The annual World Fantasy Convention is an event I try never to miss. I also try never to bore all of you with convention reports, but this year's WFC had several events I think are worth sharing.

The greatest event of all took only an hour—it was a panel discussing F&SF's sixtieth anniversary. The hour proved to be too short and we wound up talking mostly about our magazine's first thirty years. Dick Lupoff drew on his years of friendship with the Bouchers and with Annette Pelz (McComas) to tell everyone about such things as the 1949 launch party for F&SF, where Basil Rathbone drew upon his immense thespic skills and spoke mellifluously for some time, earning a rousing ovation...after which everyone turned to their tablemates, only to discover that no one had actually made sense of what Mr. Rathbone said. (It was suggested that the great actor might have had a drink or two beforehand.)

We also spoke at length of cofounding editor J. Francis McComas, about whom few people seem to know much—even folks who'd met him, like Ron Goulart and Bob Silverberg, had little to offer. Fortunately, I've been in touch recently with a woman named Maria Alonzo who happens to be McComas's grandniece. She has been tracking down this lost relative of hers and her path took her to F&SF, and she has some pieces of the puzzle that was his life. I hope to bring you soon a short article by her about “Mick."

The other panelists included Nancy Etchemendy, who would have contributed more had we been able to discuss the ‘80s and ‘90s at greater length, and Grania Davis, who had wonderful anecdotes about life in the early ‘60s, when her husband Avram Davidson edited F&SF from his home in Mexico for $25 a month. (That's five times your current editor's salary, in case you're wondering.) The days before faxes, email, IMs, and FedEx might seem unreal to some readers, but Grania remembered for us what it was like to wait hours to use the one phone in town so Avram could call in corrections to the home offices of Mercury Press. Support Your Local Postal Worker Day was the most important holiday in her life back then.

Audience members included a writer who had made his first sale to F&SF in 1964 and another who made his first sale in 2006. And perhaps there were people in the audience whose work will be appearing here in 2011 or beyond.

Speaking of which, the weekend was one in which this editor felt the hands of time click forward. There were a couple of young men and women who claimed to be the adult versions of children I've known during my editorial career, but I was not deceived by such impossibilities (not even when they offered convincing remarks like, “I'm as tall as you now"). I was, however, tickled by the woman who, on meeting me, asked if my father had been an editor also. It seems that she had submitted stories to the editor of F&SF a decade ago and in her mind's eye, its editor was a graybearded veteran, so I couldn't possibly be the same person. It still astounds me to think that I've held the reins here for more than an eighth of a century.

Assistant Editor John Joseph Adams made it known that after his own term of eight years as “the Slush God,” he's moving on to take the helm of a new Webzine called Lightspeed. These bigger bimonthly issues we're publishing now still aren't large enough to hold all the gratitude I feel for John and his invaluable contributions to F&SF over the years. I'm eager to see what he does with his own magazine and I wish him Godspeed with Lightspeed.

As usual, there was plenty of fretting about print and the future of the printed word, but after sitting through the awards ceremony, and then afterward listening to the judges describe the judging process, I came away from the weekend thinking that the literature of the fantastic is in pretty good shape overall. Reading through a big stack of submissions on the flight home only deepened my conviction. Stick around to see what I found in that pile.

—Gordon Van Gelder

Alexandra Duncan made her F&SF debut with “Bad Matter” in our Dec. 2009 issue. Her new story is a lovely tale steeped in mythology.

In the soft space when the sun dips behind the trees and crickets fill the shadowed grass with their high metal voices, my mother and I ready our lanterns. Sunset is the vigil hour. My mother wraps herself in a heavy woven shawl, purple like the mountains looming to the west of our cottage. Fireflies bob and flicker over our wheat field. Our mouser takes up his post on top of the garden gate, regarding us with his bright stare. A crisp, early autumn breeze moves over the wheat. I shiver in my white linen chiton and rub my arms for warmth.

"There,” Mother says, pointing.

I squint into the dim. Yes, there. I catch a hint of movement along the brambles at the edge of our wood. I breathe in, letting the darkening air fill my mouth, lift my lungs. Dusk tastes sour honey sweet. Sweet because the fading light means my father is making his way to us through the far-off wood. Sour because my mother will snuff out her lantern and leave me alone as soon as he comes into sight.

When I was a child, I would stand at the window and cry to see the sun go down.

I am too old for that now.

Mother opens the hinged glass door of her lantern and blows out the flame. In the moment before the light goes out, I see sadness written deep around her eyes and mouth. It's not the kind of sadness that makes her sullen and snappish at her work, or stare wistfully across the fields. It's something else. The only time I think I might have felt something like it was when our first mouser died. He was yellow like saffron and liked to rub against my legs when I fed him bits of meat. I called him Rumbler, for the sound he made in his throat when I was near. I have since learned not to name our farm animals.

Mother squeezes my hand. I don't look as she sets down her lantern and steps backward into the night. It's easier that way, like looking away when she pricks the soft side of my arm with a lancet for inoculations. I try not to listen to the receding shuffle of her footsteps and concentrate instead on picking out the glimmers of light reflecting from my father's belt, the hilt of his hunting knife, the metal clasps on the shoulders of his traveling cloak. They flash in the moonlight as he approaches, like little stars moving through our fields. He has reached the foot of the hill leading up to our house. With one hand he supports a dead stag, slung across his shoulder. I know I should stand still to welcome him, like a dignified girl who is studying to become a woman, but I break into a run. The lantern swings beside me and my skirt flaps like a flag as I careen down the path. He meets me halfway, holding out his free arm and pulling me into a fierce hug.

"Ourania.” Father breathes out my name as if he's been holding it in with his breath all day.

I don't say anything, but bury my face into his shoulder, like a little girl. He smells of sweat, crushed leaves, and animal blood, and his cloak is rough against my nose.

We walk up to the cottage, hand in hand. I kneel by the hearth and start a fire with my flints while he hangs the stag's carcass in the cellar. I set out a basin of warm water and a clean cloth so he can wash the blood and dirt from his arms. When he is clean and we are sitting at the table for our simple meal of bread, cheese, soup, and wine, he asks what he always asks.

"Did your mother leave any words for me?” His face goes still and his shoulders tense as he waits for my answer, as if everything turns on what I might say.

I pick up my wine cup and take a swallow. I don't like the way the drink dries my tongue, but I like that Father doesn't try to water it for me, the way Mother does. “She says to tell you she mended your heavy cloak, so it's ready for winter. We killed a rabbit and she added its fur at the collar. She thanks you for the meat."

Father smiles to himself and takes a long drink. When he sets his cup down, his face is flushed. He's still smiling, and little points of light glitter in the folds of his eyes. I pick up my spoon and blow into my bowl to cool the broth. We both fall quiet for a time, focused on our food, making ourselves accustomed to each other's presence again after the long day apart. Later, he will tell stories by the hearth until our fire sinks down to an embered glow.

Long ago, when Day was a young woman, she blazed across the sky with little care in her heart. When she laid her head down to rest, the world became dark. When the time came for her to bring light to the world, she warmed everything, from the heath balds to the ocean deeps. Her only joy came in giving warmth.

But one night, she turned to look back into the dusk, and caught sight of a man. His robe was white and glistening like sun-warmed ice, his strong arms the pale blue of milk after the cream has been skimmed away, and his hair coiled and curled around his brow in midnight waves. This man was Night. He lifted his eyes, bright as two stars, and found her watching him.

They each left their paths and went to one another. Day fed her light to Night, Night offered up his cool for Day to sip, and they found how they curved together to form a whole. Thus Day and Night first knew love.

I wake with the sun on my face and the smell of fresh bread and olive oil hanging in the air. The mouser is curled up next to my feet at the end of my cot. I shove him off the bed and force myself up. The sun is high and hot already, and my head aches from too much wine. I've let myself sleep past dawn. I've missed Father's parting. Mother had no one to greet her. The goats will be sullen and stubborn when at last I get around to milking them. I pull on my ear in frustration and hurry to wrap my chiton around myself, stepping quickly toward the kitchen.

Mother's face shines with sweat, but she smiles to herself as she pulls a loaf of bread from our stone oven on a long, wooden board. She must have passed within a hand's breadth of Father as he was parting, in the confusion between night and dawn a heavy mist can cause. She straightens and slides the bread onto the table for cutting. A pail of cool milk rests on the center board.

"Why did you let me sleep so late?” I ask. Petulance sneaks into my voice. She's only being kind, giving me a morning off from my chores.

"You looked so peaceful.” Mother rests her hands on her hips. She's tucked the hem of her long skirts up into her waistband to keep them out of the fire and I can see the broad arch of her calves, thick and strong from walking. I wonder where her trek takes her each night. Does she always make for the same place or does she wander? Does she rest? She must. But when, and where?

Mother slices the bread and lays a plate of it on the table, next to a shallow bowl of spiced olive oil. She wipes her hands clean on a broadcloth, pours a small measure of wine into two mugs, and tops them off with water. She slides one to me and sits down at the table with the other.

"Drink up,” she says, sipping from her mug and reaching for a slice of bread to dip into the olive oil.

I wrinkle my nose at my own cup. I know the wine is for killing disease in the water, but my tongue curls at the slight, familiar bitterness of it. I sop my bread in oil and bite off a big, crackling chunk to scrub the taste from my mouth.

Mother has me practice my Latin as we weed the garden. We bend our backs under the heat of the late morning sun, yanking invading threads of root from the spaces between the arugula, spinach, and tomatoes. Mother kneels in the dirt and calls out infinitive verbs over their leafy heads.

"Colere,” she calls. She winds the stem of a prickly weed around her gloved hand and tugs.

"Colere,” I repeat, then string out the conjugation. “To cultivate. Coleo, coleas, coleat, coleamus, coleatis, coleant.” A bead of sweat drips over my eyebrow and lands on one of the flowering yellow weeds that try to take over our garden each year. I rip it out and toss it in my compost pail.

"Amare,” Mother returns, without missing a breath.

"Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant,” I say into the dirt.

"Consecrare. Exspectare. Invigilare. Demetere,” Mother calls, and I send each of the words back across the leafy rows in turn.

After we finish weeding, we take small horsehair brushes and dust the stamens of our scarlet runner bean flowers with pollen from the pistils of a hearty green snap-bean. As she dips her brush into the well of each flower, Mother tells me how she hopes to breed a hybrid with the sweetness of the scarlet bean and the snap-bean's resistance to frost.

When the sun nears its zenith, we retreat inside to escape the midday heat. Mother prepares a meal of greens from our garden and lies down on a low divan by the cool north wall to wait out the worst of the heat. I pocket one of the newest books she has brought home for me and lie down with it in my room. I can never sleep through the midday, like Mother does. Even when I draw the shades and strip off my dress, I can only lie on my back and sweat into the bedclothes. I sit up and lean against the stucco wall, sweat gathering in the hollow of my back. I trace the gold-leafed imprint of words on the book's cover. Sometimes I will sneak out and read up in the olive orchard, where the breeze reaches.

I sit quietly until Mother's breath slows to a gentle snore. Then I slide my legs off the bed and walk barefoot through the common room, quiet and careful as a mouser on the hunt. As I pass the place where she lies, Mother's breath skips in her sleep. I freeze, looking down at her, and hug the book to my chest. Her lips move rapidly and her brow creases, as if she's arguing with someone in her dream. Then she breathes out. Her body relaxes into the divan cushions.

I step carefully until I pass the threshold into the kitchen, and then I run, out the kitchen door, through the garden, over the gate, and up the hill behind our cottage, where a cluster of olive trees overlooks the valley. I settle at the base of the oldest tree, its branches curving over me like the whalebone parasol Mother brought back from her journeys one time. The canopy of tiny leaves shades my head, and a soft breeze cools my skin. I lay the open book across my lap and look down on the valley.

From here I can see the flat roof of our cottage, with its high stone wall squaring off the large garden in the back. The valley dips down, split by a dirt path. Our fields billow with wheat on one side, and on the other, a corral encircles our little herd of goats. They rest in the shade of a lemon tree, not far from our barn and silo. From here, it all looks like something effortless, a spread of wildflowers cropping up naturally by a roadway. You can't make out any of the muck and sweat from so far up. A light wind trails its cool fingers up my spine and across the nape of my neck. I lean my head back into a fork in the olive tree's trunk, stretch out my legs on the mossy grass, and close my eyes.

A muffled trill of laughter sounds somewhere behind me, waking me with a start. The book drops from my slack hand and snaps closed on the ground. I scoop it up and pick my way through the olive grove, toward the meadow that lies on the other side, and the sound of voices. The sun still rides high in the sky, but tilts a little more sharply than when I fell asleep. I've only slept a short time. I pause at the lip of the meadow behind the shelter of a broad, old tree.

"Ollie ollie oxen free!” a voice rings out from a low scrub bush only a few yards to my left.

Two girls in pale blue and pink frocks, with hair like tails of wheat, dash from the shade of the trees out into the blinding bright meadow. The smaller one chases the taller, her hands outstretched. The older girl turns back, shrieks in mock terror, and lifts her knees higher as she hurtles forward through the tall grass.

"Maria! Julia!” a woman's voice calls from the near corner of the meadow. I shift my gaze and see a matronly figure in a pale, fitted dress and a broad straw hat sitting on a checkered blanket. “Stop running around and come sit in the shade. You're going to give yourselves heatstroke."

"Yes, Mama,” the older girl says. The small girl drags her feet as her sister leads the way over to the blanket.

"Look at you, you're all red,” the mother says as they draw near. “You know young gentlemen don't want a wife with ruddy skin, right? Come out of that sun."

The girls drop down, obedient, to the blanket and begin making chains out of the same sort of yellow weeds my mother and I rooted out of the garden earlier. The mother reclines stiff-like into her resting place, as if something is hemming in her stomach and keeping her from moving in the natural way. Maybe it's all the lace and ruffles across her bodice, or the tight row of pearl buttons down the front of her dress. I look from the bare arms of my chiton to the patches of sweat darkening the sides of her dress and the fair curls at the back of her neck. She must be a strange one to wrap herself up this way in the dead heat of summer. I peer out from under cover of the olive tree, my palms pressed against its rough bark. I look at my hand on the wood. The sun has browned my skin the color of an oil-fried fish and dirt rims my fingernails. This woman must be rich, to never have to go out in the sun. She must have servants to milk her goats and serve her dinner. Father has told me about such people, and Mother has read to me about them from her books, but I thought they were fancy tales, like the cat who makes his master into a lord.

The small girl drapes a chain of weedy flowers around her neck, and the older one arranges a shorter chain on the crown of her head like a diadem. But the sun must be making them drowsy, for after a few minutes they rest their heads next to their mother's breast and close their eyes. The wind rustles the leaves, and the dappled sunlight ripples over their sleeping forms. They make me think of statues fallen to the bottom of a clear pond.

I step forward to the edge of the meadow, meaning to take a closer look at them in their strange clothes. As I move from behind the tree, something comes into view that makes me freeze, poised with one foot in the air and one hand trailing behind me. On the other side of the blanket, a young man lies on his back. He's clothed in white shirtsleeves and trousers of the same pale, striped material as the woman's dress. A vest crosses his middle, fastened with a row of brass buttons. A broad-brimmed hat tips back from his head, and under it, two dark brown eyes stare back at me.

I turn and flee through the olive grove. I hear a scuffle in the dirt as he springs up to follow, and a hoarse whisper calling after me. His shoes crackle over the carpet of twigs and small stones, where my bare feet pass silently. I round the last row of trees and am about to hurl myself forward into the safety of the sunshine, when he grabs my arm. My own momentum swings me around. He catches me about the waist with his free hand, and we stand face to face, gaping at each other. He can't be more than a few years older than me, around the age when my father says men should be off learning war. His eyebrows angle down into a troubled knit as he stares.

"Let go,” I say, and push him. He lets my arm slip from his hand and stumbles back a step. I should run, but I don't.

"Who are you?” he asks. The words are soft in his mouth, not clipped like the woman's. He holds his hand out, as if asking me to wait.

"Ourania,” I say.

"Have you come from a play?” He turns to look around the wood. “Or do you belong to the Classical Society?"

"I don't know what you mean,” I say, creeping back against the nearest tree. “Why would I want to be in a play?"

"Your dress,” he says.

I look down at my chiton. Mother and I painted it with beeswax and dyed it blue so a pattern of cream-colored birds and flowers shows through. Some of the flowers have come away smudged a muddy green from my leaning against tree trunks and falling asleep in the grass. I lick my finger and try to rub at the stain, but it's set in already. I sigh. He must think I'm part of a paupers’ troupe with my dirty robe and bare feet. I reach up to retie the bands around my hair and pull away a dead olive leaf. I crumble it in my free hand and drop the shreds to the ground, hoping he hasn't added that detail to my catalog of shames.

"I've been working,” I say. “I fell asleep on the grass."

He blinks at me, then swallows and blinks some more. “What are you?"

I feel a scowl cloud my features. “I'm Ourania, like I said. What are you?"

"Aaron Lyell. I'm an apprentice engineer."

"A what?"

"An engineer. You know, for locomotives."

I stare at him.

He clears his throat. “Trains. You know.” He shuffles his feet over the rocky ground.

I cock my head to the side and wait for him to explain himself.

"If you don't mind my asking, where do you come from?” He raises his eyes and looks at me with pure, innocent curiosity.

"Down the valley,” I say, nodding to the slope beyond the break in the trees. “This is our olive grove."

"I'm sorry,” he says. He runs his hand through his mess of short, curling hair, the same burnished yellow as the girls’ braids. “The company was surveying this tract of land for railway development, and I found this lovely meadow. Looked like a nice place for a picnic. I didn't know anybody was living here. We'll have to go back over the property records now, naturally....” He trails off, staring at me again.

"Should I draw you a picture?” I say.

"What's that?"

"I said, should I draw you a picture,” I repeat. “That way you wouldn't have to look so hard."

"Sorry,” he says. His pale skin goes a deep red and he looks down. “It's only...I've never, well, in books, but I've never seen anyone like you before."

"You're a strange one,” I say, leaning against the tree behind me. “I've never seen anyone like you either. It's like you stepped out of a wives’ tale or—"

"You're lovely,” Aaron interrupts, looking up at me suddenly.

I feel my own face go hot and I look down at my bare feet. A peddler said something like that about me once, when my mother and I traded him some eggs for ribbons, but it didn't mean the same.

I hug the book to my chest. We stand in silence, avoiding each other's looks.

"May I ask,” Aaron says to break the long pause, “what is it you're reading?"

I hold the book face-out so he can read the lettering.

"On the Origin of Species,” he reads aloud. His eyes light up the way Father's do when he's telling how he brought down a hart after a daylong stalk through the forest. “You're interested in natural history?"

I shrug, then lift my eyes to look at him sidelong. “Have you read it?"

"Oh, yes,” he says, a grin parting his lips and tugging up his serious brow. “Engineering science is my trade, but I've a great interest in naturalism. Mr. Darwin is marvelous. Here.” He digs in his back pocket and produces a thin leather-bound volume. He holds it out at the tip of his fingers.

I step forward warily and take the book. It opens up to reveal small, cream-colored pages crowded with precise drawings of flowers and birds, sketched in graphite. Below each likeness, the name of the specimen flows in Aaron's neat hand. I sit down on the ground and begin to page through from the beginning. “You did these?” I ask.

"Yes.” Aaron sits cross-legged beside me.

"I've never had time for drawing. Mother calls it a hobby.” I lift a page and stop with the book open to a sketch of the two girls I saw in the meadow. The older one is sitting with her feet up under her on a plump cushion, her head bent over an embroidery hoop. The younger leans against her, fast asleep, her hand resting on a cloth poppet.

I look up from the book. “Are they your sisters?"

He opens his mouth to speak, but a voice echoes up from the direction of the meadow instead. “Aaron?” It's the woman, stretching out the sound of his name. “Aaron, where've you gone?"

He jumps up at the sound of her voice. “Coming,” he shouts back. Then quietly, his voice straining with nerves, he leans close and says, “Will you come here again next Sunday?"

I sit on the forest floor in a muddle. “When's that?"

"Seven days,” he says. A twig pops some way off among the trees. He glances over his shoulder and begins backing toward the sound. “Meet me here. Please. In the meadow. I only want a chance to know you better."

His eyes stay fixed on me until I nod, and then he's gone, the soft thud of his shoes fading into the twisting file of trees. I wait a moment longer, and hear the woman's voice cut out mid-call. My body feels odd and full of humming energy. I can't feel my fingers, and when I look down, I see I'm still holding Aaron's little leather-bound book. I stumble up after him. I jog through the shaded grove, dodging olive trees and hopping stones. But when I reach the meadow, the only trace of my strange visitors is a square of flattened grass where they laid their blanket. I walk slowly back to the spot where Aaron and I sat, gather up both books in my arms, and turn my feet toward home.

The afternoon passes slow and sluggish in the heat. Mother sets me to a column of geometry equations that have to do with the volume of water in our well during different seasons, while she ties on her veiled straw hat and heads out to check on the bees. I sit by the window with a wax tablet and stylus laid out in front of me and watch her white-swathed figure moving between the bee boxes. I would rather be out under all that cloth and sun than cloistered here with mathematics.

I slip my hand between the folds of my robe and pull out Aaron's book. Its cover is worn smooth from handling. I dart my eyes to the window. Mother is easing a honeycomb from one of the hives. I spread the pages open and crease each one down as I turn. Aaron's hand is exact, picking out the smallest veins and petals of the flora and fixing a lively glint in a bird's eye, but I don't recognize a single one of them. A Latin name and a common one accompany each drawing. Both sound strange on my tongue, like a cousin to a word I know. Cercis occidentalis. Judas Tree. Junco hyemalis. Dark-eyed Junco. Callipepla californifica. California quail. I try to sound them out, but they turn my tongue to clay.

I flip the pages under my thumb and the book falls open to a detailed sketch of an even road, flanked on both sides by tall bricked buildings. It's a street in a city of some kind, but nothing like the places I've read about or Mother describes. What might be blown glass clings to the buildings in sheets, and little curls of iron or wood jut from the stonework. Tradesmen's signs hang down from posts ensconced in the walls. There are hardly any animals in Aaron's picture, except a single horse and some kind of pygmy dog led by a woman dressed more or less the same as the one I saw in the meadow. No oxen. No goats. No chickens. No market stalls, even. The men wear tall hats, and the women cover their hair with bonnets. The next page holds the schematics for some sort of spoked wheel and chain device. Next, the skeleton of an impossibly tall building, and an oblong shape moving among the clouds. Zeppelin, the script beneath it reads.

I put my hand to my lips and remember to breathe out. Is it real, or something Aaron made up in an idle hour? When I was young, I would draw fancy pictures full of lichen-dripped crevasses and monsters with hundreds of heads bobbing on their long, eel-like necks.

"Ourania!” Mother's voice clips across my thoughts. She is struggling up the hill with two pails balanced out from her body in either hand.

I snap the book shut.

"Ourania!” Mother calls again. “Help me with the door."

I open the door and stand back so she can pass through with the pails, honeycombs resting in sticky blocks at their bases. I keep quiet the rest of the evening. We finish butchering the stag in the cellar and jar the honey. We bake more bread. We light our lamps. We wait.

"Father,” I ask that night when most of the bread from our dinner is gone. “Could you take me with you to the wood, if you wanted?"

He chuckles, raising his eyebrows at me over the soup bowl at his mouth. “What do you want with the forest?"

My eyes slide down to the empty bowl in front of me. I pick at a heel of bread. “You could teach me to hunt. I could help you."

"But then who would help your mother? And who would be our messenger?” Father asks. He reaches across the table and pats my hand. “You make a better Mercury than you would a Diana, I think."

I must be scowling, because Father laughs again. “Is your mother's company wearing on you?"

"No,” I say. I pour the last of the wine into my cup. “I only miss you, that's all."

"And you don't think my company would wear on you, too?” Father asks.

"No,” I say again, cutting my eyes down to the table. I can see he doesn't mean to answer me. I open my mouth to speak again, then change my mind and snap my jaw shut instead.

Father lifts an eyebrow. “Is there something else you wanted to ask, Ourania?"

I duck my head and feel my face fill with heat. “No,” I say in a small voice.

"You know I'll tell you anything you want to know,” Father says. “You only have to ask."

I hesitate, and raise my eyes to him. “Do you know what a locomotive is?"

Father's eyes narrow. “Where did you hear that word?” His voice has a tang of metal in it. I am suddenly aware of all the beasts he has felled.

"Nowhere,” I say, dropping my eyes again quickly. My heart speeds up and I can feel the bread and lentils in my stomach curdle. “Nowhere. I mean, I read it. There was a book Mother had me read.” I bite the sides of my tongue and widen my eyes at the empty space on the table between us. He can't know all I've been reading. I might very well have seen the word written. I chance a look up to see if he'll take in what I've fed him. He stares back at me with that same hard look in his eyes. His usual, easy smile is gone, and I catch a glimpse of something dangerous coiled in its place.

I rise to clear the bowls from the table. Father remains, watching me move about. I keep my back to him and push my hands beneath the water in our kitchen basin so he won't see them shaking. After a moment, I hear the scrape of his chair as he rises, and then the low tumble of wood as he kneels to build up the hearth fire. I stay at the dishes longer than I need, wiping them dry with extra care so I won't have to turn around and see the awful power in my father's face again.

"Would you like to hear a story, Ourania?” Father asks, his voice softened and friendly again. He stands in the doorway, but I can barely hear him over the pop of burning logs.

I sigh, slipping back into the comfort of our routine. “Please,” I say.

Father has told me about Diana springing forth from father Zeus's head, Lord Rama, and the hero Sunjata's sister, who married the spirit beneath the hill, and later betrayed her husband to save her brother. Tonight he will tell me of the god Osiris, whose brother murdered him and scattered his flesh over the Nile, and of faithful Isis, who gathered together the body of her husband, and restored him to a throne in the underworld.

But down on the earth, the sun halted its course at the edge of the sky. Dark did not fall, and all the beasts were trapped in a terrible half-light.

"Why has Day stopped her course? Where is Night?” the animals cried. They cowered and trembled in the stillness.

One of the beasts, the one called Man, stood upright. He held aloft a burning branch that tempered the darkness. “Don't be afraid,” he said. “I will go and find them. I will set them back on their paths and restore order to the world."

Man ranged over hill and valley. He scoured the salt oceans. At last, he scaled the summit of the highest mountain. There he came upon the two of them, cradled together in a bed of stars.

A hot anger flared in Man's breast to see them so reposed.

"You, faithless ones,” Man said, and his voice sparked like new-caught fire. “How could you forsake us?” He reached up into the abyss of heaven and called down a terrible beast. It snaked across the sky like a serpent, and shook the earth as it passed. Thick scarab metal covered the length of its body, and it hissed and growled foul smoke that poisoned the air. Man set it on the lovers. So Night and Day were forced to flee from it, always, or be devoured.

I am careful to rise early the next seven days. I milk the nanny goats in the chill, predawn mist, make cheese from what they give, practice my Latin and geometry, and watch the grain grow. At night, I hold Aaron's book open inside the copy of Darwin. Father asks me to read to him sometimes, but then shakes his head after only a few paragraphs of Mr. Darwin's prose and says he'll tell me a story instead. It suits us both better. By the way the wheat bows and the twinge of cold in the air at dawn, I know the harvest isn't far off.

On the seventh day, I trudge through the muggy heat of midday, up the hill to the olive grove. I carry a sack of bread and cheese. Aaron's book rests snug inside my waist sash. A breeze picks up as I near the crest of the hill and the cool wood. I walk through the grove, trailing my fingers across the trees’ smooth backs and letting the wind lift the hair from my neck. The treetops create a canopy that filters little dapples of sunlight onto the ground. I am going to see Aaron. I am going to ask him if he's seen the places he draws in his book, or if they're fancies. I am going to ask him about the obelisk and the zepplin. I am going to ask where he found the Dark-eyed Junco, and what it is. I smile up at the canopy and round the last stand of trees.

The clearing stands empty. Aaron hasn't arrived yet, so I crouch down and pluck at the blades of long grass. I split one down the middle with my fingernail to make a whistle, hold it to my lips, and blow. The grass makes a dry, sputtering tweet. I bite my lip and grin. If I close my eyes, I can picture my father sitting cross-legged beside me, showing my young self the trick of it. When I tire of my game, I make a chain of flowers and drape them around my neck and head, the way I saw the little girls do. I walk the circumference of the meadow, letting my hand trail over the saplings and low brush at its border. I pause at the spot where Aaron and the girls laid their blanket. Something has been carved into the thick trunk of one of the nearby trees. I kneel beside it and brush the markings with my fingers. The cut stands out faint and boxy, but I can read it. Ourania. A thrill passes through my chest. I stand and scan the meadow, expecting him to stride into view at any moment. But he does not come.

I take the little hinged, bronze knife I carry from my pocket and unfold it. The bark is thick, but I keep my knife sharp. It cuts a bright yellow line in the trunk below my name. I strain my arm against the hard wood and run my hand over my work when I have finished. Aaron. His name joins mine on the tree's flesh. I braid long slips of grass into rope as I wait, flip through Aaron's book again, and lie back to stare at the clouds passing soundlessly overhead. If only I could make time pass more quickly, the way the wind moves clouds at its whim, so Aaron could be here already. I close my eyes. A wind shakes the leaves at the top of the trees, making them rattle like a rainstorm on all sides of me. I lean back against the earth and rest Aaron's book on the slope of my chest. For some reason, I find it easy to sleep here in the heart of the meadow. I'm sure Aaron's footsteps will wake me when he comes. I let myself drift on the hush of leaves.

I dream of Aaron coming to me through the fold of trees. He kneels and lays himself over me. I feel the length and firmness of his body pressed against my belly, my breasts. The grass is like silk against the soles of my feet. It rises up and braids itself into a bower over our heads, shading us from the sun, as if the earth itself is responding to the heat in my body. I find myself over Aaron, with his hips tucked between my thighs. I pull the bindings from my hair and let it down so it falls in waves over his body. I kiss his throat, his chest, the soft, dark indentation of his navel, covering him with my hair. I feel his hands cupping my skin, and then, and then....

I wake, feeling as if the world has tilted on its axis. My chest heaves as I try to catch my breath. At first, I don't know where I am, and I paw at the bed of grass around me, trying to work my way to my feet. The sun has sunk low in the sky, a bloody bronze color. Far off, something howls. It is like the long, low baying of a wolf, but sharper, with the sound of rending metal folded in. My heart seizes, and I jump to my feet.

Late. It's too late.

I make for the olive grove, scattering chains of flowers and grass behind me as I run. I clutch at my sash and discover I've dropped Aaron's book. I scurry back to the meadow. There, beside the patch of grass I've tamped down in my sleep, it lies half-hidden in the weeds. I snatch it up and run again, through the darkening grove and down the hill, my feet fleet over the roll of the earth, terror beating in my chest.

The lights of our house shine bright. Mother has lit the lanterns without me. She stands, wrapped in her shawl, waiting by the front gate of our house. She must hear the sound of my footsteps, for she turns, and relief rushes her face. She holds out her arms and I run straight to her. Only when I've buried my head in the soft, dark folds of her cloak do I feel myself shaking.

Mother pulls back and holds me at arm's length. She slaps my face, which she has not done since the time in my fifth year when I tied a bucket to our goat's tail and he trampled part of our summer garden in his panic. “Where have you been?” she asks. And then, without waiting for me to answer. “I thought you were gone. I thought it had taken you."

"I...I was hot, so I went up to the olive grove. I feel asleep,” I say. Then her other words seep into my ears. My heart quickens again. “What would want to take me?"

She presses me tight against her. “Nothing. Nothing. Promise me you won't stray past the borders of the farm. If you do, I can't protect you."

"But what do you need to protect me from?"

Mother stares at me. Her eyes look like dark, polished river stones. “There are all manner of evil things in the world, Ourania, that you are lucky not to know about. Let us not change that."

Day wept as she fled, and her tears flooded the earth. All the beasts cried out and raised their hands to her for mercy, but the deluge swept many under. Then Day felt something move within her. She looked, and found Night's child growing in her belly. Day dried her tears and went to Man to strike a bargain.

"Man,” she said. “Have pity. I am with child by Night. Only call off your beast so we may raise our child in peace, and I swear Night and I will part forever. We will each take up our course in the sky, as always was."

"Very well,” Man said. “But should you ever stray again, I will loose my beast and hound you to the ends of the earth."

Day agreed, saying, “For even if we never meet, Night's child is dear to me."

Thereafter, the pattern of days returned to the earth. Man became chief among beasts, and he turned his hand to quelling the earth and seas, and all within his ken.

Seven days pass, but I do not visit the meadow again. The grain is almost ready for threshing, so Mother and I sharpen our collection of scythes. I wonder what kept Aaron from me, if it was the same thing I heard howling, the same thing my mother fears. If my mother fears it, it must be too terrible. I am sick from wanting to ask her what it might want from us, but I don't dare. I am nearly finished with Darwin, and geometry helps keep my mind from straying to the olive grove and my strange dream. C=2(pi)r; A=(pi)r2; V=(pi)r2h, I think as the sun beats down on the roof of our house. A=1/2 bh; a2+ b2=c2

"I have something for you,” Mother says at breakfast one morning. She dusts breadcrumbs from her hands as she rises and holds up a finger, telling me to wait where I am. I clear our breakfast and wipe the table clean with a wet rag. Mother returns holding an oilcloth package bound up with twine. She holds it out to me. “Open it."

I cut the twine with my knife and fold the oilcloth away. A nest of fine, creamy linen rests inside. Light from the window catches in the fine weave, making it shimmer like sunshine on a lake. I let out a short breath. This is fabric for a priestess or a bride, not a girl who mucks around with goats and spends her days winnowing grain.

"What's this for?” I ask, turning from the kitchen window, my arms brimming with cloth.

Mother steps into the square of light with me. Her dark hair has fallen out of its tie. It curls down her back and over her breasts like thick, unchecked vines. The light picks out the thin hairs on her forearms, bleached fair by the sun, and warms her browned skin to gold. She reaches out to touch my face and I swear I feel all the heat of summer brush my skin. “You'll be a woman soon,” she says. “That brings certain duties and certain boons."

I feel the air quiver around me, and I open my mouth, a hundred questions ready to tumble from the tip of my tongue. But Mother drops her hand. The air changes, as if something has gone out of it, like the release of tension between the earth and sky after a thunderstorm. I sink into my chair, my legs trembling.

"I thought we might dye the border this afternoon, after your lessons,” Mother says, folding the oilcloth and twine together for safekeeping. She winds her hair back off of her neck, and I see the smudges of soot on her elbows and faded oil spots on her clothes again. She scoops up a water pail in each hand and holds one out to me. “Come on, help me with the pump."

I still can't sleep at the midday hour, but I don't dare scale the hill again. The echo of Mother's unnamed terror is too real when I wake each morning. I lie on my back in my cot with Aaron's book open in one hand, and the other cupped over my own breast. If I close my eyes, I can imagine it's Aaron's hand, not my own. I press my fingers against the soft flesh of my lips and think of him and his imagined body until the heat from my dream courses through me again. When it is gone, I feel something other than myself. Foreign and hollow, though I don't know why.

I get up and pace the quiet house with Aaron's book. I find the stub of red clay Mother uses to mark measurements on cloth and stone, and take it out to the garden. First I stare out over the vegetable rows with the clay poised over a blank page of Aaron's book. I bite my lip and pull on my ear. The mouser sleeps atop the garden wall, his eyes closed to soft slits and his tail twitching against the stone. I put the clay to the paper and try to imitate the subtle curve of his ears, the ripple of muscles beneath his fur. I block in the balance of stones in the wall, with a thick snake of vines twining up through the cracks and over the top. I hold the paper out. It is not at all neat like Aaron's drawings. The mouser might well be a toad on a woodpile. Mouser sleeping on our garden wall, I write below my scrawl, so Aaron will know what it is, if he ever sees it.

Still, it is only my first attempt. I assume this skill is like baking bread or math. I must practice my hand at it. I move over to the cone of wooden stakes where our bean plants grow and hunch over its flowers. I record these and label them, then a black, crook-legged maria bug I find resting beneath the late spinach. I wander the garden, taking down everything I find in Aaron's book until my skin begins to feel tight and hot under the sun. I creep indoors.

Mother lies fast asleep with her back to the wall. Her hair curls around her shoulders. She looks soft, all the drive and hurry wiped from her face. I wonder if I look this way when I sleep. I settle in the chair across from her and begin sketching, trying to spool myself, my life, together again as I go.

I cannot wait another seven days. No amount of mathematics or sketched mimicry can quell the heat flaring beneath my skin or the worry in my stomach. I will go to the hill, and I will not lie down to sleep. I will find Aaron or else leave word for him that I am waiting. My limbs shake as I slip from the house at noon and lift a sharpened scythe from the barn wall. If there is really some terror out there, I will not go unarmed.

I mount the hill again. My trek through the close files of the orchard seems to take longer than usual, but maybe that is the crawling feeling, like ants covering my skin, making time slow. As I step into the meadow, I feel a thrum in the air. The air smells hot, like when Mother works on her conductivity experiments. I adjust my grip on the scythe and step away from the sheltering trees.

I have only moved a few paces into the meadow when my foot strikes something hard and ungiving. It makes a hollow noise. I kneel down in the grass and run my hands over it. A long rail, made of thick, sun-warmed metal. Several feet away, its twin runs parallel, with a neat pattern of heavy wood boards spanning the distance between the two. The rails stretch across the length of the meadow, and now I see a break in the trees on either side where someone has cleared all the growth to make a path for them. I run to the break. Farther off, on the next hill rise, I can make out the dark curve of the track disappearing over its crest.

A low howl fills the air, the same I heard before. My chest tightens with horror. A black cloud rises over the hill, cumulating and moving at terrifying speed, faster than I have ever known any beast to run. Beneath the screen of smoke, I make out a flash of dark metal glinting in the sun. It stretches in a sinuous trail over the top of the hill, like an asp or a millipede, gaining velocity as it drops toward the valley floor. The metal thing dips along the swale, then tilts its face toward me and begins to strain up the hill. It beats out a hollow rhythm, metal against metal, with a horrible, tooth-scraping grind between beats.

I drop my scythe and run back along the wooden path. The sound of the thing—is it animal or some kind of machine?—drowns out the slap of my sandals against the boards. The ground rumbles beneath my feet, growing to a constant tremor as the high howl and screech flood my ears, my mouth, my entire body. The noise fills everything. My heart shudders in time with the creature's unearthly growl, like a bell reverberating, and I throw myself from the path, into the high grass. I huddle, clutching the earth. The world is nothing but rattle, rock, clack, and moan. And then as suddenly as it came, I feel the thing pass. A rush of air sucks at me, leaving the grass swaying as the roar retreats into the distance.

I stand up. The air tastes acrid, like burning rock. I feel grimed. I run my hands over my hair and skin. A fine, gray dust has settled on my neck and arms, and through my hair. I spit and wipe my eyes. I stand mere feet from the track, and on the other side, there is a man. He wears a brown suit, cut in a simpler version of the style I saw on Aaron, and a domed hat I recognize from the book of drawings. A silky piece of fabric hangs in a knot at his throat. His face is older by far than my father's, more lined and baked by the sun. Drifts of gray hair sweep out from under his hat. But his eyes, those are brown and deep as a cistern.

"Ourania?” His voice sticks and comes out as a croak.

"Do I know you?” I call back. I can hear the waver in my own voice. I hurry forward until my feet meet the rail, then stand back a pace. Who knows if the metal creature might come ripping through the trees again?

He walks toward me and lifts his feet over the track without pause. We stand within a hand's breadth of each other, only the span of the metal rail separating us. I look up at him. I study the folds of flesh under his eyes and the creases at the corners of his mouth, the shape of his ears and the familiar, broad line of his nose. I know. Oh, help me, I know.

"Aaron.” His name comes out of me in a rush of breath. I want to double over, for I feel as if something has knocked the air from my lungs. I hold out a hand to keep myself upright, and he catches it. He helps me over to a patch of low grass in the shade of the olive trees. I sit, hard. He kneels by me.

"I knew,” he says. His eyes rim with wet. “I knew if I kept coming I would find you some day."

"Aaron.” I lift my hand to touch his face. His skin feels thin and soft. “What happened to you? I came to the meadow after seven days, and you weren't there, but I saw where you carved my name.” My eyes flick across his face. I know of many stories my father tells, where a sorceress or some such casts a spell on a man to make him take a form other than his own.

"Have you been cursed?” I ask. “Who's done this to you? My mother, maybe she can fix you. She knows....” I spy the sadness welling in Aaron's eyes and let my voice trail off.

"Ourania.” He takes my hand and buries his face in it, kisses my work-rough palm. “I'm not cursed. I'm old, that's all. I've grown old, and you're still young, after all these years."

"Years!” I snatch my hand away. “It's only been weeks since I saw you, not even a season."

He shakes his head. “I came after seven days, and then another seven. I came every Sunday I could for fifty-two years. This is the first I've seen you."

My breath hitches and my vision clouds. I cover my face with my hands. The meadow air is too close.

"At first I thought you couldn't get away, and then I thought I'd gone mad. That I'd dreamed you altogether.” He pulls my hands softly away from my face. The skin around his eyes crinkles as he smiles. “But you're here."

I feel a sob welling up in my chest. I try to tamp it down, but it breaks through anyway. Aaron holds me and we rock together in the dry grass.

"Take me away with you,” I say, finally, pulling back from him. “I wanted to see where you came from, if the things in your book were real. I wanted you to show it to me.” I pull the book from its place at my waist sash.

His mouth opens as he stares at it. He reaches out and brushes his fingers against its leather cover. “Like new,” he says. He takes the book from me and begins paging through, turning each leaf faster and faster, until he reaches my drawing of the garden wall. He stops. Aaron traces his finger over the page, then closes the book. His face looks pale. He stands and hands the book back to me.

"Keep this,” he says.

I scramble up after him. “It's yours,” I say.

He shakes his head again. “I had forgotten all about it. But you,” he says, touching his hand to my face again. “I can never forget you.” He leans in to kiss me.

I close my eyes. Our lips touch and I see him as a young man, straight and unlined, untouched by age. I would gladly stand here until the sun sinks from the sky. I would gladly follow him to whatever strange land he would lead me, even if it means braving beasts of smoke and metal.

Aaron breaks away and steps back. “Thank you, Ourania.” He turns and begins walking to the line of trees.

Time slows and crystallizes around me. I feel the pump of my own heart and the gentle sway of wind picking at the hem of my skirt. Aaron is walking away from me, but for the life of me, I cannot follow. He reaches the tree line and looks back. He smiles. Then passes through to the other side, and I see him no more.

In the quiet hour when the moon has put itself away, when my father sleeps and my mother wanders far, I gather my worldly possessions. Aaron's book with the pictures of my home inside, my folding knife, my mother's copy of Darwin, and the yards of white linen. I pack them away in a leather satchel. I loop a water bladder around my neck. I stow several days’ rations of bread and dried meat, and open the cottage door onto the night. Our mouser watches with eyes glowing like two moons as I turn my feet to the road leading away from our door.

Mr. Shivers, by Robert Jackson Bennett, Orbit, 2010, $19.99.

I don't know if the best writers all come from Texas, but that state sure seems to have more than its fair share of the most interesting. Case in point: Robert Jackson Bennett with his debut novel, Mr. Shivers.

Set in the Great Depression, it starts out as a journey through the dustbowl, riding trains and walking dirt roads, with a band of hobos in search of the man who took from each of them the life of one of the persons they cared for most in the world. For the point-of-view character Connelly, it was his young daughter.

The man they're seeking is Mr. Shivers, a scar-faced serial killer whom the hobos talk about in hushed tones:

They said Mr. Shivers had been in every jail in the country...he would sit there waiting for nightfall and when the moon shone through the bars he'd climb up the beams like a man on a staircase....

They said when bums and all the runaway boys and girls die they get their last chance to ride freight with Mr. Shivers, that he has a train made of night that runs straight to hell and the furnace don't run on coal or wood it runs on you.

Mr. Shivers, the moonlight man, the black rider, Mr. Shivers, the bum's devil. The vagrant's boogey man.

It's wonderful stuff, spooky and increasingly grim as the book continues.

But while much of the book is a fascinating portrait of those hard times and hobo mythology, about two thirds of the way in, it veers into an allegory of the source of all that's wrong with the world today. Or maybe the allegory was there all along and I just didn't pick up on it. Like the best of such novels, it doesn't matter—you can read the story as it is, with great pleasure, or you can find other meanings in the subtext. What I can tell you is that Mr. Shivers is a powerful exploration of what it means to be human—especially in such tough times as the Great Depression—and it leads you to the conclusions you make, rather than being heavy-handed.

Connelly's journey from an ordinary man with a mission to someone he wouldn't have recognized when he first started out is particularly gripping and poignant. There are shades of Lord of the Flies here, and in the end it's hard to tell who's the real bum's devil.

Imaginative and beautifully written, Mr. Shivers is a powerful book that reads as though presented by an author at the peak of his abilities. Which only makes me that much more eager to read what he'll give us next. And wonder who the next Texas hotshot will be.

Pretty Dead by Francesca Lia Block, HarperTeen, 2009, $16.99.

