwood grandfather clocks. The Maker put Adelia to work cleaning and repairing the clocks, for what better way to build and maintain such tiny parts than with a tiny person? Adelia learned to mesh pinions and set balance wheels and calibrate gear trains. After a while she became an expert at wrestling mainsprings back into alignment, and honing pendulum weights and calculating gear reductions.

She thought at first it would be easy to escape the shop, especially with so many dark corners, but she hadn't counted on the cat. No matter where she went within the shop, the tabby shadowed her, watching and guarding, seemingly never sleeping. They talked on occasion, when the tabby was bored, and it made a point of telling her she was lucky to work for the Maker, who was too consumed by his craft ever to bother making life difficult for her. Other Small Folk had it worse off, forced to run secret messages across town on the backs of rats, or to scurry around under floorboards to spy for deceitful politicians, or jealous wives of deceitful politicians, or distrustful lovers of jealous wives of deceitful politicians.

This was little comfort to Adelia, who felt every bit a slave in the Maker's shop, and eventually concluded that this village of giants certainly was not Gantica. As the days passed and she cleaned or repaired the clocks, she would sometimes detect the scent of freshly chopped pepperwood, or the musk of a man's sweat, or the fragrance of dried rose petals. Other times Adelia heard the ringing of hammer on anvil, or the bray of a horse, or even felt the humidity of the ocean seep out from the inside of a clock escapement. And then one day she found she could hear voices from the clocks, as if she were eavesdropping, and she heard many things common and polite, and sometimes she also heard things secret and personal, like whispers of passion or promises of love. But she also heard things sinister and dark, cries of pain and whimpers of misery, and plots born of jealousy, greed, and regret.

Cleaning and maintaining the clocks then became daunting to Adelia. As she crawled inside each she felt as if she were crawling inside a person, and though some were pleasant, many were not. She learned to avoid the clocks that were broken, for out of them came the smell of decay and dirt and worms. Then one day Adelia recognized the voice in one of the clocks as a mayor of the City Folk. In another clock she recognized the voice of the Fiddle Giant, and in still another the voice of the Family Giant. In others she heard the voices of the Mountain Folk, and the Mushroom Folk, and even the Farmer and the Farmer's little boy.

After that Adelia took extra care with the clocks, for she knew they were more than just clocks, and the Maker was more than just a clocksmith. She was also tempted then—tempted as she had never been tempted before—to spend less effort with some of the clocks she did not care for, perhaps to clean the pinions poorly, or misalign the gears slightly. Now that she was small she had a power like no giant ever had, for she knew what happened when the clocks stopped working. But in the end she could not bring herself to act that way. Maybe she was too afraid, or too weak. Or maybe the vision of someone else standing over her clock left a cold uncertainty in her stomach.

Some time later Adelia stumbled across a small, unassuming pocket watch in the back of the shop, and from it came the scent of fresh spun wool in dye, the click of a loom shuttle, and the sound of a woman singing. There was loneliness in that voice, and tears came to Adelia's eyes, for she realized the same loneliness had been in that voice the day Adelia had left the Dell in the Hills. Adelia had simply not recognized it then, or chose to ignore it. Now Adelia missed her mother greatly and wanted more than anything to return home to tell her so. But the teeth on the gears were wearing down, and though she gave the watch extra special attention and the finest of care, Adelia knew it was running slow.

One night, Adelia put the pocket watch on her back and carried it to the Maker's workbench, and when he came in the next morning and sat down she said to him, “Sir, what can be done for this piece?"

From behind his dirty, chipped spectacles the Maker said, “I work with simple gears and springs, my dear. This timepiece requires something else for repair, something beyond my power."

Adelia lowered her head.

"But not,” he added, “beyond your power."

The Maker gave a soft whistle over ancient gums and tangled beard, and in through the morning light flew the same silver-back hummingbird that had carried Adelia from the Mushroom Folk to the Sunflower Folk and beyond. It alighted on the workbench next to Adelia with a nervous flit.

"Go,” the Maker said. “Go Upland, and do not be afraid of a judgment tempered by humility."

Adelia was surprised, but she did not hesitate, and so left the Maker and his shop, and rode on the back of the hummingbird out of the village, Upland once again. She had not gone far when the world around her began to shrink. The hummingbird struggled to stay aloft, as it, too, shrank, and Adelia became too heavy for it. Adelia then set it free and continued on foot, wandering for days, until finally she began to doubt the Maker's words, or to think that she had misunderstood his meaning. The Land turned to desert, and then to marsh, and then to swamp, all the while growing smaller until one day the trees and rivers and animals and the Land itself were just the right size for her.

When the swamps became rolling hills, she came to a village where all the Folk poured forth to greet her with shouts of surprise and welcome. The Iron-Weaver said, “Was your vision always cast so far Upland that you do not recognize your own Folk?” And then it dawned on her that these were the Dell Folk, and this was the Dell in the Hills, though how she had returned home by only venturing Upland, she could not understand.

When Adelia's mother rose from the bench behind her loom and saw Adelia walking up the pathway, she knew her daughter had grown. In Adelia's bearing was a trace of the Land, a strength not of gears and springs, nor even of flesh and bone, but rather of spirit and will. Adelia in turn saw her mother's eyes brighten and her breath quicken, and finally she dared believe the Maker had been right.

Adelia entered her mother's kitchen without having to duck her head, she ate dinner at her mother's table without scraping her knees, and that night Adelia slept comfortably in the goose-down bed of her childhood. Whether in her journey the Land had changed around her, or she had changed within the Land, Adelia did not know.

Adelia realized there would never be a return to the childhood she had left. She even wondered if she could stay in the Dell at all, for it would be difficult to follow the Maker's advice here, where the past whispers of jealousy among the Dell Folk had not been forgotten (by either side). And yet that night, after dreaming of mainsprings as large as mountains and pendulums swinging far and wide on the Upland horizon, Adelia finally decided that here, in her mother's house, was the best place to try.

You do what you can for your country. I'm sixty-eight years old and even in high school—it's 2015 now, so that was fifty years ago—I wanted to be an intelligence analyst ... an analyst for an intelligence agency, or if I couldn't do that, at least be a writer for the United States Information Agency, writing books for people of limited English vocabularies so they'd know about us, our freedoms, the way we live. But what I wanted most was to be an analyst—not a covert-action operative, just an analyst. For the CIA or NSA, one of the big civilian agencies. That's what I wanted to do for my country.

I knew they looked at your high school record, not just college—and not just grades, but also the clubs you were in and any sports. And your family background, that was important too. My father was an Annapolis graduate, a Pearl Harbor survivor and a gentle Cold War warrior who'd worked for NATO in northern Italy, when we'd lived there. I knew that would look good to the Agency, and I knew that my dad had friends who'd put in a good word for me, too, friends in the Office of Naval Intelligence.

But I also knew I had to do something for my high school record; and I wasn't an athlete, so I joined the Anti-Communist Club. I thought it was going to be a group of kids who'd discuss Marxist economics and our free-market system, maybe the misconceptions Marx had about human nature, and maybe even mistakes we were making in developing countries, both propaganda-wise and in the kind of help we were giving them. I didn't know it was just a front for Barry Goldwater and that all we were going to do was make election signs, but at least I had it on my record.

Because a lot of Agency recruiting happens at private colleges, I went to one in Southern California—not far from where my parents lived. My high school grades were good enough for a state scholarship, and my dad covered the rest. It was the ‘60s, but the administration was conservative; and I was expecting the typical Cold War Agency recruitment to happen to me the way it had happened to people I'd heard about—the sons of some of my dad's friends. But it didn't. I went through five majors without doing well in any of them; and it wasn't until my senior year, when I was taking an IR course with a popular prof named Booth—a guy who'd been a POW in WWII—that I mentioned what I wanted to do. He worked, everyone said, in germ warfare policy—classified stuff—at Stanford; and I figured that if I was about to graduate I'd better tell someone, anyone, what I really wanted to do in life: Not sell insurance or be a middle manager or a government bureaucrat, but work for a civilian intelligence agency—get a graduate degree on their tab maybe—and be an analyst.

I could tell he wanted to laugh, but he didn't. He was a good guy. The administration didn't like him because he never went to faculty meetings; and he didn't act like a scholar, even though he had his doctorate, and he wasn't on campus much. But when they tried to fire him, the students protested—carried signs, wrote letters, and caused enough of a scene that they kept him. This was back in the ‘60s when you did this kind of thing.

He was smiling at me and I could see those teeth—the ones he hadn't taken good enough care of in the POW camp, the ones that had rotted and were gone now, replaced years ago with dentures.

He looked at me for a long time, very serious, and said, “I could put in a good word for you at the USIA. You're a good writer, Matt."

"I'd rather be an analyst."

"Have you thought about the FBI?"

I had to laugh at that.

"Okay,” he said, laughing too.

"I shouldn't be doing this. Your grades are terrible and I can't say much about you except that you're a good writer. In fact, I'm not sure why I'm even considering this. You're a pretty tame guy. You're even tamer than I was your age and I was pretty tame. I stole hubcaps at least."

We both laughed.

He got serious. “You want to do something for your country, right?"

"Yes."

"But you don't want to join the military like your father did. You love and admire him, but you don't want to join the military."

"Right."

"No one's enlisting these days anyway,” he said. “Can't blame them. JFK and his brightest aren't fighting this war very well. Look at the Chinese—how those crossborder ops brought them in. Jack's green-beanie darlings."

"Yes, sir."

"And the Army won't take you anyway, right?"

"Yes. I've got some scoliosis, and you can see how thick my glasses are, sir."

"That's what I thought. What you need to do is send for the Agency application. Make two Xeroxes of it, send one to me, fill out one for yourself rough draft, send a copy of that to me, and I'll help you with it. You'll have to have a physical, just like the Army, and a polygraph, and you'll have to have your doctor send your records. How does your dad feel about this?"

"My dad's always been for it,” I answered.

"He not very political, is he."

That was true.

"No,” he said quickly, grinning, “I haven't been talking to your dad, but people say he's a good man."

What people?

"You're right,” I said. “He's not political, and neither am I, I guess."

"Maybe that's why I'm doing this."

"Sir?"

"You can't analyze a situation if you're blinded by your own politics, Matt."

"You've taught us that, sir."

He laughed again.

"And you don't have to kiss ass, Matt. Remember that in the interview. Either they want you or they don't and either way you'll never figure out exactly why."

Some people—maybe one in one hundred thousand—can get infected by an epidemic disease and not get sick and die. They don't even get the symptoms, but they can carry it and they can give it to others. They're called “chronic asymptomatic carriers,” or CAC's. You've heard of Typhoid Mary maybe, in health class or history. She was one. Not to the degree that the history books say she was, but she was. She didn't even know she was one until they told her how many people she'd probably killed; but she was one and it drove her crazy to find out. It drove her crazy and the government dropped their case against her. That was about 1910, I think, and it was here in America, during an epidemic.

That's how hard it can be on a person when they find out they're a carrier. That's what I'm saying, I guess.

I don't know whose pull did it. I know it wasn't my record. The Anti-Communist Club certainly wouldn't have been enough and my grades in college weren't very good, though Booth was right. I was a good writer. Both of my parents were good writers. My mom had a master's degree and my dad did a lot of writing for the admirals he served. Maybe it was the writing, but I also knew they could get all the 1600 SAT and 4.0-GPA graduates they wanted—who were better writers than I was—so it had to be something else. It had to be Booth or one of my father's friends or even the fact that my dad was about to retire as a rear admiral.

However it happened, I got called into an interview in Los Angeles in the middle of summer after graduation. The man wore a short-sleeve shirt with a loud red tie and didn't seem very interested. I panicked, thinking, “Shit, he's just interviewing me so the Agency can tell Booth or my Dad's friends they did, but they're not really interested.” That's how it felt. At one point the man did look up at me with interest, like he was waking up, when I said stupidly, “I feel like I really don't have a country."

"What do you mean by that?"

Uh oh, I thought, and tried to backpedal. “I don't mean that in patriotic terms. I don't mean—"

"I know you don't mean it in patriotic terms,” he said impatiently. “You're the Cold War son of a Cold War father, Mr. Hudson. Even if you had long hair and were running around with posters saying KILL THE FASCIST PIGS!, you'd still be your father's son and I wouldn't doubt your patriotism.” He stopped himself and I didn't know whether to believe him. “So how do you mean it?” he said.

I took a deep breath. “My dad's a career Navy man, and my mother's a teacher. We moved around a lot and my father is a kind man and my mother loves people of all races, all cultures, so it's a little hard to talk about home towns and wave the American flag the way some people wave it...."

He didn't say anything for a moment.

"You're a perceptive young man, Mr. Hudson. That's what we're looking for, but I don't think you've finished your answer, do you?"