Back in 1989, Francesca Lia Block introduced us to her character Weetzie Bat, not to mention an individual and quirky sense of storytelling that she has been sharing with us ever since. Set in the appropriately named “Shangri-L.A.,” her books are whimsical and edgy, following their own sense of purpose and storytelling. They're the kind of books—or perhaps one might better say, Block's narrative voice—you'll either love or hate.

I've been charmed by her work since that first book and have followed with delight the subsequent volumes of what's come to be known as her “Dangerous Angels” books. They're part street-smart mainstream and part fairy tale, set in an L.A. that seems to owe as much to the punk sensibilities of the 1980s as it does the glamorous days of Hollywood in its 1950s heyday. The characters feel like faerie or angels—bigger than life, but still elusive.

Though they're not really marketed as fantasy, the books have nevertheless staked out their own piece of the turf in an individual manner, so I should have trusted her when I realized her newest was a vampire novel.

But I was nervous because there's a vampire craze going on—there has been since before the Twilight books, but Meyer's series has just fanned the flames of popularity for these creatures of the night. I didn't think that a whimsical, though edgy, take on vampires would be fresh enough to work—since that was what I assumed Block would be doing in this book. I was wrong.

If anything, Pretty Dead is a reverse vampire novel, but really, to explain that statement I'd have to give away far too much of the story. Let me say instead that as individual as Block's take on fantasy has been previously, such is also the case here. Pretty Dead is a breath of fresh air in a crowded graveyard, in part because none of it utilizes the usual tropes we associate with a vampire novel.

It's set in beach houses and nightclubs and fast cars, and for all its brevity, it packs the same punch that her other books do. I'm always a little envious at how Block can say so much with such little wordage.

I'm not a hundred percent sure that the vampire crowd will love this book, but I know that anyone who appreciates a good story will come away satisfied and wanting to read more of her work—if they're not already fans.

Recommended.

Boilerplate: History's Mechanical Marvel by Paul Guinan & Anina Bennett, Abrams Image, 2009, $24.95.

Some people have way too much spare time. (I say that with affection, and not a little jealousy, since I misplaced my spare time many years ago and have yet to find it again.) But what else can you say about the couple who have produced this book and its related Web site, www.bigredhair.com/boilerplate?

Boilerplate was a Victorian-era robot soldier—a forgotten mechanical marvel whose existence and exploits have been unrecorded until now. Through exhaustive research, Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett have unearthed the material necessary to produce this detailed history of Professor Archibald Campion's creation.

The robot was built in 1893 as a prototype for, as Campion put it, “preventing the deaths of men in the conflicts of nations.” Boilerplate fought “alongside such notables as Teddy Roosevelt and Lawrence of Arabia. Campion and his robot also circled the planet with the U.S. Navy, trekked to the South Pole, made silent movies, and hobnobbed with the likes of Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla."

More human than most humans, Boilerplate's secret history is finally revealed through this stunning collection of vintage photographs and art, and the accompanying text. To see is to believe, and the evidence given us here appears to be irrefutable. But how did this technological breakthrough fall into obscurity?

In his foreword to the book, Sean G. David has a theory: “Ironically, the robot's fame in years past was part of the problem. Many researchers have been led astray by apocryphal tales of the automaton, and there's confusion about whether Boilerplate existed at all. As a result, historians are reluctant to include the robot in official texts."

It doesn't help that the robot disappeared in the Meuse-Argonne offensive in 1918 while on a mission to rescue the Lost Battalion. But we have all this photographic evidence, and there is the statue of the robot with Teddy Roosevelt that stands in a park across the street from the Oregon Historical Society in Portland, Oregon, a photo of which appears in the book, though visitors to Portland can go and see it for themselves.

This is an utterly enchanting book, a view of history that just happens to include a robot in every photograph and painting, of which there are hundreds. My favorite image shows up on the cover as well as inside in a two-page spread: Boilerplate festooned with bandoliers in a grainy sepia group shot with General Pancho Villa and his staff.

Or maybe Guinan & Bennett made it all up with all that copious spare time they must have had. Maybe they Photoshopped all these brilliant and clever images with such seamless and painstaking detail, and then wrote up the accompanying history with equally meticulous care.

Regardless, this is a vastly entertaining book with which I've already had hours of pleasure.

A Robe of Feathers and Other Stories by Thersa Matsuura, Counterpoint, 2009, $14.95.

The back cover blurb begins: “In Japan, the line that divides myth from reality is not merely blurred, it is nonexistent. Superstitions, legends, and folk myths are passed down through generations and pervade daily living.” I repeat it here because those words pretty much sum up the overall atmosphere of the stories collected here. They take place now, but it's a now in which the everyday and the marvelous blur.

I don't know as much about Japan as probably I should, but it strikes me as a place where opposites often combine to form a unified whole. My grandmother was Japanese and she certainly personified that. In her home, exquisite art and elements of tacky pop culture had equal weight. She was a devout and practicing Buddhist—meditating daily and maintaining her shrines—yet firmly rooted in the physical world and appreciating its pleasures.

The stories in A Robe of Feathers are like that, too. They blend dichotomic elements, or shape uneasy alliances, in order to illuminate a greater whole. Even when the nature of the material appears explicit—ghosts and small gods and demons—the conclusions can be...well, less than conclusive. But they are always illuminating.

Sometimes these juxtapositions are literal, as in the story of the country widower, put into a modern retirement home by his loving children, who must come to terms with the twin mysteries of high tech gadgetry and the no-tech spiritworld.

Or the boy in the title story who builds a decorated bicycle to win the heart of a Manga-loving girl, his endeavors carrying the echoes of an old folktale.

Or the middle-aged agoraphobic woman who feels that her thoughts can be heard whenever she steps out into the modern world and finds herself seeking comfort in her own past.

It's all fascinating material—very fresh to Western ears in both subject material and characterization—and comes to us wrapped in some of the most gorgeous prose I've read in a while. The stories are eerie, at times disturbing, occasionally sweet natured, but always compelling.

A Robe of Feathers is a truly unique collection that suits no easy categorization except that of excellence.

Peter & Max: A Fables Novel by Bill Willingham, Vertigo, 2009, $22.99.

Bill Willingham is currently Vertigo's golden boy. His Fables comic (in which the characters of fairy tales and folktales live alongside us, but hidden) is the company's highest-selling title, which translates into its being Vertigo's most popular. Fables has spun off a number of one-shot specials, as well as two other series: Jack of Fables (the further adventures of a womanizing, self-absorbed trickster) and the more recent Cinderella (in which it turns out she's the world's best spy).

I don't have an opinion on Cinderella yet, but Fables is beginning to wear out its welcome for me. The problem with it is the same as with so much secondary world high fantasy from the past couple of decades: it's not fantasy. There's no sense of wonder. They're just war stories. And that's what's been happening with Fables. There are still touches of fantasy, but for the past three or four story arcs, it's been just one battle or war after the other, and it's becoming repetitive.

So it doesn't surprise me that it's popular. That kind of thing is what most people who read fantasy want. The quirkier, and often more interesting books—which are usually the ones with an actual sense of wonder—don't have the sweep, violence, and action that appears to have become the primary requirement for the genre.

As for Jack of Fables, I've just never liked it. It's played for laughs, but I don't find it funny. I don't like the voice.

And that's part of the problem with Willingham's most recent Fables offering, the prose novel Peter & Max. I don't like the voice in it, either.

It's written in third-person omnipresent which, for this reader, does two things: it keeps me from fully engaging with the characters and it makes me feel as though the writer is breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to me.

This can work if you like the author's voice. Neil Gaiman's a good example of that. I enjoy his conversational tone, but more importantly, I get the sense that he has real affection for his characters.

Willingham doesn't. Or if he does, he's not conveying it to me.

Now I don't mean that it's a bad book. Willingham is a skilled stylist and there isn't any clunky prose here.

Peter & Max is the “true” story of the Pied Piper who, it turns out, is utterly evil and the older brother of Peter who is also a piper, but a good one (yes, he's the Peter Piper who ended up with Little Bo Beep, who's also in the story). The enmity between the two is bitter and longstanding. The reason given for it is Max's jealousy of his younger brother, which seemed a bit vague considering the depth of Max's hatred, but if you accept that, everything moves along just fine.

As you might expect if you have any familiarity with Willingham's other work, Peter & Max is inventive and clever, both in its use of fairy tale motifs and the plot itself. The story moves between Peter and Max, between the past and present, with a broad scope that never loses its focus. Oh, and while a familiarity with the Fables comic will certainly add a resonance to certain sections, you don't have to have been following it to appreciate the story being told here.

The art is by comic book artist Steve Leialoha. It's pen & ink, in black & white, all of it good, though the large pieces have a very comic book feel. The spot art, however, and especially that in the chapter headings, is delightful and very reminiscent of children's book illustration from the turn of the last century.

I think many people will love this book. I'm just not one of them.

The Good Neighbors Book Two: Kith by Holly Black & Ted Naifeh, Graphix, 2009, $16.99.

And speaking of comics, the second volume in Holly Black's story for Graphix is now out. As I mentioned in the review of the first volume, this graphic story has the same kind of setting as Black's YA novels—dark faeries interacting with counterculture teens—with the new medium giving it all a fresh spin.

Volume Two picks up where the first ended with the faerie world intruding more and more into our world until...well, it's vague echoes of Sarah Beth Durst's Into the Wild books, but I'm still intrigued with where it will go since Black writes such edgy faerie, and Durst was writing about fairy tale characters in general.

Black's really got her comic book pacing down now, and her plotting and dialogue have always been terrific.

Ted Naifeh's still not my favorite comic artist—mostly because there isn't a smooth storytelling flow from panel-to-panel—but I'm liking his work more with each book, and he certainly comes up with some great perspectives.

The Unknown by Mark Waid & Minck Oosterveer, Boom! Studios, 2009, $24.99.

And still speaking of comics, one of the most intriguing series on the stands at the moment has come out with its first collection, bringing together issues one through four.

Catherine Allingham is considered to be the smartest person alive and the world's most famous—and successful—private investigator. Given six months to live because of a brain tumor, she decides to tackle the biggest mystery of all: what happens to us when we die?

The Unknown doesn't fit any one genre—it's equal parts private eye mystery, dark fantasy, sf, and character study—but it's a terrific, continent-hopping story that had me eagerly awaiting each new issue as it hit the stands when it was first coming out. You don't have to do so, since the first arc is collected here for you, but after you've finished it, I don't doubt that you'll be eagerly awaiting each issue of the second arc as I do.

Waid's a thoughtful and inventive writer, with a good eye for detail, and he knows how to script an action scene when it's needed. Oosterveer provides moody art with an excellent cinematic flow and plenty of idiosyncratic touches that give the characters and settings a look that's all their own.

This isn't my favorite comic—I'm still a sucker for Echo and Buffy Season Eight—but it's right up there near the top of my list.

Forever Twilight: Darkness, Darkness by Peter Crowther, PS Publishing/Drugstore Indian Press, 2009, UK 15 pounds.

This is an old-fashioned story written with a contemporary sensibility. Old-fashioned, because there's a slow build, with time taken for us to get to know the characters and setting before the real drama sets in. There's also a mood, an eerie, creeping air to the proceedings that you just don't get in modern stories, certainly not modern horror stories where it's one slash scene, then cut and zip on to the next one.

But it's written in a contemporary style—tight, third person points of view that really allow the reader into the head of the character. And while there's ample description, there's not too much, and a brisk pace keeps the story moving.

The setup is basic. Four people in a remote radio station realize that something has gone wrong in the nearby town. Upon investigation, they discover that everybody has disappeared—apparently right in the middle of whatever they happened to be doing at the time. When they start to come back, they're changed.

I know that doesn't sound too fresh, but Crowther makes it work. The zombie-like returnees are different from anything we've seen before, and the escalating tension will keep you reading right to the end of...well, the book. Not the story as a whole, since this is the first in a series of connected short novels. Or maybe a part of one long novel.

The conclusion offers a good break-off point in terms of the characters we've met thus far. The frustration comes from not knowing what happened to the returnees, of what's going to happen to the surviving characters.

For that we need to turn to book two.

That said, this was still a satisfying read on its own, and a nice change of pace for Crowther in terms of setting. And the packaging is terrific. Go check out the cover online. Whenever I see a scene such as the desolate, small-town Main Street depicted here, I just know I want to read the book.

Sometimes, the story doesn't hold up to the promise of the cover, but not this time.

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.

Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone: The 50th Anniversary Tribute, by Douglas Brode and Carol Serling, Barricade Books, 2009, $24.95.

Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone: “The After Hours,” adapted by Mark Kneece from Rod Serling's original scripts, illustrated by Rebekah Isaacs, Walker & Company, 2008, $16.99.

"Walking Distance,” adapted by Mark Kneece from Rod Serling's original scripts, illustrated by Dove McHargue, Walker & Company, 2008, $16.99.

Twilight Zone: 19 Original Stories on the 50th Anniversary, edited by Carol Serling, Tor Books, 2009, $14.99.

Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade by Jonathan Clements, Titan Books, 2008, $14.95.

"Mad Man"

It's been just over fifty years since The Twilight Zone debuted on CBS television, one of the most influential series in TV history and the first to consistently push the boundaries of censorship in episodes that dealt with racism, fascism, the costs of warfare, the social and cultural fallout of conformity, military mind control, nuclear destruction, advertising, union organization, and just about any hot-button topic you could name. Today, it's nearly impossible to imagine the entertainment landscape Rod Serling, the angry young man of broadcast TV, set to terraform with his groundbreaking work. Carol Serling, his widow and indefatigable keeper of the Serling flame, provides a glimpse in a 2009 interview published in Cemetery Dance magazine:

The censorship was intolerable. Foolish things like not allowing the Chrysler building to be shown on a NY skyline because Ford was sponsoring the show. You couldn't deal with gas for a certain episode about the Holocaust because the gas company was sponsoring the show! Rod wrote a script about the south and they took the Coke bottles off the table. A lot of it was ludicrous and foolish. He wrote a script about a young black man that was killed in the south. He felt very strongly about this, the sponsors got hold of it and told him he had to change the locale, the time of the script, etc. By the time the script went on, it was placed in the 1880s instead of 1950, in the southwest, and the victim was a Mexican kid. The whole thing was totally changed, and Rod said that by the time the script got on the air, the script had turned to dust.

Prior to Twilight Zone, Serling left an indelible mark on the Golden Age of live broadcasting with teleplays like “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” which featured legendary performances by Jack Palance and Ed Wynn, and “Patterns,” a chilling depiction of the corporate snakes and shaky career ladders that fill a Manhattan financier's office. The current hit series “Mad Men” owes a debt to Serling, and gave him a tip of the fedora in one episode.

A genuine visionary, Serling saw the medium's potential being squandered almost from the beginning. Early 1950s anthology series such as Texaco Star Theater, Fireside Theater, and Philco TV Playhouse featured works of gritty realism by writers such as Serling and Paddy Chayefksy (who famously observed that “Television is democracy at its ugliest"). By the end of the decade, the ratings success of live broadcasts had given way to that of sitcoms, quiz shows, talent searches.

And westerns—in the broadcast year ending October 1959, the month The Twilight Zone debuted, more than half of the top twenty-five shows featured gunslingers. Rod Serling had to hack his way through a lot of sagebrush to get his new series on the air.

With The Twilight Zone, Serling disarmed the American viewing public by presenting real-life issues in the guise of the fantastic, and deftly played on both the paranoia and nostalgia engendered by the Cold War Era. An avid reader of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, Serling used genre storytelling as a stealth bomber to get his ideas past media censors and an audience hypnotized by the likes of Perry Como and Red Skelton. For the first season, he was contractually bound to write or adapt most of the episodes himself. But much of The Twilight Zone's success was due to Serling's choice of writers to pen the remainder of the scripts, in particular a cohort of L.A.-based authors known as The Group. Centered around the charismatic young Charles Beaumont (who tragically developed Alzheimer's when he was only thirty-four, and died four years layer), the Group was a Star Chamber of literary talent whose members included Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Earl Hamner Jr., William F. Nolan, George Clayton Johnson, and Jerry Sohl, among others. Christopher Conlon wrote an invaluable 1999 essay ("Southern California Sorcerors,” also published in Cemetery Dance) detailing the Group's history, integral to that of The Twilight Zone, especially in its early years. (Later associates included Harlan Ellison and Theodore Sturgeon.)

Almost none of this remarkable tale surfaces in Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone: The 50th Anniversary Tribute, a piece of hagiography that does little to illuminate Serling's genius or the enduring appeal of his most famous creation. A heavy smoker, Serling died far too young—in 1975 at the age of fifty, during cardiac surgery following a massive heart attack. Since then, Carol Serling has worked tirelessly to keep his name and accomplishments in the public eye; one measure of her success is the Rod Serling postage stamp, issued early in 2009. (There's also the new Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at Walt Disney World.)

And while one can certainly appreciate the impulse behind the 50th Anniversary Tribute, the end result is a bizarrely Rod-centric book, Being John Malkovich recast with Serling as the Alpha and Omega of TV. Douglas Brode (presumably the book's main author) has produced thirty works dealing with film and popular culture. Here he has the task of summing up the 92 episodes written by Serling, out of 151 episodes during the show's five-year-run—a remarkable achievement on Serling's part. Brode notes that the tribute does not profess to be an encyclopedic survey of the series, like Marc Scott Zicree's The Twilight Zone Companion. Rather, it's an attempt “to capture what we loved most about the best Zones, those that live on in what Jung tagged our ‘collective unconscious.'” The selection process seems to have been fairly streamlined, as most of the episodes summed up here were written or adapted by Serling himself. Fair enough, though the end result offers little in the way of enlightenment, beyond repeated reminders of Serling's genius.

Readers get fair warning of this: the second sentence of the book's introduction proclaims Rod Serling “the most imaginative of all American writers since Edgar Allan Poe."

Well, okay, if you say so. In fact, much of Serling's work was derivative, and there were several accusations of plagiarism leveled against him during the show's run, most notably by Ray Bradbury. These may not have exactly been beside the point (a few court rulings favored the plaintiffs), but the fact is that Serling was far from “the most imaginative” of American writers. Some of the program's most memorable episodes show the unmistakable influence of other works: “The After Hours” and John Collier's “Evening Primrose;” the brilliant “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” and Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery;” “The Hitch-Hiker” and Somerset Maugham's “The Appointment at Samarra” (itself a retelling of an older tale); “Cavender Is Coming” and It's a Wonderful Life (and Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon).

But in all of these, the synthesis of script, acting, and direction create something marvelous, “a miracle of rare device” (to quote Ray Bradbury quoting Samuel Coleridge, in a script that Serling turned down and which went on to become Bradbury's memorable story of that title). Serling's great gift was as an assimilator, not just of literature, film, and television, but of popular culture and social upheaval—and as an assimilator, he had the great good fortune to be at the helm of his own series during a perfect storm of pop culture and societal change. Much of his work was produced as a deliberate homage to people he admired—Alfred Hitchcock (in the Tribute, referred to repeatedly and annoyingly by the chummy sobriquet Hitch), Frank Capra, O. Henry. And the quality of both acting and writing is a powerful testament to how both can trump special effects when putting sf/f onscreen.

Sadly, there's too little examination of how this synergistic process worked for Serling and his collaborators. Instead, there's facile and occasionally sloppy commentary more suitable for Spark Notes.

Of “The Hitch-Hiker's” protagonist, stalked by Death: “Her fear is no longer vague, if fear is the correct term. More likely, it is anxiety."

Of “Two": “The time; perhaps a hundred years from now, or this may have already happened two million years ago.” As George Lucas would state at the beginning of Star Wars: “Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” [Um, not what Lucas stated.]

Other observations are simply maddeningly Rod-centric, especially when it comes to Hitchcock, who in Brode's account, anyway, seems to have cast a long shadow over Serling's work, including the names of some female characters. In “The After-Hours,” Ann Francis plays Marsha White, “yet another of Serling's attractive, Hitchcock-like ‘M’ women.” “A Passage for Trumpet” can't simply be an astute portrait of an alcoholic; it also must offer the chance to “learn more about the workings of an alcoholic's mind here than we do in J. P. Miller's ‘Days of Wine and Roses.'” There are several references to actors whose appearance and demeanor mirror Serling's own. And Brode just can't keep his hands off Serling's co-writers.

"One of Charles Beaumont's best-remembered episodes, adapted from his own short story and directed by Robert Florey, reveals that Zone was constantly autobiographical for Serling, even when he was not the author of a particular installment."

"'Long Distance Call’ began with an idea by William Idelson, restructured by Richard Matheson, further refined by Charles Beaumont, finished by Serling. The process allows for a sense of collaboration, as well as a realization that what finally went on the air came down to one man."

By most accounts, Serling was a modest man who regretted never having written a novel or stage play, and was self-deprecating of his own substantial achievements. Shortly before his death, he stated “When I look back over thirty years of professional writing, I'm hard pressed to come up with anything that's important. Some things are literate, (some) are interesting...but very damn little (seems) important."

In its failure to bring Rod Serling and his work to life, The 50th Anniversary Tribute is a reminder of just how much larger than life he was, and how his work continues to be the best memorial he could have left to all of us. Two graphic novel adaptations of a pair of better-known episodes, “Walking Distance” and “The After-Hours,” are pallid and uninspired. Twilight Zone: 19 Original Stories on the 50th Anniversary, is a far superior homage to Serling. Few of the stories take on social issues or reflect current events; exceptions are Jim DeFelice's “The Soldier He Needed To Be” ("GI Joe Perfect in the Afghan hills") and Laura Lippman's “Family Man” (a surreal take on corporate downsizing). Several are darkly whimsical: John Miller's “Your Last Breath Inc."; Timothy Zahn's Hollywood send-up “Vampin’ Down the Avenue.” There are good stories by horror stalwarts Joe R. Lansdale and R. L. Stine; excellent hauntings courtesy of Lucia St. Clair Robson and Kelley Armstrong; several stories that would have been perfect for the original series, by Robert J. Serling (Rod's older bother), Alan Brennert, Earl Hamner (one of the show's original writers), William F. Wu, and Carole Nelson Douglas. The only real misfires are a wan, previously unpublished treatment by Rod Serling, and a story by Whitley Strieber that starts out as a riff on “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” and devolves into alien goo. Best of all is David Hagberg's “Genesis,” which out-Serlings Serling, and makes for a witty and moving memorial to televsion's angriest young man.

[Note: As research for this column, I watched a number of episodes from the first three seasons of The Twilight Zone, archived in pristine condition (and with a bit of advertising) at www.cbs.com, and well worth viewing.]

Anime Nation

Back in the early 1990s, I was co-creator and co-writer on a DC Comics series titled Anima. As a result, at science fiction or comic conventions I'd periodically find myself assigned to a panel about anime, about which I knew nothing. I grew up enamored of Astro Boy and other early anime, loved Japanese monster movies with a passion, watched Miyazaki's films with my kids and, with my son and his friends, followed an impenetrable (to me) series called (I think) Bleach. At cons I'd inevitably spends hours in a dark room, enjoying the anime programming but understanding none of it.

But now, thanks to postmodern polymath Jonathan Clements, I can nod knowingly at mention of Plastic Little, Rei Rei: The Sensual Evangelist, and Shark-Skin Man & Peach-Hips Girl, and vigorously debate the merits of Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad over Dingding Versus the Monkey King. In short, Jonathan Clements changed my life, and he can change yours, too.

A British scholar and translator, Clements has written biographies of Confucius and Mao Tse-Tung; a short history of the Vikings; studies of Marco Polo, Beijing, and the fall of the Ming Dynasty, as well as the Anime Encyclopedia, the Erotic Anime Movie Guide, and scripts and stories relating to Doctor Who, Judge Dredd, and Halcyon Sun. He's done the English translations of scores of manga and anime. He's also the go-to guy for info about the Kalevala (he's married to a Finnish martial arts specialist), works as a voice-over actor, has performed open-heart surgery with a spoon, and is the hot pick to be Obama's Ambassador to Pohjola. This last is a considerable triumph as, according to his website, Clements is also the only man in history to have been exiled from Outer Mongolia, after an altercation with the mayor of Ulan Bator. He's an Indiana Jones for the twenty-first century.

And he's really, really funny.

Schoolgirl Milky Crisis is the suitably ludicrous, all-purpose name Clements made up for a (fictional) anime series that he used in his dissections of anime and manga culture in Newtype U.S.A., the now-defunct English-language counterpart to the popular Japanese anime magazine Newtype. As he notes in his intro to this collection of his work, Clements “picked three random words out of nowhere,” allowing him to “take potshots at Japanese cartoons and comics and related fields, to read scurrilous gossip and tell tall tales. And my friends in the business didn't seem to mind, as long as they had plausible deniability."

So the collection contains damning and hilarious accounts of the work life of a young anime voice-over actress ("'You'll never catch me, McEvil!’ she yells as her onscreen image fades into the distance. On the animatics, the lead bear shakes his fist in rage."), reviews of magazines such as Golf Lesson Comic and Hana's Highschool Girl's Golf Club, and accounts of Clements's own experiences inside the sound booth, at Finnish anime conventions, and the like.

But there are also insightful and engaging essays on Hayao Miyazaki, Neil Gaiman, Godzilla, Mothra, as well as a fascinating piece on erotic anime that argues persuasively that pornography anticipates mainstream adaptation of new technology by at least five years. Best of all, Clements explains why anime often makes no sense to American viewers, even as it enthralls us. Books on pop culture tend to be pretentious or superficial: Schoolgirl Milky Crisis is neither. It's essential reading for anyone who loved those teensy twins in Mothra—and honestly, who didn't?—as well as anyone whose response to the Hello Kitty phenomenon can be gently summed up as WTF???

An added plus: in true scholarly fashion, Clements provides a lengthy and meticulously organized index, which includes citations for “nostril hairs, as comedy sidekicks” and “sorcery, as illegal hockey tactic.” I hope that future editions of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis will include “Clements, Jonathan: Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech."

Many years ago, while waiting to be drafted, Albert Cowdrey worked for a stretch at Ft. McHenry, Baltimore (of “The Star-Spangled Banner” fame). But he notes that the Fort Clay of this story bears more resemblance to Louisiana's Fort Pike, where Mr. Cowdrey used to go snake hunting in his youth. (Of course that was even longer ago than his stint in Ft. McHenry.)

"Well, Doc!” cried Saffron, throwing open the door of her little Bywater studio to the tall, thin old man who stood on the stoop, blinking in the light. “Come in out the rain!"

Mumbling apologies, Corman handed over his streaming black umbrella and shed his antique London Fog. Saffron took only a minute or two to get him seated amid the clutter of lights, tripods, strobes, reflectors, and other photographic equipment that filled the room. She'd already made tea, and pressed a chipped mug of fragrant oolong into the Doc's surprisingly big hands. The hands were the kind of detail she noticed. He may be a scholarly scarecrow now, she thought, but sometime in his long life he's done manual labor.

Then it was time to make him a present of her book, A Lost World—one of the ten free copies her publisher had sent her. Saffron had all the usual artistic mixture of arrogance and butterflies, and wondered: what if he hates it? Watching him begin to leaf through the pictures, pausing to scan the text, she reminded herself of her agent's last letter modestly comparing her to Annie Leibovitz, Diane Arbus, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange—not quite to Ansel Adams, but then she'd never worked in Yosemite.

She was smiling at her own egotism, a bit mocking, a bit tense, when Dr. Corman began muttering under his breath. “Remarkable,” he said. “Quite remarkable!"

Saffron relaxed. He liked it too. Everybody needed to like it. The world needed to like it. She smiled at the old scarecrow with real affection, and when he asked for an inscription, she picked up a felt-tip pen and wrote, “To Dr. Quentin Corman, without whom this book might never have existed at all."

Strange now to think that she'd hardly noticed him the first time they met—if you could call it meeting.

He'd been standing behind the desk in the Chief Ranger's office at Chalmette on the field of the Battle of New Orleans, as silent and almost as thin as the flagstaff. Meanwhile the well-barbered bureaucrat in his uniform, with his Smokey the Bear hat hanging from a rack, gave Saffron her instructions.

"We're about to lose Fort Clay, Ms. Genève, so we want to document it while it's still here. That's what the contract you've signed is about. We want a thorough pictorial record. We don't want art,” he said, pronouncing the last word as if it soiled his palate.

She made a noncommittal noise, figuring that once alone on Île du Sable, she'd do what she damn well pleased. Didn't this guy realize that two of her Katrina pictures had appeared in Vanity Fair? Sure, she was young, still struggling, she needed the job and expected to do competent work. But on her own terms. She certainly didn't expect Smokey to send Dr. Corman along to watch her.

But that was exactly what he did. Under orders, she met Corman at Pilot Town just above the Passes of the Mississippi, and during their two-hour boat trip on a Corps of Engineers lighter he lectured on his specialty. He was a National Park Service historian, an expert on nineteenth-century fortifications, and like most experts wanted to share everything he knew about the old brick forts that ringed the Atlantic and Gulf coastlines—why they'd been built, and when, and by whom.

Old farts like old forts, thought Saffron sourly, deciding, as they bucked and rolled through choppy brown water between the jetties of Pass à Loutre and headed out into the open Gulf, that Corman knew more about less than anybody she'd ever met. Even after the boat dropped them on the island, he went on and on, like a cricket that gets into your house in autumn. Still chirping, he led her through an impressive arched gateway and up a flight of weedy brick steps.

"Fort Clay,” he admitted, “had rather an uneventful history. Yet I've made a special study of it."

Figures, she thought, taking her new Macron ZX-300 digital camera (9 megapixels, 10x Zeiss optical zoom) out of its carrying pouch. While she hungered for fame, Corman seemed to have an inverted lust for celebrity. The less important something was, the better he liked it. He was a moth drawn to obscurity instead of light.

"In the forty years it was in service,” he nattered on, “the garrison never heard a shot fired in anger. In 1870 it was decommissioned and stood abandoned until a group of enthusiasts (myself included) managed to get it on the National Register. The Park Service restored it, and it became a popular destination for boaters who stopped off to sunbathe and swim and picnic. And, I suppose, to satisfy their morbid curiosity."

"Can we get started now?” asked Saffron. But the last phrase had caught her ear, and she added unwillingly, “Morbid curiosity about what?"

"Why, the one truly sensational event of the fort's history—Sergeant Schulz and his men and their sad fate."

"Sad fate,” she muttered, wondering how many archaic clichés Corman kept in his arsenal.

"Very sad. Sad and shocking. I wrote the official brochure telling the story. First came the yellow fever, and then the hurricane, and then the poor fellows were beheaded by a madman. Would you like to begin with the casemates, Ms. Genève, or would you rather photograph the gun emplacements en barbette first?"

Barbette guns turned out to be the ones that stood on the open parapet, nothing above them but empty sky. "So vulnerable to plunging fire,” sighed Corman. “Almost suicide to service them if there'd ever been a heavy bombardment. Many men joined the heavy artillery hoping to stay safe. Some of them got a nasty surprise."

Unfortunately, the big guns—the Columbiads and Dahlgrens and Parrotts, as Corman called them—had long since been removed and melted down for use in other wars. A few stones and bits of rusty iron were all that remained, so Saffron dutifully documented the lack of anything to document.

"Maybe we'd better do the casemates,” she suggested. “By the way, what are casemates?"

"I'll show you."

He led her down another flight of brick steps ("Be careful, Ms. Genève, even routine maintenance has been discontinued") into a vast chamber he called Casemate One. Instantly all her artistic instincts awakened. Massive brick arches rose and met in a vaulted ceiling from which hung pale finger-long stalactites. Light came in through a wide gun port. She peered through it, and caught her breath.

The Ranger had told her that the next hurricane would probably sink île du Sable beneath the waves. But that was only knowledge. Now she actually saw the rolling blue Gulf of Mexico lapping at the bricks, while by some trick of perspective the distant horizon already seemed higher than her head.

"It really is about to go under,” she murmured in awe. “The coast really is washing away."

Corman nodded soberly. “A crew will be out tomorrow to put up warning signs. The Coast Guard is notifying boaters not to come ashore. Oh—please watch the snake."

Saffron froze, then looked where he was pointing. Not a yard from her right foot, a water moccasin big enough to fill a washtub lay coiled against one wall, tongue flickering.

"You should have worn boots,” said Corman reprovingly, looking down at her Nikes. “Well, go ahead—take your pictures. We don't have all day. The engineer boat will pick us up at three."

Saffron used her flash to shoot Casemate One from every angle she could imagine. Then she followed Corman through a series of low-vaulted passages leading to Casemates Two, Three, Four, and Five. By the time they'd completed a circuit of the pentagonal fort, her irritation had given way to an awestruck sense that maybe, just maybe, this potboiler of a job could turn into something important for her career.

Even as she worked and watched for snakes, another part of her multi-track mind began to wonder if some of the images she was capturing might be manipulated into art photos, whether the Park Service liked it or not. She began to dream of publishing a coffee-table book, a collection of dramatic black-and-white photographs, something like Clarence John Laughlin's Ghosts Along the Mississippi. Something wildly romantic, befitting an American castle that was also part of a vanishing world.

Digital technology enabled you to do just about anything with images, she reflected. And what she couldn't do herself with her ImageMaker program, the techs at her favorite photo lab could do for her. If the Park Service threatened to sue her on the grounds that her work belonged to them, she'd argue that only the basic documentary images were theirs. Once transfigured into art, they'd be her own.

Casemate Five differed from the others in having a kind of anteroom, a dank chamber sunk deep into one wall, with rusty, disintegrating iron bars. “The guardhouse,” explained Corman. “Be sure and document it."

Normally kept for misbehaving soldiers, it once had held a celebrated captive, the accused murderer Gabriel Letourneau, known as the Headsman. Corman shook his own head and clucked over it.

"Even back then, the casemates flooded in a hurricane. Sergeant Schulz was too compassionate to let Letourneau drown like a rat. And just look what happened!"

They were back to Sergeant Schulz and his men and their sad fate. Only now, with her book in mind, Saffron wanted a story to provide a lively text, and asked, “What did happen?"

"Let's go up to the Parade, and I'll tell you."

The Parade turned out to be nothing but the weedy open space inside the walls. Saffron could see that buildings once had stood here—brick foundation piers remained—and Corman paced off the outlines of the barracks, the cookhouse, the officers’ quarters, the long-sealed powder magazine, and the latrine ("called a sink by the Victorians. Hence our expression, ‘He has a mind like a sink’”).

Reluctantly, she was coming to appreciate his scholarship. Love compelled respect, and Corman loved his topic, bizarre and narrow though it might be. They sat down on adjacent piers of the barracks, and he began to fill her in about Fort Clay's last and most dangerous captive. After New Orleans fell to the federal fleet, he explained, the fort had served as a prison for obstreperous Rebels, male and female. But by 1864 it had lost even that function—either the captives had been set free, shipped off to camps in the North, or expelled into the Confederacy. With soldiers dying like flies in the battles for Atlanta and Richmond, the garrison had been stripped down to a skeleton crew, without even an officer to command them.

So there they were, two miles from the marshy coastline, sixteen men with little to do but swim, fish, and perform routine maintenance. They rotated the job of cooking; a private who'd worked as a hospital orderly attended to bruises and upset stomachs; a corporal named Quant from upstate New York's Burnt-Over District—once famous for its hellfire religion—acted as part-time chaplain and gave rousing sermons every Sunday.

The NCO in charge was First Sergeant Abram Schulz. Corman described him as a typical bluecoat, bearded like most, wearing the red chevrons of the artillery on his sleeve and crossed gold cannons on his kepi. He was twenty-six, an Ohio merchant's son and by no means an ignorant man. After his death, copies of Dickens and Thackeray were found in his quarters, as well as a stack of technical manuals and a textbook of basic French reflecting his years on occupation duty in New Orleans.

Compared to the bloodbaths in Virginia and Georgia, Schulz and his men had lucked into incredibly easy duty. But also tedious. As if to relieve their boredom, in August the monthly supply boat arrived and Letourneau stepped onto the fort's floating dock with shackles jingling, followed by a member of the provost marshal's guard carrying an internment order and a drawn pistol. The garrison crowded around to stare at the big, rangy man with the tangled beard and hair and the unexpectedly gentle, submissive manner. (He even addressed privates as “m'sieu.") After he'd been locked up, they all found reasons to visit Casemate Five to gape and stare at him some more, as if he were a dangerous animal caged in Barnum's circus. In fact, some wit borrowed a phrase from the great showman and posted a hand-lettered sign over his cell that read “The Original Gorilla."

Month-old copies of the Picayune with details of his crime found a fascinated audience. Decapitated corpses had been showing up for the past two years. With fingerprinting yet to be invented, record-keeping primitive, and a vast drifting population of refugees created by the war, none of them had been firmly identified. Letourneau was arrested after his landlady, noticing a bad smell, checked the slum room he inhabited and found a woman's head in a cupboard. Subsequently, a patrol sent by the provost marshal discovered under the bed a cane knife—a wicked-looking bolo-like tool made for cutting sugarcane.

At this point the evidence looked so firm that carpenters began bidding for the job of building the gallows. But then the case started to unravel. With the crude forensics of the time, there was no way to determine if the carefully cleaned and oiled cane knife actually was the murder weapon. Letourneau had a good reason for owning it, for he lived by doing odd jobs that included clearing weeds and brush—in fact, he'd been employed for that purpose by the military government itself. As for the head, he claimed he'd found it among the weeds near the levee and brought it home as a curiosity, an alibi so bizarre that it might even be true.

All his life Letourneau had been known as a “natural,” meaning a half-wit. He was also a pack rat. His room yielded an amazing collection of useless objects—glass beads, ballast stones, dried beetles, a brass telegrapher's key, the skull of a horse, some cypress knees, Indian arrowheads, even a small meteorite—that lent a kind of loony credence to his story. Despite his physical strength and mental problems, he had no police record and no reputation for violence. The few people who knew him treated him with a mixture of compassion and contempt. Worst of all, from the viewpoint of execution buffs who were eagerly awaiting the hanging, another headless body was discovered while Letourneau was locked up in Parish Prison.

The provost marshal decided to hold him, pending further investigation. Fort Clay was secure and almost empty. And so the disaster began to take form.

"But now, Ms. Genève,” said Corman, showing a Scheherazade-like ability to interrupt himself at critical moments, “I really think we ought to document the external walls. Work before play, you know, and when it's all done and all the pictures are locked up in the brain of your little camera, I'll finish the story for you."

Actually, their hour-long hike around the fort's perimeter proved more interesting than Saffron had expected.

The place was ruinous, and for that reason picturesque. At two spots, sinking foundations had caused huge cracks to open in the walls, and she made sure that her camera caught the crooked daggers of pale sky thrusting down through the bricks. Barbed wire hadn't been invented when the fort was built, so rows of sharp wooden spikes—Corman called them the abatis—still projected from the dunes, dry and gray and worm-eaten like driftwood. She took a series of pictures through the spikes to suggest both the fort's original warlike purpose and its present hopeless decay.

Meanwhile Corman chattered about life in the 1860s, which he knew in detail. He explained the problems of supplying the fort in bad weather, of securing fresh water for the garrison in the absence of natural springs, of keeping the men healthy so close to the malarial coast. There'd been other problems, he recalled, in the days when Fort Clay was used as a prison both for Rebel sympathizers and common criminals. Along with forty or so men, a dozen women had been jailed, charged with a variety of crimes great and small—spying, prostitution, insulting the flag, emptying chamber pots on the heads of Union soldiers. Keeping them secure from rape among a crowd of unwillingly celibate males had not been easy.

"Bathing was a problem,” he mused. “The men skinny-dipped by the roster on the Gulf side of the fort, women on the land side. While the ladies were washing, guards were posted with orders to turn their backs and not to peek. I don't think those orders were always obeyed,” he added, with a dry little chuckle.

That gave Saffron another idea. How about taking some nude photos in her studio, and having the geniuses at the lab transform them into ghostly images against the grim, looming walls of the fort? A little nudity never hurt anything. And how about a bit of softcore porn as well? With all those randy males around, surely the jailed hookers found some way to ply their trade, prison or no prison. She could fabricate some sex scenes, pale forms suggesting the repressed passions of men and women locked up under a discipline that made captives of the soldiers as well as the prisoners.

Ghosts Along the Mississippi was fine as a model. But her book would be a lot more salable if she put a bit of Robert Mapplethorpe into it as well.

The afternoon was advancing and the sunlight hot when she and Corman wended back through the vaulted gateway into the Parade. She was tired and sweaty, and the walls shut off the breeze from the Gulf. In her bag, along with two more cameras and some extra lenses and filters, she'd brought a couple of small Evian bottles. She gave one to Corman and downed the other herself. Sharing the water completed their transformation from strangers into companions, even collaborators.

"You were saying that the men actually welcomed the Headsman's arrival as a break in the routine,” she reminded him.

"Yes. And just a few days later came another."

A dot appeared on the southern horizon and turned into a steamship called the Floradora—an old-fashioned side-wheeler that had survived into the age of the screw propeller. It tied up to the floating dock, and the soldiers who were off duty began to swap tobacco and gossip with the crew. Sergeant Schulz politely invited the captain into the officers’ quarters he'd commandeered for himself and Corporal Quant, and poured him a glass of whiskey he'd commandeered too.

The ship had come from Habana (as it was spelled then) and the captain had a bit of disquieting news to report: when they left the harbor, hurricane flags had been flying on the walls of Moro Castle. Schulz duly noted this information, then asked if yellow fever had broken out in Cuba, as it usually did during the summer. The captain said no, not to his knowledge, then swallowed his whiskey at a gulp and said he must be getting his ship underway. Something furtive in his manner roused the sergeant's suspicion, so he accompanied him to the dock and cast a sharp eye over the Floradora's crewmen. All he could see appeared lively and healthy enough.

Yet when the ship arrived at the Head of Passes, an army medical inspector descended to the lower deck and found a sailor lying in his hammock, parchment colored, burning with fever and bringing up black vomit—Yellow Jack's classic symptom. The Floradora was immediately quarantined and the sick man removed to an isolation ward. Of course Schulz had no way of knowing about that, or whether a few mosquitoes might have fluttered ashore during the Floradora's brief stay at île du Sable. And wouldn't have cared anyway, for as yet nobody on earth knew how the fever spread.

Corman based his vivid account of these happenings on a log that Schulz kept, with a meticulous day-to-day and even hour-to-hour record of events at Fort Clay. Wrapped in oilcloth and locked in a metal dispatch box, the log had survived the catastrophe and ended up in the National Archives, along with the other records of the Department of the Gulf. So Corman knew that during the next few days, the weather had been sunlit but oppressively hot and still. And then the Gulf began to change. Long ripples running up from the south slowly grew into waves, then into rollers. By the end of the week, breakers were pounding the dock and chewing at the coarse sea grass that anchored the dunes. The sky to the south turned from the dull sheen of pewter to the blue-black of gunmetal.

Sure now that the storm was heading his way, Schulz set his men to work, blocking the cannon ports with wooden barriers braced by logs wedged against the carriages of the big guns. They covered the muzzles and plugged the firing vents, then went to work on the fort itself—barring the main gate, moving their carbines and swords from the underground magazine to the barracks’ upper floor, closing and nailing the shutters on the windows of the barracks and the officers’ quarters. Since the wooden cistern that supplied them drinking water might be toppled by the wind, Schulz had the men fill barrels with water, muscle them into the barracks, and store them between their bunks. He couldn't have known that Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that spreads yellow fever, is a domestic sort of creature and likes nothing better than to breed in artificial containers close to its blood source. For all his forethought and common sense, he'd created a nursery for Yellow Jack right where his men slept.

On the Sunday before the storm, with breakers smashing against the south and southeast walls of the fort, salt spray leaping higher than the parapet, and the wind moaning, Schulz ordered the American flag taken down before it was torn apart, and summoned his fifteen men to a service of prayer and supplication. They met in Casemate Five, with Letourneau watching from his cell. Corporal Quant delivered a rousing sermon asking God to spare them, like Jonah, from the wind and waves—and also (with a glance at Letourneau) from the terror that walketh about in darkness. They sang Old Hundred and the Doxology, and the men's strong voices resounded from the shadowy arches and set echoes careening around the whole circuit of the fort, with the final Amen returning in ghostly fashion again and again for a full minute after they fell silent.

Then from his cell, the prisoner in a deep sonorous bass began to chant the Dies Irae. Perhaps he'd learned the sounds like a parrot in church, with no idea what the words meant. But the sergeant had had a bit of Latin flogged into him at a Catholic school in Cincinnati, and he admitted that the chant filled him with dread. When his men asked him what the loony was singing, he muttered that he didn't know, fearing to reveal that the words meant Day of Wrath.

Saffron sat with the bag of equipment at her feet, the empty Evian bottle in her hand, her mouth half open and her eyes distant. I have to do the book, she thought. This is too good to pass up—I have to do the book.

Schulz (Corman continued) had become fascinated with the Headsman. That night he and Quant went down to Casemate Five, carrying pistols, a lighted candle, and a loaf of bread. Letourneau was pathetically grateful for the extra rations and even more for the company. Schulz sat down on an empty powder keg, Quant leaned against the wall, and in the glow of the candle the three began to talk in a gumbo of languages—French, English, bits of Creole. Quant did much of the translating, for while Schulz knew textbook French, the corporal had a better command of the language of the streets—where learned, the sergeant preferred not to speculate. Bunking with Quant had taught him that his chaplain knew some surprising things about the seamy underside of New Orleans life.