"Sir?"

"How do you wave the American flag?"

"I guess I don't, sir. It's not my style. I don't burn the flag—that would be wrong—but I don't wave it. I don't need to. I see the United States as a good country, one that should be defended at all costs because history doesn't see enough good countries."

"You learn that in college?"

"I was thinking it before—when my dad was stationed with NATO in Italy, when I was younger—but, yes, I learned that from a college professor of mine, too."

He was nodding.

"I think I know which prof you're talking about, and he's right. It's an experiment, our society—the most successful experiment in the history of humankind—and certainly worth protecting."

"Yes, sir."

"Thank you for coming in today, Mr. Hudson. We'll let you know if we decide another interview would be helpful."

What they were looking for was not just somebody who could carry the plague without getting sick—your normal CAC—but someone whose body could get rid of the disease fast with the right antibiotics—what you'd call “designer antibiotics” these days. Experimental. Even classified. And definitely not yet FDA-approved. And it couldn't be a genetically engineered plague. That would be discovered pretty quickly and you wouldn't be able to deny it. Everyone would know it was GW—germ warfare—so they had to use good old-fashioned plague. Bubonic, the Black Death of the Middle Ages, the Great Dying. History's had a lot of names for it. It had to be “natural."

And it wasn't any good if it took the carrier days or a week or more to get clean. If it still showed in his blood, he'd never be able to get out of the quarantine areas; he'd never be able to get out of the field and sit the crisis out—back in the States or somewhere—until he was needed again.

They'd already found one carrier—a guy they could use—but he went crazy in the field halfway through his first mission and they had to pull him.

I didn't hear about him until much later. I wish I'd heard earlier.

I waited two months working in the sports section of a K-Mart. I'd given up, in fact, ever hearing from them when a different guy called to set up another interview, this time in Riverside. There would be a physical just after the interview, he said, and I needed to be able to give urine and blood samples.

I don't remember exactly what I said in the interview or even what the guy said. He was interested at first, asking me about my relationship with my father—which I told him was great—and about any research papers I'd found most rewarding in my college courses. One on “economic sanctions and North-South relations,” I said, and another on the impact of military invasion on the cultural history of Vietnam. He perked up hearing that, but after that lost interest again. I don't know whether it was the questions he had to ask—they bored him—or my answers to them—which were boring too—but all I remember is saying “Yes” and “No” a lot and not much else.

So I wasn't surprised two weeks later to get a letter turning me down. I knew I'd get something in writing so they could tell Booth and my dad's friends and anyone else that they'd considered me “very carefully” and sent me a nice letter.

I was getting ready to apply—my father had offered to help and I had some savings—to graduate school, for an MBA at a state college, when someone called from the L.A. office again. The voice sounded not just interested, but even a little urgent. They wanted me to come in for another interview and more blood tests.

I couldn't imagine what had changed their minds.

I should explain what a “vector” is? A vector is how a disease—an epidemic—is spread. In the case of Yersenia pestis—the classic plague—it's carried not by a rat, but by a flea on the rat. It's very interesting actually. There are three main forms of plague: bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic. Bubonic is the most famous. It's the form you see in etchings from the Middle Ages—what was called the Black Death. Incubation—which is how long it takes you to come down with it—is two to five days, and your lymphatic system tries to deal with it, but can't. Your lymph nodes swell up and they're so full of the bacteria, the bacteria's toxins, that they're like knobs on your skins. These are called “buboes"—and why it's called bubonic—and eventually they burst and run. You also get a red rash. This is the “ring around the rosies” that the old nursery rhyme is referring to. It's a terrible way to die. Your temperature gets up to 103-106. Your blood pressure's so low you can't stand up, and you've got to watch these things, these big bumps, growing on you. You're becoming something else—your body is changing completely—and even if you're delirious, you hate what you're becoming. You're rotting, actually rotting, and you can smell it.

I've never had the symptoms, but I know what that feels like—to hate what you're becoming.

The second form is called “pneumonic"—like the word pneumonia. It fills your lungs. You get it from what's called “aerial droplet transmission"—which means from the air. It goes straight to your lungs and you come down with a pneumonia that's actually plague. You can even get it from your cat or your dog. From their saliva or their sneezing. This kind takes half as long to come down with. You get a splitting headache, chills, fever, and before you know it you're coughing up blood. It looks like strawberry jelly—even the doctors describe it that way. Your lungs are dying and you get to watch. With this kind if you don't get treatment, you always die.

The worst form—septicemic—isn't very common, fortunately, but I should mention it anyway, so you'll know. In this kind the flea is so full of the germ that when it bites you—just one bite—when it tries to suck blood from you—the germs backwash into your bloodstream, and you get infected instantly. You die in twenty-four hours. Your blood is crawling with the bacteria—it just can't handle it—and that's how you die, poisoned by living things crawling through your bloodstream.

Actually there's a fourth type, a meningitis plague—a brain membrane kind. I'd forgotten that, but it's even less common. Its code in epidemiological circles is A20.7. You don't hear about it.

The kind they wanted me to spread—the only kind I could spread—was pneumonic. I'd cough, and the coughing would spread it, but once the pneumonic gets started you see the first type too, the bubonic. That's what they wanted. Something fast to get it started, but then both kinds appearing so that it couldn't be traced.

It's important to know the history of things. That's what Booth always said and that's what they said at Langley, and it's true. In the old days—when they first had a drug for the plague, in the early 1900s—they used sulfonamides. That's the fancy name for sulfur drugs. Back in the Middle Ages the guy with all the prophecies—Nostradamus—was so smart he invented an herbal treatment that was actually pretty good. It had rose petals, evergreen needles, and a special root in it, but you couldn't save the entire population of Europe with that. You couldn't even save twenty percent. Even if everyone had believed it would work, there wouldn't have been enough roses.

So the sulfur drugs in the early 1900s weren't very good, but they were better than nothing and they could have cut the Black Death mortality rate by fifty percent. Later, what's called the tetracycline drugs came in and these cured people quickly. That's why you only get a couple of plague cases every year in the U.S., and they're out on Indian reservations or in the woods in a national park somewhere, someone getting bitten by a squirrel maybe.