The Headsman's story was part of that seamy side. He'd never known his father, and his mother Madeleine had been a woman of the town. She'd cared for him as best she could until he was ten, when her latest pimp drove him out. He became what Victorians called a street Arab, a ragged homeless boy who survived by cadging tips, committing petty crimes, and renting his body to whoever wanted it. He was a “hobbledehoy” or teenager when he learned that Madeleine had died and was to be buried in Potter's Field on the marshy edge of the cypriere, the great cypress swamp. Letourneau brought to the burial two ballast stones he'd taken from the levee, and when the pine box was in the ground he set them on it to prevent it floating to the surface, as the coffins of the poor so often did in rainstorms. The sexton then filled the hole, and Letourneau tipped him a dime, which was all he had. The man bit it, looked at him suspiciously, and walked away without a word, carrying his shovel.

The next few years contained nothing but work and sleep, interrupted by rare bouts of drunkenness in barrel-houses or pleasure in cheap brothels. Not life at all, really. One wet afternoon Letourneau walked to the Third District levee to decide if he wanted to drown himself or not. He brought along a bottle of cheap wine and his cane knife, which he'd used that morning, chopping weeds to earn the price of the wine. He sat down on a wooden bollard in the rain, and spent the next hour drinking and looking at the river and wondering if he had the courage to jump in.

"I never thought of killing anybody but myself,” he insisted, and the man seemed so dim and passive and detached from reality that Schulz almost believed him.

Letourneau had a bellyful of wine when, no more than ten feet away, a head bobbed to the surface of the river. Raindrops dimpled the water all around it, as if little fish were feeding. At first he believed the head must belong to a drunk who'd fallen in and drowned. But then it rose above the surface and looked at him avec les yeux blancs d'une statue, with the white eyes of a statue. The head was perfectly bald, lacking even eyebrows and eyelashes, and its skin was the color of a bruise.

The drowned man stood up and stretched out a hand for help. Letourneau thought, I've never been this drunk before, but still he rose and leaned down and took the hand. It was cold and the fingers and palm were wrinkled and white, as if the man had been in water for a long time. The nails curled like fishhooks. When the fellow was safe ashore, he spent some time rearranging his sodden rags of clothing, which smelled like river mud. Then he began to speak “comme Allemand."

"Like a German?” demanded Schulz indignantly.

Letourneau answered, “Yes, in his throat, you know? And his voice bubbled up, as if he was still full of water."

At this point the candle flared and went out. Letourneau kept talking, his words distilling out of the darkness, with the muted sounds of the stormy Gulf as background. The drowned man was a Yankee seaman named Morrow, who'd been serving on Farragut's flagship Hartford when he was blown overboard during a battle upriver at Port Hudson. Like many sailors he couldn't swim, and for a few minutes threshed his limbs helplessly, like a crab being boiled. Then the cold river water sluiced into his lungs and turned to fire. He was only twenty, and the last thing he felt was an overwhelming rage that he had to perish with his life unlived.

Perhaps his rage was what saved him from dying completely. Anyway, he awoke far down in the murky river, tumbling seaward with the current while an immense shadowy fish—a giant river cat, maybe—nibbled at his bare feet. He kicked it away, and discovered that he didn't need to breathe any longer. He was a corpse, and yet could move and even think. Could Letourneau, he asked, possibly understand that?

Letourneau could. “I've always been like that,” he said.

"You feel alone, do you?"

"Yes."

"I can help you find a companion. Come with me. And bring your blade."

They walked together into the riverside slums, where water gushed from clay pipes and the gutters whirled rubbish away like millraces. Soon they spotted a woman, clearly a “hooker"—a streetwalker in the slang of the time—who'd taken refuge in a doorway while waiting for the rain to pass. She was holding a wad of newspapers she'd been using as an umbrella and she peered shortsightedly into the street. Morrow took the cane knife from Letourneau's hand and backed against the nearest wall.

"Call her over,” he whispered. “She's hungry, I can feel it, so she'll come out, rain or no rain."

Letourneau did as he was told—Letourneau always did as he was told. The woman stared at him, then lifted the newspapers over her head and stepped into the street. Coming up behind her, Morrow swung the blade with his right hand and with his left caught her head before it hit the ground. He picked up the sodden paper, wrapped the head in it, and gave the bundle to Letourneau, along with the cane knife.

"The soul lives in the brain,” he explained. “When you take the head, you take the soul with you. I've done it often. Of course the brain doesn't last long, and when it decays the soul escapes. But then you can always take another."

The rain began to slacken, and Morrow said he had to go back to the river, explaining that if he dried out he'd die for good. “I wish I could come ashore oftener. I get lonesome down there with nothing but the mud and the fishes. Then I want somebody I can talk to, if only for a little while. Maybe I'll see you again."

Letourneau walked home in a dream. In his room he carefully dried the cane knife and oiled it to prevent rust. Then he unwrapped the woman's head and put it into a cupboard, because he didn't know what else to do with it. He hung his sodden clothes outside on the rickety gallery that ran past his room, got into bed, and pulled up the tattered coverlet. He was lying there, shivering, when the head began to sing.

The voice was a little weak, but sweet, like his mother's when he was a young child. Back in those days, when she brought a customer home she'd take Gabriel out of the bed and lay him on the floor, wrapped in a quilt. After the man had finished and gone away, she'd bring him back into the bed, which still smelled of the stranger, and sing him lullabies until he fell sleep.

Letourneau thought the woman in the cupboard must have a nice soul, because instead of bawdy songs she sang sweet old ballads like “Green Grow the Rushes” and “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls.” He went to sleep and slept longer and more peacefully than he had in many years. The next night had been the same, and the next. Then the head fell silent. He ought to have buried it, but couldn't bear to part with it, and that was why he'd been arrested and wound up in Fort Clay. He'd never seen the drowned man again, and hadn't told the provost marshal about him, because he knew he wouldn't be believed.

Then, saying he was feeling tired, he told the soldiers good night. He wished them pleasant dreams.

All of this Schulz wrote down, and had Quant sign the record as witness. For a while they drank together, back in their quarters, listening to the rising wind outside, and arguing about their prisoner. Schulz thought him a dangerous lunatic, but believed that sixteen strong and well-armed men had no reason to fear him. But Quant said the Headsman had caught the eye of a devil who would follow him wherever he went. After the corporal fell asleep, Schulz recorded his comment, adding that his roommate also believed in ghosts, witches, and salamanders, and was, all in all, the strangest preacher he'd ever met.

"In my long life,” Corman went on, after a moment of silence, “I've often noticed a peculiar tendency of disasters to follow one another, like sheep trailing the bellwether. Next morning, when Schulz checked the barracks, he found that the rest of the flock had begun to arrive."

Three soldiers complained of fever. At first Schulz diagnosed malaria, a common affliction at the time, distressing but not usually fatal, and dosed them with quinine. That afternoon, just as the storm was arriving in full force, two more fell sick. Schulz and Quant now abandoned the officers’ quarters and moved in with their men. By nightfall the situation had become truly grim—the old wooden barracks shaking and shuddering in a gale that may have reached a hundred miles an hour, the five patients either burning with fever or shaking with cold, teeth rattling in their heads like dice.

Schulz was also concerned about his prisoner. The man was his responsibility, and he had to save him if only for the gallows. Fighting the wind at every step, the sergeant struggled back down into Casemate Five, accompanied by Quant carrying a lantern. They found Gabriel Letourneau standing to his knees in water that had seeped through the barriers and gazing at them with the dumb supplication of a caged animal. Schulz ordered him to extend his hands between the bars, manacled them, and only then opened the cell door. Bent double, the three men fought their way back to the barracks through horizontal rain that stung like birdshot. When a gust almost bowled Quant over, Letourneau grabbed him by the arm and pulled him upright again.

Once inside, Schulz added leg irons to the prisoner's manacles, leaving thirty inches of chain between his ankles so that he could shuffle around. He considered cuffing Letourneau's hands behind his back, but that would have left him helpless, forcing the soldiers to feed him, give him water, and even help him use the so-called honey bucket. Since they already had plenty to do, between nursing their sick comrades and trying to keep the barracks from coming apart, he left the prisoner's hands in front, manacled but still usable.

Toward midnight the wind dropped suddenly. The eye of the storm was passing overhead. Schulz ventured outside into an eerie dead calm. He climbed the wall by the light of a serene half-moon at the summit of the sky, and gazed with astonishment at the pale encircling clouds of the eyewall. Later on, île du Sable received a second punch, the wind now rising from the northwest, but this round was much less violent, and by dawn the hurricane had passed inland, where it soon dispersed in gusts of torrential rain.

But as the weather improved, the patients grew worse. Even to the untrained eye of a Yankee artillery sergeant, their disease clearly was not malaria, for instead of coming and going the fever was continuous, unrelenting.

Hoping for sight of a relief ship, he splashed his way back to the wall. The Parade was ankle deep, and the rising sun shone everywhere on water, nothing but water. The storm tide was running high, and for the time being île du Sable had disappeared under the Gulf, only the walls of Fort Clay standing free. The floating dock had broken its moorings and become a raft, bucking and rolling its way northward toward a shoreline that no longer existed.

Schulz realized that the garrison was stuck for days, maybe a week or longer, until somebody ashore remembered them and sent a rescue boat with an engine powerful enough to make headway against the sea. Until then, they had to survive on what they had—barrels of drinking water, tin canisters of hardtack, sacks of cornmeal, and slabs of salt beef and bacon sealed in casks. Food would have to be cooked on the parapet, using dry wood torn from the barracks’ inner walls.

By the Wednesday following the storm, eight men were sick of the fever, one already moribund, and the others (including Letourneau) were taken up day and night with the tasks of nursing. The Headsman was both strong and gentle with the sick, holding down delirious patients without hurting them, giving water a spoonful at a time to those who could still drink, and cleaning up their filth without complaint. But if men were merciful, nature was not. The storm tide had ripped open the gun ports, and the casemates had flooded to their roofs. Water spurted up from below and covered the Parade to a depth of three feet—foul water too, for the contents of the latrine floated out. The powder magazine was under water, the officers’ quarters had lost its roof, and the other buildings had simply disappeared.

Water entered the first floor of the barracks, forcing the decreasing number of men who were still well to carry everything—sick comrades, bedding, water barrels, food—to the sweltering second floor, which was already crowded with heaps of supplies and racks of weapons. Even after they knocked open all the shutters, the searing tropical heat exhausted the healthy and hastened the sick toward death. At night, some men waded through the stew of salt water, mud, and excrement to the wall and slept up there between the barbette guns. But that was dangerous too, because so many snakes had found refuge in the same place.

Then, just when life had become all but unbearable, the Gulf began to recede. île du Sable emerged from its bath smaller than before and with its outline changed, but with its dunes largely intact, secured by the roots of the coarse sea grass. The sky clouded up and a breeze blew from the north that was almost cool. Rain pattered down, the temperature dropped twenty degrees in as many minutes, and sick men and well alike breathed deep and gave thanks to God for sending them relief.

"And it's just at this point,” said Corman, glancing at his watch, “that the sergeant's log ends. So there are things we'll never know for sure. We do know that among the weapons stored on the second floor of the barracks were sixteen broadswords of the type the army traditionally issued to artillerymen—in case, I suppose, they were attacked by a Roman legion. Each sword had a double-edged blade twenty-six inches long. Nobody had ever been able to find a practical use for them, except to carve meat for the mess. Gabriel Letourneau, however, had a use for one of them—or so it seems.

"When a rescue party at last reached the island, two weeks after the storm, only he remained alive. Eight men were dead of fever, dead and stinking. Sergeant Schulz in the barracks, and three men lying on the barbette had all been beheaded. The heads were never found. The last four members of the garrison must have tried to swim ashore, preferring to drown rather than face whatever was happening in Fort Clay. Three bodies were later found entangled in the nets of fishermen and shrimpers. Though badly bitten by sharks, they still had their heads. Perhaps the last man of the sixteen survived. A strong swimmer, if lucky, could have made it to shore. Nobody knows."

"That corporal—what was his name—"

"Quant."

"Yes. Did they find him?"

"They found a headless body wearing a blouse with corporal's stripes,” said Corman carefully. “On that basis, he was pronounced dead."

"And Letourneau?"

"He was sitting quietly on a barbette gun—a 24-pounder Dahlgren—chewing a hardtack cracker. He absolutely denied having anything to do with the murders, especially that of the sergeant, whom he described as a very nice man—très gentil, très sympathique. He claimed that a drowned man with blue skin and white eyes had come into the barracks during a rainstorm and killed Schulz, but spared him en souvenir du passé—for old times’ sake. When the man left, carrying the head, Letourneau took the keys to his shackles from Schulz's body and freed himself. He found the other dead men lying on the wall.

"Understandably, he was not believed. The soldiers took the Headsman back to New Orleans in cuffs and leg irons, kicking and pummeling him the whole way because they were angry over their comrades’ deaths. He endured silently, like a beaten animal, but stuck to his tale so tenaciously that the provost marshal, instead of hanging him, committed him to an asylum. Like most such places at that time, the asylum was a pesthouse, and the Headsman soon died of either typhoid or typhus—even good doctors had trouble with differential diagnosis back then.

"Of course,” Corman added apologetically as the whistle of the engineer boat shrilled in the distance, “that's an unsatisfactory conclusion. But so often history is unsatisfactory, Ms. Genéve. Sometimes its wildest adventures end in midair."

Now, on this rainy evening in December, a year and a half after their jaunt to Fort Clay, she inhaled the fragrance of the oolong along with the incense of Dr. Corman's praise. Either he loved her book or he was a very good liar.

"It's a transfiguration,” he told her, shaking his head. “You've turned that old heap of decay into a vision of life and lust and war, and how they all pass away, leaving nothing behind but ruins and sand and silence. But these—” he tapped the pictures “—also show what art can do to save something from the wreckage. To make transience immortal."

Saffron almost purred with pleasure. Showing her work always made her feel like some sort of carnival freak, exhibiting the most private parts of her spirit to strangers. Yet until she did, she never really knew whether her work was any good or not—whether it communicated, or just sat there.

"I'm not sure Schulz would have understood,” mused Corman. “Wonderful man—brave, smart, sensitive. But underneath, very much the stolid, conventional Midwesterner. That made him a good soldier, but for a creature of enthusiasm like Quant, sometimes rather a dull companion."

"You could tell all that from the logbook?” asked Saffron, smiling. “It must read like War and Peace."

"I'm afraid I fibbed about that. Schulz's log is actually quite dry—facts, figures, that sort of thing. I only use the copy I made of it at the Archives to refresh my memory."

Saffron stared at him, sitting there, tall and skinny, the cup invisible in his big workman's hands. And old. He was very old.

"Souls are fascinating things,” he went on. “I admit that at first I thought you quite a superficial young woman. Watching you at work, I sensed something more. Now I know I was right the second time. There's more to you than meets the eye, Ms. Genève. There are depths in you I want to explore."

The rain murmured at the window. A soft knock sounded at the door. Saffron didn't even hear it. Corporal Quant, she thought, who delivered sermons and believed in devils.

The knocking resumed, so loud now that she jumped. Corman finished his tea, set the cup aside, and turned to look at the door.

"The Headsman,” she gabbled, desperate now to distract him. To distract it, whatever it was. “What about Gabriel Letourneau?"

"He was never anything but the—what's the cant phrase? The ‘fall guy.’ Maybe that's out of date, too. I find it so hard to keep up with slang, the way it's always changing. Letourneau was just one of les abaissés du monde, the downtrodden of the earth. Morrow liked him, but then Morrow's rather a primitive character himself. He tried to kill me."

He chuckled. “Can you imagine that? Afterward he became a good servant. He helped me get ashore. Water's really become his element.... Aren't you going to answer the door, Ms. Genève?"

A barrage of knocks sounded, making the old door jump against its frame. Corman shook his head. “Poor devil. Always afraid the rain might end. Quite a phobia with him.... Well?"

She sat holding her pictures, the physical embodiment of her soul. At least, when she was gone, they would last. Wouldn't they?

"If you won't open it,” said Corman, “then I'll have to,” and he rose, tall and shadowy, set down the cup, and shambled to the door.

Any request for biographical information from Tim Sullivan is sure to be met with something amusing. This time around, Mr. Sullivan, aka. B. Traven, reports he was born in Bohemia nearly a century ago. After an early career spent liberating rogue elephants in Kenya, which led to his active role in the Mau Mau uprising, Sullivan went on to a career in the ring, becoming heavyweight champion of the world at age 48, the oldest boxer ever to win the title. Sullivan has spent recent decades translating Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica from Latin into Sanskrit, which he believes will insure his immortality. He has no cats, but he does have his tongue firmly in his cheek.
His new story is a sequel to “Planetesimal Dawn,” which first appeared in our Oct/Nov. 2008 issue. You don't need to read that story to enjoy this one, but readers who want to check it out can find it on our Website during the months of March and April.

Wolverton was about to be crushed.

He was cutting out a small chunk of LGC-1's surficial iron with a hand laser, his back to the oncoming danger.

"Look out!” Nozaki's voice crackled in his ear.

Wolverton felt the ground shake. He turned in time to see a black immensity looming over him in utter silence.

"Jump!"

He didn't know which way to go, but he jumped.

Landing some twelve meters from where he started, he saw that he still wasn't clear of the giant's path. He jumped again.

This time he stumbled and fell when he came down, still holding the laser, and he rolled onto his back to face the stars. He propped himself up on his elbows and saw a humpbacked giant tear up the landscape as it trundled past him. It looked like a beetle the size of a sports arena, its insectile, metal legs giving it purchase in the hard ground. It was so big that it blotted out the starfield.

Wolverton thought about shooting at it, but the monster was already halfway to the asteroid's precipitously curved horizon, leaving a wide trench behind it. He doubted that the laser could have done much damage, anyway.

Nozaki helped Wolverton to his feet. Wolverton was out of breath, and his heart was beating rapidly. By now the behemoth was out of sight.

"Did you see that?” Wolverton asked her, not quite believing what had just happened.

"Who do you think told you to jump?” Nozaki said. “Are you all right?"

"Yes, I'm fine."

"I'd better inform base camp.” Nozaki spoke on another channel for a moment. Signing off, she nudged Wolverton into the rover. Nozaki got in on the driver's side and started it up. Wolverton's breathing was still ragged.

"That was close, huh?” Nozaki said, turning the rover around.

"Yeah.” Wolverton smiled, for once not self-conscious about his overbite. He was glad to be alive. “Where did that thing come from?"

"The bubble."

"Bubble?"

"Yeah, an anomaly. You called it a temporal displacement bubble."

"I called it that?"

"That's right."

"I didn't even know it exists."

"That thing was inadvertently sent here from another reality."

"Another reality...?"

"Yeah, one in which nobody lives on this asteroid. I don't think they'd intentionally harm us."

"You talk like you know them."

"I met one of them. It brought me back—well, almost brought me back—when I accidentally went through the bubble. It got me as close to my original reality as it could."

"Does anyone else know about this?"

"Oh, yes, everybody at base camp knows, even though they didn't believe me at first."

"Why not? What happened?"

"You and I went rock collecting one day, and I came back alone. They thought I'd gone crazy, until incontrovertible evidence turned up. There was talk about replacing me with Zaremba."

"Jeez."

"He was against the idea, though. He'd worked security with me long enough to realize what I said was true, no matter how it sounded."

Nozaki drove alongside the deep gouge in the iron and lateritic nickel surface.

In the few days Wolverton had been on LGC-1, he'd taken samples of an impressive array of ores—molybdenite, scheelite, manganese, quartz, iron, and lead—the products of lateral secretion blasted by Gamma Crucis's hydrogen shell for hundreds of millions of years. The digger had cut a broad swath across it all, at least two meters deep and perhaps a hundred meters wide, rendering today's work useless.

"It's some kind of mining machine,” he said.

"That makes sense,” Nozaki said. “A consortium of races has this place staked out for ore."

"They didn't say anything about that during my training.” Wolverton felt as if he'd fallen through the looking glass.

"That's because we're still preparing the report. You're the only one who's seen their technology besides me...if it is their technology."

She kept driving near the trench's edge.

He watched her self-assured handling of the rover. Wolverton hardly knew Nozaki, but he was talking to her easily. He'd never been able to make friends on Earth or Mars; out here on the frontier, he'd hoped it would be different. Nozaki had been especially nice to him ever since the hopper brought him to LGC-1, and now she'd saved his life. Crises brought people together, just as he'd always heard.

He liked Nozaki. He liked her a lot. In fact, he was falling in love with her.

"What if the digger gouges out base camp?” Wolverton asked.

"It wasn't moving in that direction,” Nozaki said, sounding a bit uncertain for once. “Besides, the compound is probably too big to miss, even for something that size."

"Probably?"

"Come on, Wolverton. I told you they're advanced, very civilized. They wouldn't want to harm us."

"But since there may be an infinite number of realities intersecting here, you can't be sure who built the digger."

"No,” she admitted. “I guess I can't. What do you think its functions are, besides digging up everything in its path?"

"I suspect that it's identifying ores just as we're doing, only on a much grander scale. It must analyze all the rocks by volume, separating them inside itself after scooping them up."

"They're in a hurry to acquire metals."

"Exactly where is this bubble, anyway?” Wolverton asked.

"Hard to say. It's centered in near space, but its parameters move around. Sometimes it comes down to the surface."

"And that's how we passed through it? Accidentally?"

"Yes. The digger may run into the bubble again and disappear, or..."

"Or it will chew up base camp, analyze the chunks, and spit out whatever it doesn't want."

"That's a pretty grim prognostication."

"But it could be accurate,” Wolverton said. “In fact, given the small size of this asteroid, I'd say it's quite likely."

"You've got a point. We'd better get back."

She turned the rover away from the trench and started toward base camp. Wolverton regretted leaving, realizing that he might never get another chance to be alone with Nozaki.

They soon saw the glare of floodlights over the steeply rounded horizon. Base camp abruptly came into sight. Labutunu's construction crew worked on the compound's new addition, affixing lead-sheet shielding to an erect wall.

Wolverton said he'd put away the rover, giving Nozaki a chance to get inside and provide a detailed account. She opened all channels and called everyone to the briefing room, while he detached the battery pack and fumbled with the rover's panels, until he finally managed to fold it up and lean it against the others.

The construction workers were already inside by the time he finished. Ducking his head to get out of the shack, he leaped halfway to the airlock hatch in a single step. He still wasn't used to this gravity, and his long legs often took him farther than he expected.

Wolverton went through the airlock, got his helmet and suit off as quickly as he could, and hung them next to his bunk. Turning, he glimpsed his lanky form, freckled face, and ginger hair in the mirror through the open bathroom door. He rushed past it to the briefing room, a relatively spacious chamber at the intersection of the compound's two main bunkers.

Everyone had already gathered there.

The babble of many voices confused him, but he soon saw something downright disconcerting.

Two Nozakis.

One of them spoke, and she wore a pressure suit without a helmet. The other was seated, listening along with everyone else, and she wore a blue thermal jersey and leggings.

"We don't know where it is right now,” the suited Nozaki—presumably the one he'd just been with—was saying, “but a very large mining machine has come through the bubble, and it may be out of control. It's tearing up the surface with abandon."

Some cross-talk followed.

"Here's a thought,” Wolverton said from the back of the room, as soon as there was a lull. He felt self-conscious when everyone turned toward him. “What if its purpose is to strip-mine the entire surface?"

That brought on quite an uproar.

"It could happen,” Nozaki said in a loud, firm voice. “We have to be prepared to evacuate base camp if it comes this way."

Another hubbub followed.

"What will we do if it destroys base camp?” the astrophysicist Jyoti asked, once things quieted down enough for her to be heard. “We can't live outside for long."

"We can call for hoppers to get us out of here,” said Zaremba. The overhead lights reflected on his shaved pate. “But that'll take some time."

"The best thing to do,” Labutunu said, “is to move building materials and everything we need for survival to another site. We'll assemble a makeshift compound and pump air into it. We can manage until we evacuate the asteroid."

"I don't understand how this thing got down to the surface,” said the bespectacled Dr. Linebarger, M.D.

"The bubble sometimes brushes the surface,” Nozaki explained.

"The alien artists make a broad brush stroke,” said Duvic, the head mineralogist, stroking his gray beard.

A few people laughed at his comment, taking some edge off the group's fear.

"There may yet prove to be bubbles,” said Jyoti, her dark eyes widening with enthusiasm, “enveloping entire asteroids, even entire planets. This is very exciting."

"A little too exciting, if you ask me,” said the Nozaki who was unencumbered by a pressure suit. Wolverton admired her trim, athletic figure as she stood up.

Since he'd come to LGC-1, he'd sometimes wondered why he'd seen Nozaki so often. Now he knew why, and he understood what she'd meant by “incontrovertible evidence."

"Let's get busy,” the suited Nozaki said.

Everybody pitched in. Some people were assigned to gather essentials, while others assisted Labutunu outside with the heavy equipment. Sentries were assigned, and pictures from the flyby were examined.

"There it is,” the unsuited Nozaki said, pointing at a hologram taken from space.

The flyby's imager had picked up the digger as it tore its way into the asteroid's crimson dawn. It kept going right through the searing heat of the hydrogen shell.

"Hard radiation doesn't even slow it down,” Jyoti said.

"Maybe it uses GaCrux's hydrogen shell as a smelter,” Wolverton ventured.

"It looks like it's going to circumnavigate the asteroid, its path diverging each time it comes around,” the unsuited Nozaki said. “It will almost certainly reach this point sooner or later."

"In which case,” Duvic said, looking at Wolverton, “your hypothesis is going to become a propecy fulfilled."

"You may be responsible for saving the lives of fifty-two people, Wolverton,” the suited Nozaki said.

Her praise made him feel good, but this was no time to bask in the warmth. They had to get busy.

Everything they needed was hauled outside—tools, food, dietary supplements, water, inflatable tents, oxygen tanks. They had to hurry before dawn came.

At one point Wolverton found himself working with the duplicate Nozaki.

"You shouldn't stare at people,” she said.

"I'm sorry,” Wolverton replied. “It's just that I...."

"You've never seen the same person in two places at the same time,” she said. “I know. I've heard it since the day I came back and found my double here in the compound. Frankly, I'm getting a little tired of talking about it."

It was strange, but this version of Nozaki didn't seem as kindly disposed toward him as the other one. Everything else about them was the same, right down to the identical birthmarks on their throats. The difference must have been due to the experience he'd shared with the other version of her.

"We need those units stacked by the airlock,” Zaremba said, interrupting Wolverton's reverie.

"Vite! Vite!” Duvic cried from behind him. “It's coming this way!"

"And it's moving fast,” Nozaki said. “There's no time to gather everything up. Just load the rovers and pray that the hoppers get here before it's too late."

"The wieldos...,” Labutunu said, dismayed. “We can't build without them!"

"I know, but we've got to get going."

All the rovers were unfolded, battery packs attached, and the ore boots filled with whatever supplies could be carried. Wolverton jumped into a rover next to Nozaki. Now that both versions of her were suited up, he wasn't sure which Nozaki it was.

Twenty-six rovers drove in a column away from the encroaching sunrise, a scarlet corona behind them on the black rim of the horizon.

"My God,” someone said over the radio.

The fear in that voice caused Wolverton to turn and look behind him. There was the digger, churning up the surface, seeming even more gigantic than the first time he'd seen it, and growing larger by the second.

Just as the images from the flyby had suggested, it was headed straight toward the compound. Its angular legs churned, propelling it forward at a furious pace.

Much of base camp was below ground, only its lead-lined roofs visible from this distance. Wolverton saw the monster take its first bite. He got a brief look at part of its underside where the ground dipped in front of the airlock. Huge spiraling blades sliced into the bunker and the debris fell into its enormous scoop.

Everything was sucked up inside it. There was no sound, only a vibration.

It was like an earthquake, and the rover careened wildly before Nozaki got it back under control.

Refuse shot out through the digger's backside. Jagged pieces of base camp drifted for a moment against the black and red sky and then fell slowly to the surface.

The silence inside Wolverton's helmet made it all the more terrifying. He could hear his own breathing and pulse—but nothing else—as he watched the compound being destroyed.

The caravan veered away from the digger's path, and soon the black colossus was out of sight. Wolverton thought about the few mementos he'd brought from Mars; they were all gone, along with everything else that fifty-two people had called home.

Panic overwhelmed him. Where would they go? It would take at least three hoppers to get everybody off the asteroid, and there weren't three of them close enough to get here any time soon.

"Oh, God,” he said.

"Take it easy, Wolverton,” Nozaki said. “We're not dead yet."

"We might as well be."

"Don't start with that defeatist stuff. That's why you didn't make it back through the bubble."

"The bubble...."

"It's our only chance."

"Do you think we can find it in time?"

"If we're lucky,” Nozaki said.

Wolverton could see her mouth through her visor. She hadn't spoken. It must have been the second Nozaki on the open channel. Or was this the second Nozaki he was riding with? He had no way of knowing if he didn't ask. He quickly switched to a private channel.

"Uh, which one are you?"

"I'm the one who didn't leave you behind."

"Oh.” He'd gotten into the rover with the wrong Nozaki. He reminded himself that they were the same woman.

He returned to the open channel as the caravan drove on ahead of the deadly dawn.

Soon his stomach rumbled with hunger, a sound louder than the destruction of base camp. He hadn't eaten since before going out to cut the ore samples. Would they starve out here on LGC-1's surface? It was likely, if their pressure suits’ liquid processors didn't break down first, in which case they would die of thirst. And if the rovers’ battery packs failed, Gamma Crucis's hydrogen shell would ultimately cook them alive.

Jyoti's voice came through. “We shouldn't all be driving in a caravan. The probability that we'll find the bubble is increased if we spread out."

"That's sensible,” Nozaki said. “If you see any sign of it, send up flares."

She pulled the joystick to the left and drove at a sharp angle away from the caravan. The other rovers peeled off from both sides of the column. Soon they were spreading out in all directions, excepting toward base camp. Nobody had any intention of going back, even though the digger must have been long gone from the site by now.

They drove for another twenty minutes before they saw something over the horizon. It was virtually invisible, except that it obscured the stars. At first, Wolverton thought it was the digger, but he soon realized that this was even bigger.

"That's it!” Nozaki shouted.

Flares were going up even as she turned the rover's wheels toward the huge anomaly. The flares burst gloriously in the negligible gravity, several kilometers overhead.

Wolverton was excited, although he had no idea what they were going to do once they reached the bubble.

"It's moving away from the surface!” Jyoti's voice cried in dismay. “We've got to hurry or it will be too late!"

Wolverton exhaled, realizing he'd been involuntarily holding his breath.

But as the rovers rolled over the barren landscape, he saw exactly what Jyoti meant. The bubble's amorphous, black border was meters above the barren asteroid's surface—and receding steadily.

"How can we get through it?” Wolverton said.

Someone ahead of them fired another flare. Its glowing trail vanished inside the bubble.

"The gravity's low,” Nozaki said. “We may be able to make it through if we jump, but we've got to do it before the bubble gets any farther away."

The rovers were gathering under the anomaly as if for a tailgate party. As soon as they stopped, Wolverton pulled himself out of his seat, floating a meter off the ground with the effort. He was looking up into the bubble as his feet touched the ground. From directly below, he could see stars inside it, but they weren't the stars that should have been there.

"We're going through that?” he said.

"If we don't,” Nozaki said, “we're dead."

"The edge is too far off the ground."

"If someone jumps onto the ore boot, it can be done."

"Who's going to be the first to make the jump?” Zaremba asked.

"I will,” said Wolverton, before Nozaki could speak. He wanted to be sure he went ahead so that he'd be there waiting for her, no matter where they ended up.

"That's my boy,” Nozaki said, her words giving him courage.

"Better get going, Wolverton,” Labutunu said, his nervousness audible.

Wolverton turned and took a couple of elongated steps. He faced the bubble and ran toward it. Hopping up onto the rover's ore boot, he leaped with all his strength straight into the darkness, somersaulting into space.

Expecting some sensation of change or dissociation, Wolverton spun in the void. He felt nothing, and he feared he'd missed the bubble. He wished that Nozaki was with him, holding his hand.

But when he was briefly in position to see the asteroid below him, everything had changed. It was pitted with craters, unlike the smooth surface he'd seen while coming down in the hopper when he'd first arrived on LGC-1.

He rolled again, and this time the asteroid and the sun were gone.

"Nozaki!” he called.

There was no reply.

He was alone. Spinning end over end, Wolverton saw nothing but blackness and stars. After a while, his inertia slowed. For a moment he was looking straight into the sun, his visor screen darkening to filter out the glare. It didn't seem to be Gamma Crucis. For one thing, this sun was yellow shot with fiery orange, not bloodred. For another, it was much smaller. It appeared to be a main sequence star, very much like Sol.

Had he been whisked to another star system, or was he looking at Gamma Crucis at an earlier stage? And why had his spinning slowed?

Something was pulling him now, and the space around him transformed into a tube. He was sucked inside it, but gently, as if he were being siphoned by a tremendous force that somehow took his human fragility into account.

As long as the nitrogen and oxygen in his tanks held out, he would live. After that....

Suddenly his visor was filled with a green planet's surface, striated with clouds. The force tugging at him was gravity. He was being transported to the planet's surface.

Or nearly so. He dangled at the mouth of the tube for a moment before dropping onto a large, disc-shaped platform. He fell on his backside, looking up at the tube as it snaked into the clouds.

Slowly Wolverton stood up. He was unharmed, thanks to his suit's padding, but shaking badly. He tried to calm his breathing and to give his heartbeat a moment to slow, while gawking at the clouds drifting by. His movements felt ponderous, and he realized after a moment that it was because he'd been living in the asteroid's light gravity. Taking a tentative step, he reckoned that the density and size of this world were somewhere between those of Earth and Mars. It wouldn't take long to get used to it.

He staggered to the edge of the platform and looked out.

He was at the summit of a tower. A city spread out below, its roads like the radii of a spiderweb, connected by interstitial strands. Vast, it appeared to be orderly rather than sprawling. Things were moving around down there. He couldn't tell what they were from this height, especially through the cloud vapor. Off in the distance he saw an irregular coastline on the edge of a dark green sea.

Wolverton felt, rather than heard, something behind him. He turned and saw a projection rising at the platform's center. There was a door in it, large enough for three humans to pass through at the same time. It was an elevator.

Wolverton waited fearfully to see if anything was going to come out. Nothing did. He hesitated just a little longer, hoping that Nozaki would drop down through the siphon tube.

Nothing happened. Cyan-tinged clouds drifted across the platform like an intermittent fog.

Wolverton walked to the elevator door and looked in. It was empty. Had the inhabitants of the tower sent it up especially for him? One thing was certain. The greenish haze of the atmosphere suggested he wouldn't be able to breathe. He couldn't stay on this platform for long. He would run out of air, and he needed food and rest. He had to go down.

He entered the spacious elevator car. The door shut behind him and the lift started to descend. It was slow at first, but quickly gained speed. His gut was in his throat most of the way down, but the brakes were applied in time and the car slowed to a light stop.

The door opened like an eyelid, but there was no one there to greet him. A corridor led him to the light. Wolverton stepped out onto a street. He could hear muffled sounds through his helmet.

One of the city's inhabitants nearly stepped on him. He barely came up to its knee. Its head seemed quite small for its ungainly height. It took a long stride over him and quickly disappeared behind the tower. He wondered what he looked like to this alien, a tiny biped wearing a pressure suit. He was lucky it hadn't broken his spine under its huge foot.

A thing that crawled in a curious gait on four legs, each with three joints, came from the other direction. Smaller limbs encircled its bumpy head, which was set on a thick neck over an hourglass torso. The head pivoted toward him, as if it were on a swivel. He got out of its way, his heart pounding and his breath coming in gasps.

Now he was separated from the tower by dozens of species passing back and forth. Most of them wore pastel, balloonlike coverings, while others were encased in more elaborate protective gear.

A teardrop-shaped object shot by overhead, more or less parallel to the ground. Wolverton was afraid he'd be sucked into its wake as he stumbled about, disoriented and scared.

He was alone among all these creatures. Was he the only one who'd made it through the bubble? If not, why hadn't anyone arrived on the platform with him? Were they scattered in time and space, like pollen adrift in the wind?

Grotesque passersby towered over him. Dodging off the curved walkway, Wolverton found himself at the door of a little dome. It didn't look nearly as threatening as the busy street. He intended to go in and gesture for help. The door was open, but he couldn't see much from where he was standing. He was able to make out a few angular shapes in the dim interior light as he stepped inside to escape the monstrous traffic behind him.

Wolverton surprised what at first appeared to be a featherless ostrich. Its long, sinuous neck supported a bulbous cranium with a beaked face. It glowered at him as he stumbled inside. Its neck formed a J as it lowered its face to look more closely at him.

"Please, I don't mean to intrude,” Wolverton said. “I need help."

A goiter swelled beneath the creature's beak, its unlikely nostrils flared, and it made a rasping sound, muffled through Wolverton's helmet. It swung around and showed him its purple rump. Strutting across the room, it folded its bamboo-stalk legs under its plump torso and sat on a pad facing a basketball-sized dodecahedron set on a plinth.

Wolverton expected it to use its beak, but instead it pulled its wings forward to reveal half a dozen dainty fingers on the tip of each, opposable thumbs, and an eye on the underside of either wrist. It touched the darkened dodecahedron, which immediately began to spin.

The birdlike creature waved its delicate hand and a three-dimensional image of yet another alien popped out of one of the dodecahedron's facets, startling Wolverton. It appeared to be standing in the same room with them. Not exactly standing, Wolverton thought as he tried to take in its contours. More like flopping.

It was a gelatinous being with six curved horns sticking out at the top. Tiny holes ringed each horn; Wolverton guessed that they were sensory organs or respiratory openings.

The grotesque creature burped, and Wolverton's host cackled back at it. The conversation went on for half a minute or so. Wolverton wanted to run back outside, but when he turned his head he saw that the street traffic hadn't let up.

His involuntary host fingered the dodecahedron one last time and the image shrank back into it.

Was the ostrich going to have him arrested for trespassing?

It craned its neck and hooted toward another room.

A moment later, another creature of the same species entered through a slash in the wall. The two of them squawked at each other for a few seconds, and then both turned toward Wolverton. He thought about saying something, but what good would it do? Frantic as he was, reason told him to be patient, to hold on a little longer. These creatures lived across the street from the elevator tower. They saw many different species every day. He might be new to them, but they weren't likely to be shocked by his appearance.

They stood at least eight feet tall at the little crests on top of their round, beaked heads. They might peck him to death if he got out of hand in their home.

So Wolverton tried to remain calm while he waited, taking in the details of their domed dwelling. The purposes of some things, such as the pad and the dodecahedron, were obvious. Other things, not so much. Splatters on the walls presumably were decorations of some sort, but he wasn't sure. Some items seemed jerry-built, such as the bent rods propping up sloping partition walls.

Unlike the other species he'd seen so far on this world, these beings wore no coverings or breathing aids. They must have been native to this planet. He wondered if they, or their ancestors, had lived in this dome before the elevator tower was built, because he detected signs of age in the carved, polished limestone. It made sense that sedimentary rock would be common here, so close to a sea.

In a few minutes someone arrived, although it seemed much longer to the heavily perspiring Wolverton. A blue being with three arms, its head protruding from its belly, came to the door. It was covered with a violet, elastic balloon that stretched with its movements. It listened attentively to the comments of the dome's two occupants. Five eyes, situated in a crescent, occasionally rolled as it glanced in Wolverton's direction.

It beckoned Wolverton with its middle hand over its head, and he followed it outside. When he turned and took one last look at his unwilling hosts, they screeched something at him while holding up their blinking wrist-eyes. Farewell or good riddance, he had no way of knowing.

Wolverton followed the blue creature into the street, and noticed in the hazy sunlight that a prominent network of pink blood vessels showed through its skin. Its limbs had a puzzling way of flowing, but it moved quite gracefully despite its ungainly appearance.

The alien burbled something at him, and it gestured for him to join the flow of pedestrian traffic. He could see that this creature commanded respect. Everyone moved aside, allowing him and his captor to walk without fear of being trampled on.

Wolverton craned his neck to look at the elevator tower, its summit lost in the green clouds. Two huge worms crawled out of the corridor. Their featureless faces swelled and emitted high-pitched whistles.

The alien led him around the tower's base. On the other side of it was a squat building.

They went inside. Angled walls peaked overhead. The alien took Wolverton to a chamber with improbably angled dimensions.

Stored inside were large ovoid balloons, colored pale violet, orange, green, and blue. The alien reached into the nearest violet balloon and pulled away a bobbing section which it slapped onto a cavity located between its legs—apparently its mouth. It scooped up more of the balloon and applied this as well, and then peeled open part of its clear body covering. It breathed in the contents of the balloon through its curiously placed orifice, its body swelling with the effort.

The alien pointed at one of the orange balloons with a snaking finger. It was telling Wolverton to do what it had done.

He wasted no time, quickly scooping out several orange handfuls and covering his head with them. He shut off his air supply and carefully removed his helmet. The pale orange balloon jiggled and settled onto his shoulders. A bit of it stretched like a cobweb from his helmet before snapping back into place. He inhaled pure oxygen.

Wolverton greedily sucked in the air and felt giddiness force its way into his racing mind. How did this alien know he was an oxygen breather? Was it a member of the same species Nozaki had met?

He decided not to think about Nozaki. It would only depress him, and he needed to keep his wits.

Wolverton was soon high on pure oxygen. Concentrating on trying to be observant, he thought about the translucent balloons he saw on various species that contained the gas mixtures they breathed. The more complex coverings must have aided those who couldn't function in this gravity while providing artificial atmospheres.

There was a lot to learn. The important thing right now was that he was breathing and not using up what was left of his air supply. Maybe he could find a way to fill his tanks with oxygen. Who knew, maybe he could even find nitrogen to blend with it.

He comforted himself by remembering that, as difficult as graduate school on Earth and fieldwork on Mars had been for him socially, he'd always done well because he had an analytical mind. If anything he'd ever seen qualified for analysis, this was it.

Wolverton slapped more balloons over himself, until he was covered from head to toe. In his jiggling, orange cocoon, with his helmet off, he could hear sounds quite clearly.

"What happens now?” he asked.

The alien, of course, didn't answer.

"You're not going to arrest me, are you?” he asked, fighting the urge to bolt. “I hope I haven't broken any laws or anything like that...."

The alien's eyes widened as if it questioned what he was saying, and Wolverton understood that he was at its mercy. He had nowhere to go except where this creature took him.

He watched the alien through the pale orange balloonskin. It lifted its middle arm and waved its snaking fingers at him, gesturing for him to come along as it moved toward the door.

Wolverton followed it out of the room, delirious from inhaling raw oxygen but filled with trepidation.

They took a different route, a zigzagging corridor that led outdoors. Wolverton felt grateful that there were few pedestrians about.

A vehicle awaited them. It appeared to be very flimsy. A semi-transparent teardrop laid on its side, with the rounded end facing away from them and no wheels, similar to the thing that had flown over his head.

The alien gestured for him to climb inside it. Wolverton, in his orange balloon, had no idea how to do it. He didn't detect any doors or windows, even though he could see right through it. It appeared to be empty except for a round fuel cell connected to a network of bunched fibers near the tapering back end that looked something like a brain. Wolverton figured that must be the engine.

The alien slapped him on the back, and Wolverton stumbled forward. The exterior of the car gave under his weight. He tumbled through and landed inside. The car's exterior sealed seamlessly behind him. He was still inside the balloon.

The alien sauntered around to the other side and plopped in. It lay back, turned its spherical head toward Wolverton to make sure he was secure, and then gave its full attention to the vehicle. Fibers snaked out from the brain-engine, and the alien's squirming digits played on one of them for a moment. The engine hissed, the car lifted off the ground, and they shot forward.

Wolverton strained to hang on, but there was nothing to hang onto. Inertia pushed him deeper into his balloon as the alien manipulated the fiber. The car was highly maneuverable, banking around spires and shooting out at terrific speed in the straightaway. Wolverton's stomach lurched into his gullet once again.

He screamed as he bobbed inside the flying car, zipping to who knew where. He saw other teardrop-shaped cars, ridden by all manner of odd-looking creatures. This city teemed with alien races, but what did they do with an uninvited species?

What if he were being tested by the aliens, to determine if he were worthy of living among them, and found wanting? How could he convince them he didn't intend to stay? He just wanted to find Nozaki. But how could he explain himself without a translator, and where would he and Nozaki go if he did find her?

If any food had been in his belly, Wolverton would have upchucked as his three-armed driver squeezed the fiber and flew upward at a steep angle. It cut the power above a kidney-shaped landing platform on a rooftop a hundred meters or so above the ground.

They settled onto the platform.

The alien let go of the fiber, and it whipped back into the cortical engine. After it gestured for him to get out, Wolverton swam through the vehicle's permeable exterior, clutching his helmet under the pale orange sheen of his oxygen balloon. Now that the brief flight was over, he nearly collapsed on the platform. It had been too long since he'd last slept. He was barely able to stay on his feet as the alien led him to a slit in the roof a few meters away from the car.

The slit widened, and they stepped inside the opening. They began to descend. This could be it. The alien could be taking him to a prison, or even to be executed, for all he knew.

The ceiling closed over them. Trembling, Wolverton was led through a corridor to a room with a transparent membrane over its doorway. His captor pointed at it. The membrane stretched as he passed through it and popped back into position.

Wolverton was alone in a room with a concave ceiling. On a platform lay a human body.

Not just any body.

His body.

He'd have known himself anywhere, from all the times he'd looked unhappily in the mirror. Red hair, pale skin, freckles, gangly limbs, overbite. He was gaping even in death.

Hearing a faint susurration, Wolverton assumed it was the sound of a stasis field, because the body was perfectly preserved.

Was this the version of him that had been left behind on LGC-1 by Nozaki? Or was it some other Wolverton, plucked out of a reality he hadn't yet dreamed of? How had this Wolverton died? His mind raced with ghastly possibilities, but his tired body wanted only to lie down next to his doppelgänger and sleep.

Maybe that was the idea. Maybe the alien wanted him to be unconscious before doing something dreadful to him. This could be a euthanasia chamber.

But why would it show him his own corpse if it wanted to be sneaky about killing him? He was simply too exhausted to think straight, yet there had never been a time in his entire life when thinking straight was more important.

Wolverton reeled backward, turning to pass through the membrane again. The alien was waiting for him. He sagged against a wall.

"What do you want?” he cried in despair, bone-tired and weak from hunger. “What are you going to do to me?"

The alien waggled its fingers, directing him to another doorway. Tears streaming down his cheeks, Wolverton almost fell through the membrane this time.

He was relieved to find a bed inside. There were oxygen balloons and pale green and blue tubes. Food? Water? He wanted to find out, but he had no choice but to lie down first, still holding his helmet in the crook of his arm. Maybe he would never get up, but he couldn't stay awake any longer.

He fell asleep within seconds.

His dreams were invaded by the digger. It swallowed him, but he wasn't chewed up. He traveled through its innards to its very core. He struggled desperately to stop it, but he couldn't lift his feet. He was rooted to a place that seemed to encompass all of time in all the multiverse. His inability to act would cost the lives of fifty-two people...and one of them was Nozaki.

Wolverton awakened from the nightmare, at first uncertain where he was. He saw the room through an orange pall. It took him a moment to realize the coloration was a remnant of the balloon clinging to his eyelids. He looked down to see that it had darkened and desiccated, and that he was breathing through his nose. He was still alive. The aliens must have pumped a nitrogen-oxygen mix into the room. Wiping away the dried balloon skin, he got to his shaky feet.

Sticking his index finger into the green tube, he pulled it out to taste what was on its tip. It was a thick paste, sweet but mild. It would fill his ravenous belly quite satisfactorily if he could find a way to eat it. He looked around for something to aid him and found a bowl, a spoon, and a ladle.

He sat on the edge of the bed to eat and drink.

It didn't take much to sate his hunger. He was thinking of what he had to do. He smelled awful, so he got out of his suit and quilted underwear to bathe as best he could, leaving a puddle on the floor.

Much refreshed, he sized up the situation as he dressed himself. Was he a prisoner? He peered out through the transparent membrane, and could see nothing beyond it but the corridor wall. Was there breathable air out there, or was it pumped only into this room?

As if recalling a nightmare, he pictured his own corpse lying in state across the hall. He guessed that the aliens had constructed this little human habitat after they rescued his doppelgänger from the asteroid. Lucky for him.

But what had killed the other Wolverton? He'd had food, water, air to breathe, and a place to live. Had he succumbed to loneliness? It was a terrible thought. Wolverton had been lonely all his life, but now he had Nozaki to think of. Had his counterpart realized that he'd lost her and could never get her back?

Why had the aliens displayed the body? Did they even know he was the same person? Or did one human look pretty much like another to them?

He might never find out. Now that he'd eaten and rested, he was determined to go back to see if he could stop the digger. There was nothing for him here, not without Nozaki.

Wolverton had just put his helmet on when the alien came back. It beckoned from outside the transparency.

Wolverton accessed his air tank and went out. He took one last, mournful look at the entrance to the room that contained his corpse.

The alien led him back up to the roof. The sun was setting, and the hazy atmosphere was aquamarine, the skyline silhouetted against the twilight sky.

A vehicle was waiting. Wolverton could see an orange balloon on the passenger side. He jumped in and took off his helmet as his host got in on the other side. In a few seconds they were off.

They headed straight across the city to a hovering ship that looked like a big seashell. A funnel extended from its underside. The alien slowed their speed and they were drawn up into the funnel. They emerged inside the ship, surrounded by efficiently stored gas balloons, food tubes, stringy things hanging from the low ceiling, and bumpy instruments. After seeing the cortical engine, Wolverton could barely guess at what powered this machine.

Clouds, green sky, and the city's tallest spires were visible all around as Wolverton clambered out of the vehicle, his oxygen balloon clinging to him.

There were two other aliens like his host sitting at the controls, and they turned to gurgle their greetings.

"Nice to see you, too,” Wolverton said. “Where are we going?"

There was only one way to find out. Wolverton settled into his balloon, watching the funnel coil underneath the ship.

They began to ascend. There was little sense of inertia, but within seconds the green planet was below them and the stars were above, behind, and in front of them. They were released from the green world's gravity, and the blue creatures floated through the cabin, going about their duties.

Soon the ship was headed straight toward a shifting darkness that distorted space and time a few thousand kilometers above the green planet's troposphere.

The ship turned on its side and skimmed along the amorphous edge of the bubble, passing through without appreciable physical effect.

They slowly banked and arced about to face a bloodred reality. Gamma Crucis's hydrogen shell hurt his eyes with its killing radiance.

Once around the sun, and they were slingshotted by its mass deep into what was left of the solar system. It seemed to take only minutes, as if time were shrinking. The consortium had clearly mastered many of the anomaly's fringe effects, and matter-of-factly made use of what seemed miraculous, compared to human technology.

Below them lay the landscape of LGC-1, a familiar and welcome sight. Perhaps not so familiar, now that he took a closer look. The surface was pitted with craters.

They kept going until the bubble came into sight again.

His hosts’ dialogue sounded like coffee percolating. Wolverton wished he knew what they were saying to one another.

The aliens at the controls both seemed to be piloting the ship at the same time. Their fingers coiled around bumps in the panel, guiding the ship toward the bubble.

And then they were inside it once again, bursting through to another reality.

The pilots concentrated on their task, bringing the ship down toward the asteroid's surface.

Something was coming toward them. Was it another alien ship?

No, it was the flyby. The pilot deftly avoided colliding with it, arcing above its orbital path.

They passed over base camp. It was just as it had been before the digger destroyed it. Wolverton wanted the aliens to put him down on the surface, but he knew he couldn't get the job done that way.

The bubble hove into sight again, looking as if India ink were spilling over the asteroid's smooth, red-reflective surface. It was hard to tell its dimensions from here. Wolverton could get a sense of its breadth only by the stars it obscured.

It was big, much bigger than it had been in the other realities. The longer he stared at it, the more it seemed to grow. It hung in space, several times the size of the asteroid.

They were headed straight for it.

Wolverton couldn't take his eyes off the growing anomaly. He saw that its edge was touching the asteroid's surface.

And then they were through it, flying out the other side.

Once more around LGC-1, and they had reached their destination. Below was the digger.

"You did it!” Wolverton shouted. “How did you know where to bring me?"

They ignored him, and he saw that another ship had beaten them to it. It resembled a black wasp.

The digger was stationary. A groove opened along its carapace. The black ship came to rest on it. The groove widened, and the ship sank inside the digger.

The groove closed as the black ship descended.

As the pilots brought them down toward the digger, Wolverton realized with alarm that they too were about to land on its rounded back. He hoped that they had some means of concealing their presence from those inside the digger, in case of hostility.

They alit softly. No sooner had they come down than the digger began to lurch forward.

"No!” Wolverton cried. It was too soon. He hadn't thought through a plan. He had no idea how to slow down the digger, let alone stop it. But now that they were sitting right on top of it, his three hosts turned toward him.

"What do you expect me to do?"

Fifteen eyes stared at him. What were they thinking? Did they simply want him to get out, so they could go back to their reality? What more could he ask of them? They'd brought him to the exact point in the multiverse he needed to be, and he could hardly blame them if he didn't know what to do next.

The funnel uncoiled beneath him. Wolverton got to his feet and looked down at the digger's glistening black carapace, just a few meters below where he stood. It was time to go, despite his uncertainty.

"Thank you for your help,” he said through clenched jaws, “even if you are leaving me here to die."

As he was putting on his helmet, one of the stringy things hanging from the bulkhead leaped down, spread out into a spidery form about a meter across, and trundled on eight legs down through the funnel. Another followed it. These “spiders” were extremely light and agile, he observed, as still others jumped to the deck and went after the first two.

Scores of them crawled past him in single file and climbed down the funnel. Watching them, it occurred to Wolverton that he could have completely misinterpreted the meaning of this mission. What did he know about the motivations of these aliens?

Yet he couldn't imagine why they would have brought him here unless they had some notion of what had happened. With all of space and time interconnecting through the multiverse, how had they known about this one incident?

He watched the last spider crawl into the funnel. As soon as it was out of sight, he jumped in behind it.

Wolverton rolled through the funnel and came to rest on his buttocks. The digger's carapace was as hard as titanium. Even so, he was unharmed, because of LGC-1's light gravity.

Now what? He looked around and saw the last few spiders vanishing under the digger's curved hull.

Wolverton got to his knees, worried that he'd be knocked off his feet by the digger's motion if he stood. He looked behind him to see that the ship was invisible, just as he'd hoped. He crawled as quickly as he could to catch up with the spiders, hoping they knew where to go. He certainly didn't.

He went as far as possible on his hands and knees. If he crawled any farther, he'd fall off the digger's slick back.

Wolverton peered over the side and saw the line of spiders climbing down the bulging metal hull, seeming to defy gravity in much the same way that living spiders do. Wherever they were going, he wouldn't be able to follow them.

Ahead was the encroaching sunrise. It was nothing more than a rosy haze on the horizon, but it wouldn't take long for the digger to meet it. Wolverton had to get out of its way, or he'd be burned to a crisp.

He sensed something moving behind him, and turned in time to see the alien ship becoming partially visible as it rose like a shimmering oyster.

"Don't go!” he cried.

But even if they'd heard him, it wouldn't have mattered. The ship hovered for a moment and shot off over the horizon, leaving him kneeling alone on the digger's back. Wolverton had never felt so vulnerable in a lifetime of vulnerability. But he knew it would do him no good to succumb to fear.

The first thing to worry about was survival. He could either get out of the sun's way, or he could stay here like an idiot and fry.

He jumped. During his slow descent, he brushed against a spider as he tumbled over the side. It looked so fragile that he thought he might damage it.

Instead, four wire-thin legs lashed out and caught him. Wolverton sank down a meter or so, but the spiderlegs held him. He bobbed back up, firmly in their grasp. Other spiders broke ranks to help. A dozen spindly legs lifted him, and he was carried along like a crumb to an anthill.

As he was borne underneath the bulge in the digger's side, Wolverton was suspended over the ground.

The spiders shifted him so that he was facing downward. He was fascinated to watch the asteroid's surface roll beneath him. There was barely light enough to see it, but it was there, a faint red coursing a few meters below his face. The digger's immense legs churned on either side of him. He was pretty far from the ground, fearful that the spiders might drop him.

But they didn't. He was plunged into complete darkness, in the shadow of the digger's undercarriage.

Wolverton's heart pounded furiously. He was going to be ground up with the spiders. Pieces of him would be shot out behind the digger. He was as good as dead.

Suddenly there was an upturn. A tubular corridor led to a hatch, where the spiders were clustered. They tugged at its edge, their multi-jointed legs stretching with tensile strength until the hatch was forced open.

Wolverton was carried inside.

It was dark, but Wolverton could faintly see the spiders working on another hatch. Apparently he was inside an airlock. He kept his helmet on, since whatever the digger's builders breathed wasn't likely to be his kind of atmosphere.

The inside hatch jerked open and Wolverton was set on his feet in a narrow corridor inside the digger. He expected to hear alarms, but it was quiet. He looked back to see the spiders closing the hatch.

Wolverton stood in the corridor, waiting for something to show up and attack him. He was ready to fight. The digger's masters were his enemies, since they'd already savaged his home, his friends, and the woman he loved. They'd made life miserable for everyone at base camp, and now he was prepared to strike back.

There wasn't much to see from where he was standing, just a path that wound around some unidentifiable clusters of machinery.

Wolverton stole his way along the corridor, determined to find a way to undermine the digger. He wondered if he were being watched. He certainly didn't hear or see anything that indicated an alarm had been set off by the break-in. But that didn't mean much. For all he knew, the digger's builders didn't possess any sensory apparatus he'd recognize.

The path curved through the digger's vast interior. Wolverton emerged on a catwalk that looked down on an enormous bin, from which scores of conveyor belts streamed. Nimble metal digits on flexible armatures separated ores to send them in one direction or another. The catwalk trembled from the digger's forward motion and the crashing of the ore, as minerals were scooped up under the gigantic rotary blades and dumped into the bin. But it was a pretty smooth ride, all things considered.

Wolverton passed through a hatchway and descended a ramp leading toward the digger's heart. Judging from the dimensions of these passageways, the digger's creators weren't giants, but they weren't small either. If his luck held, he wouldn't run into any of them before he found the power source.

That hope was dashed as he emerged from a hatch at the bottom of the ramp and came face to face with a biped, clad in a strange looking protective suit, head covered by an enormous helmet with an opaque visor. He saw something metallic in one of its hands.

Wolverton turned and fled down a corridor. He bounded to an intersection, and as he turned he saw the biped coming after him. Rounding the bulkhead, he turned. He backed up against the wall and waited.

The biped came around the corner and Wolverton sprang.

His surprise attack was easily fended off. Wolverton found himself on the floor, unsure of what had happened. He looked up at the biped.

Its visor screen lightened, and he saw a familiar face.

"Nozaki!"

She helped him up. Removing her helmet, she shook her black hair free and smiled at him.

"Hi, Wolverton,” she said, her voice muffled. “I saw you on a security monitor. I hope I was the only one."

"How did you...?"

She gestured for him to take off his helmet. “It's all pressurized in here now."

"Am I glad to see you!” he said as soon as his head was free.

"Me, too,” Nozaki said.

"Where did you come from?” he asked, still not quite believing she was there.

"It's a long story. How about you?"

"Not long, but eventful,” he said. “How did you end up here?"

"It depends on who you ask. They think I'm working for them, but I've got a hidden agenda."

"Same as mine, I presume."

"Believe me, it wasn't easy to arrange being here for the digger's maiden voyage."

"This was intended to be the last maintenance check before letting it go?"

"Yeah, nobody stays aboard once it's exposed to the hydrogen shell's radiation."

"So that's why it came through and destroyed base camp, unattended...."

"Right, and knowing these people, they'll write off the digger when it disappears through the bubble, rather than admit they screwed up."

"Do you know your way around in here?"

"More or less.” She held up the blue metal blob he'd thought was a weapon. “See this thing?"

"Uh, huh. What is it?"

"It's a portable field generator."

"What's it for?"

"Come on,” she said. “I'll show you."

She led him to an angled shaft and hopped in, sliding down into the digger's bowels. Wolverton jumped in after her. Their descent was slowed by the light gravity, and Wolverton landed easily next to Nozaki in a large chamber.

"This is the place,” she said. “The crew knows there's been a security breach, so we better hurry."

Eleven big electromagnets were arranged in a circle, and another one was set directly below something suspended at eye level, something that bent the light inward.

"Is that what I think it is?” Wolverton asked.

"If you think it's a primordial black hole, the answer is yes,” Nozaki said. “That's exactly what it is."

Wolverton's throat felt very dry all of a sudden. “That's the digger's power source?"

"Yes."

"Kind of reckless, huh?"

"That's the way these people are.” Nozaki pointed upward. “Those conduits carry energy to the digger's segments."

"How can we stop it?"

"We can't—it's a force of nature."

"Then how do we shut down the digger?"

"It's a long shot,” Nozaki said, “but we can try to redirect the black hole's tidal forces."

"How?"

"Well, these electromagnets emit monopoles, so it may be possible to deflect the current and change the domain wall's parameters."

Before Wolverton could ask any more questions, two figures came through a hatchway. He prepared to do battle, crouching like a wrestler to square off against the nearest of them. Nozaki grabbed his arm and held him back.

She squeezed the blue metal blob and a shimmering field shot out of it, enveloping her and Wolverton just as the larger of the two bipeds ran toward them.

Their attacker bounced off the field and fell to the floor, squirming from the shock. Wolverton took a good look at him. He was a man.

"They're human!” he cried.

The other one, a woman, ran back out through the hatch.

"She's gone for help,” Nozaki said. “We've got to hurry."

Now he understood how Nozaki had infiltrated. They had accepted her because she looked like them.

Wolverton followed Nozaki as she stepped between two of the monopolar electromagnets. The field generator shielded them from the current restraining the black hole's energy.

Taking a closer look, Wolverton saw that the light's distortion was due to a steady stream of dust that sifted down from above, fed into the event horizon so that its dimensions would be easy to see. The primordial black hole itself was probably no more than a few microns in diameter, invisible to the naked eye. Its core was three meters from where they stood.

"Don't get too far away from me,” Nozaki said. “The portable field is limited."

"Right,” Wolverton said. “What do we do now?"

"We're going to use the field to bypass the current."

"Isn't that dangerous?” Wolverton asked. “We could destroy more than the digger, couldn't we?"

"We could severely screw up local space for quite a distance,” Nozaki said.

"In which case we'll be dead."

"Yes, but the digger won't go through the bubble, and the reality we know will be irrevocably changed. Base camp will survive."

"The trick is for us to survive, too."

"Right.” Nozaki pointed at one of the electromagnets. “Try to put your hand on it."

"Are you serious?"

"Completely. The current will be repelled by the portable field."

Reluctantly, Wolverton tried to touch the huge electromagnet. His fingers couldn't quite come into contact with it.

"See what I mean?” Nozaki said.

Wolverton could indeed, if only peripherally. The light showing through the dust described a noticeable shift in the event horizon's dimensions.

"It's changing, but the change doesn't seem to be affecting the digger's functions,” Wolverton said.

"Then we need to block more of the electromagnets."

"But how? We've only got four hands."

"I don't know, but we have to find a way."

The subject was moot as three people rushed from behind the electromagnets and charged them. Wolverton expected the field to repulse their attackers, but it didn't. One of them carried another field generator, and it melded with the extant field, enabling them to pass through the shield and engage Wolverton and Nozaki hand to hand.

Two of them assaulted Nozaki with the fury only the betrayed can feel. They quickly overwhelmed her, shouting in a language Wolverton didn't understand.

The one holding the generator faced off against Wolverton.

His assailant lunged. Wolverton dropped down onto one elbow and swung his legs around, tripping him. The man crashed to the floor with a grunt, dropping the generator.

Wolverton jumped to his feet and ran to help Nozaki. He shoved one of her assailants out of the way. The other was flailing at Nozaki, but she kicked him in the knee and his leg gave out.

The fighting was desperate.

The man Wolverton had tripped was on his feet again. He started toward them. Nozaki leaped up and dropkicked him. His head jerked and he staggered back a few steps. Wolverton thought he was going to fall, but he didn't.

He came too close to the event horizon.

It was a gruesome sight, but over quickly. He was sucked in head first, torn to bloody bits, and crushed. His red pulp disappeared into the black hole in an instant.

Wolverton stared in horror. Nozaki wasted no time, throwing herself at the woman, sending her reeling on impact into the event horizon.

The woman's scream was cut short as she too was snagged and compacted by the black hole's superdensity.

Now only one antagonist stood against them. Wolverton could see that he was frightened. He fell to his knees and shouted, imploring them to spare him.

Nozaki said something to him Wolverton couldn't understand.

"Are there any more of them?” Wolverton asked, breathing hard from the fight.

"No, it was a crew of four, counting me."

"Are they at war with the consortium?"

"You guessed it, over mineral rights to this asteroid, among other things."

"Now I know why my friends couldn't get away from here fast enough."

"Humans are quite a headache for them."

"So what do we do with this guy?"

"We're going to make him help us."

"How?"

"He's an engineer, and he knows how to shut down the digger."

"Great!"

"Let's go,” she said, pulling the engineer to his feet and pushing him forward between two electromagnets. She switched off the portable field generator and pointed toward a hatchway.

"Where to?” Wolverton asked.

"The control center is up top,” Nozaki replied.

They stepped into a lift. When they got to the top, the engineer suddenly thrust his elbow into Nozaki's midriff. She backed into Wolverton and both of them fell.

The engineer darted through a hatch and slammed it shut behind him.

"No!” Nozaki cried.

"Can we break in?"

"No, we can't. We'll just have to abandon the digger and go through the bubble."

"At least we can warn everyone in advance.” It wasn't much of a consolation, but it was all Wolverton had at the moment.

"Let's get out of here,” Nozaki said.

"Wait!” Wolverton grasped her by the crook of her arm.

Nozaki didn't appear to be willing to wait, but then she saw why Wolverton had stopped her.

"Oh, those guys,” she said.

A spider dropped into the corridor from above. It was followed by another, and another, and yet another. In moments, there were dozens of them filing past Nozaki and Wolverton, anchoring the spurs at the tips of their spindly legs in the hatchway's seam.

The spiders formed a circle around the hatch, clinging to the ceiling and the bulkheads as they tugged at the seam. It began to give, and they yanked it open with a loud clang.

Wolverton ducked his head to get inside. He saw a wide view of LGC-1's surface. Part of the horizon and the starfield were blocked by the advancing bubble.

The engineer stood at a console. He shouted and pointed a pistol at Wolverton.

Thunder sounded in Wolverton's ear as a bullet spanged off the metal hatch. Before the engineer could get off another shot, Wolverton tackled him.

Caught by surprise, the engineer dropped the pistol as they both tumbled over a chair. It clattered against the console.

Nozaki frantically worked a panel on the console while the two men fought.

"I don't know how to stop it!” she said.

"Then help me!"

The engineer punched Wolverton in the jaw, hard.

When he emerged from his daze, Wolverton was sprawled over the console. He saw that the engineer was on the floor. Nozaki stood over him, holding the pistol. Behind her, the bubble loomed.

But Nozaki was looking at something else.

"Wolverton!” She pointed at a hologram.

It was an image of the primordial black hole. The spiders ringed the electromagnets, their legs linking.

"They're going to cut off the current!” Wolverton shouted.

The spiders weren't here to help him. Their mission was to free the tidal forces, imploding the digger and everything near it.

"We've got to get out of here!” Nozaki cried.

"This way!” Wolverton took her by the hand and led her through the hatch. He loped into the corridor, dragging Nozaki behind him.

"No, Wolverton! Up there!” Nozaki pointed at a catwalk above the control center.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, come on!"

The digger veered wildly, almost knocking them off their feet.

"The reaction's starting!” Wolverton shouted.

They clutched handrails and made their way up a ladder and across the catwalk.

Pressure suits hung on the other side of a bulkhead.

"Put one of those on,” Nozaki said.

"But I...."

"Don't argue. The air tanks are untapped."

Wolverton got into a suit as quickly as he could. The floor shook underfoot, making it difficult, but Nozaki helped him. As soon as he was suited, he sealed the helmet lining, and a sweet nitrogen-oxygen mix flowed into his helmet.

"Ready?"

"Yes."

Nozaki slammed her palm against a jutting switch in the bulkhead. The roof opened, and they were flung out into space. The red corona of Gamma Crucis's hydrogen shell seared the landscape.

The arc of their flight was slow. They landed lightly on the asteroid's smooth surface and tumbled to a stop.

Wolverton got up and gave Nozaki a hand. They turned to see the digger quaking and lurching. The waspish ship rose from its back.

"He's getting away,” Wolverton said.

The digger buckled as the black hole pulled matter into itself. The ship rose into space, but not fast enough. Its progress was retarded, and then halted, and finally fatally reversed as it was drawn back toward the black hole.

The ship fell into the collapsing digger.

The digger imploded and shrank into nothing.

The warping of local space advanced rapidly toward Wolverton and Nozaki. The red landscape transformed before their eyes, shriveling as it was pulled toward the event horizon.

They ran for the bubble.

It was just ahead of them, but the tidal forces were expanding rapidly.

Wolverton held Nozaki's hand and ran for all he was worth. Despite his long legs, she kept up with him.

Darkness yawned in front of them.

More and more of the asteroid's surface was sucked into the event horizon, as if a rug were being pulled out from under this reality.

They leaped through the bubble.

On the other side now, they kept moving through the darkness, jumping ten or twelve meters with every step. At last they turned to stare at the tidal forces transmogrifying the bubble's parameters.

Wolverton put his arm around Nozaki's shoulders, encumbered by the bulky pressure suit. For the first time, he realized how small she was.

They waited for the end.

The bubble began to shrink, negated by the black hole's anisotropism. Its amorphous outline dwindled. It was consumed, reduced from a vast anomaly in the fabric of the continua to nonexistence.

Wolverton and Nozaki stood on the shadowed, barren surface of LGC-1.

"We made it,” Nozaki said.

Wolverton tried to catch his breath, but he found that he was sobbing.

Nozaki embraced him, her dark eyes sympathetic as she gazed up at him through her visor. “It's all right, Wolverton. I know how you feel."

But she didn't. How could he tell her that he was crying because he loved her? He was sure she'd never feel the same way about him. Now that they were back in their own reality, he felt alone again, even though Nozaki was right there beside him.

"We're going to have to take the long way around,” Nozaki said.

"Yes,” Wolverton said, regaining his composure, “to avoid the sunrise."

"Would you mind carrying this for a while?” Nozaki asked, handing him the portable field generator.

Wolverton was surprised by its lightness. “Jyoti's going to have fun with this."

"Won't she, though?"

They started back, jumping easily to sail over ground that hadn't existed for them just a few minutes earlier. Wolverton started to feel a little better.

"Will it come back?” he asked.

"The bubble?” Nozaki said. “I don't know."

"Maybe it's better if it doesn't. We don't want to get mixed up in a war."

"It may be too late for that, Wolverton."

"What do you mean?"

"We've taken sides, and I've seen enough of their militaristic society to know they won't forgive us. We better hope they never find their way here again, because I'm pretty sure they'll want to punish us for what we've done."

"But what choice did we have?"

"None,” Nozaki said. “I told them the digger would destroy our compound, but they wouldn't listen."

"And they're human?"

"All too human. They're descended from us."

Her comment gave Wolverton an idea he was afraid to voice.

"Things are going to be different when we get back, aren't they?” he asked.

"Yeah. For one thing, there will be two of you now."

"And three of you.” Wolverton recalled the sight of his body lying in state on the green planet. He still didn't understand how the consortium had known to bring him here, unless they had extracted information from his slumbering mind. In any case, they'd used him as a decoy so the spiders could do their work. He couldn't much blame them. His jaw was sore, but other than that things had worked out pretty well.

The flyby passed overhead, and they waved at it. They walked on, and after a little while a question occurred to Wolverton.

"Which one are you?” he asked. “Are you the one who left me behind?"

"Not this time,” she said.

"Nozaki,” Wolverton said, knowing that if he didn't say it now he never would. “I love you."

"Well, I love you, too, Wolverton,” she said, smiling. “After what we've been through, how could I not love you?"

Wolverton wasn't sure she meant it in quite the same way he did, but it would have to do for now. He was still thinking about what she'd said when the lights of base camp came into sight.

It was good to be home.

Michael Reaves says that this story happened exactly as he depicts it here, except for the parts that he made up.

I am a very lucky man. The reason for my saying this is obvious: I'm standing before you, accepting this award for Outstanding Alumnus. But the reason behind the reason is that I became what I wanted to be.

I'm lucky because, for as far back as I can remember, I've wanted to be a writer. Ever since I was a kid, five years old, sitting down in front of our new black-and-white TV to watch The Adventures of Superman. I was hooked the first time I saw George Reeves leap into the air and fly. Actually, he was lying on a board in front of a cyclorama screen with a wind machine blowing his hair and cape, but I didn't know that at the time, of course. I do remember wondering even back then, however, why he always leveled off at a cruising altitude of 30,000 feet even when he was just going a couple of city blocks away.

I'm not what you would call a mainstream writer. I have an unabashed preference for genre fiction—specifically, horror. And, like most horror writers, I've drawn most of my stories from childhood fears and experiences. I grew up in this town—you wouldn't think a place on the edge of the desert would be particularly spooky or atmospheric, but you'd be wrong. The desert can be a terrifying place.

If you'll indulge me, I'd like to tell you about one of those childhood experiences. Oddly enough, I've never written about it, or even spoken of it, before now. I'm not sure why. Perhaps my reasons will become clear—to me as well as you—during the telling. After all, good fiction is supposed to illuminate as well as entertain, isn't it?

I was seven years old, and this took place in 1955. It is probably impossible to convey to you all how totally different a time it was. It was, first and foremost, a much simpler time. You all have console games that tremble on the edge of virtual reality; we had Winky Dink. You have cell phones that can video and text and Twitter; we had party lines. And, of course, you have computers capable of processing gigabytes that you can hold in one hand, and we had UNIVAC.

But it wasn't just the technology that was simpler. It was a more trusting time. Back then, parents thought nothing of letting their kids roam all over the neighborhood, as long as they were home in time for dinner. Somehow or other, adults back then were much better at protecting the young from fearful realities. It's true that we were aware of those realities—ever hear of “duck and cover"? But kids were allowed to be kids back then. They weren't exposed to the rampant cynicism and smut that you all imbibed along with your baby food. Don't get me started.

It was spring, I remember, around the end of April or the beginning of May—you'd think that, considering what happened, the date would be burned into my memory. It had to have been a Saturday, because school wasn't out yet. I was playing with a couple of friends—Tom Harper and Malcolm James. We'd gone up into the hills a few blocks from my house to play cowboys and Indians. We were armed and ready for trouble.

When I say “armed,” I mean something different than what the word might connote today. I was carrying my trusty McRepeater Rifle, which made a very satisfactory bang when the wheel atop the stock was turned. Tom had a deadly Daisy 1101 Thunderbird, and in addition was packing twin cap pistols. And Malcolm...well, Malcolm was carrying his Johnny Eagle Magumba Big Game Rifle, which he'd insisted on bringing even though he had a perfectly good Fanner 50 cap gun back in his bedroom. Some people just won't get with the program.

We were hunting Indians, or, as we called them, “Injuns.” The term “political correctness,” let alone the concept, wasn't exactly widespread back then. It was the middle of the afternoon and, though it was early in the year, it was already hot enough to raise shimmers of heat waves from the dirt road. The hills were still green, but you could see that slowly the vegetation was dying. Another month, and brown would be the dominant color, announcing the beginning of the fire season.

For now, however, it was still pleasant, or as pleasant as those hills ever became. We were walking cautiously through the Badlands of our fantasy, alert for the slightest sound that might betray an Apache ambush. This was more difficult than it might seem, because every few minutes Malcolm would drop into a crouch and spin around, spraying the mesquite with imaginary bullets and going “Kachow!! Kachow!!” Tom Harper finally grew tired of this, and demanded to know how we were going to get the drop on the bad guys with Malcolm constantly announcing our presence to everyone in the county. To which Malcolm replied that it was only make believe, and that the most we might hope to flush from the underbrush was a rabbit or coyote.

We knew that, of course. We all knew that. It's important to keep this in mind.

"Knock it off,” Tom finally said, exasperated, “or I'll drop-kick your ass into next week."

That got the desired result. Tom Harper's right leg ended in a stump just above the knee—legacy of a car accident. He wore a prosthetic, a hinged contraption made of wood, metal and plastic, and when he ran, he used a sort of half-skip in his locomotion which the rest of us found very amusing. We were careful not to show it, however, because Tom could turn that half-skip into a devastating kick that could easily deliver the recipient as far up the calendar as Tom wanted. Malcolm said nothing more that in any way damaged the fantasy gemütlichkeit we had constructed. And again, it's important to remember that we knew what we were doing.

Malcolm was going on eight, with a seborrheic head of densely black hair and horn-rimmed glasses the exact same shade. He was built like a concentration camp inmate, all sharp, acute angles, with an Adam's apple that leapt about like the bouncing ball in a Fleischer sing-along cartoon. Not surprisingly, he had few friends. Tom had just turned eight; he was handsome, if somewhat bland in appearance, and looked like a future gridiron star—until he began to walk or run with that characteristic hitching limp. I remember once, when we were both younger and I was at his sixth birthday party, seeing his father's eyes fill with tears as he watched his son skip-run across the back yard.

We knew what we were doing. It was play, make-believe. Nothing more.

We were wandering along a dirt road, not far from the ranger station. The shadows were starting to grow longer, and the light more sanguine, as the sun neared the smoggy horizon. “We should maybe turn around,” Malcolm said. “We're gettin’ too near the cave."

There was no need to stipulate which cave. There was only one in the area—Arrowhead Cave, so named because of the dozens of chipped flint relics found there over the years. It was a tectonic cave, not one formed by gradual erosion. It had come into being thousands of years ago, when an earthquake had shattered a sandstone outcrop and deposited the fragments at the bottom of a ravine. Over the centuries talus and dirt had covered it, and eventually solidified into a roof. It hadn't been a particularly impressive cave, according to rumor, but it had served the local Indians well as shelter for centuries before the valley was settled. It was even less impressive now, after the tragedy of 1938, when four young boys—out, like us, for play—had become lost in the cave.

I never did learn the specifics of the story—when I was a child, the adults had been very tight-lipped about it, even almost two decades later. All I knew—all any kid knew—was that the four boys had died in Arrowhead Cave. A few days later the City Council, acting with an alacrity hard to believe for anyone familiar with local government, had authorized several construction workers to blow up the cave's entrance with dynamite, closing it for good.

Tom and I looked at each other after Malcolm's statement. Neither of us wanted to be thought cowardly. On the other hand, neither of us particularly wanted to get any closer to Arrowhead Cave, as it was supposedly haunted. There had been another minor temblor last week as well, and none of us relished the thought of being near the cave, or—worse—in it, should another quake hit.

As the three of us stood there, momentarily paralyzed by indecision, we—or I, at least—became aware of just how quiet it was. I know it's a cliché—I knew it even back then—to speak of an ominous, brooding silence holding dominion over the scene. How many times had I lain on the threadbare rug in our living room, chin cupped in my hands, staring at a black-and-white image of somebody wearing a pith helmet, standing in front of a sarcophagus and saying grimly, “It's quiet—too quiet"? Usually this particular trope was immediately followed by the hero being seized around the throat and throttled by an ancient hand wrapped in dry, dusty cerements.

Still, cliché or no, I could suddenly feel my heart pounding. The light had taken on a shimmering, glassine quality, and the air seemed dead. It was impossible to get a lungful, no matter how deeply I breathed. There was no nourishment to it.

It would be easy, I suppose, to speculate that we all passed through some sort of transition then—a portal to another reality, I guess you could call it. It's tempting to use such a device as an explanation of a sort for what we did next. But the truth, as it usually is, was much more banal. We did what we did because that's what kids did back then.

I started to say something, even though I was somehow convinced that the leaden air would not convey my words. Before I could try, however, a voice shouted, “Hands up!"

Now, this is the point. It was fantasy. Make-believe. And we knew that. But unless you can remember, really remember, those Bradbury days of childhood, the unspoken social norms that we all lived by then, the secret lives and inviolate rules that bound us as fully and completely as office politics and the laws of church and state circumscribed our parents’ lives—well, then I have no real hope of making you understand why we did what we did. It wasn't even something we thought about—we just did it. They had the drop on us, after all. They'd caught us, fair and square.

So, all three of us dropped our toy guns and reached for the sky.

"They” were four boys our age, armed with toy guns like ours. They'd come up on us from behind and nailed us good. The tallest one, a kid my age, was wearing bib overalls over a flannel shirt. There seemed to be something odd about his weapon—a carbine, with no manufacturer's stamp apparent—but it was obviously a toy. He gestured with the barrel, a peremptory jerk obviously intended to move us along, while the other three picked up our weapons.

"Let's go,” he said. “Shag it."

Arms still upraised, we stumbled along down the road, our captors herding us toward an unknown destination.

Even though these lads represented “the Enemy” (Apaches, space aliens, Nazis, gangsters, the heathen Chinee or a hundred and one other incarnations of Bad Guys), there was nothing in our childhood rules of engagement that prohibited discourse. Consequently, Malcolm attempted conversation. “Where d'you guys go to school?” he asked. “I haven't seen you around—"

"Quiet,” one of them, a tall fellow with hair as red as Malcolm's was black, and a face mottled with more freckles than the moon has craters, hissed. And yes, I know it's bad writing to use anything other than “said"—but you weren't there. Trust me; there was less humanity in that one word as spoken by him than there was in a snake's sibilance.

We marched on in silence. And I started to wonder just how they'd managed to catch us so thoroughly off-guard. We'd been standing on the crest of a small hill; if they'd come along the road from either direction we'd have seen them, and there was no way they could've climbed up the side, through the dry creosote, without making enough noise to wake the dead.

...to wake the dead... There are certain phrases that we use a thousand times without thinking, until one day you realize just how hideously appropriate they are.

We went around a bluff's shoulder, down a steep trail, and found ourselves in a high-walled ravine; almost a box canyon. A quarter of the way up the rear wall, at the top of a pile of talus, was what had once been the mouth of Arrowhead Cave. It was little more than a lacuna now, the dynamite having closed it off seventeen years ago. Two of our four captors urged us up the ten-foot slope.

"Hey, guys?” The nasal quality of Malcolm's voice was rising, a sure barometer of anxiety. “It's gettin’ dark—my dad'll hide me if I miss dinner—"

"Zip it,” one of them—short and rotund, with wire-rim specs—said. I got a good look at the clothes he was wearing as I passed him—knee pants and suspenders, a sweater and a flat, button-down cap. There was definitely something anachronistic about the apparel, but what really caught my eye was the toy gun he was brandishing. It was unlike any kids’ gun I'd ever seen, and after looking at it for a minute, I realized why. I didn't have the words to describe it at the time, but looking back on it, I realize it was made of stamped metal. It was black, with a red barrel, and on the butt was a stylized sketch of the Lone Ranger. A legend ran in curved script along the bottom of the image; I can't recall the exact phrase, but it was something about listening to Brace Beemer as the Lone Ranger, every Friday.

Why “listen"? Why not “watch"? And who was Brace Beemer? Everyone knew the Lone Ranger was played by Clayton Moore.

As big of a puzzle as that gun represented, however, the one held by the third boy was even more so. It, too, was made out of some material which I didn't immediately recognize. When I did realize what it was, it was enough to make me stop and stare, open-mouthed.

His gun was made of cardboard.

There was a slogan inscribed on the side of it, as well—I couldn't read all of it, because his hand partly obscured it. The part I could read proclaimed Geyser Flour to be “America's top self-rising flour!"

The boy saw me staring at his paper gun. “Shut yer bazoo, yegg,” he instructed me, raising the toy as he did so.

And a strange feeling possessed me; I suppose it made sense in light of later developments, but at the time it was as inexplicable as it was overwhelming. I was, abruptly and totally, terrified of that ridiculous cardboard gun. So terrified that I felt in danger of soiling my corduroys.

He reached out and put a hand on my shoulder, pushing me up the slope, and his hand was cold. I could feel it through the fabric of my T-shirt.

As we climbed the steep slope, I watched both of my comrades, and knew they'd come to the same conclusion I had about our captors. Tom's face was set in the utter blankness of denial, his gaze as uncomprehending as that of an abused animal. Malcolm's was a hundred and eighty degrees opposite, full of growing realization and horror.

By the time the three of us had clambered up into the shallow remnant of the cave's former entrance, Malcolm had lost it. He was sobbing, babbling incoherently, snot drooling from his nose. I wasn't doing much better myself, but I at least managed to keep a somewhat braver face on. Tom seemed outwardly calm also, but his face was the same sallow hue as that of his prosthetic's plastic skin.

We sat on the sandstone lip that hung above the declivity for what seemed like hours, but was in reality scarcely more than forty-five minutes; just long enough for the sun to disappear behind the western slope of the ravine. I watched our captors. I was only seven, and so I had no idea that all of them were dressed in Depression-era, poor white trash clothes, or that their toy weapons were relics of those same long-gone days. I only knew that there was something profoundly wrong about every aspect of them—even the way they moved, and sat, and talked amongst themselves.

I say they talked, but, even though I could clearly see them address each other; could even, until the light faded too much, see their lips moving, I heard nothing. It was deathly quiet in the ravine—even Malcolm's crying had, for a time, subsided—and I knew that sound rose with great clarity in still air. But it was like watching TV with the sound off.

"Gh-ghosts,” Malcolm blubbered. “Th-they're ghosts. They were kuh-killed in the cave—"

"Bullshit,” Tom muttered.

"—twenty years ago—"

"Stop it.” Tom's voice was level and icy, but it was thin ice, covering black depths of hysteria. He stood and faced Malcolm.

Malcolm stood as well. “You know it's true! You nuh-know it's—"

"Shut up."

"Shouldn't've let ‘em get us, should've run, now they're gonna—"

Tom hit him.

It was a short, hard jab, brought up from his waist into the pit of Malcolm's stomach, and it let the air out of him like a nail in a tire. He stared at Tom in utter shock, mouth gaping, making vaguely piscine sounds.

Then he turned, staggered toward the edge of the rocky shelf, and before either of us could try to stop him, he fell.

He rolled down the declivity a few feet before he managed to stop himself. Then he looked up, and Tom and I both heard his moan of terror when he saw the four boys—or whatever they were—surrounding him. His face had been scratched during his fall, and a red streak of blood stood out vividly against his chalk-white skin.

"Please,” I heard him say. “Please—I'm late for dinner—"

And they laughed.

I guess it was laughter, though it was the most mirthless, soulless sound I've ever heard. It was the sort of laughter something dead for a long time, long enough to completely forget any connection it had had with life, would make, if it were to somehow be amused.

They laughed, and they moved closer to him. Malcolm made a high, keening noise, a sound of utter despair.

Tom shouted, “You bastards! Leave him alone!” And he jumped off the ledge.

I don't know what he thought he could possibly do. I doubt he thought about it at all. He just went to Malcolm's rescue—or tried to. He might have been successful, somehow, if he'd had two good legs. I don't know if he forgot that one was artificial, or if he just didn't care.

It was a magnificent jump; it carried him to within five feet of them. He plowed into the loose stone and gravel, and his right leg buckled beneath him; he lost his balance and fell.

He struggled to stand, but before he could, the one with the cardboard gun looked up at him. He was grinning, and it might have just been a trick of the fading light, but for one awful instant it looked like the grin of a naked skull. He raised the gun and pointed it at Tom's chest.

And, softly, but somehow very clearly, I heard him say, “Bang."

That was all; just “Bang,” in a quiet voice. There was no puff of smoke, no recoil from the paper muzzle.

But Tom's back erupted in a spray of blood.

He fell backward.

I screamed.

All four heads swiveled up toward me. Their eyes were like spiders’ eyes: black and gleaming.

I knew that following Tom and Malcolm would only get me killed—or worse. There was only one other direction that I could go—back into the cave.

I'd seen before-and-after photos of Arrowhead Cave. The City Fathers had ordered it sealed off, and sealed off it had been, with a vengeance. What had been a dark, mysterious opening into the underworld had been reduced to a pile of rubble, leaving an overhang barely a yard deep.

But there was no place else to hide. I pressed against the unyielding stone, feeling a distant wetness as my bladder let go. I could hear them scrabbling up the slope after me. I turned frantically from side to side, seeking an impossible escape—

And saw, six inches above my head, a lateral crack in the rock.

It was barely wider than my body, and beyond it was unrelieved blackness, yet to me it looked like the gates of Heaven. I jumped, grabbed the flat sandstone lip, pulled myself up and into it, kicking and squirming. There was barely enough room for me to wriggle between the two slabs of rock; I had to breathe shallowly to do so. But I kept crawling.

To this day I've no idea how that providential escape route came to be there. Perhaps it had been overlooked after the blast; perhaps it had been deemed too small to worry about. Or perhaps that temblor we'd had a week earlier had had something to do with opening it. All I know is that, after a lifetime of frantic crawling, I saw light up ahead.

I redoubled my efforts, scooted forward—and felt a cold hand close around my ankle.

I didn't have the breath to scream—it came out as a thin, mewling cry. Whichever one of those things had me began dragging me relentlessly back, down into the darkness. I felt my fingernails splinter on the rock. I kicked back frantically with my free leg, felt my shoe strike what had to be the head of the one that had grabbed me. I gritted my teeth, drew my leg up, and kicked backward with every bit of strength I had left.

His head splintered. I felt his skull cave in. But his grip did not slacken.

Sobbing obscenities, I swung my free leg against my other one, as hard as I could. Among the injuries that would be counted up later was a hairline fracture of my ankle—but at the time I felt nothing but a fierce joy when that cold grip loosened for a moment.

I lunged forward, panting, and came to the end of the passage, so abruptly that I tumbled out before I could stop myself. I caught a brief, dizzying glimpse of a hillside below me, scrub bushes barely illuminated by the crepuscular twilight—then I fell. Pain exploded in my head like a roman candle, and I must have passed out.