But if you've got a Third World country, what we used to call an “LDC"—a “Lesser Developing Country"—you couldn't necessarily get the drugs, either quickly or at all, and maybe thousands would get infected and thousands would die. Especially if you didn't want them to get the drugs. If, say, the president of a little country was a leftist and you didn't want that kind of leadership in that country—where American businesses had factories and relied on certain kinds of privileges, and because you saw communism as a threat to our way of life—you could keep the drugs from getting to it. If the country couldn't get the drugs fast enough and enough people died, the country would become “destabilized.” And if there was a group like the military or a landowner with the army's backing ready to overthrow the president, that was the time to do it. You know what I'm saying. I'm not talking politics here. I'm just saying how it was back then.

I'm sure you've heard about some of these things before. In World War II the Japanese tried plague on China and killed a couple of hundred Chinese, but also one of their own companies of soldiers. They were also, later in the war, planning to try it on San Diego, California, but then Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened and they signed the surrender. And all the old Agency stories—the news media coverage, the “black ops,” the assassinations of heads of state, the secret support of coups d'tat—all those covert actions that got the intelligence community in trouble in the 1970s. You've heard about those things, I'm sure.

They didn't want me as an intelligence analyst. They wanted me to do this other work for them—in countries where they needed it done. I needed training for that—any twenty-two-year-old would have—and it was the kind any overseas operative would get. In my case it was training for South America. It lasted sixteen weeks—they taught me Spanish and E&E, escape and evasion—and gave me some medic training, some reporter-skills training (I'll talk about that in a minute), and some firearms training—which was pretty funny with my bad eyesight. Right before I left for all that training I went to visit my parents. I couldn't tell them anything, but I wanted them to be proud of me. All I could say was, “I'm about to work for the intelligence community, Dad. But not as an analyst. I'm heading out in two days for sixteen weeks of training."

"I thought that might be what was happening, Matt,” he told me with a smile, but I could tell he was worried. Analysts live safe lives. Field operatives don't always. “You haven't been saying much recently."

"You're right,” I said. “That was why."

I couldn't tell them what I'd be doing. I couldn't tell anyone. Even if I'd been allowed to, how could I?

"I know I can't ask you anything about it, Matt, and that's okay,” my dad said. “During the war in the Pacific we couldn't tell our families. No places, people, events. Just what we were feeling. Whenever you want to tell us how you're feeling, we'd like to hear. We're very happy for you."

I didn't become what I would become until maybe the second mission. I didn't develop the habits, I mean—the crazy ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that you develop when you know that if you touch someone you love, you may be giving them a disease that will kill them—until later. Those things didn't really start until after the first mission, though during that mission I'd meet people I liked and they'd be in the city where I needed to start the thing, and I had no choice—it was important that I start it there, in that city, if what we needed to have happen was to happen.

I remember a young woman in—a mid-sized city—let's call it Santa Livia. That's not its real name, but I still can't use the real names. She was an ex-Peace Corps worker and back in the States I'd have asked her out; but when I met her she was in—in Santa Livia working for a civilian aid organization. And that was the city where they wanted me to crack the hollow thing in my tooth to start it. All I needed to do after I cracked it was take the train from Santa Livia to the next two cities on the train route and cough a lot. It was in my bloodstream and that's all it would take. I'd cough, put my hand over my mouth, cough some more, touch the railings and doors of the train as I left and entered each car along the way. It was easy. You weren't sick yourself—you didn't have the symptoms—and the first time you did it you couldn't believe you were starting an epidemic. How could you be starting an epidemic just by doing that? You didn't believe it. You were just doing what they wanted you to do.

When I'd reach the third city, I'd crack the other three fillings on the other side of my mouth and the antibiotic would kill the Yersenia in my bloodstream; and I'd continue on the train to—let's call them Santo Tomas, and Santa Carolina ... and Morela. If anyone tried to track the spread of it, the “vector trail,” as they called it, would end in Morela; but only the World Health Organization would know how to track it and by the time they did, my train trip would be lost in the epidemic. Everyone—the cities, the government, the aid organizations—would be overwhelmed in days by the infected and no one could charge the U.S. with anything even if we got what we wanted. The disease would move from city to city within a day, and there'd be geometric spread—the kind you get in urban areas with rats, fleas, and aerial transmission—out from those cities. I'd be evacuated along with other non-quarantined Americans before the disease could hit the capital, where I was staying.

Spreading it that way made it look natural. That was, as I think I said, the main reason to have someone—a human carrier—do it—do it “by hand,” as we liked to say—in a couple of cities and then let it spread. Looking natural was important. The word you hear all the time in CIA movies—"deniability"—is true. It's not just a Hollywood idea. That was the guiding principle. You don't have to have it deniable in economic warfare, the way we do things now; but you do in covert-action matters. Economic warfare—public sector and private sector both—works better anyway.

She had blue eyes and she liked me, I think. I didn't know if she got out. I didn't want to know. She was in the first city and maybe that gave her a chance, unless she chose to stay—to help. With pneumonic, if it's an untreated population, you can have ninety to one hundred percent mortality. With bubonic it tends just to be fifty to sixty percent, so I didn't know.

After doing those three cities, I took the train back to the capital and found myself not looking at women or children. If I looked at them, I felt like they were going to die, that I was going to kill them—which could have been true, but not in the way it felt at the moment. I felt that my eyes—just my eyes—could do it. If I looked at them, they'd die. And with the women, if I thought they were beautiful, they'd also die because I thought it—because I thought they were beautiful.

Later, it would get a lot worse—the superstitions and habits—but that's how it started, on the first mission. Not looking at women and children.

Or anyone who looked at all like my parents.

It started with toothbrushes, I guess. That's when I first really noticed it. Not just averting my eyes on a train, but actual things I could touch—that I took home with me, and couldn't get away from. I wasn't supposed to do anything to draw attention to myself when I was in the field; but after the first mission, it was like I couldn't get the taste out of my mouth, so I started buying toothbrushes, one for every day; and I'd wrap up each one in a plastic bag at the end of the day. I started doing this when I was still in the field the second time. It was in the capital city, when all of the uninfected Americans and Europeans and Chinese and Japanese were being rushed out by jet. I used up ten toothbrushes in six days—that's more than one a day—right before I was evacked.

Back in the States, they had me live in Minneapolis. Why, I don't know. They didn't check me in at Langley—Agency headquarters—when I got back. Not at first. They put me in Walter Reed, the big military hospital in DC. I was there for three days to make sure I wasn't still carrying, and then I did go to Langley for debriefing, a week of it, if I remember correctly. And then finally to Minneapolis, where they wanted me low profile until they needed me again, which wouldn't be for another six months. I kept buying the toothbrushes—a different one, sometimes two, for each day, and eventually rubber gloves to hold them with and plastic bags to put them in. I'd put them in the blue dumpsters behind my apartment. I wanted to burn them in a furnace, but the building didn't have one.