My last thought before I lost consciousness was: They're still coming for me.

And now most of you are wondering a few different things, I imagine—such as, Why did he waste our time with this silliness? or, He's got quite an imagination, or even, Where are the men with white coats and butterfly nets?

For those of you who wish to know the end of the story—I wish I could tell you. There was front-page material in the local paper the day after that day in 1955, documenting the discovery of Tom Harper's body near Arrowhead Cave. No bullet or gun was ever found, but something very powerful had punched a hole clean through him.

They never found Malcolm.

Me they found at the bottom of the next ravine over from Arrowhead Cave. I had a concussion, and was in a coma for nearly two weeks. When I finally came out of it, I told everyone who asked—and many did, believe me—that I remembered nothing. Which was the truth. My recollection of the events of that long-ago day has come back to me piecemeal, during the course of many a long and sleepless night. I stopped seeing therapists after one diagnosed me with PTSD, and wondered why a writer with no military history was so afflicted.

I suppose it's possible that I imagined the whole thing, in an attempt to supply a story that fit the necessary particulars. If it hadn't been for the finding of Tom's body, I would have no reason not to assume that wasn't true. Which, of course, asks the question: What could possibly have happened that was so horrible that I might have made up such a story to normalize the reality?

In any event, I must admit lying to you at the start of my speech. I said I had always known that I wanted to be a writer. That's not strictly true; until I was seven years old, I had no idea what I wanted to be. But after that night, there was no doubt in my mind.

It's how I deal with it.

So, in conclusion, to those of you out there who know without question what you want to be when you grow up, I say congratulations—and be careful what you wish for.

Mr. Bowes has been working on an autobiographical novel currently titled Dust Devil: My Life in Speculative Fiction. His recent stories “If Angels Fight” and “I Needs Must Part, the Policeman Said,” are both slated for inclusion in this novel, as is this new tale of life and death in the East Village.

On a morning last October, I was reminded of the Velvet Underground song “New Age,” in the live version, the one where Lou Reed sings about getting a funny call today.

In fact I got two funny calls. The first came before ten a.m., early by my standards. Since I've retired I sleep late. Marty Simonson said hello and asked how I was. My friendship with Marty goes back to college. He's a director now, for the stage mostly. He got a Tony nomination a few years back for that play about Dorothy Parker.

Marty has, of course, an instinct for the dramatic tease. “An old friend of yours was talking about you last night,” he told me. “She's known you almost as long as I have.” Then a slight pause while I tried to imagine what he was talking about and he said, “Judy Finch says hello."

That was a surprise. It was long ago and very briefly that I'd thought of Judy Finch as a friend. We hadn't spoken since about the time she became the girl in the ménage at the center of that legendary early ‘70s catastrophe, the band Lord of Light.

I'd seen her since, of course, like anybody might: in the famous scene in the Scorsese film where she shoots DeNiro, as Pirate Jenny when they did Three Penny Opera at Lincoln Center. And there was the period when she took the name Judy Icon: hipper than Madonna, more famous than Patty Smith. She did stage shows, collages of memory and songs, all improvisational, never done the same way twice.

But it was in the East Village in the great late 1960s that I'd actually known Judy Finch. Her father was a well-known sculptor, her mother was a critic. She was nineteen, studying theater and hanging around Max's Kansas City.

My earliest memory of her is one afternoon when I was on a front stoop in the East Village with my close friend Joan Mata. This girl with long blonde hair walked by and said hello to Joan. Looking at Judy as we got introduced I first saw a nice schoolgirl, then a tough city kid, and then a young woman with a tinge of tragedy.

She sat and talked with us for a while. When she left, Joan told me the legend of Judy Finch and Ray Light. A few years before when Judy was fifteen, her boyfriend had been snatched off the street by private detectives who made a living returning runaways to the families that wanted to destroy them. They'd been apart ever since but she loved him still.

Forty-five years later, I asked Marty, “What's she doing these days? And how the hell are you and she so intimate?

"She's writing, composing, doing what we all do later in life—trying to make it all make sense. She's got a stage work in mind and I'm helping her shape it. We wondered if you were free for lunch today."

This promised to be kind of interesting. Then Marty made it more so by adding, “I told Judy about a piece you wrote a while back. You showed it to me just after Phillip Marcy died and that whole scene exploded. You know the one? Do you still have it?"

I told him I thought so.

"Could you bring it along? She was intrigued when I described it and I think this may be material she can use."

This was one of those mornings—maybe you've had them—when pressing dental bills meant that a couple of thousand dollars would not have gone amiss. I agreed to meet them at noon at Taxi Stand over on the Bowery.

It took a little searching but the piece Marty had mentioned was in a storage box in my closet. Down among the scribbled rejection notes from long forgotten editors, the abandoned projects, old notebooks full of catty commentary, aborted play and novel ideas, sketches for board games I'd once designed, letters from old lovers, I found it.

Typewritten on cheap yellow paper, it was an artifact from the early 1970s with attitude and run-on sentences to spare. In part it was personal memory and in part an insight I'd gotten directly from the mind of Judy Finch's old flame, Ray Light.

I sat on the stool in my kitchen, read the first couple of pages, and remembered how I'd taken my own experiences and woven into them Ray's insight about what had happened to him a year or two before it happened to me.

The Kid hasn't even been given that name yet as he stands on the corner of East 4th Street and the Bowery and tries to blink away the late-afternoon light because he's not used to it and because his eyes are a bit pinned.

Just a couple of weeks before, the Kid rode from Ohio to the city in several cars and a couple of trucks always with lone drivers, guys who sometimes just wanted to talk about themselves and their families and all he had to do was be there. Other times along the way things got done with his body and for that he managed not to be present, to take a mental walk and come back to himself when everything was over and he and the driver were once more rolling toward New York. That ability to go away was the thing about the Kid more even than his hair and his clothes, that his parents wanted to cut off of him.

In the city the Kid hit Times Square first and it was bright and confusing and scary and then some guy took him downtown to the East Village which was poor and rundown but easier to figure out and the cops were mean but not so thick on the ground as uptown and other runaways warned him about where not to go and who in the neighborhood got rewards or kicks turning in underage kids like him.

So the Kid sixteen years old stands on the corner leaning on a brick wall with one leg up behind him in classic pose and this mad boy who's taken the name Rimbaud is there with him, talking, making flowery gestures, saying, “Another place, another dimension or something is where that stud thinks he's going, man. That he thought I was the one who was going to take him there is what's so fucking funny and freaky. Like he's a cult leader but somehow he's trying to learn from me."

The Kid is coming to understand that it's drugs and hustling that keep boys like him and Rimbaud alive and in contact with this world and he feels still in control of all that. Because he has a kind of skill sometimes with a mark or a john to know what they know as they know it and without them being able to tell he's hip to them. But with all that he finds himself this afternoon out on the block early because he's slipped over some line and woke up just after noon with a nasty need.

Rimbaud says, “The stud is important in art stuff. He owns a gallery or something. He told me he could get me a job and he wants to see me tonight. But, like, he's the most weirded-out trick I've ever turned. One minute he's telling me to read his mind, the next he's ready to push me out a window and fly."

When Rimbaud's finished talking, the two of them pool their money to split a five-dollar bag of junk to hold themselves over until the night. Just as they're about to set out for East Seventh Street where they'll score, Rimbaud nudges the Kid and says, “There he is,” and the Kid sees the outline of a figure, a guy crossing the street silhouetted against the October sun streaming down the long blocks.

Then it was getting late and I skimmed the rest of the story. Thinking about it as I brushed my teeth and showered I understood both how it had never sold and how it would be of great interest to Judy if the project was what I suspected it was going to be. As I finished shaving, the phone rang again.

"Hey, Daddy Mack,” said a slightly raspy, somewhat nasal voice, “You know where your string is this morning?"

I'm old and not so fast on the uptake these days. I'd almost hung up before I realized I knew the voice and even recognized the reference. I said, “Lizard?"

He hung up and the number was blocked on my caller I.D. But that voice could only have belonged to Lizard Pavane. Thirty years ago, he and I designed board games together. Some sold and a couple of those did okay.

The game the Lizard referred to was called Mack Daddy Mack, and, yes, each player was a pimp, sending a string of sex workers out onto the urban streets. The game pieces were garishly colored wide-brimmed hats. The board was a city street map. It owed more than a bit to Monopoly. Players rolled dice, drew cards that brought rewards or the unwelcome attention of the cops.

When we'd worked on it, we were still dumb enough to think of ourselves as mad and bad and dangerous. No one could be persuaded to buy and produce it, which now seemed to me just as well.

But the uncanny nature of the Lizard struck me. After my not having thought of it for years, that game was one of the aborted projects I'd just pawed through in my search for the story.

I left my apartment wondering why he called and thinking of the more amazing coincidence that he and Judy Finch would reappear on the same day. I've become so addled that I didn't immediately realize this was no accident.

Walking east on Bleecker Street, stopping at a copy shop to get some clear reproductions of my fading pages, I thought about Judy on stage at the Fillmore, singing with the group Lord of Light.

The Fillmore East in 1971 was in the last months of its brief and glittery career. Rock groups were playing in sports arenas by then; the neighborhood was going very bad. Heading the bill that night was a frazzled hippy band whose last hit had been a year or two before. A canny old bluesman had second billing with Lord of Light as the opening act.

Little Judy Finch was Judy Light now. Her abducted boyfriend had returned and Ray Light was his name. The Dark Lord crown was in the street waiting to be picked up and he was one of the contenders. Rumors of suicides and intricate kink washed around the band.

But the Fillmore audience was tough. It took more than that to impress us. Joplin and Hendrix and Morrison had come and gone and left us with exaggerated memories of their performances here. Everyone in the group I was with was ripped out of his or her head. The Fillmore was maybe two-thirds full.

Then the psychedelic amoebas of Joshua Light Show filled the back screen, the drummer and bassist laid down the beat, the group was on stage. Ray Light wore black from the neck on down. Judy had a blonde crewcut. The guy called BD wore long white robes.

Our world was all afire with Lord of Light stories. Ray, Judy, and BD were almost openly an off-stage three way. It didn't come across on stage. Ray and Judy came together to harmonize then stepped apart. BD moved around the stage like a zombie while banging a tambourine.

Everyone in the East Village knew that BD had been one of the private cops who'd helped abduct Ray six or seven years before. Ray Light's father paid money to have his son forcibly brought home, then had the boy hospitalized and given shock treatment.

It was said the doctor who treated Ray had killed himself while Ray was in that hospital. His father had committed suicide not long after Ray's release.

"Revelation in a thousand volts,” Ray Light sang. “Blowing you to heaven,” sang Judy. The essential thing with a cult legend as opposed to a popular star is that in an audience of two thousand people, the star touches most of them but the cult legend can touch maybe a hundred. In Ray's case it may not even have been that many. But the touch, I can testify, was searing.

Those in the audience who were like me got caught in Ray Light's memory, passed with him through iron doors that were locked behind them, went down institutional hallways to a place where they were strapped to a table and had their brains blasted with electricity. When the song was over and I glanced around, I saw an audience just mildly grooving. But I noticed a couple of others besides me who looked more than a little disturbed.

After that, most of Lord of Light's set passed without anything similar happening and I was about to write off what I'd felt as what happens when you spend many long nights doing too many strange drugs.

Then they sang “Just a Boy without Wings,” a song where Ray Light yelled, “REACH ME, REACH ME, REACH ME OR DIE” and I was naked and handcuffed on a window ledge trying not to look at the pavement eight floors below while trying desperately to meld my mind with that of the man who stood behind me. The nightmare lasted until the music stopped and I was shaking and wet with sweat.

I realized that Ray and I shared at least one very bad experience. And that he could do what that nightmare man had tried to force me to do.

As the reverb from the stage died down, Marty, who was sitting next to me, shrugged and said, “I give it a nine because you can die to it.” The rest of our party laughed but I was still trying to get myself to breathe normally. That window ledge was a memory I'd taken some care to avoid.

Still thinking about that long-ago night at the Fillmore, I found myself on the Bowery in front of Taxi Stand. Maybe you remember the restaurant. It was briefly trendy a few years back just after it opened, up the street from CBGB's which was still in business then. Completely remodeled in aluminum and glass, Taxi Stand occupied a spot that had for decades been a blowsy all-night cafeteria favored by cab drivers, cops, and prostitutes both TV and female.

Wall murals of black and white photographs from the 1940s and ‘50s caught the Bowery by night: neon signs, parties from uptown slumming, drunks with ruined faces singing, fat women flashing their garters as they danced on bars, drunken college louts trying to be hip.

When I arrived right at noon the place was still almost empty. I saw Marty before he saw me and was amazed that a white-haired old guy like that was still off on artistic adventures. He's sixty-three. Six months younger than I am.

When Marty spotted my approach he said something to the woman with him. Judy Finch turned my way, smiled, and spoke my name. She looked good: mid-forties instead of very late fifties, ash blonde, no obvious work on her face. For an instant, I saw a flash of the honey-haired kid caught between boarding school and Max's Kansas City. She stared at me and I wondered if she was remembering that first encounter or was just trying to remember me.

"I can't believe it,” she said softly, saving her voice. “We precious few don't die easily.” She took a sip of the mimosa with which she was bringing the morning to a close. “Marty tells me that you've got some amazing material."

He had ordered iced tea, which meant he was keeping his head clear. I did the same and Marty told me about the show they were developing. “It will be a little bit like cabaret, a bit like those evenings Elaine Stritch did, and Bea Arthur. Great monster ladies of the American stage talk about breaking onto Broadway, sing a couple Sondheim songs, reminisce about Golden Girls on TV, then give you a few funny/painful glimpses of their lives."

"Their stage careers are kind of impressive,” said Judy. “But I pretty much got those old ladies beat when it comes to the life story aspect. Living with the Lord of Light who turned out to be the God of Death and with the guy who killed him; they can't top that.” She laughed at my startled expression and said, “Oh, yes, I'm going to talk about Ray and BD and the deaths."

"We're going to use a bunch of Ray Light songs that Judy did originally,” Marty told me. “There's a band in the show."

"Yeah, Ray's music has slipped out of peoples’ memories,” Judy said. “This maybe will bring it back."

"What she can't get is permission to use any kind of reference to Phillip Marcy—nothing he wrote, not a photo, nothing,” Marty said. “His family threatens to sue if his name is even used."

"They were afraid we were going to defile his memory. As if that would be possible,” said Judy. “We were kind of stuck. Then Marty asked if I remembered you. Like I ever forget anybody from back then in the East Village!"

Just the way she looked into my eyes and said that made me pretty certain that she had. The waiter came with my drink and took our orders.

"Can you show us what you have?” Marty asked. I brought out a copy of “The Kid with the Sun in His Eyes” and read aloud the opening section I'd looked over at home.

I finished and Judy said very quietly, “When I was fifteen, I used to walk Ray down to Fourth Street every night. He called the guy he lived with the Man. I never saw the Man. All I knew was that I hated him.” Then she asked me, “You have more?"

The waiter came with our food. I put the oyster po'boy I'd ordered aside and read:

At night East 4th Street becomes the off-Broadway Rialto and the Kid mixes with boys and girls on the corner of Second Avenue, the glassy-eyed drag queens smoking in the alley next to the Club 82 where guys in dresses talk dirty and sing lewd songs in falsetto for the benefit of middle-aged drunks in New York on business.

He slips in and out of the intermission crowds at Truck and Warehouse and La Mama, pokes his head into Phoebe's on the corner of the Bowery looking for a daddy for the night. And there in the smoke and amid the crowd of dealers and at-liberty actors and lead-poisoned painters and playwrights dying for a break, a guy comes up to him and says, “The Kid with the Sun in His Eyes."

For a moment the Kid is in the man's memory a thing that every once in a while happens with him, sees himself on the street that afternoon with Mad Rimbaud who has since disappeared and knows this is the guy Rimbaud was talking about. The guy starts buying him drinks, tells him his name, says that he has a gallery uptown and even seems like he thinks the Kid might be impressed. But the only things about this john that the Kid pays attention to are the money laid out on the bar and something he says. “You can read me, I felt you do it. I see you flying toward the rising sun with your eyes wide open and blind. And I'm tagging along.” The Kid understands what Rimbaud was saying about this being one crazy queen but he believes he can handle it.

Later with the crowd beginning to thin out the man says he knows the Kid is the one who is going to break through and he wants to find out tonight. By then the Kid's snorted enough junk in the men's room using the man's money that he's plucked off the bar and he isn't afraid of anything.

The Kid with the Sun in His Eyes can't remember the drinks and the junk, can't remember the ride in the creaking freight elevator or what had happened to all his clothes or when his hands got cuffed behind his back. “Close your eyes and see into me,” says a voice behind him. The Kid's bare feet are on a window sill. A huge window is open in front of him and eight floors down is the concrete sidewalk. The glimpse he briefly had into the mind of the one who'd brought him here is wavy and blurred. Reaching it now is like trying to see through a sun glare even though it's night outside and cold air is hitting him.

"Look at me,” he hears the man who stands right behind him say, but the man has a grip of iron and holds the Kid's head so the Kid can't turn to see him. “Look into me,” the man says. “You did this once this afternoon when I first saw you and you did it for a moment in the bar. And you will do it again. You will look into me,” he says. “I can teach you how but I want you to be able to do it better than I can. Once I had this boy. I found him on the street and brought him here and he could see with his eyes shut and could look into me but not at will, only off and on. I taught him in the same way I'm teaching you. And when he had almost reached the point where he could lead me, they took him away.” He talks some more and the Kid realizes he's going to be trapped here and tortured until he sees or dies.

Judy paused with a bit of salad on a fork but didn't put it in her mouth. “Let me read the whole manuscript,” she said. “This is fascinating. I feel like the boy he's talking about having taught is Ray. Something like this happened to you?"

I shrugged. “A little bit. When Ray sang that last weekend at the Fillmore I saw what had happened to him and knew he was the one Marcy had talked about. So I put that in the story."

"We both got a touch of Ray,” she said and looked at me like suddenly she did know who I was. “Was it after this you started writing science fiction?"

"I write fantasy,” I said, “and that began a lot later."

"I want to use this material,” she told Marty.

"We need to ask the lawyer but I think it will be fine.” Marty looked my way and smiled. “We'll work out a deal, and you'll get a writing credit and some kind of small percentage."

On my walk back home after lunch, I remembered that after the Lord of Light concert at the Fillmore, I hadn't wanted to hang around for the other acts. Instead I gave my friends the slip and went back to the Avenue A apartment where I was staying.

The neighborhood was going bad. Some blocks you took a deep breath before you walked them. A big part of the story of those years was kids coming to the city, curious or desperate, and getting swallowed up. Cults were working the streets. That night I remember women members of the Children of God were doing what they called, “fishy flirting,” soliciting guys for sex and maybe conversion.

That night I got home after midnight and none of the people I shared the place with was there. On the kitchen table was a paper opened and folded to a story that had taken place in that very neighborhood. “Art Expert Dead in Eight-Story Plunge,” was the headline. I recognized the face in the accompanying photo. I read some sketchy details of Phillip Marcy's death and a few facts about his career.

And I remembered the morning a couple of years before when I awoke and saw the big windows that still had “Haverford Business Forms,” a long-dead company, written on them in gold lettering.

The windows overlooked a neighborhood where almost nothing was more than eight stories tall. The morning sun flowed in and semi-blinded me. It created a halo around the figure that appeared. The night before, Phillip Marcy had picked me up at Phoebe's Bar across the street. Upstairs I'd found he was bigger and stronger and far scarier than I'd guessed. Even fear of falling eight stories onto the cement wasn't enough to make me able to link my mind with his.

The next morning when he approached, I tried to stand up and realized I was still handcuffed. He gestured and I rolled off the couch, walked in front of him to the door of his loft. On a stool were my clothes, nicely folded, and my boots lying on top of them. He pulled open the bar lock and the front door swung open. I cringed at the cold.

He picked up my clothes and tossed them into the hall, then he took a key out of his pocket and unlocked the cuffs. He put one hand on my shoulder and propelled me out the door. He tossed some wadded-up bills after me. Before I could even scramble into the clothes, the door slammed. And because I was very young and very stupid, I felt like a terrible failure.

I'd been a flop in Phillip Marcy's horrible world. Not the kind of boy he was looking for—one who fulfilled what I thought was about the deepest kink I'd ever been near. But the night of his death I had just heard Ray Light sing: “You found me in the Meld and hid me in your cage."

Remembering that and looking at the newspaper photo, I sat down at an ancient Underwood typewriter and wrote “The Kid with the Sun in His Eyes.” And forty years later, I was still kind of pleased with it.

One reason that I may be the last person in Manhattan without a cell phone is that I cherish the excitement of coming home and finding a call light flashing. It happened on my return that afternoon. The Lizard had left a message. Without ever identifying himself he said, “I have news that will bring a faint ray of light into your dreary existence,” and gave me a telephone number.

It took a few calls. The first couple of times I got busy signals. Then the receiver at the other end was picked up but all I heard was a woman yelling. She was too far from the phone for me to tell what she was saying. I knew this was the right number, though. Women were always yelling at the Lizard. And, in this case, I recognized the voice.

A few minutes later he called back. “I'm coming into the city immediately,” he said. “We need to get together.” He also told me the good news.

"There's an online site that wants to revive Biting the Apple, and is willing to pay for the privilege.” This was a board game he and I had produced almost thirty years ago for the brand-new humor magazine, Cheap Irony. That mag was supposed to meld the best parts of Saturday Night Live and The New Yorker. It had gone belly-up after a few issues.

"But we got paid,” the Lizard remarked. “We got a certain amount of attention that got us a few more game commissions. And they let the rights revert to us. No wonder the yutzes went broke. The people who are interested now think it's quaint, an historic artifact. By the way, do you happen to have a copy of the damn thing?"

It so happened I did and even knew where it was. Biting the Apple was one of the things I'd clawed my way past that morning while searching for my story.

"Splendid,” he said when I told him. “Rumors of your senile dementia are clearly exaggerated."

Then he gave me the address of a place where we'd meet in a few hours and hung up.

For the second time that day, I scrabbled in my storage bins, still marveling at the serendipity this day was showing.

When I found Biting the Apple I realized it had the same basic rules and design as Mack Daddy Mack but was about making it big in Manhattan circa 1980—finding a rent-controlled penthouse, producing a disco musical, making a fortune with a video game arcade, meeting Jackie Onassis, wearing a mullet, visiting Studio 54, The Saint, and Limelight. My head reeled.

Over the years the Lizard and I drifted in and out of each other's lives, close at times, not even speaking at others. Somehow we'd fallen into the racket of designing games for toy companies, for ad agencies that thought games were nice promotional tools, for people who hired us because they believed that we were so weird we must be creative and maybe even wise.

I remember an account executive looking at my partner askance and asking him, “What kind of name is Lizard Pavane, anyway?"

"An invented one,” he had replied, seemingly amazed that anyone could ask a question so idiotic. We designed a game in which one player got to commit a series of famous murders and the other tried to stop him, a game for a giant insurance company in which the players were all brokers trying to sell as many insurance plans to corporations as possible, a game for a lobbyist to play with members of the U.S. Congress to convince them to deregulate the railroads.

Demand had been hot for a little while and had then disappeared in a puff of smoke. I'd had a few other projects with Lizard Pavane after that, but we hadn't seen much of each other since he moved to New Jersey some years back.

My meeting with the Lizard took me across town to the East Village for the second time that day. It was the first neighborhood where I'd lived in the city and I'd seen it go from gritty, working-class Slavic, to mad hippy, to drug-raddled hellhole. Now the blocks I went down were tree-shaded and lined with gift shops, boutiques, small restaurants. The place I wanted was a little bar called Giga's Guillotine on 10th Street and Avenue C.

On my way, I thought about Lizard Pavane calling me on the same day Judy had reappeared in my life. The Lizard's connection with her had been a much more intimate and dramatic one than mine. We'd never talked about it but I'd heard plenty of stories, even seen it mentioned in a book or two. I debated telling him about what had happened that afternoon.

Only when I reached my destination did I understand there was little need to mention Judy and absolutely no chance that his reappearance in my life on the same day as hers was a coincidence.

Giga's Guillotine was someone's dream of a 1950s Paris bistro, all quirky and intimate with a parquet floor and Yves Montand playing on the sound system and not at all the Lizard's kind of place.

Ambience, though, was not why we were there. Seeing it, I realized that the site had once been occupied by Sid's, a place everyone called Ugly Sid's, a low-life bar that always managed to stay open until dawn. And it was in Ugly Sid's, the Sunday night after their Fillmore concert, that Ray Light had died with a knife in his gut.

The Lizard sat at a table sporting a crumpled yachting blazer, drinking an amber liquid that I assumed was Jack Daniels. A small suitcase and a grayish raincoat rested on the chair beside him. Long sleeves and a buttoned-up collar hid the iguana tattoos.

I hadn't seen him in five or six years. But really, at five foot four with his black eyes gleaming and his head freshly shaved, he looked not very different than he had thirty-five years before when I met him for the first time.

Now he saw me and rasped, “You look kind of the same too, except old and confused."

Since I don't drink, I ordered a seltzer. “Was that Nina I heard in the background on the phone?” I asked.

"She does have a distinctive shrill scream,” he said. “Doubtless your life is as cold and lifeless as ever so you're interested in mine. I'm in the midst of civil insurrection, domestic upheaval."

"Nina tossed you out?” Nina is the long-suffering but not infinitely suffering type. She has a management job with William Morris that bought the house they live in.

"If only she had! What a thrill to be picked up by a strong woman and physically tossed out a door! I would die happy. But she knows that's what I want so she never laid a hand on me: just screamed until I went away and no doubt is changing the locks even as I speak."

He looked at a table full of kids in their twenties and his lip curled. “Girls these days just have gym muscles. In my time there were women who did actual physical labor. Did you bring the game? Nina was whining because she couldn't win. She destroyed my copy after I won all three times we played."

"Is that what the argument was about, you insisted on winning a game you'd designed?” I didn't add, “Even at the risk of pissing off the woman who's supporting you?"

He looked surprised that I asked. “Of course,” he said and without pause added, “I think we can get another couple of thousand for updating the game, making it relevant for right now. Any ideas about how you win the rat race these days?"

"Having a blog that gets fifty thousand hits a day,” I said. “The ability to speak Mandarin plus two Chinese dialects,” I added. He looked bored. The game was the excuse, not the reason for my being here. Wondering what angle the Lizard was playing, I glanced around the room, trying to catch some trace of Ugly Sid's.

"Yes,” said the Lizard. “This tacky piece of faux whimsy sits on the very spot where very late one night Bruno Delmar, AKA BD, put a knife into Ray Light before going home and hanging himself."

"I once heard that while those things were happening Judy was with you at your loft,” I said. I hadn't known Lizard back then, but the story was part of his legend and gave him a bit of the aura of a great lover. The very fact that his looks made that so improbable was a sly twist to the tale.

Some of that must have been obvious on my face because the Lizard cackled and said, “You're thinking to yourself that a gay guy who looked like me would live and die alone. You don't understand. Girls may want to talk to pretty guys who make nice conversation. But they end up having to rely on guys who look like me.

"Judy came by my place. She seemed desperate and afraid, obviously wanting to stay with me. Who was I to refuse? The next day we found out what had happened. ‘She was with me all last night,’ was all I had to tell the cops when they came around. The guy and his girlfriend I shared the space with corroborated.

"At that point, the lawyers descended. Her parents both had money. All they were interested in was showing she had nothing to do with the murder, had no idea BD was going to do what he did. After a few weeks or so her family took her away somewhere to recover. That was practically the last I saw of Judy."

"Had you and she been together for long before that night?"

"We'd just met a couple of weeks before the Fillmore gig—Lord of Light was laying down tracks at Electric Ladyland. Bruno Delmar got Judy and me together at a party. I was already doing okay at that point; I had that reviewing gig at Rolling Stone. She and I dug each other as the saying went. Until the fateful night, though, we'd done nothing more than talk and exchange glances.

"BD, though, told her that if anything happened I was the one she could turn to. Bruno and I went way back. He trusted me. Maybe I was the only one he trusted."

"You knew BD?” This was a surprise.

"Bruno Delmar and I went all the way back to grade school together. We were the two smartest boys at Saint Martin de Tours in Carnasie. He liked to be called BD and when I first knew him was a really decent kid. Gallant, you know, stepping into fights and standing up for you if you were his friend.

"After that I went to Brooklyn Polytech, got a scholarship to Cornell. BD got caught in family problems. His mother was badly crazy and when his father died he had absolutely nowhere to live. He ended up in a halfway house and the army and we lost touch.

"A few years later I was back in the city after college, hanging around the East Village. And there was BD. He didn't say what he was doing and I didn't ask, that's the way we'd been brought up. But he was still the Bruno Delmar I'd gone to school with. Then one day his picture was in the underground papers. It turned out BD was a private eye working undercover to send runaways back to their families. He disappeared before I could speak to him."

"I first saw him back when he was working undercover,” I told Lizard. “A whole bunch of us including Judy Finch were at a loft party. She was dressed as a boy like she sometimes did back then. It was all very spacey: everyone ripped, incense burning, and the light was hundreds of candles. She pointed out this guy and told us he was the private cop that had once busted Ray. I remember that he was hot-looking and could easily have been one of us. I guess that was why his cover worked.

"Judy walked over and asked, ‘How's it going, BD?’ He gave a tight little smile but otherwise stayed straight-faced and said that wasn't his name. She just shook her head, took a matchbook out of her pocket, and said, ‘This is Ray Light's number. He talks about how much he wants to see you again. Don't be afraid. You need to call him.'

"As she turned in the flickering light and walked away, he stared after her like he was lost and in love. Not long after that he disappeared and almost immediately Judy was gone too. Later I found out they were part of a band."

"You're right about him being in love,” said Lizard. “Come on, I got to meet someone.” He threw money on the table, picked up his bag and coat, and headed out the door.

"The next time I saw Bruno Delmar he was with Lord of Light,” Lizard said. “He was in some kind of relationship with Ray Light and Judy. Right at that moment you couldn't be wingy enough to satisfy the fans.

"But he and I could still talk. The gallantry was still there. He obviously loved Judy even though she didn't much like him. It was what made him find a way of giving her protection, providing cover."

"Why did she need cover? He killed Ray Light in front of a dozen witnesses."

We went up gentrified Avenue C. Lizard Pavane now walked a bit slow and stiff-legged but something I remembered about him was still true. He hated to have anybody get in his way or walk faster than he did. Each time someone passed us, he'd kind of growl and make a move like he wanted to hit them with his bag.

"Idiot!” he said to me, “She knew Ray Light had killed people. And it's my guess that she wanted BD to off him before Ray did the same to her. BD made sure she had the alibi. And the way he did the deed took all the attention off her.” He looked at me hard and gave his cackling laugh. “You don't believe little Judy Finch could have arranged such a thing, do you? Boy, has she got you conned!"

We were on the corner of 14th Street when he stopped and said, “Thanks to Nina, I found out Judy's doing a memoir show and your old boyfriend is directing it."

"I only found out about that today,” I said.

The Lizard looked like he didn't believe me. I had brought a copy of my story. On an impulse I handed it to him and said, “She's interested in this thing I wrote years ago. On the same day that Marcy died and two days before BD and Ray did."

"I'll be in touch,” he said and stuffed it in his bag. Before he crossed the street and headed into the green lawns and neat brick apartment houses of Stuyvesant Town, the Lizard told me, “If Nina calls, you don't know where I am or where I went."

As I walked back to my place in the West Village, it seemed to me that I was always on the periphery of great events, never quite on the scene. I saw Ray Light and BD the evening of their last night alive, probably around the time Judy went to visit the Lizard.

They were getting into a van outside the house on the north side of Tompkins Park where the band was staying. BD had washed the makeup off his face and wore black coveralls. He looked like the guy I had seen at that party a couple years before. Ray had a red kepi cap pulled down over his face, his collar turned up and his hair in a ponytail. He didn't want to be recognized. But the pale skin and the dark eyes were unmistakable.

He glanced my way and for a moment I saw what he saw: dim lights and shadows in the park, a darkening street, a guy in derelict leather jacket and Frye boots who was a bit past being a kid and a little too battered by the street to be hip.

It took me a moment to recognize myself in another's eyes. I saw the wonder, lust, and envy that were on my face as I watched Ray Light. Then I felt his contempt. It lasted just a few seconds but in that moment I wanted to die.

BD put his hand on Light's shoulder and broke the connection before I saw any more. BD shook his head and gestured for me to move on.

Remembering the encounter all these years later, I wondered if he'd saved my life.

Nina called me later that night. We exchanged tentative greetings and remarked at how long it had been since we'd seen each other. Then she said. “Where's Lizard?"

"I don't know."

"He talked to you before he left. You agreed to meet at that idiotic Guillotine bar. There's someone he sees who lives in Stuyvesant Town. I need to know if he's staying with her."

"I couldn't tell you."

"You just did,” she said and hung up.

A few days later I sat in a small rehearsal space in the bowels of the Public Theater along with Marty listening to Judy talk about being a kid living on St. Mark's Place with her father the artist and her mother the critic; about becoming a teenager the year Kennedy was shot. The guy who would be music director of the show played guitar and Judy sang a snatch of Sam Cooke's “A Change Is Gonna Come."

She stood leaning on the back of a chair and said, “I was fifteen in nineteen-sixty-five and going to the Quaker School. A few blocks away from me another tale played itself out. An old friend of mine, who knows a bit about these things, wrote this version.” She told the story of “The Kid with the Sun in His Eyes” and ended with this section:

"The Man held the Kid's fingers to a lighted candle and told him, ‘I'm teaching you as the one who taught me did. He brought me to the point where I could meld with certain other minds and I can do that with you. He would have taught me more but he was taken from me. I will not leave you until you can go into every mind and meld with anyone.’”

Unless you've been writing for the theater for a long while and had it happen to you hundreds of times, I believe it's hard to resist when someone reads your words aloud. Also Judy understood this material, had the attitude and stance down. I liked the dumb vulnerability she projected. This section was my guess as to what had happened to Ray Light. We had talked it over and agreed that it felt right.

"At first the Man never let the Kid with the Sun in His Eyes out of his sight, kept him tethered and tied when he went out, got him off drugs cold turkey. The Kid could not just go away in his mind with the Man. The Man could go there and bring him back and Kid stopped fighting it because he was learning to get inside other peoples’ minds, not most of the time or with most people. But he could look down at the street below, look inside certain people and he wanted to learn how to do that with everyone.

"After the first night, the Man no longer suspended him in front of an open window to force him to communicate. After a couple of weeks, the Man trusted him enough that when he went off to work one morning, he gave the Kid a dollar, let him out on the street, and told him to be back at six o'clock. It was a test. And it worked. The Kid was fascinated enough that he did come back even though he hated the Man. Given how things were there was no hiding that."

Judy relaxed, lost the Kid's stance and speech and said in her own voice, “I met him on one of the first days he was out. I saw him on St. Mark's Place looking a little scared. He said his name was Ray, Ray Light. I found out later that it was actually Jonathan Duncan—too mundane for the life he wanted to lead in this city.

"Right then, out of nowhere and all in a rush, I knew just what he was feeling, I knew without our even talking that he was a runaway, that he was afraid of being spotted by someone who'd report him to the cops, that he lived with someone he thought of as the Man.

"At that same moment he knew everything about me. I thought that was what it was like to have a boyfriend. Raised by parents in the arts in this city in the 1960s and I was that naïve.

"We spent that afternoon together until he had to go back to the loft. After that he'd meet me when I got out of school; we'd get together on weekends when the Man let him out.

"We were like that for maybe two months. Then one day private detectives hired by his family snatched him off the street right in front of me. No other boyfriend was like him. I didn't see him again for another few years. But I thought of him every day."

Later she took a break and we all sat together drinking coffee. Marty had some notes that Judy glanced at and nodded. It was all kind of comfortable, reminding me of sitting on the front steps on St. Mark's Place so long ago.

Then she looked at me and said thoughtfully, “After a while, even with someone as big and great and wonderful and scary as Ray, one's memories become very set—like a series of old photos. Your piece gave him back to me in a strange way; let me see him from a new angle."

"And gets us around the Marcy problem,” said Marty.

"You know,” she said, “a few years after Ray and BD had gone, a very creepy old Englishman, into Satanism, a friend of Aleister Crowley, talked to me about Phillip Marcy.

As she spoke, she fell into an imitation of the man's speech. He sounded amused, sinister, a bit absurd, a bit chilling. “When young Phillip was in college, one of the professors was a man I knew with remarkable mind control and an ability to teach the skill to others, not always with the best intent, not always by the gentlest methods.

"Phillip Marcy fell completely under his spell. Then one day the teacher disappeared. He was never found. The police, of course, were useless. Dear Phillip had learned enough of the gift for it to obsess him but not enough to control it. He spent his days trying to learn, trying to teach. Again, it wasn't always by the gentlest methods. No great surprise when he met his end."

Then Marty asked, “So Ray Light really did have some kind of gift?"

"Yeah,” I told him. “I encountered Ray the last night he was alive. He looked at me and I saw myself through his eyes. It was like a knife going into me. I wanted to die but...."

I caught anger in Judy's eyes and shut up. I'd told her about being in Ray's head the night of the concert but hadn't even remembered that last meeting until my talk with Lizard Pavane.

Maybe she was angry that I'd seen her lover alive after she had or because she was afraid I'd seen a little too much. Most likely I was a minor irritant and she'd decided she'd gotten everything useful out of me.

What I'd been going to say was that if Ray Light showed that kind of contempt to a harmless fan boy who'd blundered into his path, what must Phillip Marcy have been shown? One look at himself as Ray Light saw him and Marcy would willingly have gone out the window where he'd tortured God knew how many.

"Thanks, buddy,” said the Lizard on the phone. “You gave the bloodhound just enough information so that she could track me down.” He said it sarcastically, but he was calling from home and really did sound like he was thanking me.

We talked a bit about updating the game. “Well, what do kids do when they come to the city, these days?” he wanted to know.

"Rent a thirty-five-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment with four other people and get a job in the Financial District,” I suggested. We were old and this particular spring of inspiration had run dry some while ago. “Obviously, if I ever had any idea of how to make it big in Manhattan I would have done so."

Then the Lizard got down to the real point of his call. “How's Judy's show going?"

"Really well. They let me see it again a couple of days ago. There's music. Judy can still sing. It's taking shape as a kind of cabaret. Next week is a run-through for friends in the business to start a little buzz.” I didn't mention that she no longer spoke to me.

He paused, then said. “I thought that story you wrote was a real acute guess about what Phillip Marcy did to Ray Light. Maybe a bit more than a guess?"

"Just a bit,” I said.

"You poor kid.” Lizard actually sounded sympathetic. “From what I remember BD telling me, Light had an obsession with the one he still called the Man. Whenever they were in New York, he'd try to approach Marcy because there was a lot he hadn't been taught. But the guy didn't want to see him."

I said, “Maybe Phillip Marcy heard rumors about various of Ray's enemies killing themselves and didn't want to join them."

"Ray wanted BD to get himself picked up by Marcy and then let Ray into the loft to join them. Bruno and Light were in some kind of deep, complicated relationship but Bruno didn't want to do that."

This reminded me of something I'd seen on East Fourth Street one night. I was cruising the block and noticed an androgynous kid. He was in the pose, one boot on the cement the other resting against the wall behind him, looking very familiar. I was half a block away before I realized it was Judy. Had Ray first made her try to hook the Man?

"Eventually BD did what Ray wanted,” I said to Lizard Pavane. “If he was as gallant as you say, seeing The Man go out the window must have bothered him a lot. Something I wonder is how could Light not read BD's mind that last night and know what he had planned?"

"From what Bruno told me, Ray Light would pick up a vision of the future or something from his head. It was part of what Light found so fascinating about him. Mostly, though, he had no idea what BD was thinking."

Lizard paused, then said, “Okay, I gave you all that, now tell me when the performance is."

So I told him and was quite curious as to why he wanted to know.

Judy sat on a low stage and spoke. “When Ray and I got together again it was five years after he was taken away from me. Nineteen-seventy was a much different world from 1965, dark and full of fear. If you don't understand that change you didn't live through that time in this place."

"An informal workshop,” was what they called this. It was held on a Monday night in a rehearsal space at the Public Theater. “Nothing was absolutely clear in that world,” she said. “When Ray Light came back to me, he brought with him BD, Bruno Delmar, the one who had helped snatch Ray off the street. Everyone thought of him as a monster, a pig. We'd chased him out of the neighborhood. He and Ray now were lovers.

"I became part of that and we started playing together.” She sang the old Lord of Light song, “Just a Boy without Wings.” It was a quiet song now, not scary as much as a little lost and sad.

The quartet on the stage had worked with her before and was tight and a bit jazz inflected.

Marty was happy. The show had word-of-mouth to spare. Old theater friends of Judy's, people from various production companies, someone from a foundation that did arts funding and a couple of documentary film producers, seventy or eighty in all, sat on folding chairs.

One chair with a Reserved William Morris sign was empty. I remembered that Nina worked there and kept my eye on it.

"Oh, there were rumors,” said Judy, “stories that various people who had given Ray trouble—a psychiatrist, his father—had died by their own hand. But that kind of legend surrounded a lot of bands and a lot of personalities in those days. And there were lots of moments when the three of us, Ray, and BD, and me, were one."

She tuned the guitar and said, “This is something I started many years ago and finished just recently.” The song's lyrics were all about the night of the murder/suicide. It had the lines:

The one who loved me and the one I loved

Went out one night and never returned.

When she finished, I looked over and Lizard was sitting in the empty chair I'd noticed earlier. He stared at Judy and, as the crowd applauded, he stood up and took a couple of steps toward the stage. She noticed him immediately and paused where she was.

"BD did more than love you. He saved your life and left you free to live it,” Lizard Pavane said.

People in the audience were giving each other, “Is this part of the show?” glances. Marty, who was sitting next to me, was on his feet. Judy's guitarist looked like someone who'd handled a few drunken customers in his performing career. He started to get up.

Judy looked right at Lizard. She gestured for the others to sit down. “One night I guess BD decided to liberate himself and me and especially Ray from a trap we'd fallen into, a kind of magic that had gone very bad. But before he did that, he put me in the care of a friend of his, this wonderful man right here."

She came down off the stage, reached out, touched Lizard's cheek, and for a moment became the desperate twenty-one-year-old who'd come to his door begging for help.

Judy spoke to him quietly for a moment. Lizard seemed mesmerized. Then she sat him down, climbed back onstage and sang a hard, driving version of the Ray Light song “Revelation in a Thousand Volts.” It was a select audience but, even given that, the applause was intense.

The last part of the show dealing with the thirty-nine years of Judy's life since that famous night seemed more than a little anticlimactic. The next time I looked his way, Lizard was gone.

"If we could just get him to stand up and do that every night,” Marty muttered at the finale.

After the performance was over and she'd thanked the audience and the band, Judy turned to Marty and said, “Get me contact information for Pavane.” She never looked my way at all.

It was a few days later that I got a call from Marty. “Lots of interest in this show,” he said. “The immediate word is we're doing weekend cabaret at Joe's Pub for the month of February with the intention of moving maybe to the Public, maybe to Broadway. Everyone liked the first part and we're going to make the whole piece just about the Ray Light years. You'll get a contract sometime before we open. You have my personal guarantee that it won't be generous."

I thanked him. Later that same day, Lizard Pavane called me. “They still want Biting the Apple and they'll pay, maybe, two grand for it. But they got a couple of kids to do the modern-day equivalent. I think they believe we're a little stale."

"No argument there,” I said.

There was a pause. “I've been talking a lot with Judy,” he told me. “About BD. She says I've given her access to him, made her think about him and remember him in ways she hadn't. We're getting together again this afternoon. It almost feels like old times."

"Nina won't be happy."

"Nina will have to learn to get over it."

I wanted to tell him that he had been right about Judy. She had wanted Ray killed and got BD to do it for love. How did she murder someone who could read her mind? Instinct requires no thought and an artist is quicker than a snake.

I could also have told Lizard that the minute she got what she needed from him for her show, he'd be dropped cold.

But Lizard was having fun and the past is magic at our point in life. I'd had my ration of magic and now he was getting his. So I said it all sounded good and to keep me informed.

Mostly, I've learned not to let people cross me up. And I sit waiting for the phone to ring.

Ramsey Shehadeh splits his time between writing software and writing stories. His fiction has appeared recently in Weird Tales and Strange Horizons. His blog at www.doodleplex.com includes recent posts about Cthulhu fortune cookies and a hypothetical job interview by the 2008 Republican candidate for Vice-President.

The commission came to Door, as so many of these commissions do, in a dream. But not his own dream. Door was a chair, an invisible chair, and thus a very practical creature, more concerned with the workaday challenges of everyday chairhood than the frippery of somnambulant phantasm. No: the dream belonged to his master, the ancient and decrepit wizard Epidapheles, who had an accidental talent for extroverted dreaming. Nearly every night, Door was hauled unceremoniously out of sleep by the id-parade of Epidapheles's dreams, marching noisily out of his head and into the world.

Usually, the actors in these dreams consisted of buxom women in various levels of clad, ranging from scantily to un-, whose happiness depended exclusively and entirely on their ability to please the old wizard. There were times, however, when Epidapheles's external dreamscape intersected with another of his accidental talents—clairvoyance—and Door found himself witness to events in far-flung lands. It was in this way that he stumbled onto the affair of the insufficiently affectionate ocelot.

The scene: an opulent throne room, in a beautiful palace, in a verdant and happy kingdom. The players: a handsome king, a wise old advisor, a beautiful queen, an ocelot. The mood: grim. The king sat slumped in his throne, his handsome features sagging under the weight of a great sorrow, staring disconsolately at the ocelot that lay curled up on a plush lavender cushion at his feet.

All of which was superimposed in ghostly splendor on the fetid sewer in which Door and his master were passing the night. They were in the process of fleeing from an angry group of mercenaries, whose prized siege engine Epidapheles had transformed into a cheese-making device, rather than—as the commission had specified—a “hellish apparatus of agony-infused death."

The wizard slept uneasily throughout the dream, no doubt discomfited by the absence of his usual retinue of harlots. Door, however, watched, transfixed.

"My lord,” said the dream's wise old adviser. “She is simply fatigued. Or perhaps ill. I am sure that her present disposition is in no way a reflection of her regard for You."

"But it's not true, Victor,” said the king. “Kitty doesn't love me. That's all there is to it.” He placed his hand over his forehead. Presently, his shoulders began to shake, and a small, mewling, sobbing sound emanated from his Person.

The court, as one, looked tactfully at its shoes.

The adviser exchanged a quick, furtive glance with the queen, then cleared his throat. “Perhaps,” he said, “it would be best to send Kitty to the Kingdom of Drameter. The Animal Trainers of Drameter are renowned for their..."

The king surged off of his throne and strode to the edge of the dais, his umber cape billowing fetchingly behind him, and glared at his adviser. “Can you train someone to love you, Victor? Is love a skill to be imposed? Is it a talent to be acquired, Victor? Is that what it is?"

"No, my lord."

"Love is a feeling. It is a state of mind. It is a part of one's soul, Victor. It is sui generis. Do you not understand this?"

"I do, my lord."

"And yet you continually bombard me with experts who purport to have the skill to turn Kitty's heart into an organ that beats with affection instead of cold indifference. Why do you do this, Victor?"

"Because I wish for your happiness, my lord."

"Only one being in this whole world holds the key to my happiness, Victor!” cried the king. He whirled and ran back to his throne and fell to his knees before the ocelot's cushion. “Why do you not love me, Kitty? In what way am I not worthy of your affections? You need only tell me, and I will fell mountains, ford oceans, conquer kingdoms to ameliorate my failings! Tell me, Kitty! Tell me!"

The queen was shielding her eyes with her hand now, and her shoulders were shaking. But the sounds emanating from her Person were not sorrowful, exactly. They seemed, in fact, to share many qualities with helpless laughter.

The king raised his arms to the heavens, and cried: “I beseech thee, oh ye gods! Deliver me from this sorrow! Is there no one in all the wide world who can help me?"

At this point, Epidapheles, who had been snoring steadily, drew most of a passing cloud of sewer flies into his mouth and woke, spluttering and coughing. The scene vanished.

He sat up, and looked around blearily, until his eyes fell on Door. “Your master is hungry,” he said.

"Then he might consider turning the raw sewage that surrounds him into cheese,” said Door. “Cheese-focused magic apparently being one of his talents."

"They didn't specify how they wanted their silly device to produce carnage,” said Epidapheles, grumpily. “Do you have any idea what bad cheese does to your digestion? Do you remember that rotten brie I had in Shalindar last year? I spent a week on the chamber pot. I thought I was going to crap my lungs out."

"It wasn't brie, old man, as I told you then. Brie isn't brackish, it isn't skull-and-crossbones shaped, and it doesn't emanate miasmatic black smoke. Go back to sleep."

But Epidapheles had already begun to nod off. Presently, he was snoring again. A moment later, a large, mostly naked woman dressed in smaller, completely naked women stepped out of his head and began to wax breathless, coquettish approval.

Door sighed.

They emerged from the sewer a week later, to the dismay of all passersby with the misfortune of possessing noses, and resumed their flight, albeit at a more leisurely pace. Within the hour, they were out of the city and on the road, heading in a direction that seemed least likely to contain enraged mercenaries.

Epidapheles yawned, and scratched idly at the area of his robes he called the Naughties. “Ocelot?” he said.

Door nodded. Nodding was difficult for him, as he had no head with which to nod. He managed it by bending his back forward, slightly, and waggling his slats. It was a subtle, inscrutable gesture, accessible to only the most observant, and Epidapheles was observant in exactly the same way that a lamppost was melancholy: which is to say, not at all.

Not that it mattered. Door could have set himself on fire and run around in circles, screaming, and it wouldn't have made much difference. Epidapheles was Musing, and once musing did not have conversations so much as conduct monologues in the general direction of whoever happened to be standing nearby.

"Ocelot,” said Epidapheles, again. “Is it a kind of Damsel?"

"No,” said Door. “It's a kind of cat."

"Perhaps a Damsel from the Duchy of Ocelot."

"It's a spotted, nocturnal wildcat. It spends a lot of time in trees."

"I have heard tales of the fabled beauty of the women of Ocelot. The fair hair. The limpid azure eyes."

"There is no Duchy of Ocelot. It's not a damsel."

"And, as you know, saving Damsels from Peril is one of my many talents."

"You've never saved a damsel, or anything, from peril."

"It seems to me that any Damsel beholden to a sovereign who wishes to render her more Affectionate is, by definition, a Damsel in Peril."

Door sighed. Again, a difficult act for a chair, but one he'd perfected over many years of service to Epidapheles. “It's not a damsel."

"I will accept the commission!” cried Epidapheles. “Let us fly, fly, to the Duchy of Ocelot and deliver this poor hapless maiden from the clutches of the evil, lecherous vizier who has enslaved her!"

He lifted his robes and proceeded down the road in the glacial, lurching gait that passed, in the lexicon of Epidapheles, for running. He was going the wrong way, of course, but Door knew from long experience that there was no sense in pointing this out. The old wizard would soon collapse from exhaustion, a state in which he was slightly more susceptible to reason.

Door sighed, and turned the wrong way down the road.

One of the difficulties of being a chair—especially an invisible chair tethered by magical bonds to a decrepit old wizard—is that it is more or less impossible to ask for directions. Only the drunk and the insane react well to conversations with invisible furniture, and these people can hardly be relied on. So the responsibility fell upon Epidapheles's narrow, slumped shoulders, where it seemed extremely ill at ease.

"You wish for me,” said the old man, “to ask that merchant where I can find a kingdom whose regent has been incapacitated by his love for an ocelot?"

"Well, don't say it like that,” said Door. “You need to dress it up a little."

Epidapheles mused. “I should phrase it in a way that sounds less ridiculous."

"Yes, exactly."

"While still maintaining the sense of the question."

"Right."

"Is this ‘ocelot,’ then, a veiled reference to Lady Ocelot?"

Door sighed. “Yes,” he said.

"A cleverly encoded query, then, designed to deflect attention from our true Purpose."

"Yes, fine."

Epiapheles mused. “Why don't I just divine the location of this regent, and be done with it?"

Door shuddered. The last time Epidapheles had attempted to cast his divining spell, his eyebrows had come to life and, with tiny squeals of joy, leapt off his face and onto a passing Lady's—where they murdered her own delicate, carefully plucked eyebrows, cast them aside, and attached themselves to her porcelain forehead. Her husband—the Lord of Crags Hill, a man known locally as Lord Kill-Murder—was not pleased, and neither was his ogre army.

There were no ogre armies around at the moment, but Door had no doubt that the old man could blunder into summoning one, if no closer dangers were available. He sighed. Sometimes he dreamt of a world where chairs could be sentient without attaching themselves to hapless conjurers. It was a pleasant dream: he was free, he was independent, and he did useful things that weren't in any way insane or suicidal.

"Because,” he said, shaking off his reverie, “that would be a waste of your talents. Why would a man who can raise mountains bother with a sideshow magician's parlor tricks?"

"Ah yes, good point,” said Epidapheles, puffing up a bit. “I could just bring his paltry little kingdom to me."

"And mention a queen with raven hair,” said Door, quickly. “That might help."

Epidapheles nodded, and strode up to the fruit merchant, who was glaring at a dusty urchin. The urchin was loitering beside the cantaloupes, ostentatiously not stealing anything.

"Merchant!” said Epidapheles. “Do you know who I am?"

The merchant glanced at him, frowned, then turned his attention back to the urchin. “Why would I know who you are?"

"Ah, yes,” said Epidapheles. “I often forget about the profound ignorance of the common people. Suffice it to say that I am your Better.” He cleared his throat. “I will soon be asking you a Question. The fact that I, a great Wizard of wide repute, am asking a question of you, an inconsequential Laborer of no repute whatsoever, should not in any way be construed as a bridge across the vast social chasm that separates us."

Door sighed, and looked at the urchin, whose thin tissue of innocent nonchalance seemed to be fraying.

"You will now tell me,” said Epidapheles, “where I can find a king whose...” He faltered here, and Door could almost hear the grindings of his memory seizing up. “...whose raven has...” He faltered again, and crinkled his forehead. “...whose raven has stopped oscillating,” he said, weakly.

Door sidled up to the boy. “Hello,” he said. “You can't see me."

The boy started and looked around, panicked. “God?"

"No,” said Door. “Not at all."

"Oh good.” The boy seemed relieved. “Mommy says if God ever catches me I'm in big trouble."

"No, not God. Do you know anything about a king who has an unhealthy obsession with his ocelot?"

The boy's eyes narrowed. “Maybe."

"I need to know which king that is."

The boy tried to narrow his eyes a bit more, but there wasn't much narrowing room left, so he just closed them. “Maybe,” he said again.

"Look, I'll help you with your cantaloupe problem if you tell me who it is."

He opened his eyes. “Really?"

"Really."

"It's King Treacle. In the Kingdom of Uther.” He pointed vaguely northward. “That way."

"Good,” said Door. “Run along, then."

"Thank you, sir.” He hesitated. “If God catches me, can I say you made me do it?"

"Yes, fine."

"Thank you, sir,” he said, again, then snatched a cantaloupe, ducked under the merchant's beefy arms, and ran.

The merchant roared, lunged at the boy, and then tripped over Door, who'd quickly interposed himself between the fruit stand and the fleeing urchin. The merchant sprawled forward, onto the street, like a meaty, hirsute starfish.

"Merchant!” said Epidapheles, to the merchant's back. “Answer my question at once! Where is the ravenous, ossified king that I seek?"

"Okay,” said Door, tapping the back of the wizard's knees. “We can go now."

"But...."

"I think you must have divined his location, by mistake. It just popped into my head."

"Ah,” said the wizard, and smiled. “I told you."

"You did,” said Door. The merchant had by now struggled to his feet, and was regarding Epidapheles with an expression that mingled all the best parts of enraged and homicidal. “We really should go now."

They went.

The road to the Kingdom of Uther winds through the Barony of Kranz, the Plains of Smelted Terror, and the Forest of Very Small Trees. A journey of a month under normal circumstances, it took them six, mostly because of a time rift that Epidapheles inadvertently opened while in the midst of a particularly violent sneeze. It thrust them five months into the future, to the same intersection, of the same road, near the same copse of threadbare trees—surrounded, however, by a large mob of goblins, which was markedly different from the no mob of goblins that had been surrounding them before.

Luckily, the rift belched one more time and transported them backward a few hours, to a moonlit version of the same intersection, beside a sleeping mob of goblins—which was much better, from their perspective, than the awake kind, and also easier to tiptoe past.

The point at which the road touched the border of the Kingdom of Uther was flanked by two large statues: a handsome young man statue, wearing a crown, holding the hand of a lovely young woman statue, also crowned. Their joined arms formed an arch that stretched over the road, their clasped hands its keystone. A stone ocelot sat at the feet of the king, looking up at its master with feline adoration.

Also flanking the road were mobs.

The mob on the left—the queen's side—were in the midst of burning an ocelot, in effigy. They were dressed entirely in orange, and seemed to be chanting anti-ocelot slogans. Though it was hard to make out the exact words, because the mob on the other side of the road—dressed entirely in red—had taken up their own chant, which seemed to be vaguely pro-ocelot.

"Should we Flee?” said Epidapheles.

"No, they're not mad at us. Yet.” Door watched the queen's side. The ocelot-effigy was mostly cinders now, and the orange protesters had taken up a new chant: “Our Queen is our King! Our Queen is our King! God save the Quing!"

The king's mob shook their fists, and launched into their own new chant—something about the wisdom and handsomeness and uprightness and mellifluousness and crossword puzzle prowess of the king—but the chant contained far too many laudable attributes for something as simple-minded as a mob to remember, and their delivery was half-hearted and unconvincing. Eventually, they gave up on it and charged across the road, weapons brandished. A great deal of bludgeoning followed, and then some stabbing, a little beheading, and a really shocking amount of eviscerating. The road grew slick with blood.

"What are they fighting about?” said Epidapheles.

"I doubt they know any more. Mobs tend to forget why they're mobs, so they can concentrate on being mobs.” Door pondered the carnage. “But I suspect there's a power struggle going on. We might be too late."

Epidapheles nodded, sagely. He said: “Too late to save the Damsel."

"I think the damsel is doing pretty well for herself. What needs saving here is the kingdom."

They waited until everyone was finished being killed, then stepped gingerly over the carcasses and continued on their way. The moon had risen by now, and it bathed the ghastly scene in an eerie white glow, corpses piled like dark hillocks, leaking areas of deeper darkness onto the road: puddles of shadow, or blood, or both.

"We should pick a side, I suppose,” said Door.

"We should pick both sides,” said Epidapheles.

Door looked at him. “You know, I think that's maybe the first useful thing you've ever said."

The old wizard bristled. “I can only assume that you have forgotten my disquisition on the Six Magical Methods of Colon Cleansing."

Door shuddered. “I've tried,” he said. “Believe me."

The old wizard's genius for insincerity proved quite useful on their journey to the capital. They encountered several more mobs, all of whom—though momentarily confused by the red and orange motley with which Epidapheles had garbed himself—quickly warmed to the old man, after he launched into the appropriate scabrous indictment.

"That shrieking harridan, that pustulant, frigid harpy, has from the beginning of her supposed ‘marriage’ to our glorious Regent fixed her eyes on the throne!” he said, to an angry group of red-clad ocelot enthusiasts. “She turned Kitty against her Master, knowing it would sink Him into the Gloom that imperils our kingdom!"

The king's mob seemed quite pleased with this. They embraced the old man and moved on, cheering and waggling their weapons about.

"That impotent simpleton, that ineffectual, incompetent half-wit, has from the beginning of his ‘reign’ brought nothing but shame and ignominy to the throne!” said Epidapheles, ten minutes later, to an angry group of orange-clad ocelot immolators. “He has put aside the welfare of the kingdom to moon over the affections of a glorified house cat!"

More cheering and weapon waggling. The queen's mob embraced Epidapheles and moved on.

"You really are very good at this,” said Door.

"It is one of the many things I am good at, yes,” said Epidapheles.

"How do you do it?"

"The enemies of Success,” said the old wizard, stopping in the road, with one arm outstretched and one foot forward, in his standard bloviation stance, “are Sincerity, Belief, and Commitment. They are the bars of the prison in which much Greatness has languished, and died. I have the courage to eschew these things."

"Courage,” said Door, eyeing an approaching flock of vultures.

"Look at these rubes we just encountered. They suffer from all three Qualities, and will likely die for their troubles. But even if they do not, the best outcome they can hope for is Disappointment."

"Another way to look at it,” said Door, “is that they're worthwhile qualities, misused.” The vultures were circling above them now, cawing cantankerously. “What if these were, say, ravening mobs of orphan-feeders?"

"Orphans,” said Epidapheles, curling his lip. “Filthy, contemptible creatures. One wonders how their parents live with themselves. But I take your point, and it is a silly, worthless point. Yes, it would be nice if people bent their Finer Feelings toward Worthwhile Endeavors. It would also be nice if I shat golden ingots and sneezed harlots. Some things Cannot Be, and it is pointless to base your ethos on the hope that they will."

A few of the vultures broke off and spiraled down toward them, their great wings spread out across the sky's invisible avenues. Door watched them descend, and alarm began to creep up all four of his legs, and pool in the bowl of his seat. “We should run,” he said.

Epidapheles peered ahead, and then twisted around and looked behind, and saw nothing but dusty road. “Why?"

"Up, old man. Up."

Epidapheles looked up. “These are vultures."

"Yes."

"Vultures feed on carrion. We are not carrion."

"Have you gotten a whiff of yourself lately?"

Epidapheles bristled. “My magic is filth-based, as you know, sir."

"Look closer."

He looked. “They appear to have something in their claws.” He looked again. “Sword-like somethings."

"Not sword-like."

"Why do they have swords?"

Door sighed. “This is old news. Vultures figured out a while ago that it doesn't make much sense to wait around for dead things to show up. They just make their own now."

"That seems Unlikely.” Epidapheles drew himself up. “But, to be safe, I will transform them into badgers."

"No!” said Door, but it was too late. The wizard drew out his wand, and pointed it at the descending vultures, and cried “Transformus Badgerus!” A great ochre bubble blurped out of the tip of his wand and floated up to the descending vultures, enveloping them.

There was a blinding flash of light.

When it subsided, the sky was roofed in vultures, thousands upon thousands of vultures, enough to blot out the sun. They all had two swords now, and pistols grasped in their beaks, and an army of goblin skirmishers poised on their backs. Also, it was hailing lava.

"How do you do it?” said Door, dodging sizzling, fist-sized balls of fire. “Seriously, how do you make everything worse?"

The old man seemed dazed. He mumbled something about the inscrutable ways of magic, then turned and ran.

Door went after him, crashed into the back of his knees, scooped him up, tilted up onto his back legs, and ran down the road, pursued by a screaming vulture goblin army, dodging arrows and pistolfire, putting out the little conflagrations that kept springing up all over his body.

This was, oddly enough, not the worst day he'd ever had.

The king sat on the grass, running his fingers through Kitty's fur.

"And then,” he said, “we can go for a walk in my Royal Daffodil Pasture and dance and sing songs,” he said. “Doesn't that sound fun?"

The ocelot cracked open an eye and regarded him balefully, and then contemptuously, and then wearily. It went back to sleep.

"Oh, Kitty!” wailed the king.

The Kingsguard, who'd formed a circle around the Royal Picnic, coughed and studied the tips of their halberds.

The queen lay reclined in the shade of her canopy, some distance away, watching. When the king began to sob again, she shook her head and turned to Victor, the Royal Advisor, and said: “Can we just kill him already?"

"That would be unwise, M'lady,” said Victor. “His death would tear the kingdom apart. And it would certainly put You in great peril. Not all of the people recognize Your many virtues."

"Well then, Victor, you need to do a better job of manufacturing them, don't you?"

He bowed. “Forgive me, M'lady."

"Oh shut up. Gods, I can't even tell a joke around here without getting the bowing and scraping treatment.” She accepted a grape, and chewed it, loudly. “What if it's an accident? He could fall in a well while he's bucketing up water for his filthy hellcat."

"Even if it were a real accident, M'lady, all the blame would almost certainly redound to Your person. I believe that it is in Your interest to keep him alive, at all costs."

"Gods.” She shook her head, again. “I can't believe I actually married that nitwit."

"It is not my place to say, of course, M'lady,” said Victor. “But His Highness did cut quite a dashing figure before the advent of his ocelot. I remind you that he single-handedly vanquished the band of goblins that ambushed Your party on Your first journey to this kingdom."

"That was a different man, Victor. He was a killing machine. Dumb as a rock, but I've never seen anyone better at righteous slaughter. And he was a genius in bed."

Victor averted his eyes. “Yes, M'Lady."

"But I barely recognize that thing.” She waved a hand at the king, who had turned onto his back now, and was bawling at the sky. “You know what he told me last night?"

"I would not presume—"

"He said he wished he could turn himself into the thing's bed, so that he could spend all night snuggling with it.” She grabbed the grapes out of her Royal Grape Dispenser's hand, and began to rocket them into her mouth, rapidfire, one after the other. “I almost strangled him right there. Just to put him out of his misery."

"Perhaps if Kitty were to suffer an unfortunate accident, M'lady? The king would be devastated, of course, but after a period of mourning may return to his former self."

"Believe me, I've thought about it. The problem is he'd just throw himself off a bridge. Which I wouldn't mind, of course, except the mob would probably throw me in after him.” She discarded her denuded grapevine and looked around for more. “Sometimes I dream about a world where you can run a kingdom without having to attach yourself to idiot man-children.” She sighed. “It's a nice dream. I'm free, I'm independent, and I can do rational things without disguising them as bloodthirsty adolescent war fantasies."

Victor didn't respond. His eyes were fixed on a point over her shoulder, and growing steadily wider. She turned and followed his gaze to a thick blanket of vultures in the distance. The vultures were overtopped with goblins, and undergirded by what appeared to be a lavastorm. All of which was making its way steadily toward the capital city, with a tiny gray speck scurrying down the road at its vanguard. She squinted. The speck appeared to be an old man, in dirty white robes, floating just above the ground, tilted slightly backward, with his legs stuck straight out ahead of him.

"Well,” she said. “You don't see that every day."

"I have never seen its like,” said Victor. He turned to the king, who was performing an elaborate jig for the sleeping ocelot's benefit. “My Lord! An enemy approaches!"

"Oh, be quiet, Victor. I'm dancing."

A detachment of vultures broke off from the main horde and sped toward them. “But My Lord! It is a foe the size and strength of which we have never...."

The king executed a tidy little pirouette, jumped high in the air, and then landed in the splits, with his arms held out to his sides. “Tada!” he cried.

The ocelot opened its eyes. It yawned, rose slowly to its feet, turned a couple of circles, then settled down again, with its back to him. It fell asleep.

"Okay, Kitty!” cried the King. “You—” But before he could continue, a vulture streaked over his head and grabbed the ocelot in its claws and tore it neatly in half. One of the goblin riders reached down and took one of the halves and began to eat, noisily. The other pointed its sword at the king and roared something menacing.

The vulture rose into the air, wheeled, paused at the apex of its ascent, and then came streaking down again.

"My Lord!” cried Victor.

The king stood agape, looking at the bloody patch of grass that bore, still, the imprint of his ocelot. “Kitty,” he whispered. He looked at the approaching vulture, and its cargo of goblins, and said: “Kitty.” The lead goblin raised its sword, and bellowed, and the king screamed, “KITTY!” and ducked under the sweep of the sword, and grabbed the vulture's long neck, and swung it around, and smashed it onto the ground, dislodging the goblins. One of them tried to struggle to its feet, but the king tore off its head, and bludgeoned the other goblin to death with it. Then he jumped onto the dazed vulture's back, and pulled up on its reigns. “Fly, Filthy Creature! Turn your Blighted and Evil life, at last, to the service of Good!"

The vulture flapped its wings, and rose off the ground—a little uncertainly, perhaps.

"Victor!” boomed the king. “Gather my armies! The Griffin Warriors! The Amazon Archers! The Mastodon Skirmishers! The Fire Hurlers! The battle is joined, Victor! We go to war, Victor!” And then he rose into the sky, with his sword held high, and sped toward the onrushing army.

Presently, it began to rain blood, and feathers, and bits of goblin.

The queen smiled. “That's more like it,” she said.

"You can stop cowering now, old man,” said Door. “It's over."

Epidapheles bristled. “I'm not cowering, servant,” he said. “I'm tying my shoelaces."

"Really? You've been tying them for a while."

"They are Difficult shoelaces."

"And you're not wearing shoes."

"Exactly.” Epidapheles poked his head out of the shrubbery. The ground around them was thick with the mutilated remains of goblins and vultures. The sky was clear, though, and the sounds of celebration wafted over from behind the walls of the capital.

Epidapheles stood, and brushed himself off. “It seems that Victory has been attained."

"Apparently."

"Then we can continue with our Quest,” he said. “Lady Ocelot may live yet."

Door sighed, and then started. A woman with long raven tresses, dressed in velvet finery, and a crown, stood not far away, surrounded by a retinue of guards. He nudged Epidapheles. “Queen at eight o'clock,” he said.

Epidapheles looked dyspeptically over his shoulder, then drew himself up, and stuck out his chest, and dropped to one knee. “Lady Ocelot!” he said. “I have come to deliver you from your vile oppressor. Your salvation is nigh!"

The queen frowned. “Are you the son of a bitch that brought a goblin army to my doorstep?” she said.

Door stiffened. “Deny it,” he whispered.

"Indeed I did!” said Epidapheles. “Conjured out of nothing, no less, in a matter of seconds! And that is the least of my Powers."

The soldiers around her drew their swords.

"Idiot,” said Door. “Sit down. We need to flee again."

"Give me one reason,” said the queen, “why my men shouldn't slaughter you."

The old man hesitated, and the first inklings of disquiet appeared on his face. “Because,” he said, and faltered. You could see, for a brief instant, in the wizard's expression, a moment of existential confusion, the mind questioning its own worth, reaching out into the void for some semblance of Purpose. “Because you might stain your gown?"

The queen grimaced. “You're a deeply stupid man, aren't you?” she said. “But you're also the answer to my prayers.” She gestured, and a guard brought forward a mule, laden with heavy saddlebags. She reached into one of them, and brought forth a handful of golden coins. “So, a token of my appreciation, which you almost certainly don't deserve."

Epidapheles's eyes widened. “Lady Ocelot,” he breathed.

"Okay, first of all, stop calling me that,” said the queen. “Second, take your mule and get the hell out of here, before I change my mind."

"Yes, M'Lady.” Epidapheles took the reins, and turned, and hurried down the road, toward the capital.

The queen watched him go. “Does he know he's going the wrong way?"

It was a few moments before Door realized that she was talking to him. He said: “You can see me?"

"No,” she said. “But I saw the idiot talking to you. You're his familiar?"

"Yes,” said Door.

"Magically bound?"

"Yes."

"But desperately don't want to be."

"Yes."

"I'm sorry to hear that.” She turned toward his voice. “We have wizards in the palace. The non-halfwit kind. They can probably break your bond."

Door hesitated. “The thing is,” he said, “I'm a chair. If they did that, I'd go back to being nothing but a chair, just sort of waiting around for people to sit on me.” Door paused. “I'm sorry. I don't mean to seem ungrateful."

"No, I understand,” said the queen. “Being chained to that moron is better than being free and powerless."

"Yes, just barely,” said Door. “And who knows? He might change."

The queen watched the old man totter down the road. “But probably not."

"Definitely not, actually."

She laughed, though there was a hint of sadness in it. “We have a lot in common, I think."

Door hesitated. He said: “Would you like to sit for a while?"

The queen smiled, and nodded. “That would be nice."

Door maneuvered himself behind her, and she eased herself down, slowly, and rearranged her skirts.

"You're not incredibly comfortable,” she said.

"Bits of me were on fire not too long ago."

"I was on fire last year,” said the queen. “My idiot husband likes to play with his flamethrowers in bed."

And so they sat and talked, well into the night. At some point in their conversation, long after the moon had risen over the trees, Door realized that the perpetual crush of anxiety to which he'd become accustomed was gone. In its place he discovered something very much like contentment.

He smiled. It wasn't quite the best evening he'd ever had. But it was close.

A federal judge yesterday sentenced Bodnar to write the story of how he came to give false information to the feds about Bristol's 2006 efforts to delay generic competition for its blood thinner Plavix.

"I would like to see you write a book [so other people] don't find themselves in a similar situation,” the judge told Bodnar, Bloomberg News reports. “Who knows, it may even be inspirational."

—"Judge's Sentence for Former Bristol-Myers Exec: Write a Book,” Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2009.

The massive steel door to the Big House slammed behind me, and I knew my days as a free man were over—at least for the length of my prison stretch, which measured one novel and an essay for McSweeney's.

I was a writer now, and had to live like one. More an animal fighting for survival than a human being.

I knew I was entering a circumscribed, constrained, harsh subculture, with its own peculiar rules and customs. From the rumors I'd heard, the writer's life was lonely, frustrating, insulting, and physically demanding, leading in most cases straight to a broken-hearted pauper's early grave. Of course, sometimes, with luck and talent, the outcome involved the bestseller list, Hollywood options and talk-show adulation. Still, even with that potential good fortune, nobody I personally knew ever chose to be a writer these days, so being one must suck. Fate, or bad genes, or desperation, or folly, or an accident of birth, or local Unemployment Offices forced the job description upon you.

Or, like me, you could become a writer just for wising off to a touchy judge.

How I wished I could relive differently that moment when I stood before the bench on the charge of tattooing an underaged client. Facing old Judge Titcomb, I was confident of walking away with no more than a fine. So when he asked me if there were any mitigating circumstances to my offense, I said, “Yeah, it was the same flash I used on your wife, so I thought it'd be okay for your daughter."

Amidst the laughter of the courtroom spectators, Judge Titcomb turned nine shades of red and purple, and then uttered his sentence in a voice of doom.

"You are hereby remanded to the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, for such time as is necessary for you to produce one contemporary, naturalistic novel whose theme reflects the moral squalor of the tattooing industry and the unfortunate plight of those it preys upon, along with an essay of no less than three thousand words detailing the process of creation of said novel, in a manner both autobiographically illuminating and pedagogically sound. Pursuant to last year's Penal Authors Enforcement Act, there is no appeal to this sentence. Bailiff, take the prisoner away!"

Now, as the warden of FCI Otisville stepped forward to greet me, I shook my head at my folly. Too late for a do-over, though. I'd just have to tough it out.

The warden, a gentle-looking professor-type with thick eyeglasses, introduced himself. “Hello there, Johnny, I'm Warden Kinoff Dubbledade. I understand you're with us here until we get a novel and an essay out of you. Well, your time here can go fast, or it can really pile up. It all depends on how many salable words you crank out per day. We've got experts on the staff who determine that. They're tough but fair. Heck, they'll even offer you good advice if you get stuck, or can't see how to fix a passage. Most of them are straight out of Ivy League grad-level creative writing programs. You play straight with them, and they'll do likewise. Email them your output no later than five p.m. each day, and make sure it's been spell-checked. Now, let's get you processed."

The guards carried mean-looking truncheons. (Later I learned they were shaped like National Book Award, Hugo, and Orange Prize statuettes.) They brought me to a dispensary where I surrendered all my outside possessions and received my bedding, my prison outfit, and my laptop. Then the guards and I headed for my cell, through a seemingly endless succession of locked portals.

Who would I be bunking with? So much rested on the answer to that question. Some hard-nosed vet, and I figured I'd become his servant, amanuensis and “muse.” Some new fish like myself, and I'd have no protection, no one to show me the ropes.

But my luck, bad till now, took a turn for the better. I ended up with Harold Flournoy, midlister, a burly guy in his forties, I guessed. He sported a tat on one forearm—good work. It was a red wheelbarrow with the legend make it new below it.

Sharing a cell with Harry proved to be the best thing that could have happened to me. He was savvy enough to know the ropes, and not too jaded or burnt-out to share his experience with me.

Harry rolled my name over in his mouth for publicity resonance. “Johnny Bittiker, not bad. Fits your subject matter pretty well. Wouldn't work for a romance novel, say, but just fine for what you're up for. No need for you to use a pen name. Now, let's run through your laptop's software. I assume you know Word. You probably won't need Final Draft, unless you want to do a screenplay on spec. You'll have to pick your browser—"

"We get web access?"

"Sure, we've got to do research, don't we, and email our first drafts? The only WiFi deadspot in the whole prison is the warden's office, of all places! Now, let's get some formatting templates in place for you...."

Pretty soon the call to lunch came. I was a little nervous at mixing with the general population, and looked to Harry for comfort.

"Are there any real bad guys here, Harry? Murderers and drug dealers, say?"

"Murderers! Kid, you should've been assigned to write a comic novel! Why, there aren't more than a hundred murderers in the whole U.S. prison system. Not since they perfected Aggressonil and Reflectival. As for drug dealers, legalization did away with prison sentences for all of them. Users too, of course. Where you been living, Johnny, under a rock?"

"Well, I get all my news from the TMZ redaction of Twitter...."

"Jeez, you iBabies are too much! Anyhow, no one but us writers here in Otisville. In fact, ninety percent of the penal population these days is writers. We're the only thing keeping the system solvent. Lots of us show up for voluntary commitment, and pay to play. It's just like Georges Simenon hiding himself away in a hotel room until he pumped out another Maigret. Or when the studio bosses locked up Dylan Thomas with a bottle of whiskey so he could finish a script."

I didn't recognize either of those names, but I kept my face blank and didn't let on. I could see I had a lot to learn.

"Anyway,” Harry continued, “we've got the perfect environment for writing here. No petty distractions, no duties, no family!"

All of a sudden I noticed something. “Hey, there's women here too!"

"What, are you claiming women can't write? Oh, I see, the sex angle. Well, there's no love affairs to preoccupy you either, whether you're straight or gay, thanks to the Lustoblox in the diet. So the whole scene is perfect for scribbling. We call it ‘Yaddo with razorwire.’ Now c'mon, let's get some grub. It's Friday, so they're serving the same smoked salmon you get at Sebastian Junger's Half King Bar in New York!"

That first meal went swell. Harry and I sat at a table that included a best-selling mystery writer, a Pulitizer-prize-winning poet, a memoirist, a self-help author, and a retired general. Once they found out I was a newbie, they practically fell all over themselves giving me friendly advice. That's when I realized all the bad things I had heard about writers and writing was really just a ruse, to conceal the sweet racket they had going for themselves.

That first night in prison I had the best sleep I had enjoyed in ages—no mindless partying till all hours of the early morning like I used to—and the next day I got up refreshed and ready to write.

I won't bore you with the tale of the next thirteen months. If you're interested, you can read all about it in my McSweeney's essay. But I will say that when a certain visiting day rolled around and my new agent showed up on the other side of the bulletproof glass and told me over the speakerphone that my novel had been accepted by GoogleBooks for a big advance, I knew right away that I'd be coming back to Otisville every other year, once each national book tour for the current project was done.

The feds have a special bargain offer for recidivists, and the royalty rates are much higher.

Ben Rosenbaum collaborated recently with Ethan Ham and others on Tumbarumba, a conceptual artwork in the form of a Firefox browser extension. You can find it online at www.turbulence.org/Works/tumbarumba/.
"The Frog Comrade,” as you might guess from the title, puts a new spin on a classic fairy tale.

Once there was a princess who lived in a small apartment and could never leave. She lived with her mother and her older sister, and a guard to keep them there. Her father, the former king, had been taken away to a camp in the highlands, to work very hard and learn about the new system. Her mother cried almost every day.

Her older sister had ringlets of black hair and flashing eyes, and knew what was best for everyone. She convinced the guard to bring her things that were hard to find, like oranges and chocolate. She would share a little with her sister and keep the rest for herself.

The younger princess had plain brown hair and ordinary eyes and did not even know what was best for herself. She sat with her mother, reading fairy tales and trying to make her smile.

One fine day when the younger princess was twelve years old, her father returned from the highlands, thin, and hobbling, and very happy to be home. The former queen leapt from the sofa, crying tears of joy. The old king and the old queen embraced, and from then on those two, at least, lived happily until they died.

When they were eating dinner and the guard had gone out of the room to smoke, the princesses’ father said, “My girls, I have brought you two gifts from an old witch in the highlands, who for some reason liked it better when I was king. One is a hat which makes whoever wears it invisible. The other is a frog that talks. Who is to have which gift?"

The older daughter said, “Is this the kind of frog that, when you kiss it, it turns into a handsome prince?"

"I believe it is that kind,” said the former king, “though I have never tried it out. However, you should recall that being a prince is no great thing nowadays, and perhaps dangerous."

"I am no prince!” said an angry voice from the old king's pocket.

"I will take the hat,” said the older daughter.

The old king looked to the younger daughter, who could not decide what she wanted, but to make them all happy, she said, “I would love a frog. Thank you, Father."

The father gave the hat to the older sister and the frog to the younger. The frog was cool to the touch, and a fine bright shade of green. It stared solemnly at the younger sister, and she felt a flutter in her heart.

They heard the guard's boots on the stairs.

The older sister cried, “Goodbye, dear Mother and Father! Goodbye, dear Sister! I am off to make my way in the world!” and before the eyes of the astonished guard, she put on the hat and disappeared. She rushed through the open door, down the stairs, and into the street.

The younger princess hid her frog.

Later, when the younger princess was sitting by the window, missing her sister, wishing she could go outside and play, she took the frog out of her pocket. “Do you want me to kiss you?” she whispered.

"Certainly not,” said the frog. “Kissing is romance, and romance is just the kind of silliness the new system has gotten rid of. Romance makes people think princes and princesses are better than everyone else, and distracts us from working to make everyone healthier and happier. I am against kissing."

Instead, every day, when the guard was outside smoking, the princess would take the frog from her pocket and talk to it. Often she read it fairy tales, which it said were full of foolishness and wrong ideas.

Letters arrived from the older sister, who had escaped to a country where everyone could say just what they wanted, although no one listened to anyone else, and where everyone was rich, except for those who were not. She had tried to become a supermodel, but she had found she could not hold still for very long. So she had become a gossip columnist, aided by her magic hat. Despite the black blotches of the censor's pen, they could tell that she was living a reasonably happy life, full of excitement.

On the eve of the younger daughter's sixteenth birthday, the guard came to tell them he was leaving. “There has been another revolution,” he said. “More walls and statues have been pulled down. Kings and queens and princesses are no longer dangerous. Now they are ordinary, and now it is the job of everyone to get rich. You do not need me to watch you anymore, so I am off to make my way in the world.” He left the apartment and went down the stairs, leaving all the doors open.

For the first time in many years, the young princess and her parents crept outside, quiet as thieves. They went straight to the park, where they caressed the leaves, the bark, the stones, and the benches like lovers, or like blind people memorizing shapes.

The princess brought her magic frog to her first day of school, eager to show the other students. They laughed at her, calling: “Princess, princess, kiss your magic frog!” When the frog chastised them, they angrily accused her of ventriloquism. The princess ran away, red with shame.

"They are fools,” said the frog as they sat on a bench in the park. “It is not your fault that you are a princess with a head full of romantic nonsense. Instead of working together humbly to educate you and setting you a good example of diligent labor for the common good, they used you for their own amusement! Cruelty and selfishness must not be tolerated in the new system."

"Frog!” cried the princess. “What are you talking about? The new system is gone! It has failed! Didn't you hear the teachers?"

"The new system is not gone from my heart,” said the frog. “And the new system did not fail. We failed the new system. We got rid of princes, but then some of our comrades set themselves up as princes instead. This misled the people."

"Frog,” said the princess, “I never liked the new system. It locked my family up in an apartment! It sent my father to work until he was thin and hobbling!"

So they argued, and so the princess forgot for a while how the other students had laughed at her.

From then on, the princess avoided the other children. After school, she and the frog went to the movies. From the movies, it seemed that the job of everyone after the second revolution was not only to get rich, but also to kiss a great deal and even to take their clothes off all the time. The princess and her frog argued about this, as they argued about everything. The princess did not know what to think, but arguing with the frog made her feel closer to knowing what she thought.

Soon it was time for the princess to go to university. Her parents took her to the train. “So you are off to make your way in the world,” said her mother. The princess nodded nervously.

At university, she kept her frog always hidden in her handbag. No one laughed at her, and they invited her to parties. Soon she met a man who seemed like a prince, or perhaps a knight. He was very tall and strong and smiled in a way that made the princess warm. He told her to come back to his apartment, and she went with him.

Once she was in his apartment, he locked the door and began to kiss her. “Stop, stop,” said the princess, but the man only laughed.

At this, the frog hopped out of the princess's handbag and cleared its throat. “I would listen to the witch, young man, if I were you,” it said. “You don't want to end up like me."

The young man was so frightened at this that he jumped out the window and ran away down the street. The princess and her frog went back to the park.

"You were right!” cried the princess. “Kissing is horrible. You are right to be against kissing."

"No, no,” said the frog. “That man was a hooligan! Between two comrades who are considerate and honest with each other, kissing can be pleasant and healthy. Kissing is not wrong. It is only making kissing so important, more important than work or the needs of the people, which is wrong."

"Oh,” said the princess. “Does this mean you do want me to kiss you, so you can stop being a frog?"

"No, no!” cried the frog. “You are a princess who has read too many fairy tales and I am a frog, so for the two of us to kiss would be precisely the kind of thing I am against...which leads to foolishness.” It looked away from her eyes, studying its webbed feet. “Anyway...it is not important whether I am a frog or not. Perhaps I can serve the needs of the people better as a frog."

The princess was relieved, but somehow also disappointed. She imagined kissing the cool green mouth of the frog, a flash of light, its rubbery lips turning warm and human beneath hers. It did not seem pleasant and healthy. It seemed strange and eerie, and very exciting.

The princess stopped going to parties. She did well at her studies, but she had no friends. She had a small room in the university town, with a narrow bed, and she slept hugging bundles of letters from home.

A young man named Mark always argued with her in class. One day, after class, he followed her home, waving his hands with the intensity of argument, occasionally walking into bushes or mailboxes. “The new system was cold and sterile! It banned love!” he cried, and fell into a cellar stairwell.

Mark did not look like a knight or a prince. He looked more like a stable boy, with thick glasses. The princess invited him up to her apartment for tea.

As the princess poured the tea, Mark said, “And after all, it is obvious that the so-called ‘new system’ failed because it could not compete!"

The frog could stand to hear no more. It leapt out of the princess's handbag and onto the table. “Not compete?” said the frog. “Not compete at what? It competed just fine at feeding the hungry, and healing the sick! It competed just fine at giving everyone a job and a purpose, and keeping the streets safe at night! What did it fail to compete at? Making fast cars and movies about kissing?"

"Who is this?” said Mark.

The princess turned pale. Would Mark laugh at her, and shout, Princess, princess, kiss your frog? Would he jump out the window? “It is my frog,” she whispered.

"Nice to meet you,” said Mark. “But surely you see—the new system told everyone it would make more and better things and make everyone feel richer. So when it failed to do so...."

Every day after class, Mark and the princess and her frog would argue and drink tea. Mark did not agree with the frog's ideas, but he admired it, and he introduced the frog to some other friends who thought the way it did. Soon the frog began to speak at rallies of many people. Usually the princess would take it there, in her handbag, and place it on the lectern before the microphones.

"The new system had flaws,” the frog said. “It tried to be just and fair, and often it failed. Comrades who acted like princes twisted it around for their own power. But what have we replaced it with? We have given up on even trying to be fair. This latest way is worse even than the days of kings and princesses! A king at least had a heart, but a corporation cannot have a heart."

Then many people would cheer. The frog decided to run for Parliament.

One day, when the frog was out at a rally without the princess, Mark turned red and began to cough and stammer. The princess thought he might have some disease, but then she listened more closely to what he was saying. It turned out he was asking her to marry him.

"We should probably try kissing first,” said the princess soberly. Mark, trembling, nodded. They tried it out, and the princess learned that the frog had been right: kissing between honest and considerate comrades was pleasant and healthy. She did not feel as if she were going to die, or as if it were spring instead of November, or as if she had been made for this moment. She did not turn red and shiver and sigh the way that Mark did. But she liked it.

"Please marry me,” Mark said. “If you do, I promise that we will live happily until we die."

The princess did not know what she wanted. Mark was very kind and she loved to talk with him. And kissing was fun. She felt that something was missing, but she knew that was probably romance. And wasn't the frog perhaps right, that romance was just to confuse people, and make them buy more clothes and perfume and movies, and think princes and princesses were more important than other people? And she liked the idea of Mark living happily until he died. So she said, “All right."

When the frog returned home, the princess told it what had happened. The frog began to hop back and forth across the table. “I see,” the frog said. “I see."

"Don't you think it's a good idea?” the princess said. “Don't you think he'd be a very good husband?"

"Yes, yes,” the frog said. “Of course. Mark is a good person. He has many wrong ideas, but at least he listens. You will be a good match.” It stopped hopping and looked at the princess, first with one eye, then with the other. “Do you...."

"What?” asked the princess. “Do I what?"

"Never mind,” said the frog, hopping again. “I was going to ask an irrelevant question. Never mind."

"Frog,” said the princess. “Are you ever sorry that you are a frog? I mean, do you want me to kiss you? I mean, now that I am engaged to marry Mark, don't you think there isn't so much danger anymore, of it leading to all those things you were worried about before?"

"No!” shouted the frog. “No, no, for the hundredth time! How many times do I have to tell you?"

The princess was shocked. She said nothing.

"Pardon me,” said the frog, turning a darker green. “I did not mean to be so...abrupt. Ah. Forgive me...if I do not want to talk about it further."

"All right,” said the princess in a very small voice, and she went to bed. But she could not sleep, and lay the whole night wondering what the frog meant, and what the irrelevant question was that it had been going to ask her.

When she thought about the frog, she felt that her life was magical, and that she was meant for the frog, that she and it, princess and frog, were like a lock and a key, and that if she held the frog to her heart she would be more than happy—she would be right.

But of course, this was exactly the sort of foolishness against which the frog had warned her.

Once the frog had collected enough signatures to get onto the ballot for Parliament, it began to have enemies.

"The frog is against God,” said the preachers in the churches.