I noticed too that I didn't touch things out in public, or where other people could touch what I'd touched. I could have hired a maid—the Agency would have paid for it—but I wouldn't hire a maid. I didn't want her touching what I'd touched in the apartment. Out in public if I touched things it would be with my left hand, the hand I never let come near my mouth.

I was back in my own country again—with people I'd grown up with and cared about—and if I wasn't careful (a voice was telling me), I could start it here. I know that doesn't make any sense, but that's how it felt. I was clean, completely clean, but that's how it felt.

I had no social life, even though my case agent—let's call him Rod—kept telling me I needed one. “It's easier in D.C.,” I'd tell him. “There's no social life in Minneapolis."

"That's not the reason, Matt,” he'd say, “and you know it."

"What are you talking about?” I'd say, pretending I didn't know.

"You're agoraphobic and you need to work your way out of it. It happens. It's going to happen in work like this. Do you want to see an Agency shrink?"

"No.” I wanted to work it out myself. I didn't want to be in a shrink's office where I could touch things and the shrink might die.

Sometimes Rod would visit me—maybe four times while I was there, during those six months—and his visits helped. Someone who knew me and thought I was okay—despite what kind of work I did—who wasn't afraid to sit near me or touch me. He was a short, squat man, and pretty gruff—a little like Joe Friday, real old school, OSS originally—but he reminded me of Professor Booth, because he also seemed to care. I'm not sure he did—that either of them really cared—but that's how it felt, and it helped.

I certainly didn't date. I didn't have to work. I had all this free time, but I didn't socialize unless I had to. I told people in the building that I was a writer and I know they thought I was some rich kid who didn't have to work, who could just write a book while everyone else worked. They didn't like that, which meant no one wanted to be around me—which was great. I had a different name, different social security number, the usual witness-protection kind of cover; and everyone assumed I was a trust-fund kid, I'm sure. I had all the time in the world, so I read a lot. When you read a lot you don't meet a lot of people. You don't meet a lot of girls.

But there was one—her name was Trisha—she lived down the hallway—but when I thought of dating her, I saw myself sitting in my car and watching it happen. They'd given me a car, a ‘68 Mustang fastback—the kind of car a trust-fund kid would have—and I saw myself sitting in it with her and, though she wanted me to kiss her, I couldn't. Why? Because if I did she'd jerk back like she'd been shot and I'd have to watch her get sick and die.

It would be like time-lapse photography, like a flower in a Disney nature movie blooming real fast, the buboes blooming like flowers, and then she'd be dead.

That's what I'd see if I thought of asking her out, but I finally did—maybe because I thought I should. I knew I was going crazy and maybe it would help. She wouldn't die—I knew that—and seeing that she didn't die might just help. But when I did ask her, when I got off the phone after asking her out, I threw up. I threw up on the bed where I'd made the call. I couldn't stop shaking and I didn't pick her up that Saturday. I never called her again, I avoided her in the hallway, and I didn't return her call the one time she called me two weeks later.

I also had a chance to see my parents during those six months and didn't. I couldn't.

I'd phone and tell my dad that they had me real busy, that even when I was out of the field they were keeping me busy, and he'd say, “That's fine, Matt. I know how it goes. My good friend Gavin from the Academy was ONI and he was the busiest man I ever knew. Just hearing your voice is wonderful. Call us when you can."

Or he'd tease me and say, “You're not trying to avoid us, are you?” and I'd lie and say, “You know me better than that.” I'd say it to my mom, too. “You know I love you both. If I'm not going to get to see you, I want at least to call. I want you to at least hear my voice."

"You know we're proud of you,” they'd both say, and they'd mean it. I didn't let myself wonder what they'd think if they knew what I was doing. Maybe they wouldn't want to know.

My dad died of a heart attack right after my third mission and I wanted to make it to the funeral, but I just couldn't do that either. I talked to my mom for a long time on the phone, trying to explain why I couldn't, inventing all sorts of things; and though I know she believed me—I know it made her proud—I know she was disappointed. But she'd been married to a Navy man, so she knew what sacrificing for your country was.

I was sitting watching television in my apartment in Phoenix—this time they had me in Arizona—when my dad's funeral started four hundred miles away. I remember looking at my watch every five minutes for an hour. I don't remember what was on television. I remember hearing in my head what I would have said about him if I'd been there. I remember imagining his body in a casket, starting to smell, the rash and bumps, and stopping myself—and then just seeing my mother's face and hugging her and telling her I loved her and what a wonderful man he'd been, which was true.

At first they lied to me and said the ex-Peace Corps woman—the woman in Santa Livia, the one I'd liked—had made it out okay; but two years later—after two more missions—they admitted she hadn't, that she'd been one of five Americans who'd died in the city because the WHO's medical shipment to the center of the epidemic took ten days, not three; and the five were sick and so they couldn't be evacuated. We'd delayed the WHO's shipment, of course. It was easy to do. I'd killed her. That was the truth of it. I hadn't delayed the shipment, but I'd killed her.

It was knowing that she'd died that made me do what I did in the city of—the city of Zaquitos. I'm sure it was. It wasn't a young woman, though. It was a boy, one who looked like a kid I'd played with—a friend—in the fourth grade in Florida, when my dad was stationed there. In the next country I was sent to I saw a lot of young women who were beautiful. Maybe their arms had little nicks and scars from a hard life. Maybe they were dirty from the dust and heat, but they were beautiful. People are beautiful wherever they are, whether it's war or peace or famine or floods they're living in. But it wasn't a woman I decided to save, it was a boy. I remember thinking: This is someone's kid. You're going to have kids some day, Matt—if you're lucky, if you make it through this—and this is someone's kid.

He was a mescla—a mixed-blood kid at the bottom of the social ladder. His hair was kind of a bronze color, the way hair sometimes is from Brazil and the Azores. My friend in the third grade was from the Azores. This boy in Zaquitos had light brown eyes just like my friend. His skin was dark, but he had that bronze hair and, believe it or not, a couple of freckles on his nose, too. There'd been lot of Irish and Germans in that country in the beginning and they'd mixed and maybe it was Irish blood coming through in this kid.