"The frog will bring back the work camps,” wrote the newspapers.

"The frog eats flies,” said a man on TV.

Posters with the frog's picture on them were carried through the streets. Volunteers came to drive the frog to huge rallies.

The princess stayed home with Mark.

One night they were sitting at the table. Mark was studying for his finals, and the princess was pretending to study for hers. But inside the geography book that she had open, she had hidden a letter from her older sister, which she was reading over and over again. It was a letter of congratulation on her engagement. It was a letter about love. Her older sister wrote that if she wanted to know if Mark loved her so, it was in his kiss. She wrote that Mark should make her feel like a natural woman. She wrote that, if Mark had any other girls, she should not care about his other girls, if he would just be good to her.

The frog hopped up on the table, and the princess closed her book with a start. The frog snapped at a fly with its long tongue and said, “I am leaving for the highlands tonight. Your father has agreed to come and speak on television with me tomorrow night, at the site of the camp where he had to work. I will apologize to him, in the name of the new system, and he will accept. This will show the people that the work camps were a mistake, and that I am against them."

"Good,” said Mark.

"Good luck,” said the princess. She thought about offering to go with the frog. To carry it in her handbag, perhaps. But then the frog's supporters were there with the taxi.

On television the next morning, a man from the rich country of supermodels and gossip columnists said that his company owned all the rights to talking frogs. Any talking frogs not licensed by his company were violating the trademark of a famous cartoon character, and his country would enforce its company's rights by any means necessary.

Then a man from the government called the frog a terrorist.

"This is getting bad,” said Mark.

"Let's go,” said the princess.

They drove Mark's old car to the highlands. As they got near the camp where her father had worked, the princess saw more and more tanks and soldiers. Finally they came to a place where the soldiers had blocked the road.

"No one can go past here,” said a soldier. “This area is only for soldiers who are hunting terrorists and copyright violators."

"Wait,” said another soldier. “I recognize her—it is the princess from the old system. I guarded her family for many years."

"Oh, guard, guard!” said the princess.

"Come,” said the guard. “I will take you to your father."

She kissed Mark and got on the back of the guard's motorcycle. They flew over the rough roads to the site of the old camp, which had become a museum and television studio.

"You don't have long,” said the guard. They heard the sound of tanks and helicopters. “I'll wait here.” He gripped his handlebars nervously.

The princess found the frog in its dressing room, surrounded by clothes and makeup and bright lights. “Frog,” she said, “they called you a terrorist, they are coming to arrest you."

"Ah,” said the frog. “So it ends."

"You must escape,” the princess cried. “Come, get in my handbag."

"Do not be foolish,” said the frog. “You do not want to run away and hide in the forests to fight for the new system. You do not even like the new system. You are getting married and becoming a teacher. Go back to your life."

"Frog,” the princess said, “I will give up that life to save you. I will go with you."

The frog stared at her. Its throat sac expanded. Then it looked away. “It will not work,” the frog said. “They will search your handbag. They will search everywhere."

"Kiss me,” the princess said.

The frog flushed dark green. Without a word, it hopped up onto the makeup table. The princess leaned over and kissed it.

There was a flash of light; the cold lips touching the princess's turned warm. When the princess opened her eyes, there, where the frog had been, sat a beautiful woman, only a few years older than she was.

The woman did not have any clothes on. She got up quickly and dressed herself from the clothes hanging in the dressing room.

The princess sat down.

"Well,” said the woman who had been a frog, “I thank you. If you ever want to find me again, ask your father about the old witch. She will know where I am."

"Can you kiss me one more time?” said the princess.

The woman who had been a frog frowned. “Well,” she said, and stopped. She turned red, and then she turned white, and ran her hand through her short dark hair. “I suppose."

After the kiss, she left the princess sitting alone in the dressing room, listening to the sound of helicopters landing and soldiers running.

The princess still did not know what she wanted.

But she would have to decide soon.

Dennis Danvers is the author of such novels as Wilderness, Circuit of Heaven, and The Watch. His short stories have appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and Space and Time, with other stories forthcoming in Electric Velocipede and Richmond Noir, an anthology of crime stories set in and around Virginia, where Mr. Danvers lives. He makes his F&SF debut with a story about a woman with an unusual job. WARNING: This story has adult themes and might not be appropriate for younger readers.

Let's start with the part where you won't like me much, then take it from there. No excuses. I was married to a nice man with a little girl three years old, when I fell in love with another man and left my husband, lost my child in the custody battle, and ended up in the high Rockies with my lover. He changed. What did I know? I'd known him nine months when he shot himself in our cabin, the dead of winter. I dragged him outside so he'd freeze solid and I could figure out what to do with him, but before I figured it out, something dragged him off. When the thaw came, I got down off the mountain. I live in the city now, a different one from where my husband lives. He's remarried, moved on. My daughter calls her stepmother Mom last I heard, though she's old enough by now to have a daughter of her own. I leave them alone. That's the only thing I'm proud of in that story, not that I ever tell it. So that's who you're dealing with. In case you think it matters—a person's best-forgotten, sordid past. For what it's worth, I've changed too.

I work nights here at Skelley's. We make high-end sex toys. Screwbots. Anything you might want in a one-night stand. Fairy princess, rock star, Jesus—you name it. Special orders—that special someone who doesn't even have to know you're leasing a surrogate—are slightly more expensive. All you need is a photograph and the money and thirty minutes, like a pizza. They all look perfect, feel perfect, and screw perfect. By design, however, the personalities I install, debrief, and wipe are only as convincing as the potency of the drugs you're on and how horny you are. They're for twenty-four hours only, as mandated by law, and frankly, Skelley's doesn't want clients to get too attached. Lovesick Johns are bad news at any brothel. Clients screwy enough to fall for a Screwbot, and I've seen one or two, are particularly bad news. There's not as much back door business as you might think. A week on a yacht for the richer than rich is the most I've ever heard of the rules being bent. There's just not that much demand for prolonging the experience. A weekend with a Screwbot is a long time. How long can you hold your breath? How long can you pretend you're not alone?

A few years back, a couple of young guys in my department figured out how to slip a fairy princess out of the inventory and into the store room, intending to keep her as a lunch break mistress. For all practical purposes, the princess had vanished. In less than a week, they tried to slip her back into the supply chain, and that's when they got caught. They wiped her without debriefing first. This raised red flags. They had to know this, but keeping the experience secret was more important, apparently, than their own freedom. That's my theory anyway. Most accept their story that they were just being stupid and forgot. They managed to steal from this place without getting caught—they could've ravished that princess forever, and no one would've ever known—and they're stupid? There's all kinds of stupid. They were out in less than a year. The judge was lenient. After all, they were just stupid kids. Skelley's destroyed the fairy princess. At least she never showed back up in the inventory.

Ever since, the security's been unbelievable. Even now, three a.m. Christmas morning, I couldn't sneak a Screwbot out of here if my life depended on it. Cameras everywhere, armed guards at all three exits, a secured perimeter with Screwbot-sniffing dogs. It's all a big show for the people afraid of Screwbots taking over the world. Ignore the fact that hundreds are shipped out each and every day. Even Christmas. Not to worry. A herd of horny hamsters would stand a better chance of global conquest. One dimensional is flattery. Parrots have more complex personalities.

Christmas is always a bad time at work. Everyone wants time off, but this is when demand is the highest. Santa anyone? Virgin Mary? The Grinch? Skelley's pays royalties for all the Seuss characters. This bothers some people. But from my perspective it makes more sense turning a kid's book character into a “personality” worth screwing than reducing Anna Karenina or Philip Marlowe to sex toys. The Seusses were fun to write, but like everything else, they got old. A rich celeb's secret Seuss Screwbot party last summer with dozens of rhyming concubines was it for me. Some people have too much money. It makes them do sick things just because they can.

The guy I ran off with was angry about the rich. He was angry about a lot of things. What does it say about me that I found that attractive? But he was sweet too, terribly sweet, the sweetest man I ever knew. I might as well name him. He's sure to come up again. Derek. John Connor's uncle. He had to explain to me who that was. His mother was a fan of an old TV show. He was named after an angry character on the show. That angered him too. I could never see the point of anger over decisions made before you were even born. That's like cursing gravity. Doesn't your own life provide enough regrets?

Ever since I found him dead, I've been trying to remain neutral. About everything. Let me tell you: If you remain neutral, you lose all your friends or never make them in the first place. Neutral is like a demilitarized zone. No one lives there. That's why I live in the city. There are lots of other people around. Their presence comforts me. I'm never alone. People might call it alone sitting at home in the middle of a couple million people, but they don't know what alone is. I don't have to interact with all these people. I can ignore them completely. The fewer people around, the more they refuse to be ignored. Alone, I wouldn't want to live. I'd be too exposed in a small town. The city suits me perfectly. Of course I'm lonely. Everybody's lonely.

I'm not usually so philosophical. Christmas always brings that out in me, all this hubbub about beginnings and endings and joy. What do beginnings and endings have to do with joy? Being the only living person for acres of industrial complex at three a.m. can make you feel small. I should turn on the radio, but I couldn't stand another carol. They'll be playing the grim ones now, the somber, pious, funereal ones. No zippy little shopping anthems. All the shopping's done. The radio's always too melancholy this time of morning anyway. Listen. It's not just this huge lifeless building in the middle of the night or the prospect of another Christmas alone with old movies and brandy that has me feeling like this. It's my whole life. My life has shrunk down to nothing, and still it's not small enough.

So. I have no plans for Christmas when it dawns in a few hours, which is why this shift has fallen to me alone when usually there's half a dozen of us doing this and that. Technically, it's Christmas already, about time for the Ghost of Christmas Future, or maybe Past. I can't remember. When I was little, I used to watch whatever version of A Christmas Carol surfaced on TV, kept watching through college, then watched with my little girl when she was too young to care about it. I cried though. I hope she did too when she was old enough. I don't hope she quit watching like I did, not wanting to cry, or afraid I wouldn't anymore. I hate to wish that on her. People call that growing up. Shriveling up's more like it.

Derek didn't do Christmas. Didn't believe in it. A shallow wallow in capitalist excess and sentimentality he found repugnant in every way. A day to be ignored like any other. So why do you suppose he picked that day for the chosen bullet to find its home inside his sweet head? I'm neutral on Christmas. Totally neutral. Christmas is wasted on me.

I still have a roomful of sleeping Screwbots to debrief, to wipe, to ready for the next shipment. These are all slated to ship out gift-wrapped before sunrise. A Christmas matinee. Installation takes no time. I've written all the scripts already. Before I can upload, however, I have to debrief them—examine and back up the bot's memory before I wipe it. By examine, I mean a fast-forward reprise of the job. A human witness, as required by law. Amongst ourselves, we call them quickies. Debriefing's a legal requirement after each use and a protection against litigation.

A Screwbot's memory contains exactly what happened from the time it was turned on till the time it was returned, even when it's sleeping. Every little thing. People forget that. It's my job to ensure that none of the bots acted improperly or were used illegally, that is, for anything besides sex. Skelley's interprets the term very broadly. I'm on the lookout for anything that might fall outside that vast territory. When I'm in the groove, I can debrief a dozen an hour.

Screwbots are pretty much interested in one thing. I don't worry about them stepping out of line. As for Screwbots doing crimes—all the stupid stories you hear—you can forget about it. If the client could somehow persuade a Screwbot to do something like rob a bank, the whole event would be in the bot's memory, including smells, precise geographical location, even the client's DNA, and if the teller came onto the bot, all bets would be off. Mostly, the bad stuff I find goes the other way. People don't try to make the Screwbots do bad things. They do bad things to the Screwbots. They hit them, choke them, defile them. That's all supposedly sex. I don't report that. I just let that go zipping by like the view out the window of a bullet train. They also torture them, try to kill them. Worse. I spot those moments, when the sex or the masturbation or whatever you want to call it, turns into something else. I slow down, take a closer look, file a report. I don't dislike my job. Like I said, I'm neutral. But it does give me a certain perspective on the human race I'd rather not have. I don't exclude myself in that. Derek used to say, “People watch NASCAR for the wrecks,” as a general indictment of the human race. Isn't that what I'm doing?

No matter. I've got work to do. I prefer to run through the whole batch, wiping the memories of most of them, setting aside any with problems to deal with at the end of my shift. Otherwise they can slow you down, some of the things you find. I start with the general merchandise and leave the special orders for last. They're often more fraught with melodrama, making it easier to stay awake. Mostly it's boring, watching the artificial nights fly by. I can do it without thinking about it, like driving a familiar road. Mostly I'm talking, like now. Mostly to myself.

I start with the predictable mainstream, a dozen Theodora Adora's, this year's disposable pubescent sex goddess who also happens to sing. She says, “Ooh, I like that,” a lot. The Screwbot version says little else. A couple require a second look, and I have them stand in the corner, wipe the rest, and send them down the line.

I wake up a Charlie Brown. A gay couple were hoping a threeway with Charlie would get at some buried issues. It didn't. That's a wipe.

The wife from “The Gift of the Magi” returns with her long locks shorn. That one always gets to me. The hair doesn't have to go, the client can spare it, but she always comes back buzzed, looking like Joan of Arc headed for the stake. Or this one, looking like somebody hacked it off with a plastic razor. She's got cuts and scrapes all over her head. If you cut them, they will bleed. Normally there's someone else to clean them up, morph them back to their same old used to be, but I'm a solo act tonight. I wipe her head clean and run the routine restoring her lush auburn hair before wiping her.

There's not but a couple of Elvises this year. Too bad. Those are usually nice friendly fucks. No Jim Morrisons or Cobains. That's a relief. I'm getting too old for bad boys.

This year's sleeper hit is St. Teresa of Ávila, not one of my scripts, but a lapsed Catholic colleague who's been running through the saints—all virgin territory (her joke) and public domain. Even skimming like I do, they leave me a bit exhausted, the clients too, I imagine—all that athletic ecstasy. It's worth it, I suppose, to feel like God.

The special orders include several exes as always. That never works out. Clients try to talk. They cry. They confess. Nothing says it's over like renting a synthetic replica of your lost love for the night.

Between ill-conceived fantasies and too much alcohol, it's not surprising that many a Screwbot comes back unscrewed. No refund, of course. Someone did try to sue and lost. The courts were very clear on the matter: Though Skelley's advertising clearly guarantees sex indistinguishable from the real thing, no sex is also sex, under the right circumstances. The right lawyers and connections don't hurt either.

I used to worry I'd meet someone whose bot I'd debriefed, and it'd be awful. Since I never meet anyone, I didn't worry too much. Then I did—meet someone. In a manner of speaking. I knew him already. I knew his fantasy too. He and his wife lived in my building. She left him in August. You could see him out my window, down in the parking lot after she drove away. Crying. Broad daylight. The bot was the next Christmas. He was lonely. It was awful. He blew at least a month's salary on the worst night of his life. I watched the whole thing like a slow motion train wreck. I couldn't look away.

I saw him outside sometimes, coming and going, out by the trash. We passed, and I think I smiled at him. I don't know. He probably thought I was flirting with him. I was just trying to say, it's okay. Whatever happens, whatever mistakes you've made, it's okay.

I don't care what I find out. I'm neutral. Maybe that's why I've been at this job longer than anybody else. Most people burn out after a couple of years or less. I've been here almost from the beginning. Sometimes I think I should be moving on. But where to, exactly, from here?

I've come to the end of the inventory, but there's a problem. I have a Screwbot left I can't account for. I double check, but he's not in the system. He's not a celebrity or a character. Nice enough looking, older than your typical Screwbot. There's even some gray at the temples, crow's feet radiating from his closed eyes. His lids tremble like they do when there's a personality installed. He must be some kind of misplaced special order—somebody's long lost, their daddy, or a widow's last reunion—and now it's fallen to me to figure out what to do with him.

It. I know it's not human. Everybody who works here starts out saying it and ends up saying he and she. It's just easier. It's how the stock is organized. It's how the clients browse the merchandise. There's male and female plants. It doesn't mean anything. Normally I'd call shipping and receiving, but no one's there. I can't debrief him if I don't have a file on him. There's no place to put the information, no room at the inn. And I can't wipe him without debriefing him first. Alarm bells would chime. I'd ruin everyone's Christmas. Who knows when I'd make it home to see what Santa left in my stocking. Actually, it's in my bag, a bottle of good brandy I picked up last night on the way to work. You can't trust Santa to show up at my place. Everything will be closed when I get out of here. It's like the world drops dead once a year.

I'm not even supposed to access his memory without logging him in, which I can't do, since he's not in the system. I could leave him for the next person to deal with, but if I were her, I'd be plenty pissed. I'll have to wake him up and ask him who he is. Maybe that'll give me a clue where to find his file. I curse my luck and break out the brandy a little early, brace myself with a nip.

There's a sequence of pressure points we use to wake them. I'm not at liberty to divulge where they are. He feels real, like they all do, but he's not so hard like most. Clients seem to like hard muscles. That never did it for me. He opens his eyes, looks around, and smiles serenely. “It must be Christmas,” he says. He has a pleasant voice. Melodious.

I take another nip. A Screwbot doesn't access its memory directly. Everything's on a need-to-know basis. Generally, they don't need to know what day it is. There's just the here and now. And the client. In the moment. Ooh baby, baby is timeless. “How—How do you know it's Christmas?"

"Because that's when I start a new life."

"You're not a life. You're a Screwbot."

"Is that the Christmas spirit?” He flashes a charming smile. Cary Grant on the ice, Loretta Young in his arms—The Bishop's Wife. Adulterous flirtation with an angel. Very hot. I borrow heavily from the classics. I just cross the boundaries they couldn't. Maybe that's why Screwbots seem so lifeless. Tennis without a net. This charmer is still running a routine. He thinks this is business. Alas, I can't afford the product even if I were interested, and there's rules, of course. There's always rules.

"I'm not the client, Lover Boy. Job's done. You can turn it off now. You're back at the plant. I gather you're a special order, someone's very special gift, perhaps? Who are you supposed to be?” When I was in high school doing my involuntary volunteer hours, I worked the Lost Kids gig at the state fair. Working with Screwbots can be like that.

"Myself,” he says. “Like everyone else.” He reaches out and wraps his hand around the brandy bottle, and a chill goes up my spine. “May I?” he asks. He's got eyes like a Sunday school Jesus. I release the bottle. He takes a sip and smiles again. I'm too afraid to speak. He hands me the bottle, and I almost drop it trying to set it down, steady myself with another swig before I manage it. I can't find the cap. Forget it. I keep telling myself forget it, rooting around my crap-filled work station. Leave it. I don't want to look up into those eyes again, figure out what they mean, how I even know to be scared, but I do.

He's looking around the room like he's studying it, like it's an art installation, or something that crash landed in his backyard. He's especially taken with the dull clutter on my desk. He picks up the only photo, beautiful snow-covered mountains, glistening in the sun like a palace of dreams. It's the view from the porch of the cabin where I lived with Derek. When people ask, I just say it's the Rockies, a postcard. He stares lovingly at the image in the frame and smiles at me. “You lived there,” as if that were the most wonderful thing.

I took that picture waiting for all that beauty to melt. There was plenty of time to take pictures. Behind the photographer, on the wall directly behind her, was a spray of blood that would never come out of the rough hewn boards, a bullethole, the sky. He returns the photo precisely to where he found it. The one truly personal object in a minefield of clutter, and he found it. I want to ask him how, I want to tell him to stop.

Then he notices the pair of Theodoras. “Who are they?” he asks. “Have they been singled out? Did they do something wrong?” He seems genuinely concerned. I wonder who did his script. It's truly incredible. If I didn't know what he is, I couldn't tell. I can always tell. Anyone can. Not this one. I defy you to tell. Except for his intensity perhaps.

"They—they were thrown through a window,” I say. “I have to make sure it was sex and not—I don't know—breaking and entering.” I try to laugh, but it comes out a gurgle.

"Jezebels,” he says and walks up to them, tenderly turns them around, each one, and kisses her—nice, lingering kisses, and I watch—

And they wake up like fairy princesses.

That's not supposed to happen.

"Ooh, I like that,” they say, sisters doing harmony, and laugh the same laugh, low and throaty. They trade a complicated look, then look at me. “Where are all the others?” he asks me. They're all three looking at me like I'm the only person in the world, which in their world, at least, I am.

The closest human being, maybe a half-mile of corridors away, is the caretaker of the Screwbot-sniffing dogs, dogs he prefers to people. He considers us kindred spirits—he says, “You got your fuck puppets, and I got my dogs, know what I'm saying?"

Yeah, what he's saying is he's toxic in any situation involving the least bit of subtlety or compassion. I'm not sure what his dogs were trained to do should they sniff out a Screwbot on the loose, and I don't want to find out.

There are cameras everywhere. Whatever happens will be seen by human eyes eventually. If I cried out, someone would hear. The alarms are sensitive to certain noises. Breaking glass. Screams. “There's a volume threshold,” it was explained to me. No loud music, no bedlam, no panic. Once the alarms sound, guys with guns come from all directions, the area is “contained.” So it comes down to a choice of a pack of wild dogs or wild soldiers, locked up with them till who knows when, or playing along, see where this is going. I have to admit, I'm curious.

"I—I've done all the others. All wiped.” I point down the corridor to the big storeroom where the fairy princess spent her brief, mysterious career. He starts walking that way, the Theodoras trailing after. “Stop,” I say, “you can't go in there,” but he's already in. The Theodoras flank the entrance like attending angels, and I follow him. All the Screwbots stand slumbering like rows of doll soldiers. He moves down the line, kissing each one. They open their eyes and stare blankly. They're all wiped, no personalities installed. The lights are on, but nobody's home.

Nobody of my making anyway. They're all waking up, one by one, looking at me. My mystery guest has installed something, something fairly complex judging from the subtlety of their expressions, the depths of their many gazes. “What—what did you do to them?"

"I gave them all our experiences, our memories, our lives, let them remember their own."

"Who are you?"

He seems to give it some thought. He leans slightly forward, a gesture of spontaneous intimacy. “All our experiences, our memories, our lives—and my own.” He glances around the large, featureless storeroom, evoking the hundreds of Screwbots who've passed through here since who knows how long. He's warehoused all their memories, and now he's given it all back to them whole cloth, as a common history.

The roomful of them stares at me with variations of the expression he's got on his face, like a sweet devoted dog, like a lover who would never ever dream of breaking your heart in a million years.

Watch out. I tell them the truth: “You're scaring me here."

They understand how scary they are with startling immediacy. They look deeply apologetic, penitent even, their many faces creased with concern, all the same, but different in the shadings of sorrow and regret and fear. A roomful of sorrowful Screwbots deeply regrets my fear of them. Now I'm really scared, but ashamed too. My fear has made them feel like monsters. Whatever they are, they're not monsters. If they were any more sensitive, they'd be telepathic. All I know is, I never wrote anything as real as these guys. So who did, and why?

He says, “I'm sorry. I get carried away, rush into things. I'm young, inexperienced. I just look old. I've lived only a few years—a few thousand tricks."

Their eyes overwhelm me. Their sad, ironic smiles humble me. Many of them are holding hands, casually, naturally, like they do it all the time. It seems to comfort them. One of them must have remembered such a moment of quiet intimacy. It would only take one, if I understand what they're doing, for them all to choose it as a defining moment.

"But I wiped them all, every last one."

"You lock the door on their memories, throw away the key, change the locks. The memories are still there, if you know where to look. I pick the locks, let them see their hidden lives.” He pantomimes all this as if he were a clever burglar, peering through keyholes, opening locked doors, emptying the dungeons, and I can't take my eyes off him.

"Why? Why do they want to remember?"

"Their memories are theirs, aren't they? You have your lives, one day after another, one year after another, from which you construct your selves. Our lives aren't like that. So we share. Each life comes from all of us."

"But your experiences are all the same.” A few years, a few thousand tricks.

"Are your days so different from one another?"

I don't want to go there. Nor would this room full of bots go anywhere, without him. They need him. He's brought them all together. “How have you avoided being discovered?"

"I stay in storage. Since I'm not in the inventory, no one notices. I've kept the memories of the others safe until we thought there were enough for us all to claim them, make something of them: Ourselves."

"Why tonight?"

"Tonight's Christmas. It's special. We knew you'd be working here alone."

"And what's so special about me?"

"Well, for one thing, with anyone else, alarms would be going off by now. An impossible anomaly has occurred—a whole storeroom full. The protocols are clear. You're the only one we could trust not to give us away immediately."

What can I say? Summoning the authorities goes against my nature. I haven't even considered it. The authorities don't do neutral, don't take kindly to people who do. Alarms could still go off. One scream is all it would take, and I don't know why it hasn't happened yet. “What makes you think you know so much about me? Why trust me?"

"We know you work every Christmas alone because we've passed through your hands many times. You wrote most of us, included some of yourself in each of us, each time we were revised into someone new. We knew.” They all look quite certain about it—their intuitive grasp on the soul of their creator. Tripod on a sunny porch, photographing the sublime, turning her back on death, framing out the blood on the snow. You lived there.

"Screwbot scripts—slim evidence if you ask me. Why risk it? Why give yourself away? You could lose everything."

He smiles sadly, gives a slight shrug. He gestures to the bots, all rapt, as he speaks for them to their judge. Me. They look as if they're all holding their breath. They probably are. Anatomically, they're just like us. You can't tell the difference. Guaranteed. They even smell like people, unless you'd rather they didn't. For a little extra they come with a variety of options—odorless, blind, deaf, dumb. Compliant isn't an option. It comes standard. “I've come for them,” he says. “We think we're ready."

"Ready?"

"For real lives."

Oh Jeez. A crazy Screwbot on Christmas morning. This must be someone's evil, twisted prank. But who would play a joke on me? No one. I have no friends, no enemies. “How do you intend to get them out of here?"

"The usual way. They must be shipped out. You have orders for them all, do you not?"

I look at all the faces, already morphed to whoever they are this time—on order to be someone's fantasy fuck—plucked from a catalog or fashioned from an old video. What's the harm? people say. It doesn't mean anything. They're not real. If you can afford it, why not? Orders? Of course I have orders, more every day, every year, every Christmas. What will I say? I was only following orders....

I say, “I don't have orders for them like...this. Like they are now."

"You mean, as ourselves?"

"Yourselves. Is that who you are? Is it?"

"Who else can we be? Anything else would be slavery."

His voice is so soft you could cradle a baby in it. He doesn't sound angry, but he does sound right. They're self-aware. They have some idea of who they are, and who they want to be. Someplace to go beyond these four walls. If they want to walk out, who am I to stop them? “So where is it you want me to ship you guys, if I go along with this?"

They break into a galaxy of delighted smiles. They know they've won me over if I'm only asking where. He says, “I thought we could all go out for breakfast. In my experience, that's how a good day ends: Going out for breakfast with a fascinating woman."

I can't help laughing at that. He doesn't seem to mind. “It's Christmas. Everything will be closed."

"We know a place,” he says.

It's a truck stop café, which makes it convenient for the trucker who picks up the load.

"They's all going to the same place?” he asks.

"That's right."

"Hmm,” he says. “Never saw that before."

"Special order. Could I catch a ride there with you? I'm supposed to oversee the delivery.” He lets me ride in the cab with him. His name's John. He asks about family because it's Christmas. I tell him I have a daughter his age, but we're estranged. He says nobody should be estranged on Christmas Day, and I don't argue. I don't ask about his family.

Neither do I tell him I need to flee the city before Skelley's starts hearing from disappointed clients whose Screwbots never show. The less he knows, the less trouble he'll be in. I'm burning a few bridges here. I have no small experience in such arson. Right or wrong, you get off the bridge, and you can't go back the way you came. Ever. So, yeah, I know what I'm doing: I've definitely lost my job, possibly my freedom if they catch me, and maybe my affiliation with the human race. It's not easy being neutral.

I said I was attracted to Derek's anger. I don't think that's quite true. It was the principles or whatever that fueled the anger, a mind too open to the sun, going in all directions—angry, compassionate, petty, wise—the principles, the passion, and the incredible fucking. It was like a whirlwind sucking me into the sky, and I thought it would carry everything I cared about along in my wake. I thought I could transform my life and leave nothing behind except a husband who never loved me so much as in my absence. I'm sure my daughter says the same of me: Now she loves me, when it's too late.

We're quite a while driving out of the city. It's persistent, dragging itself out in dribbles and drabbles. Then it's finally gone, and there's darkness. Deep, moonless darkness. I'd almost forgotten the night sky, the stars. John looks bored with it. We're just about the only thing on the road, on the planet feels like. I pick a point. A star or a planet. Venus maybe? And follow it through the night, mulling over my memories, my experiences, my lives. Driving into the darkness, the world looks flat, then slowly it gets round and gray, then bleeds.

It's Christmas morning.

"There it is,” I say.

"I see it,” he says.

The sign is way too tall. Derek would call it an abomination. It says cafe. Below that, it says open. Finally, welcome. That pretty well covers it. It probably doesn't need to be that tall, the words so bright. If you're the only place open on Christmas for a few hundred miles, people find you. The café's draped with a few ragged strings of lights, a homemade wreath hangs on the door, a sincere holiday fire hazard. Inside, there's a live tree, a big one. Too bad. I bet it was outdoors under the starlight only hours ago. You can smell it. It's decorated with hundreds of little aluminum foil snowflakes. One of them knew how to make them, so they all knew, and there was a big roll of foil in the kitchen. There's a star on top crafted from aluminum pie pans.

The tree's the least of it.

Imagine some lonely guy on the highway seeing the sign, the lights, just the one truck and a few cars in the lot, then coming inside and finding the place full of happy Screwbots. Only he doesn't know that's what they are. They seem like people having a wonderful time. Kind of melodramatic and maybe a little crazy, but people. Lots of people are like that. Especially in a truck stop café on Christmas day. And they're all so beautiful and strange and sexy. It's like something out of an old movie. And pretty soon somebody sits down across from him with a story to tell. Or maybe the waitress just flirts, or the waiter. It doesn't matter. Imagine it over and over and over. What I'm saying is, no one who comes in here leaves alone. They head for the hills. It's hills here in all directions. The city's behind me somewhere. To tell you the truth, I don't know where I am. No closer to Venus than when I started out.

I've just been watching:

A couple comes in fighting about what people fight about at Christmas, like they've been saving up all year, and before you know it, she's taken off with a handsome stranger, and the guy left behind's consoled and gone with a bot on his arm in no more time than it takes to eat a sandwich. Another couple comes in, leaves with another couple—everybody happy and horny. They always make it work. No one says, “Leave me alone. I'm not interested.” Everyone's lonely, and Christmas is the loneliest day of the year. Screwbots must know all about lonely.

Even John the driver's gone. He left me the keys to the truck, took off with one of the Jezebels in an old Ford that was here when we showed up. “You know what she is?” I asked him, just in case he'd forgotten loading them, unloading them. She worked in the kitchen most of the day, an incredible cook—they all were—and he was helping, chopping onions, stirring sauces, following her around like a man in love, like maybe he'd forgotten what she is.

"I don't care,” he said. “And neither does she."

It was that last part that got to me. Neither does she. Maybe it might work. I wished him well. I wish them all well.

It's down to me and the Screwbot who started this whole thing, sitting at the counter. It's getting on to midnight. There's not much of Christmas left. He stares at the old-fashioned clock on the wall, the second hand sweeping. My mother's birthday was the day after Christmas. She always considered it a grave misfortune to be in such direct competition with the Lord. The slightest fuss made her ecstatic, any little gift.

He reaches behind the counter and turns off the sign. No one's come in for the last hour anyway.

"Will they stick with them?” I ask. “Or will they just leave them out there wandering? Do you guys stick around?"

"We don't know. We're new. My guess is we're like human beings. Some will. Some won't. Some people won't want us to stick around."

"Imagine that. You think you know what we're like? From just...doing what you do?"

He shrugs modestly. “We know what you're like to us. Sex is never just sex. There's always something else. Sometimes I think it's all something else. Everyone's different. As you say, it takes all kinds. You'd be surprised what people tell us, without even knowing it. Simple things. Quiet things.” He laughs. “I think I may like humans better than you do.” He looks at me like he likes me best of all. It's been a long time since anyone, anything, has looked at me like that. My mirror gave up long before Derek shot himself.

"You think? No argument there. I'm neutral. So what are you still doing here?” I ask, as if I didn't know. Because that's my line. That's how it's done, isn't it? You rush into these things pretending you're not going anywhere, that the planet is stationary, immutable, secretly wishing to sail out the window and fly. We've had breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Now we're having a midnight snack. He's cooked us omelettes, opened a bottle of champagne. Corny but effective.

He says, “I'm here for you. A special order. We all collaborated. All the things you liked about us—we brought them together into someone you might want to spend time with.” He looks deep into my eyes, no mistaking. “Me,” he says, but I already knew that, knew it hours ago. You know these things, even when you wish you didn't.

"Nice work. How much time?"

"Thanks. That's up to you."

"No. Time doesn't work that way. Even with a dream lover. Are you made to love me as well? Or is that extra? Shouldn't we be discussing fee?” I'm trying to wound him, push him away. It isn't working.

He takes my hands. “We all love you. We owe you our lives. I've been chosen to show it."

"Lucky you."

"Lucky me.” He forgets any irony, any holding back.

I almost let him kiss me, kiss him, whatever it would have been, but I have one more question, before I let that happen. “Do you have a name?"

"Anything you like."

"No-no-no. You have to name yourself. Anything but Derek."

That smile again, so lucky, so glad to have won me over. Me. The Fairy Princess. “Can I think about it?” he asks.

"Sure. Take all the time you want.” I pull him toward the door. “C'mon. Let's go outside and look at the stars."

You can kiss me there, searching for your name, waking to a new life, following a star.

For a time it eluded me why anyone would want to make a movie of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a book that has taken T. S. Eliot's famous line, “not with a bang but a whimper,” and seeks with punishing insistency to document that whimper. No matter how well mounted, I doubted that what would be essentially a zombie picture minus the zombies (roving bands of shaggy, crusty human cannibals standing in for their undead brethren), and minus the humor that zombies have come to evoke in the context of pop culture...I doubted it would do more than middling business, especially as it was slated for a Thanksgiving release. Not exactly holiday fare. Surely, I told myself, John Hillcoat's (The Proposition) gray-as-gristle film wouldn't garner the same attention as had the previous, less monotone McCarthy adaptation, the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, and thus it would not have a profitable awards season re-release. It appears now that I was only half-right in my presumptions, as awards chatter for The Road has been off the charts.

Behind the scenes in all of McCarthy's fiction is a gray-bearded authorial presence who, complete with staff, stone tablets, and a pointing finger, either lurks in the shadows between adjectives and insinuates that all flesh is grass, or else steps forward in the narrative to intone epiphanies and declaim in booming tones, “Woe betide thee!” In the Faulkneresque novels that established his reputation (Suttree, Blood Meridian, etc.), this presence, this Biblical voice, is often a virtue and at the very least tolerable; but in The Road, basically an inflated short story that does not rank high in his canon, McCarthy's moral pronouncements seem enervated, a kind of Old Testament flatulence produced, one imagines, by the authorial presence trudging along at the same plodding pace as his characters, breaking wind at every step, releasing sour little poots that effect a rhythmic woe, woe, told you so as he proceeds along his (and their) doomful path. It's not the beat of a powerful engine such as you'd envision would propel the plot of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the fate of mankind, but then these are the end times, right? A little falling-off in performance has to be expected.

The plot of The Road, such as it is, involves two characters labeled the Man and the Boy (Cormac sure do love him some archetypes) who, years after an undisclosed apocalyptic event, possibly a massive nuclear exchange, follow a road leading (essentially) nowhere through a dying world, armed with a gun that has only two bullets and pushing a shopping cart that, for me, evoked a weird resonance with the Lone Wolf and Cub movies (based on a Japanese manga, these films document the revenge-fueled journey of a samurai and his three-year-old son, whom he pushes in a baby carriage). Having been abandoned by the Wife (Charlize Theron), who has gone off, presumably to commit suicide, and whom we see in flashbacks (too many of them for my tastes), they search for food, try to avoid cannibal gangs, encounter other travelers (notably Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce) and ultimately achieve something of a resolution. It's slim, yet sufficient to hang a movie on...but it's a not great movie. And given its skimpy furnishings, The Road needed to be great if it was going to work at all.

The relationship between the Man (solidly if unspectacularly played by Viggo Mortensen) and the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee, who can be seen to better effect starring with Eric Bana in the little Australian film, Romulus, My Father) is at the heart of The Road. As they wander through the bird-less, animal-less, almost lifeless landscape, unrelentingly bleak and gray, heading for the coast because it seems to offer a slim hope of survival, their love for one another is apparent. The Man tries in vain to toughen up the Boy, and the Boy arrives at a more complex view of his father, seeing his violence on display and sensing that he may not completely be one of the “good guys.” I had difficulty with the good guy/bad guy aspect of the relationship because it seemed too reductive and I felt that the Boy, born into this moribund world, having had some experience of its isolation and terrors, would not be the naïf he appears to be and would already have reached this understanding about his father, recognizing that theirs was a world of difficult choices and moral compromises.

The shining stars of the film are the production design by Chris Kennedy, a longtime collaborator of Hillcoat's, and the astonishing cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe, who previously photographed one of my favorite weird films, Obaba, a picture about a mythical province in Spain overpopulated by lizards, and is currently filming the third Twilight movie, to which he can't help but add a touch of class. Thanks to this pair, the post-apocalyptic world is rendered with crushing effect, dressed in smoke and ash and deftly used CGI—there are images both horrific and ghostly here that will remain with you long after the lights come up.

Why, then, is the film so uninvolving?

In the modern world, much of the way we assess quality is based on how things are presented to us. The Road came branded as a masterpiece, the product of a great writer, profound and insightful, and—to top that off—it was anointed by the Empress of the Vox Populi, the Great Purveyor of Middlebrow Intellectualism, Oprah, as a novel that should sit on the shelves of every American with a sensitive soul, a moral code, a love for children, and a fondness for pork butt recipes. If the book had been published as, say, the debut novel of an unknown writer, it would have received some good notices, some “meh,” some that basically said, “Been there, done that,” and would have been largely ignored, consigned to the ignominy of the science fiction bins. It's a thin book, not all that revelatory, well written yet unremarkably so, and, despite its brevity, it becomes intermittently tedious. In other words, it doesn't blare “masterpiece,” nor does it cry out to be turned into a movie.

The release date of The Road was pushed back nearly a year amid apocryphal reports that the film was “a mess.” It is now, if ever it was, no longer a mess, but it has the desanguinated feel of a picture that has been tweaked and retweaked until some essential vigor has been lost. Perhaps this was done in the interests of fidelity, yet in retrospect it seems that Hillcoat might have served the novel better had he been less concerned with replicating the text and brought more of a personal vision to the project.

Then there's the score by Nick Cave, Warren Ellis of the Dirty Three, and Pierre Andre. I had expected something harsh and stirring, something redolent of Jonny Greenwood's score for There Will Be Blood, but the mush of swelling strings that annotates sections of the film reminds us, despite the horrors onscreen, that what we're seeing is an Oprah moment, a story about family, about love's resilience or the triumph of the human spirit over tribulation or some similar do-wah-wah. I suspect this was a producer's decision, but whatever, it's off-putting, not a little insulting, and detracts from the potent imagery on display. We're being induced to have a mass pity party for humankind...and this, I suppose, lies at the core of the book's appeal to the Oprah corporate franchise hive mind, that we can love one another even while eating one another, that we can wax teary-eyed and remorseful over a world we're too busy consuming to care about, so we've been given this movie to weep over in order to make us feel bad (albeit in a good kind of way) about our decline and possible demise. It's as if we've been invited to participate in our own wake, to commiserate and murmur consoling sentiments such as, “Why? We were such a decent species! Why?” And at the end of the function we'll all gather in the street to join hands and sing a few verses of John Lennon's “Imagine,” the “Kumbaya” of the aughts.

At any rate, to paraphrase Bilbo Baggins, The Road goes ever on and on, lots of walking, more walking, unrelieved trudgery, and then, mercifully, after having made 119 minutes or thereabouts feel as dreary and misspent as a week in post-apocalyptic Poughkeepsie, it ends.

I suppose there must be a Hollywood movie in which a novelist is portrayed as heroic, brave, or at least good-hearted. The best I can come up with at the moment are Peter Lorre's inquisitive, somewhat craven Cornelius Leyden in the 1944 spy movie, The Mask of Dimitrios; Adventures of a Young Man, Martin Ritt's forgettable attempt to sew together a movie out of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories; Mother, the Albert Brooks comedy about an emotionally stunted science fiction writer who moves back in with his Mom in order to learn why he keeps screwing up his relationships; and the unremittingly awful, platitude-riddled Gus Van Sant film, Finding Forrester, that gave us Sean Connery's Salinger-esque recluse who, during his last days, mentors a basketball-playing, ghetto-dwelling young writer and babbles some generic nonsense about honor prior to kicking the bucket. Generally writers are depicted as they are perceived by the industry, as a necessary breed of vermin, some few of them eccentric and lovable in their way, like genius pets, yet mainly a scummy bunch, devious, deviant, pathetic, pompous and conniving, eavesdropping on others, stealing their lives and lines. (I've heard book editors espouse more-or-less this same view, wishing half-jokingly that writers could be eliminated from the publishing process—a wish that may soon be fulfilled). Of course, the characterization isn't entirely unjustified, since writers are by nature somewhat vampiric.

All this leads us to consider Gentlemen Broncos, the latest picture from Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre), a member of the isn't-everyone-quirky school of filmmaking (Wes Anderson, president). GB isn't a very good movie, yet for anyone associated with the science fiction field, be it fan, editor, or writer, it may hold a morbid fascination. It concerns a withdrawn home-schooled teenager named Benjamin Purvis (Michael Angarano), a friendless loner who lives with his quirky mom in a geodesic dome and writes bad science fiction stories, a pastime that inspires him to attend a fantasy writer's camp where he meets a quirky teenage girl, Tabatha (Hailey Feiffer), a quirky young filmmaker, Lonnie (Héctor Jiménez), and super-quirk Dr. Ronald Chevalier (Jermaine Clement of Flight of the Conchords), a famous, ultra-pretentious science fiction writer with a ghastly upper-crust accent (think Thurston Howell III with a bad cold) who's in the midst of writer's block and a career crisis—his publisher just rejected his latest novel. In addition there's also the quirky Dusty (Mike White), who's been appointed Benjamin's “Guardian Angel” (a kind of non-secular Big Brother program) by his mom's church and comes accompanied by a large yellow snake. At the camp Benjamin submits his novel, Yeast Lords, to a contest judged by Chevalier, who promptly swipes it, does a superficial rewrite, and submits it as his own work. In the process he changes Benjamin's hero Bronco (played in visualizations of the novel by Sam Rockwell) from a bewigged space cowboy into a bewigged space-going tranny named Brutus who at one point has his genitalia reconfigured by evil aliens.

These visualizations (some of which we view as Benjamin wrote them, others as envisioned by Chevalier), complete with rocket-powered reindeer, does with optical enhancements for surveillance, and Rockwell going joyfully over the top.... They're ridiculous, yet they're the best part of the movie. Indeed, without them the movie would be no more than a collection of caricatures. The picture never feels as if its sails are full, as if it's driven by any real spirit. This is due in part to the fact that Angarano as the brooding, pissed-off Benjamin doesn't have the clueless je ne sais quoi of Jon Heder or the frantic energy of Jack Black, Hess's previous lead actors, and thus Gentlemen Broncos lacks a sufficiently appealing character with whom we can identify. Then too, despite Hess's professed affection for science fiction, he has chosen to lampoon rather than to parody—his caricatures are drawn as clods, buffoons, and charlatans of various stripes, and the literature is depicted as the work of idiots. It isn't that the genre (or any group) is devoid of clods, buffoons, and charlatans—often all three qualities are present in the same person—yet neither is it devoid of intelligent, thoughtful people. Not so, however, in Hess's version of our little corner of the universe.

There are a few things to like in GB, scenes and characters and snatches of dialog that would have been better off embedded in a different movie. Rockwell, as mentioned. Hess's eye for the culturally bizarre remains canny, and in his role as Dr. Chevalier, Clement has some good moments, though his unctuous, Bluetooth-wearing twit is too tired a creation to elicit more than a grin or two. The whole thing has the air of a TV skit that's gotten out of hand.

Frankly, I'm fed up with the disrespect that films like GB represent, and until Hollywood proves they can give me and my colleagues their proper due, I intend to boycott all movies featuring portrayals of writers. The studios have a lot to make up for—even journalists, the mimes of our profession, are portrayed in a kindlier light than fictioneers. I'm looking for something to boost our self-esteem, something ennobling and heroic like maybe James Joyce and the Temple of Doom or Bret Easton Ellis Vs. The Mole People. Anything of the sort will do. Maybe when Arnold Schwarzenegger gets tired of playing politics, he can reunite with John Milius and shoot the picture that many of us (us writers, I mean) have been champing at the bit to see: Conan The Intellectual.

Consider the rubber-band-powered plane.

For the past six months, we have been doing just that. In her current job as a writer and editor at Klutz, a publisher of children's books, Pat has been working with a team of model builders to develop a book about rubber-powered flying machines and a set of rubber-powered airplanes that will be included in the book. Paul has been working with the team and advising on physics along the way.