He lived on a famous dump in Zaquitos—the dump I'd gone to write a story about. I was there to write a story about how terrible conditions were for the people in that country's north. They'd left the drought-stricken countryside and ended up in the favelas, the slums, and that wasn't any better. It was worse, in fact, and that's what I was writing about. I was a reporter for a liberal English-language paper out of the capital city; that's what I was supposedly doing there. The agency had figured out how to use my writing skills and that was my—as they say—cover. I'd been interviewed by the newspaper the way any applicant would and I'd been hired the way anyone would be. At least that's how it looked. A paper trail in case one was needed. I wasn't comfortable with the job. I didn't talk leftist jargon well enough to feel comfortable when I met other leftist journalists, but my case agent said, “Don't worry. They can't fire you.” The newspaper, it turned out, was funded by the Agency. Some of the editors worked for the Agency and could pipeline agents like me, and the other editors just didn't know. That's how it was in those days. It's an old story now and pretty boring; but for two missions that was my cover, and it was a good one because I got to be alone a lot of the time.

I had to make myself step up close to the boy—the one I'm talking about in the dump. Stepping up to him was hard to do because I wasn't supposed to do that with anyone I cared about. But I did it and I asked him in Spanish if I could take his picture. Some of you know Spanish, I'm sure. I said, “Puedo fotografiarte?” and he cocked his head, and for a moment I was back in the third grade and my friend Keith was looking at me. I jumped back and nearly tripped on the garbage. I wanted to run. But in that moment I was also myself twenty years in the future looking down at my own son and feeling a love I'd never felt before. No one, especially guys, ever feels a love like that—for children, I mean—when they're twenty-two. It's just not what life is like when you're twenty-two—unless you're a father already. But that's what I felt and that's what kept me from running away.

There were dirty streaks on the boy's neck from all that sweat and dirt. His ears were dirty and all he wanted to do when he saw me was beg. He kept shaking his head and putting out his hand and saying in English, “Very poor! Very poor!” He'd try to touch me—my camera, my sleeve—and I'd step back, shaking my head, too, because I was terrified. But I made myself do it. I gave him what I had—some coins and some bills. I was shaking like crazy because I was touching the money—touching it and then giving it to him—and as I did it I could see him dying right before me. But he didn't die, so I asked him again: “Can I photograph you?"

"Yes!” he said, happy now, the coins and bills in his hands. “Foto! Foto!” He'd gotten what he wanted and now I could snap his picture, just like any tourist would.

I took his picture and went back to my hotel downtown. Even though I didn't have the roll I'd taken at the dump processed, I didn't need to. I could see his face as I fell asleep. I dreamed about him; and I could see his face as I woke up and got ready to go back to the dump, where I was supposed to start the “distraction"—that's what we called it—that morning. The favelas were a logical place for it—with all the urban rats and the incredible transiency. Everyone in that country and in bordering countries and at WHO and the UN were waiting for some epidemic to start in that country. It was a time bomb. Cholera, typhoid, something. But if we—if the Agency—could get a big enough one going, there was a ninety percent chance that the government of—the government of that country—would topple. The military was ready for a coup. It had already tried once.

So I stood on the dump—in all that stink and garbage—and I just couldn't do it. I couldn't do it with the boy there somewhere—a boy who looked like my friend and a boy who was someone's kid—so I went looking for him, and it took an hour, but I found him. He was with his father and brothers, and I said, “Debe llevarse a su familia ad otra ciudad—ahora! Cosas malas llegan!” That meant: You've got to move your family to another city—right now! Bad things are coming! They looked at me like I was crazy, so I said it again and I got out the five hundred American dollars I'd had my department wire me. Living expenses, I'd explained, and that was fine with them. I said in Spanish, “I want you to be safe. You need to leave this place immediately. Do the boys have a mother?” No, she'd died, the father said. “I will give you five hundred American dollars if you will leave today—if you will leave now!"

The father looked at me and I knew damn well what he was thinking: Crazy American. The kind that tries to “save you.” That sends money to your country because of a television show and if it gets to you it's a penny rather than a dollar.

He was willing to take the money, but you could tell he wasn't going to pack up and move—not today, maybe not ever. They had friends here, other families. You don't give that up even for five years of income, do you?

I looked at them and waited and finally I said, “If you don't go today, I'll take my money back. I'll call the police and tell them you robbed me, and I'll take my money back."

When he got the point, when he saw I was dead serious, he led me to the shack they lived in—the cardboard and corrugated metal shack that had no running water or sewage—and helped his boys get things together. I just stood there. I couldn't touch anything—anything they were going to bring. I wanted to put on rubber gloves so I could help them, but I couldn't do that either. They'd be insulted, and I didn't want to insult them. The boys gathered up six toy soldiers—two apiece—hammered from tin cans, a broken plastic gun and two big balls of twine, and the father gathered up four dirty blankets, a can opener that looked bent, two pairs of pants for each of them, and a bag filled with socks, shoes, plastic plates, and cups. That's what they had. They'd slept on the dirt floor on those blankets. I'd never really thought of how people like this lived, and here it was. How do you live like that and not stop caring? I don't know.

I waited for them, and when they were ready we trudged back across the refuse and smells of the dump to the first paved road, where I took the bus with them to Parelo, where they said they had family in the favela there. They did. I paid for a taxi for us, sat in the front seat by myself, and dropped them off with the father's sister, who didn't look happy until she saw how much money it was. The favela wasn't much better than the dump, but it was two hundred miles away from where the epidemic would start, and it was a lot of money.

It was a dangerous thing for me to do—being that visible—but I didn't have any choice. I knew that if I didn't do it I'd see the boy's face forever, like a photograph in my head. I wasn't acting very normally then—I couldn't touch people—I started shaking even when I thought of touching anyone—but I knew I had to try to save this one kid. If anyone was following me, they'd wonder what the hell I was doing. That much money. A dump family. Getting them out of town and spending eleven hours on the bus with them. They might put two and two together later—someone might—but in a country this poor who'd be watching me? I was a leftist journalist and the regime was leftist. Who'd be watching a leftist reporter? And once the epidemic started, who'd be free to watch me?

I was much more worried about what my case agent and his boss and the DDP would say. “You did what?” they'd say. How do you tell someone?

I returned to Zaquitos—which took me a day.

The next morning I went back to the dump and started it. I bit down, heard the little crack, coughed into my hand, and began touching things when I got to the cemetery and crematorium, and the cars and little stores after that.

I tried not to look at anyone as I did it, especially anyone old or a woman or kids. Those were the ones who bothered me most. It was hard not to look, because you wanted to know, but I'd had a lot of practice not looking by then. Just don't look, a voice would say to me and I wouldn't.

The next day I took the train to the next two decent-sized cities; and when I was through with both of them, I stopped, cracked the other fillings, went to the capital and flew back to the States before the quarantines could even get started.

I kept seeing the boy's face, sure, but it made me happy.

You're wondering why they let me talk about all of this—"top-secret your-eyes-only” kinds of things. The kinds of things that in the movies, if someone tells you, it gets you killed, right? They let me talk not only because they're not worried—how much damage can one guy who's not very credible, who's had mental problems, do?—but also, and this is the other half of it, because it's old news. It's actually there in the Pentagon Papers—that old book—if you look closely enough, and it's even mentioned—indirectly, of course—in Richard Nixon's autobiography, along with the planned use of a single-k nuclear device to end the war in Vietnam. It's old news and I get to talk about it now because it doesn't matter anymore. I guess that's what I'm saying. No one really cares. Vietnam doesn't care whether we were planning to detonate a nuclear device to flood Hanoi—they just want favored trade status now—and those countries in South America have each had half a dozen governments since then, and they want to forget too. Ancient history. Besides, the Agency has better things to do. They've got covert economic programs you wouldn't believe and designer diseases they haven't even used yet. This is the new war. The Army's got mines that can weigh you—tell you how much you weigh—and whether you're an adult or a child and whether you're carrying a gun. Other mines that land and become dozens of little mobile mines that go out looking for you instead of waiting for you to come to them. They've got suits that, if you're a soldier and wounded, will give you an antibiotic, or if you're poisoned, give you the antidote, or if you're out of water it will recycle your urine for you. You don't have to think. The suit thinks for you. They've got these things and they're using them. This is what warfare is now, so how important is a guy who can break a filling in his tooth and start some plague from the Middle Ages—something that crude and messy?

That's how they're thinking, believe me.

I did catch hell from my boss and his boss and the DDP when they found out what I'd done with the boy. I said, “That should tell you something. It should tell you that you don't really want me to do this for you anymore."

They actually let me quit. That surprised me. I didn't think you could quit. I'd seen too many movies, I guess, where no one could quit the Agency, like no one could quit the Mafia. They said they didn't really want me if my heart wasn't it. But I don't think that was the real reason. I think it was that they just didn't need the program anymore. They were getting better programs.

They made me sign papers promising for twenty-five years not to write about what I'd done—what they'd had me do for my country—or talk about it publicly or to anyone who'd make it public—and then they let me leave. I had all these interpersonal problems, as I've been saying, but I did go back to school and, I'm proud to say, got my MBA. I wanted to get a degree I could use anywhere. I started out as a manager of a drug store, but that was because of the interpersonal problems; and when I could finally go to company meetings and not act strange, I started moving up the ladder. In three years I was in management at corporate headquarters, and that's where I met my wife. It took a few more years of therapy—of Agency shrinks at the VA hospital actually—to get over it enough to really function. The toothbrushes, the not touching people you loved, the nightmares and the flashbacks—all those things I needed to work through. My wife hung in there with me throughout it all—that I'll be forever grateful for—and we've got two kids almost grown now, both of them boys.

I don't know where that boy from Zaquitos is now, or if he's still alive. You don't live long in those countries. The Luz de Muerte paramilitary units—the ones that could make you “disappear"—started up under the military regime after I did what I was sent there to do. The new government was tied to a group called The Society for Church, Family, and Tradition, and those units were operating there for ten years at least. If the boy had any leftist leanings, he might not have made it through that. Or he could have been killed for no reason. Or, if he didn't get out of the favelas, he might have died of typhus or cholera or dengue fever. You lose a lot of Third World people to those diseases even now, and they're natural ones.

I think about that boy a lot. What if someone started a plague in the U.S., maybe at the White House in a tour group, or maybe in a big airport like LAX—to turn the tables, to “destabilize” us? I think about that. I think of my own boys dying, no one around to save them the way I saved that boy and his brothers and father. One family's not very much, but it's something. That's what I tell myself anyway.

I guess that's it. I've gone way over my time, I know. Thanks for inviting me to speak today. It's good to have an audience. It's good to know that people, especially young people, are still interested in things like this. After all, I did what I could for you.

Anderson, Douglas A:

Curiosities OcN

Bacigalupi, Paolo:

The Calorie Man (nvlt) OcN 8

Bailey, Dale:

Spells for Halloween: An Acrostic OcN 90

Barnard, Bryn:

Cover for: The Last Ten Years in the Life of Hero Kai” Dec

Barron, Laird:

The Imago Sequence (novella) May 61

Proboscis (nvlt) Feb 116

Bash, Kent:

Cover for: “Dutch” Feb

Beagle, Peter S.:

Two Hearts (nvlt) OcN 204

Bertolini, Max:

Covers for:

"Fairy Falls” Aug

"Megara” Jan

Bisson, Terry:

Billy and the Ants OcN 127

Bradfield, Scott:

Angry Duck Jul 60

Cheney, Tom:

Cartoons.... Mar

Competition # 69 Jul

Competition # 70 Dec

Cowdrey, Albert E.:

The Amulet (nvlt) Mar 6

The Housewarming Sep 108

Twilight States Jul 71

de Lint, Charles:

Books to Look For Jan-Dec

de Sousa Causo, Robert:

Curiosities Jan

Di Filippo, Paul:

Curiosities Jul

Plumage from

Pegasus.... Jan, Feb, May, Sep, Dec

The Secret Sutras of

Sally Strumpet (nvlt) Apr 6

Disch, Thomas M.:

The Wall of America Mar 35

Doherty, Paul: see: Pat Murphy

Dozois, Gardner:

When the Great Days Came ... Dec ... 78

Emshwiller, Carol:

I Live with You Mar 90

Ench, Cory and Catska: Covers for:

"The Imago Sequence” May

"Two Hearts” OcN

Farris, Joseph:

Cartoons.... Mar,Jun,Jul,OcN

Finlay, Charles Coleman:

Love and the Wayward Troll (nvlt) Mar 115

Of Silence and the Man at Arms (nvlt) Jun 6

Ford, Jeffrey:

Boatman's Holiday OcN 180

Foster, Alan Dean:

The Last Akialoa Dec 87

Frazier, Robert:

Robot Origami (poem) Mar 107

Friesner, Esther M.:

The Beau and the Beast Mar 144

Helen Remembers the Stork Club OcN 59

Last Man Standing (nvlt) Jan 135

Garcia y Robertson, R.:

Queen of the Balts (nvlt) Feb 70

Garland, Michael: Covers for:

"Hero, the Movie” Jul

"A Quantum Bit Exists in Two States” Sep

Gerrold, David:

Chester (nvlt) Jun 55

A Quantum Bit Exists in Two States Simultaneously: Off Sep 150

A Quantum Bit Exists in Two States Simultaneously: On Sep 8

Goulart, Ron:

Cannibal Farm Dec 102

The Secret of the Scarab Apr 60

Haldeman, Joe:

Foreclosure OcN 77

Hand, Elizabeth:

Books Jan,May,Aug

Echo OcN 171

Hardy, David A.: Cover for:

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Harris, S.:

Cartoons.... .... May, Jun, Jul, Aug

Hobson, M. K.:

Domovoi Apr 41

Hughes, Matt: Cover for:

"The Gist Hunter” Jun

Hughes, Matthew:

Finding Sajessarian Apr 129

The Gist Hunter (nvlt) Jun 121

Inner Huff (nvlt) Feb 6

Help Wonted (nvlt) OcN 94

Thwarting

Jabbi Gloond (nvlt) Aug 5

Irvine, Alex:

The Golems of Detroit May 37

The Lorelei (nvlt) Jan 7

Jacobs, Harvey:

A Friendly Little Oasis Apr 90

Killheffer, Robert K.J.:

Books Apr, Sep

Laidlaw, Marc:

Sweetmeats Jun 83

Langford, David:

Curiosities Jun

Lawrence, Jaye:

Fallen Idols OcN 153

Lee, Yoon Ha:

Eating Hearts Jun 50

Libling, Michael:

The Gospel of Nate (nvlt) Apr 99

Lien, Dennis:

Curiosities Dec

Link, Kelly:

Magic for Beginners (novella) Sep 46

Long, Bill: Cartoons OcN

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Curiosities Mar,Aug

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Films.... Apr, Jun, Jul, Sep

Manzieri, Maurizio: Cover for:

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Masear, Arthur:

Cartoons Jan,Feb,Mar,Apr,May,Jun,Jul,Sep,OcN,Dec

McAllister, Bruce:

Hero, the Movie (nvlt) Jul 130

Spell Aug 118

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Keyboard Practice, Consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with Two Manuals (nvlt) Jan 44

Meek, Connie Braton:

Curiosities Feb

Michaud, Al:

Ayuh, Clawdius (nvlt) Mar 44

Mirabelli, Eugene:

The Woman in Schrdinger's Wave Equations Aug 143

Morressy, John:

The Legend of the Whiney Man Jun 106

The Tournament at Surreptitia (nvlt) Jul 6

Mueller, Richard:

Age of Miracles Sep 35

Dutch Feb 144

Murphy, Pat, and Paul Doherty:

Science Mar,OcN

O'Keefe, Claudia:

Black Deer Apr 81

Maze of Trees (nvlt) Aug 38

Popkes, Steven:

The Great Caruso May 6

Porges, Arthur:

Born Bad Jan 92

What I Owe to Rick Sep 106

Pratchett, Terry:

Ode to Multiple Universes (poem) OcN 126

Reed, Robert:

The Cure Dec 67

From Above Feb 50

The New Deity May 119

Poet Snow Jun 38

Pure Vision Aug 130

Think So? Jul 90

Rickert, M.:

The Harrowing Apr 146

A Very Little Madness Goes a Long Way Aug 100

Rini, J. P.:

Cartoons.... May, Aug, Sep

Robertson, R. Garcia y: See Garcia y Robertson, R.

Rosenblum, Mary:

Gypsy Tail Wind Aug 71

Ryman, Geoff:

The Last Ten Years in the Life of Hero Kai (nvlt) Dec 126

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Books.... Mar,Jul,Dec

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I Didn't Know What Time It Was Sep 97

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Curiosities Sep

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Sherman, Delia:

Walpurgis Afternoon (nvlt) Dec 8

Shockley, Gary W.:

Late Show Mar 108

Shultz, Mike:

Old as Books Jul 118

Refried Clichs:

A Five-Course Meal Aug 89

Skal, David J.:

Films Feb

Steele, Allen M.:

An Incident at the Luncheon of the Boating Party Dec 60

Sterling, Bruce:

The Blemmye's Strategem (nvlt) Jan 97

The Denial Sep 133

Thurston, Robert:

I.D.I.D. (nvlt) May 131

Turtledove, Harry:

Bedfellows Jun 77

Utley, Steven:

Curiosities May

Promised Land Jul 96

Silv'ry Moon OcN 157

Van Scyoc, Sydney J.:

Poppies by Moonlight Dec 44

Webster, Bud:

Curiosities Apr

Wentworth, K.D.:

Born-Again May 48

West, Michelle:

Musing on Books.... Feb,Jun,OcN

Wolfe, Gene:

The Gunner's Mate OcN 132

Young, Jim:

The Pitiless Stars.... Jul 46

Russ Winterbotham, Jonathan Lethem. One wrote pot-boiler sf and comic books, the other is one of the most successful writers on the literary scene today. Is there a connection? I'll get to it, don't worry.

Planet Big Zero was a paperback original published by Monarch (the American International of paperback houses) in 1964, written by Winterbotham under the pseudonym Franklin Hadley. The delightfully named hero, Ted Narly, lieutenant in the Terran Defense Corps, is captured by the Deotions and taken to their titular headquarters, a black nebula with but a single entrance: a funnel with a curtain of fire at the end.

Now, it would be easy to make fun of this one, but I won't. It's absolutely enjoyable, and if Winterbotham/Hadley isn't Alfred Bester, so what? As space opera goes, it's not quite Doc Smith, but it certainly comes close to Hamiltonian standards. I recall enjoying it when I was a kid, and rereading it brought back warm memories of long bus rides home from school. It doesn't promise anything it doesn't deliver, unlike many of its contemporaries, and Winterbotham was nothing if not a professional writer. It pushes no envelopes and teeters not on the cutting edge, but any kid who won't put down his GameBoy to read this pulpy adventure of Lt. Narly in his fight againt the Deotions is missing some good fun.

And that connection between an old newspaper guy and his literary opposite? Well, Lethem used Winterbotham's title for his own terrific story (published in his latest collection, Men and Cartoons); it was just too good not to use again.

—Bud Webster