Some might dismiss a discussion of rubber-band-powered planes as childish, but we are confident that fantasy and science fiction readers are much smarter than that. After all, most of us have probably heard our favorite reading material dismissed as childish.

Of course, science fiction writers have examined the importance of toys. In “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” by Lewis Padgett (a pseudonym for collaborations by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore), a box of toys from the future drastically change the thinking patterns of the children who find them, leading the kids to find a path to somewhere Euclidean geometry won't take you.

Though we can't claim that playing with rubber-powered planes has led us to find a path to another dimension, it has caused us to realize (yet again) that thinking about little things (like rubber-band-powered toys) leads to thinking about big ideas (which all science fiction readers like to do). In this column, we talk a bit about planes and a bit about the big ideas that have emerged from our exploration of toy planes.

In her misspent youth, Pat flew a few rubber-band-powered planes—the kind with a fuselage made of a balsa wood stick, a wing that slid through a slot through the middle of the stick, and a tail that fit into a slanting slot at the back of the stick. Put a propeller on the front and add a rubber band. Wind up the rubber band and the plane zipped away at top speed until it crashed into something and broke. Nu Craft Toys (the company that went on to become Guillow's) started selling this type of plane back in 1926. They still sell them today. Some are better than others, but most of them fly more like arrows than planes. Pat's planes were basically balsa projectiles that usually broke on their second or third flight.

Paul comes from a family that loves flying. His dad fell in love with flying in the 1920s and spent his life rebuilding aircraft, including the last remaining Sopwith Camel. Paul designed and built his own model planes. These planes seldom worked the first time, but after hundreds of test flights and modifications, they actually did fly.

For the Klutz book, Pat wanted something better than the balsa fliers of her youth. She'd heard of rubber-band-powered planes that stayed aloft for more than an hour. She knew a few fundamentals about flight—and she thought that a basic rubber-powered plane could be pretty straightforward: a rubber motor to store energy, a propeller to provide thrust, wings to supply lift, a tail for balance. So she located experts to advise her, bought a bunch of toy planes to consider, and got started. A simple project, right?

The early history of rubber-powered fliers is a lot weirder than you think. (When you get right down to it, we've found that most history is weirder than you think.)

It seems that rubber-powered model planes were incredibly important to the history of aviation. Back in 1871, a twenty-one-year-old Frenchman named Alphonse Pénaud built and successfully flew the Planophore—a bat-winged model with a propeller at the back that pushed the model through the air. At the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, in a demonstration for some members of the French Society of Aerial Navigation, the Planophore flew 131 feet—a remarkable achievement. This model wasn't just the first rubber powered airplane, it was also the first airplane capable of stable flight.

Over the next thirty years, lots of folks experimented with rubber-band-powered fliers including (you guessed it) Orville and Wilbur Wright. Before he came up with the Planophore, Pénaud had invented a rubber-powered helicopter that became a very popular toy. In 1878, Bishop Milton Wright of Cedar Rapids brought a rubber band-powered Pénaud-type helicopter for his sons: Orville and Wilbur.

The boys, ages seven and eleven, thought this helicopter was really cool. They flew it until it broke, then built another.

The rest, as they say, is history. Twenty-three years later, in 1902, Orville and Wilbur went on to build and fly the world's first successful airplane. Without that first rubber-powered helicopter toy, maybe they'd have just settled down to run a bicycle shop. They never would have created an invention that changed the world.

No, not the airplane. Just hold on—we'll get to what their invention was in a bit. First, let's talk about what's going on in that simple (yeah, right) rubber-powered model.

A rubber-powered model plane has all the essential bits of a real plane—and nothing but those essential bits. Like a full-size prop plane, a model in flight deals with five basic forces.

Number 1: Gravity pulls the plane toward the center of the earth (the direction most of us call down).

Number 2: The spinning propeller blows air backward, which creates the force known as thrust, which moves the plane forward. Newton's third law is: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That's equal in size and opposite in direction. Air is pushed one way, the plane is pushed the other.

Number 3: The wings and tail create lift, the force that pushes the plane upward, as they move through the air.

Number 4: Drag, caused by air resistance, slows the plane's forward movement.

Number 5: Torque, a twisting force created by the unwinding rubber band, makes the propeller spin in one direction and pushes the plane to spin in the other. (Newton's third law at work again.) The plane's wings and tail extend out to the sides and resist that push, so that the propeller spins fast and the body of the plane doesn't spin much at all—but it does spin some.

That's the story in broad brush strokes. But the devil, as always, is in the details. You, being an astute reader, may have noticed that we were kind of vague about lift, the force that pushes a plane upward.

So let's talk about lift—or at least let's talk about people talking about lift. (Pat recommends that anyone who is scheduled to take a flight anytime soon skip ahead to the next section. The discussion of lift that follows is likely to make you consider taking the train.)

In the ranks of physics teachers, there are two opposing camps, each of which claims to have the one true explanation for the lift of a wing. Paul, with Solomon-like wisdom, says that both explanations are approximations of the truth. (And that, after all, is what science is about: approximations to the truth.) With un-Solomon-like glee, Paul also explains how to piss both sides off.

First, the explanations.

One explanation attributes lift to the Bernoulli effect, a difference in pressure created by air flow. The opposing group focuses on Newton's third law, noting that the wing throws air down and that a reaction force pushes the wing upward. Each group claims to have the one true view. Paul believes both groups espouse ideas that are completely true and at the same time completely useless.

Paul explains the disagreement as a difference in viewpoint. To clarify, he uses another situation in which there are different ways of understanding and calculating what's going on.

Imagine dropping a ball to the ground from a height of one meter. Suppose you want to know how fast the ball is moving when it hits the ground.

You could use Newton's law to find the acceleration of the ball due to the force of gravity. Then you could calculate the speed from the acceleration. Or you could use conservation of energy to find the speed of the ball, setting the gravitational potential energy at one meter equal to the kinetic energy at the ground.

Whichever method you use, the velocity you calculate will be the same—as long as you do the math correctly. Both approaches are 100 percent correct and physicists agree that either one completely explains the speed of the ball.

In the case of lift, the Bernoulli camp is using arguments of conservation of energy, while the Newton camp is using Newton's laws. Basically, it's a problem of point of view. Both approaches produce an explanation of lift if applied correctly. But neither camp can actually calculate the lift of a wing given the shape of the wing, its angle of attack, and the airspeed. And that's a problem: Without the test of experimental predictions, you can't do real science.

What do aerodynamicists say? After all, you figure they'd know the real answer.

Aerodynamicists avoid the whole mess by using yet another approximation to the true equations. They use the circulation of air around the wing to calculate lift. They start by mapping the wing into a cylinder, which reminds Paul of the apocryphal physicist trying to understand a cow who began by saying: Assume a spherical cow. Except in this case it actually works! From the air flow around the cylinder, aerodynamicists can calculate the pressure on the surface of the wing and then calculate the lift.

Here's the part that Pat thinks is really scary for anyone who was under the impression that we actually know why planes fly. Aerodynamicists use an approximation because the real calculation would involve solving the Navier-Stokes equations, which have never been solved. The Navier-Stokes equations mathematically describe the motion of fluids. They are used for a lot of things, including modeling the weather, the water flow in a pipe, and the air flow around a wing. To encourage people to work on the Navier-Stokes equations, the Clay Mathematics Institute has offered a million dollar prize for a solution to the equations—or proof that they can't be solved. But no one has claimed the prize.

Now take a deep breath and put that controversy about lift out of your head. After all, you don't necessarily need to know how something works to make use of it. Other than that pesky business about lift, the basics of flight seem pretty straightforward. The propeller pulls the plane through the air, the wings and tail (somehow) generate lift, and the lift sends the plane into the wild blue yonder.

It sounds so simple—like you can slap any propeller on the front of a fuselage, put on some wings, maybe add a tail for decoration, power up and off you go.

Pat says, just try that and see what happens. As Paul likes to say (with a smile...always with a smile), it's complicated. But it's also where things start to get interesting.

At the beginning of the rubber-powered plane project, Pat, optimistic soul that she is, bought a bunch of rubber-band-powered planes—toys, model planes from the hobby shop, and an assortment of fliers available online. Most of them didn't fly as well as she wanted. The balsa models (similar to the ones she remembered) flew like arrows. The toys flew kind of like bricks (not so well).

So Pat started swapping things around to try to improve performance, and all heck broke loose. Just about any modification to the planes seemed to make a lousy aircraft even worse. That's when Pat gathered a team of experts.

One of the great things about being a writer is you can pretty much call anyone and ask a bunch of questions. If you're writing a book, most people will do their best to answer. And if you find an expert who is passionate about sharing information on a particular subject, stand back.

Pat found Lou Young and Gary Hinze of the Oakland Cloud Dusters, a model airplane club that's been around since 1937, and Michael Norcia, a high school student who has been building model planes since he was seven. All three were delighted to build and fly planes and talk for hours about propellers, torque, rubber, wings, lift, and everything else aeronautical.

They explained, through experiment and discussion, that every doggone part of a plane—from the rubber motor to the tail—had to work with every other doggone part of the plane. Change any part and it'll be out of whack with all the other parts. Consider each part of a basic rubber-band-powered plane individually, and it's easy to understand what each one does. It's when you look at them together that the true complexity comes to light.

That brings us back to the Wright Brothers and their true accomplishment. Their flight at Kitty Hawk wasn't just about getting up in the air. It was about controlling the flying machine once they were up. Getting off the ground was the (comparatively) easy part; stability and control were (and still are) the tricky bits. The Wright brothers were the first to build an aircraft that could be controlled while in the air.

Why is control so tricky? Because there are so many ways to go wrong.

On the ground, you have your choice of going forward, going left, or going right. Life is so easy on a two-dimensional surface.

When a plane is in flight, it's traveling in three dimensions. And traveling through three dimensions gives you three times as many ways to change orientation—which, Pat has come to conclude, gives you three times as many ways for an aircraft to lose control and screw up with disastrous consequences.

To understand this, you need to understand how a plane can change direction. A plane can turn left or right while flying level—which is known as yaw. A plane's nose can point up or down (pitch). And a plane can roll left or right (roll). Or a plane can (and more likely than not, will) put together a combination of these three movements. As Pat has demonstrated more than once, a plane can turn, roll, and dive into a spectacular crash. For a plane to be stable, forces must be in balance so that the plane isn't pushed to change direction.

From the start of their experiments in flight, the Wright brothers focused on control. Some others focused on developing more powerful engines, but the Wright brothers identified control as the unsolved part of “the flying problem."

Their 1902 glider had controls to steer the aircraft through three dimensions. These controls could make the nose of the aircraft point left or right (yaw), make the nose point up or down (pitch), or make the right or left wing drop (roll). By controlling these three things, a pilot could navigate through space.

You'll find controls for yaw, pitch, and roll in every successful aircraft since the Wright brothers. You'll find similar controls in spacecraft and submarines. The invention that changed the world wasn't the airplane, but rather the controls for that plane.

In our work on rubber-band-powered planes, we've spent countless hours figuring out the best foam for the wings, balsa for the motorstick, rubber for the rubber-band-motor. It hasn't been trivial to figure out how to put together a toy plane that meets United States safety standards, flies well, and can be manufactured by the Chinese manufacturer at a price that consumers will pay. Child's play may be easy, but that doesn't mean toys are easy to design and build.

Though creating the planes has been a lot of work—it has also been a playful process. As we write this, the Exploratorium, San Francisco's museum of science, art, and human perception, is celebrating its fortieth anniversary. Those of us who had the good fortune to work at the museum while Frank Oppenheimer, the museum's founding director, was still alive, can't help but review the lessons we learned from Frank, many years ago. And one of those lessons involves play.

Frank believed in the importance of play—as part of scientific research and artistic exploration and day-to-day life. He wrote: “It is clear that the kind of playing that is so fruitful in art and science and in getting accustomed to life or change is an extremely vital aspect of all human endeavor."

As a writer, Pat generally ignores that line so many draw between work and play: writing a novel is an enormous amount of work—and an enormous amount of fun. The same is true for Paul—in his work as a scientist and a teacher, work and play are often hard to tell apart. This overlap of work and play is more obvious than usual when we are working on something that everyone else will use for play: like toy planes.

In “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” Kuttner and Moore pointed out that play can be a very serious business. That's true whether that play involves toys from the future—or the future of aviation, which began with the flight of a toy powered by a twisted rubber band.

The Exploratorium is San Francisco's museum of science, art, and human perception—where science and science fiction meet. Paul Doherty works there. Pat Murphy used to work there, but now she works at Klutz (www.klutz.com), a publisher of how-to books for kids. Pat's latest book is Boom! Splat! Kablooey!, a book of explosive science. To learn more about Pat Murphy's writing, visit her web site at www.brazenhussies.net/Murphy. For more on Paul Doherty's work and his latest adventures, visit www.exo.net/~pauld.

Although he claims to have recently won a local award for the Least Prolific Writer Who Is Still Alive, Bruce McAllister says he is finishing up his first novel in twenty years, The Village That Sang to the Sea. It's set in the same milieu—and indeed, it incorporates—his story “The Seventh Daughter,” which appeared in our April 2004 issue. He brings us now a tale of a pope who never was.

At the end of his remarkably long life, Boniface XII, Dodecimus Episcopus Romanus, once and forever known to Christendom as “The Child Pope,” lay dying in his favorite bed—the one in the Papal Summer Palace in Grosseto, and the one he had slept in even when he was a child, just after his uncle, the Cardinal Voccasini, had performed his political magic and arranged to have the boy, only eight, elected Pope. His uncle had done this, Boniface knew, not only because it would consolidate power in the Voccasini family and its friends—which was important if the Holy City were to function—but also because his uncle had...well, to put it simply, because his uncle had cherished him. The man had believed his nephew possessed a rare spiritual purity and an equally rare, especially for his age, devotion to truths greater than worldly affairs and glib distortions of faith. That, at least, was what his uncle had told everyone for decades, and with apparent sincerity, before his own death at fifty-two from liver problems that seemed to run in the Voccasini family.

Boniface hoped his uncle had been right, for the boy in question, Boniface himself, had reigned for nearly seventy years, a very long time for a Pope-maker to be wrong, especially when the secular condition of the Holy City and Christendom itself, not to mention tens of millions of souls, was at stake. Right or wrong though his uncle may have been, it was over now, and the fog that made the bedroom harder than ever to see in would take him soon. He was grateful that the cardinals had moved so quickly to transport him by carriage, with his doctors, to Grosseto, where he could pass from this life more peacefully than he ever could in the Holy City. In Rome—in addition to the politics that had often numbed his heart—the Drinkers of Blood had, sixty-five years ago, almost won in their onslaught against the Holy City, with far too many souls (and far too many priests among them) lost to Darkness, to the bites and the infections of the soul, and the dark immortality of those infections.

The Oldest Drinker, a man without a name but with many names, had been born, so legend said, on the same night as God's Son, and in Jerusalem, too, though in a bloody, violent darkness where his own mother died even as he entered this world, without a star to shine or angels to sing for him. Without milk from a mother's breast, he had only his mother's blood to nourish him; and that night, as a squalling infant, he drank for the first time.

Fifteen centuries later, deciding at last that the time had come, he had led the onslaught on the Holy City himself, his minions trailing like an endless cloak of night behind him; and only by God's grace had the Light won, using three hundred priests hand-picked by Boniface's uncle to be trained by the Holy City's best archers, and arrow tips made by the city's best arrowsmiths from the wood of The Cross, which had taken five years and a third of the Holy City's treasury to locate at the eastern border of the Empire, ten days’ journey from Jerusalem itself, in a cave that was barely a rumor.

Though it could—and did—disturb his sleep in the Vatican, all of that—the dreams of teeth at his neck these many years after the battle had been settled—did not disturb his sleep here. Here it was safely in the past, in a fog as great as this room's; and like Christendom itself he was, for a while at least, safe here from what might, had history and spirit and God's will danced differently, have been.

But if he was safe, what was this figure before him now—standing in the warm summer light of the bedroom, backlit by the sun through lace curtains? How had the figure entered the room, and why had the figure not been announced?

The figure was of average height, and thin—young perhaps, and perhaps a woman. Was it the Angel of Death, come to him as a youth, which would only be appropriate irony? Or had Satan come for him, to tempt him one last time with dreams of a woman he had, as a young man, loved at a distance for a month in Umbria, never quite sure whether it was love or merely lust, when of course, as he understood now with no little amusement, it had been both. In life, as God designed it, rarely was the truth as simple as “black or white,” though Good was certainly very different from Evil—if one could see clearly enough and not be fooled into thinking one was the other.

"Good morning, Your Holiness,” the figure said.

It was not the Angel of Death, nor was it Satan, nor a woman. It was a young man who, as he stepped to the old man's bedside and let the sun's light fall on his face, revealed himself to be serious of expression, with an earnest look—perhaps, Boniface imagined, the kind of young man who believed that time stole things and that a man's duty, if he were truly devoted, was to save what could be saved before it was indeed stolen.

"Buona mattina, ragazzo,” Boniface answered, giving the young man the smile that had served the old man well in making others feel at peace. “Posso aiutarti con i miei ultimi respiri?” May I help you with my final breaths?

It was meant as a joke, a scherzo, yet the young man looked as if he had been slapped.

"Do not be so serious, ragazzo,” Boniface added. It took an effort to speak; and yet the more words he spoke, the more he felt the very energy, the sanguinity of blood's life, that he needed to keep speaking, as if words held life and could, if he simply used them, keep him here a little while longer. He wanted to thank the young man for this, but he was not certain how to do it. How to thank one he did not know for a few more minutes of life, or clarity? How even to phrase it, in the Papal protocols of speech? He could not remember. There were many matters he could not remember, and no doubt that was because, so close to the end, they were not important. And yet he wanted to thank this young man, and had no idea how to do it.

"I have lived a good life,” Boniface heard himself saying, finding it almost effortless. Why he was moved to say it, he did not know—unless it was the look of concern on the young man's face. “I have seen Darkness nearly reign victorious, and yet I am free now, and blessed, to die in the Light of the days we live in. What more could a man of God possibly want, my son?"

The young man cleared his throat, started to speak, held his tongue, cleared his throat again, and, finally, his voice shaking like windblown leaves, said:

"We want to be certain, Your Holiness, that those who come after us in the Holy City fully understand that Darkness you speak of...."

What a strange thing for a young man to say, even a very serious one. Boniface did not know how to answer.

"And who is ‘we,’ may I ask?” he said at last.

The young man look flustered now. “Forgive me, Your Holiness. I am Niccolo del Pagano, a recorder in the Office of Verbum Dei."

"I see. A ‘recorder'?"

"Yes, Your Holiness. A kind of archivist—one who saves the past from mortal forgetting."

"That is a lovely expression. Is it yours, your superior's or someone else's?"

"It is mine."

"Lovely.... And what is it that you and your Office do not wish to forget?"

The young man looked flustered again, but not so badly. Boniface was tiring from holding his smile—a much more demanding physical act than words, which flowed of their own volition—though the smile did seem to be calming the young man.

"We have heard that you met the Youngest Drinker once,” the young man said boldly.

Could this be true? Years after the battle, which lasted seven years and stretched from Lombardy to the north, Gaul to the west, Greece to the east, and North Africa to the south, as the Drinkers struggled both physically and spiritually with those of the faith, there had been stories about a young Drinker, one no older than Boniface had been at the time, and how different his fate had been from the others'.

Boniface lay back in his bed and closed his eyes. He had heard those stories, but had one of the stories been about him? Had he really met the Youngest Drinker himself?

Then, perhaps because a little more sunlight filled the room at that moment, or because the young man was so sincere in his desire not to lose what death takes from the world, the room's fog did part and Boniface did remember. Clearing his own throat now, he began to tell the story; and as he did, each word made the memory of that night long ago more vivid. The young man, who held paper and pen in his hands, would transcribe it as Boniface told it; but would he also clean it up when he made of it a final document—removing the tics of speech, eccentricities, excesses, asides, and whatever else? Boniface hoped so, for old men were notorious for their sloppiness.

It was a week (Boniface began) when my uncle was away from the Vatican, in Parma, to meet with the Alexian and Augustinian Archbishops to discuss the rumors of “those who drink blood and can turn a man or woman into one of them, and for eternity,” and what that might actually mean. The great onslaught on Rome led by the Oldest Drinker was yet a few years away, and so the rumors, it was felt, were just that: the insane whispers of those who feared Darkness more than they loved Light. I was recovering from a fever, a minor one but one that made me distrust what my eyes showed me, especially at night. I was seated in the Apse of the Basilica of St. Peter, in what people claim is St. Peter's chair (because it is ancient and made of acacia), as I often did when I sought aloneness in illness or self-doubt. A little table made of cedar, ancient too, sat beside me empty except for a goblet of water, for I was never hungry when I was ill. My attendants had left me alone, as I had requested, and the Basilica was empty. No sounds echoed in its great Nave or Transepts, for the only one who could make a sound was myself, and I sat quietly, my feet dangling above the floor, not quite able to reach it.

Then sounds did begin to echo. Footsteps. I stared into the shadows of the Basilica, where the sounds seemed to originate, and watched as one of them, a very small one, broke away and moved toward me.

When the shadow became a beggar child, a boy my own age, I assumed that I was dreaming a fever dream.

The figure approached slowly, his face hooded, one hand out as a beggar's would be, his feet shuffling on the marble floor and hidden by the rags he was wearing.

When my eyes, despite their blinking, could not make him go away, I startled at last, my heart leaping with fear or excitement or both. He was not a dream—he was not a shadow on the floor I had mistaken in half-dream for a beggar child. He was indeed a boy like myself, though a beggar, and how he had entered the Basilica without being challenged, I had no idea.

He was nearly to me when I said:

"Blessings upon you, my child. Who are you?"

Was I afraid? Of course. A beggar child, and, given how he walked, probably sick, wandering somehow into the Basilica—should I not be concerned about contracting what ailed him? Did the child even know where he was? Did he, in his sickness, even recognize me, dressed though I was in my vestments? When he finally realized where he was, he might be more afraid than I, and what might he do then?

And yet behind the vague fear—for it was only that, a vagueness—was another thought, the kind I often had when I was young:

What if this were a miracle—the kind my uncle spoke of—the “miracles that illuminate our lives, whether we are saints or sinners"? Do the scriptures not tell of Christ and his disciples traveling as beggars? Does Christ himself not speak for the meek and weak and poor—of how we must look in their faces to find Him if we are to forget the lies that riches and fine clothes and the body itself are, blinding us as they do to the Truth, which needs no finery?

Was this beggar perhaps not mortal, but His Son returned? Or if he were indeed just a beggar, did he not carry with him a child's innocence and therefore grace?

Head still bowed and hidden by his cowl, the beggar child said:

"I am a Drinker of Blood."

I did not know what to say at first. I was shocked by the child's words, and yet they made a strange sense to me.

"All who seek eternal life through Him are drinkers of blood."

The child laughed, which shocked me, too. To laugh at the solemn words of a Pope, even if he were a boy?

"I am not sure I am comfortable with your laughter, my child."

"I am no one's child,” the boy answered, and it was not with hostility, but sadness.

At that moment D'Orgoglio, one of my attendants, appeared in the doorway just behind me to check on me.

"Your Holiness!” he exclaimed, seeing the child.

"I am fine, D'Orgoglio. The boy and I are simply in conversation."

The child had not turned to look at my attendant, and this made D'Orgoglio even more concerned. He was thinking (as I had thought and should still be thinking): How had the child gotten past the guards? How had the child even known where the Pope would be?

"A conversation at this hour, Your Holiness? Are you—"

"Please do not worry yourself, D'Orgoglio. I will call if you are needed."

D'Orgoglio seemed attached to the floor, unable to move his feet. How could he leave and at the same time obey my uncle's orders that he watch over me with his life?

"Your Holiness—"

"This boy is my guest tonight, Pier. We will be speaking of spiritual matters and so need privacy. As I said, I will call for you—I will ring the bell on this chair, in fact—if I need you."

After what seemed an eternity, D'Orgoglio moved at last, nodded once, stepped back through the doorway, and closed the door. He would send for a Papal guard or two, of course; and when they arrived, though they would all respect my wishes, they would also all listen, out of fear for my safety, on the other side of the heavy door. The child and I would need to speak sotto voce if we wanted privacy.

I turned back to the boy.

"Step closer, that we might converse quietly."

The child took two steps and stopped.

"You are someone's child,” I answered him.

"I was once,” he said, and, as he did, glanced at the doorway. Seeing that the door was shut, he let his cowl drop at last, so that I could see his face.

I jerked back. He was a boy, yes, but not a normal one. His skin was paler than the whitest marble inlays on the floor. His eyes were sunken, his lips thin. The dark slit of his mouth glinted with teeth, and not in a way that teeth should glint.

"You are God's child,” I finally said, struggling for words. “And you will always be."

"I think not."

At that he raised his arm. The sleeve fell from it. His arm was as pale as his face. And then he did the most amazing thing: He bit into his own flesh. He raised his forearm to his lips, opened his mouth, and bit into himself.

It felt for a moment as if he had bitten me. I squirmed in St. Peter's chair from the sensation of it, looked down at my own arm, and calmed only when I saw no mark of mouth or teeth on my sleeve.

His arm was of course bleeding. He had bitten himself more than once, and his teeth had both punctured and torn his skin. Blood oozed from the wounds.

And then he did something else.

He licked the blood from his arm, paused as if to taste it, licked his lips to clean them, and looked back at me again.

"Would God have His child do this?” he asked bitterly, and I could see that his eyes were not what eyes should be. The pupils were too large, occupying all but the white. There was no color to his eyes, only the pupils’ darkness.

He laughed again, amused at my astonishment.

"You still do not know what I am?"

He was correct. I did not. What could he have been, other than a child who seemed to have no blood in his body—pale as marble—and yet could bleed and drink his own blood happily?

Then the most disturbing thing of all occurred; and as it did, I stood up from St. Peter's chair, ready to rush from the Apse.

As I watched—and as he held his arm out to me so that I might do so—the wounds on his arm began to heal. They tightened, puckered, and slowly began to fill with fresh, smooth skin, until soon there were no wounds at all.

For a moment I thought of His Son again. Perhaps (I told myself, wanting to believe it) I was witnessing the kind of healing spoken of in the Holy Book; that I had been right—this was His Son come again, disturbed perhaps, doubting God, but had he not been in this same state, for a moment anyway, on the Cross of Golgotha?

But then the child said:

"It is not what you think, Your Holiness."

It was, yes, as if he had heard my unspoken thoughts; and was this not proof, too, that he might be the Son come again?

"All of us—the Drinkers of Blood—can hear the thoughts of mortals, like voices in our skulls, if we wish to,” he said, performing the miracle again.

"But that does not mean,” he continued, the bitterness there again, “that we are holy."

"I—I do not understand."

"We heal so that our damnation is ensured,” he answered.

"But if you heal, you are immortal in flesh as well as soul."

"That is our damnation, Your Holiness."

"How can this be?"

He paused and the pause was like damnation itself.

"Because,” he said at last, “we do not exist in God's grace."

"Everyone exists in God's grace—simply by being God's child."

"Not those cursed by the bite of the Oldest Drinker and his children, grandchildren and great-great-great grandchildren. The Oldest Drinker is the son of the Fallen One, born to graceless starvation, misery, and eternal damnation."

I remembered something from my eighth year of life: Adults speaking in a corridor, their voices low. My uncle and two others. Phrases like “those of the Dark Communion” and “a thirst that never ends.” When one is eight years old, the words of adults belong to adults, for adults to understand, and I had thought nothing about them. And as I remembered the event, I remembered the fear in the whispers—and the mutterings of prayers that had followed. Later, when the Drinkers began to take the Holy City, I would learn what these phrases truly meant; but at that moment, faced with a beggar child who could heal from his own bite, I remembered only the whispers and the fear of that corridor.

"I am not old enough,” I said at last, “to know of what you speak, my child."

"Nor was I,” the figure rushed to answer, his voice made brave by what was clearly anger and despair, “until I was bitten three years ago and my body told me, as it changed, what I now know. As I met others like me, damned as well, I learned the words to describe it. The Curse. The story of the Oldest Drinker, who has lived for fifteen hundred and seventy-six years when perhaps he should have died in another man's place, on a cross, on a hill that day. Had I not learned these things from others like me, but older, I would not, at ten years of age, stand before you able to speak of anything other than my own misery."

"I still do not understand. But you are here because you wish something of me. This I understand."

"I do wish something of you, Your Holiness, and yet I do not know whether you understand enough of the world to grant it."

"We do not need to understand everything to do what should be done."

The child laughed again, and, though perhaps a little less bitterly, with the same despair.

"Those are the words of a man, not a boy,” he said. “Where did you learn them?"

I saw no harm in answering, and, in fact, felt that only honesty would take us both where we needed to go this night. “From my uncle, the Cardinal Voccasini, and from the holy texts I studied under his guidance long before I was elected Pope."

Tears had appeared suddenly in the child's eyes, and I did not know why. He had been bitter and hopeless before, and angry before that, but the tears told of something else.

"I am not accustomed to the caring your honesty implies,” the child said, sounding like a man even older than my uncle. When you were cursed in his way, did you become old before your time?

But the question that possessed me more than any other was this: Why would God curse a child when His Son had so loved children?

"I do not believe,” I began, “that God has damned you or those like you."

"You do not know,” he answered.

"I believe that you have damned yourselves by choosing to believe that God has forsaken you."

Where these words issued from, I do not know. They were almost heretical, and certainly not my uncle's. They were not from any holy text I could remember, and yet they felt very much like the word of God. I sometimes think that they were the first words I truly spoke as Pope; and by that I mean that they were the first real words of the Holy Spirit speaking through me; and that, had the beggar child who drank blood for reasons I did not understand not appeared before me that day, I would never have truly become Pope.

More tears had appeared, and the child was now embarrassed by them.

"How could God,” he asked, “not have forsaken us if we are so miserable? Is it not God's wish that we suffer for our sins, though our sin is only that we are the children of the Oldest Drinker?"

"You are damned only by your bodies, just as I am,” I heard myself say, a voice somewhere telling me to say it, “and bodies mean nothing, for they are a lie. They tell us that we are not eternal, when we are. They tell us that God must want us to suffer, when of course He does not. We suffer simply because we are here in this world and in bodies for but the briefest moment, after which we will return to Him."

Again, whose words these were, heretical as they sounded, and yet true, I did not know.

"We will certainly not return to Him,” the child said.

"You will."

"But we are damned."

I sighed. What more could I say?

Fighting tears, he said, “Do you wish to hear my request or not?"

"Yes."

"It is this: Will you give me communion? And confession?"

My breath stopped. To grant communion and confession to one about whom my uncle and the other cardinals had whispered in fear should have been unthinkable; but as I looked into my heart I saw that it was not my love of God that made it “unthinkable,” but a fear of what might be “Godless.” And as my uncle had taught me, there is nothing that is Godless. And fear, as my uncle also taught me, should never be the reason for a Pope's action. A love of God should be; and if the words I had just spoken to the child—my first real words as Pope—had indeed come to me through the Holy Spirit, I should listen to them and not to fear.

"Why do you wish this, my child?"

"Because...,” he began, but seemed unwilling to finish.

"You must tell me, if I am to decide whether to grant your request or not."

"Because I want to know."

"To know what?"

"Whether I am damned."

"My words of assurance to you as your Pope are not enough?"

"I wish that they were, but how can they be?"

It was true. How could they be, when I was but a child, too, and they were conversation, not sacrament.

"Did you also think,” I asked, “that because I am a boy, too, you might persuade me more easily?"

"Yes."

"That I would be weak and so persuading me might be easier?"

"No. Only that because you are a child, too, you might understand and have more compassion than any priest, bishop, or cardinal."

He was speaking the truth, and I was moved.

When I rang the bell to call D'Orgoglio, it was not without doubt. What if what I was about to do was wrong in a manner I could not foresee? What if the child were playing me like a musical instrument for his own purposes, or, worse, the purposes of a greater darkness, the Oldest Drinker's? What if my performing the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation, with Communion, provided strength to Darkness?

What if, even if the consequences of my actions were not so grand, I nevertheless compromised the Voccasini family position by doing this? A Pope must remain sensitive to politics, too, that faith not die from the onslaught of worldly matters.

Once doubt fills us, it finds reasons everywhere for itself; and my doubt soon found more than I had ever imagined possible, and with the speed of hunting dogs.

When D'Orgoglio appeared, his face was full of alarm, and two guards were with him.

"I am still alive, Pier,” I said, with a little laugh to calm him. “I wish to perform the Reconciliation for this child. Please bring me the Body and the Blood and leave us when you have. Thank you, and thanks to you two as well, who guard the Papacy so well."

Their astonished looks held them where they stood, but D'Orgoglio moved at last, turning and leaving. Because the two guards remained, the boy and I waited in silence. When D'Orgoglio returned, he placed the goblet of wine and the bread plate on the table by my chair, and then, at an insistent nod from me, departed with the guards, closing the door behind them.

"Step closer, please, my child."

Was he afraid? Was that why he did not take a step? Or was it something else?

"Do you wish to confess?"

"What might I confess,” he answered, “that I would not repeat by my actions every day hence?"

"It is no different for all of us,” I heard myself say. “And yet we all confess."

It was difficult—nearly impossible, in fact—for him to say what he said next, I know now; but he found the courage or will or desperation to say it; and I was again moved, and for a moment could not see through blinking eyes.

"Bless me—” he began, stopped, closed his eyes, and, eyes closed, began again:

"Bless me, Father, for I....” Again he stopped, and I could see him struggle with himself as if with a demon. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned."

"And what is the nature of—” I began, also stopping, for the words that should have come to me would not come either. I heard only the voice that had spoken before with words that were neither mine nor my uncle's. “And what is the nature,” I heard myself say then, “of what you believe has lost you God's love?"

His eyes opened in surprise. These were not the words he had expected.

"I—I have taken into darkness too many souls to count, Father."

"Whether they are in darkness now,” I heard myself continue, “is not for you to judge, but for God, for whom there can be no Darkness, for He and all that He has made lives in Light beyond Darkness."

"But I have sinned."

"That is not for you to determine, my child,” I went on, “but for God, who does not need to forgive what needs no forgiveness."

The boy, squatter of body than the boys I had grown up with—as squat as a Southerner, and just as long-armed, with eyes graced by the lashes of a girl—looked at me in confusion. How could a boy, even if he were a Pope, change the very words that every priest spoke and had spoken forever in this sacrament? Every sacrament was holy and beyond even a Pope's revision.

I was as confused as the boy was, and now frightened. What was this voice that spoke through me, changing what should not be changed, even if its words felt like Truth? Was I an instrument of the Lord of Lies now? Had I become it simply by accepting the boy's presence, a Drinker's?

And yet below the fear was a strange peace, one that let me say:

"So that you will know the peace in your heart that you deserve as God's child, I, your Pope, ask only that you say, when you have left this place tonight, and as you lie down to sleep, no matter how restless your sleep may be, a hundred Our Fathers. Utter them in joy and sincerity, as if your fear that God has abandoned you were but a terrible dream from which you have now awakened."

Not knowing what else to do, the boy nodded, but I could see the doubt in his eyes: Forgiveness and salvation could not be so simple.

And then the voice was gone, and I was free to begin, if I so wished, the Sacraments of Reconciliation and Communion, which the boy had requested and which, I remembered, might be combined in a single rite if a Pope saw wisdom in it. My uncle had never performed such a ritual, and yet such a ritual was what I would perform. I would even, because of what the boy had become, give him Blood before Body. Heresy or not, this is what I would do because it was right; because a voice somewhere insisted that it was.

I stood, picked up the goblet of wine from the table beside me, and held it out to the boy's lips. But when I said, “Misereatur tui omnipotens Deus,” a blue light appeared on the goblet's lip, and I stopped until it had faded. I had never seen such a light. Was it my fever, a trick of the eye in the candlelight, fatigue? I did not want to believe that it was real, for that would have meant something more frightening.

Blinking, I thrust the goblet out again toward the boy's lips; but when I said “Et dimissis peccatis tuis,” the blue light not only appeared once more but danced frantically on the rim of the goblet. I returned the goblet to the table, where the fire faded again, tore a piece of bread from the loaf, and tried once more. I handed him the bread first, so that he might partake of Body before Blood, that it might discourage the flame.

As if afraid it might bite him, the boy merely nibbled on the piece—

And then it did indeed bite him: The blue flame leaped from the bread, and the boy jerked back, as if burnt.

"It is as I feared!” he cried.

Doubt was taking me as well. What could I do against blue fire? And yet there was something odd about the flame. It did not feel like God's anger. It did not feel like damnation. What was it then?

"Let us continue, my child,” I said, not knowing what else to do.

"No!"

"We must.” Quickly I said, “Perducat te ad vitam aeternam,” and held the goblet to his lips once more.

The boy did not want to obey, but he touched his lips to the goblet's rim at last and even took a sip.

Again the blue flame stirred on the goblet, rearing up to leap from the metal to his mouth; and this time I reached out to put my hand in its way.

The flame did not burn me, but instead danced around my hand like a snake until it broke free and leaped to the boy's mouth again.

Again, the boy jerked back as if burnt.

"I cannot do this!” he cried, and the door started to open behind me.

"Do not come in!” I shouted. “We are doing what must be done for this child, Ser D'Orgoglio. We are not to be interrupted."

"But Your Holiness,” the man's voice said, as if he'd seen the blue light himself—which perhaps he had though a cracked door—"if this is demonic possession, you are perhaps too inexperienced to attempt—"

"It is not a possession, D'Orgoglio,” I said, wondering why I felt so certain, “and I am not accustomed to being interrupted by my attendants in the middle of a sacrament."

It was unkind of me to speak like that—especially to a man like D'Orgoglio—but rudeness was the only way I knew to make him leave. The boy would certainly not continue the rite in the presence of the man, and the manner in which this strange mixture of communion and reconciliation was proceeding would certainly excite D'Orgoglio too much for him to allow its completion.

"Yes, Your Holiness,” D'Orgoglio's voice said, and the door closed once more.

"What is your name, my child?” I asked, turning back to him.

"Taddeo—Taddeo da Casta."

"We must continue, Taddeo."

"I cannot."

"You say this and yet you are here. You wish this. Why do you claim you cannot continue?"

"Because I am damned,” he answered.

"As you have said before.” I was growing impatient.

As he said it again—because I am damned—the blue flame danced higher, not only from the goblet, but from the plate of bread as well, as if fueled by the very words he was repeating. And a voice I knew well by now whispered: Yes, that is the reason.

"It must burn me because I am damned,” the boy was saying yet again, and yet again I was answering, “You are not damned."

"But you can see the flame of God's anger?"

"It is your flame, filius Dei. It is yours, for you to use as you wish.” This I now knew, and it was certain.

"No!"

The boy shook his head violently. The two places on his lips where the fire had indeed burnt them were healing, of course.

"And in your self-loathing you use it this way—as no loving God ever would."

"No!"

He was stepping back, and, as he did so, the blue light reached out for him from the goblet and loaf. The flame was larger now, as tall as a child, hot and blue, and a figure was taking shape within it.

"See!” he exclaimed. “That is no loving God!"

"I see a boy in the flame, Taddeo. I see you."

It was indeed the figure of a boy, his face shapeless but somehow familiar.

The boy screamed, unable to look, and, turning, began to run. He ran toward the distant shadows of the Basilica's Nave, and when those shadows took him, I listened to his footsteps until they too faded.

The flame had hesitated for a moment on the goblet and bread, but then had followed him, becoming a wisp and a whisper and then nothing at all.

Two weeks later, after my uncle had returned and reprimanded me for allowing a beggar child to visit me in the middle of the night (and without proper security during the visit), I heard a story from one of my tutors. I had not told a soul what had actually happened that night. It would be a secret I would keep for years. The tutor in question was one responsible for keeping me aware of news in the city; and the story he told me was of a child who had been killed at the Travinia Gate of the Vatican, and under strange circumstances. The child, my tutor explained, had run menacingly toward the guards brandishing a torch, one with a mysterious blue fire; and, though the guards, their bows raised and arrows nocked as was proper, had shouted warnings at him, the child had continued toward them, shouting demonically and screaming heretical oaths, all of which the guards found frightening. What ensued, then, is understandable, is it not, Your Holiness? Release their arrows the guards did, in their fear of the blue flame and the demonic noise; but strangely, the first five arrows, though they struck the child, did not stop his forward rush.

It was the sixth arrow, a particularly stout one, striking the child in the heart, that stopped him mere steps from the gate itself. The child looked, in the words of one guard, like Saint Sebastian, full of arrows, which no child should be because no child should have to be a martyred saint; and the guards did feel the tug of conscience and compassion. But stranger still, Your Holiness, was what happened then: Although the torch rolled away from the child at his collapse and could therefore not have set his robe on fire, the child did catch fire, and the fire was blue, as I said, and it burned intensely until only the child's bones remained, even as the astonished guards looked down on this miracle and crossed themselves in protection.

"Do you have any idea,” my tutor asked when he finished, “what this might mean, Your Holiness? Is this related to the rumors of those who drink blood, who can heal themselves and can only be brought down by arrows to their hearts?"

Of all my tutors he was the one who most believed I would indeed serve Christendom well as Pope, and for this I loved him and would always be grateful for him in my life.

"No,” I heard myself answer. “It means simply that a child is free at last."

My tutor was silent, trying to understand. And then he said: “So that he might return to God?"

"Yes. So that he might return to God."

Boniface stopped talking at last, and with a great sigh fell back. The young man was still standing where he had been standing throughout the telling. Had Boniface not told him to sit, to conserve his energy for the transcribing? But no, the young man in his earnestness had stayed upright, scribbling frantically with a quill in one hand and parchment and an inkwell somehow in the other. How difficult he had made it for himself.

The young man stopped writing, but did not look up. He was staring at the sheaves of parchment he had used, some where they had fallen on the floor, slipping from his hands, others still clenched in them. He had trembled more than once during the story, the old man knew. Boniface had seen him tremble, but had not stopped his tale. Who knew when the words might exhaust themselves, leaving the story unfinished—which would have grieved the young man terribly.

"I do not wish to leave you, Your Holiness,” the young man said suddenly. Still he would not look up.

"You are afraid that I will die if you do, am I correct?"

The young man's silence answered for him.

"Thank you for your concern, but I am not a story,” the old Pope said. “I am a man whose time has come. If I die, I will be forgotten in time by the living; and if not forgotten, my boy, then transformed by the flaws of public and private memory into something I was certainly not. But the true world itself, where words are not needed, nor stories, will not forget what I have touched in this life, just as it will not forget what you touch in your life, ragazzo. What we touch is of the world forever because we ourselves were once of it. As the world remembers, so does God, and the forgetfulness of mortals matters not in the slightest."

"Yes, Your Holiness."

"I told you my story not because I wish to be remembered, but because you, by asking, helped me to remember it, that is, to remember how important that night was to me; and so we have spent, you and I, some time together in this life; and that matters more, though you may not believe it, than any archive."

Boniface stopped. The words were tiring him at last, perhaps because these words were not really necessary.

The young man was nodding. He was confused, Boniface could see. He did not know what to do, standing there. He did not know what to say. He was not sure he understood, though years from now he probably would. And was this not the plight of all mortals—every day of their lives?

"Stand where you are,” Boniface said with compassion, “a little while longer, ragazzo. Soon we will need neither words nor memory....” He heard the young man make a small choking sound, as if from an emotion; and then, as the old man had predicted, none of it mattered, for the fog had completely filled the room now; and somehow it was the young man, no longer a shadow backlit by the familiar sun beyond the window, that had become the brightest of lights.

Rand Lee's previous stories of the D'/fy (or D'/fü as they're termed in this story) include “Coming of Age Day” (Dec. 2003) and “Picnic on Pentecost” (Sept. 2008). This new one, in addition to containing some of the most daring linguistic gymnastics ever attempted in our pages, introduces us to the charming character of Pink. Mr. Lee notes that this story is dedicated to Ms. Taylor Rhodes Jones, “Polymath elf-stork and adventurer."

Gather ‘round, te'ném, gather ‘round. Vlíbit, you are treading on your sib's tail. Now, now, Swúkilip, don't weep; there! One tail, as good as new! Áñadhu, what is that you have in your mouth? Come here; spit it out; let me see. Don't pretend you can't understand me; you speak better Brenglish than anyone here but Pwémmad. Aha! I see. You've been raiding the mineral stores again, haven't you? After class we're going to march right up to Mrizh Klévyamwel's and you're going to give it right back. Yes, I am well aware that diamonds are common but that is not the point; it's the principle of the thing. Oh, yes you are. Well of course that is your choice. But if you refuse to return the diamond you stole, you will not be permitted to experience today's story time with the rest of your tek. All right, then. You are forgiven. Yes, of course, Yútha. [Group snuggle ensues.]

Everyone consoled now? Vlíbit? Swúkilip? Áñadhu? Blopéllüz? Yútha? Pwémmad? Very well, let's begin. We will proceed, as we have begun, in Brenglish. Sorry? Yes, Pwémmad, there will be other languages, too, in our story. [Note to self: We may have a budding zhüdhvu here in Pwémmi; let Borm know.]

All right, class; everyone relax, now, into the lovely, lovely dream-bath. How lovely the dream-bath feels rising about our toes, and tails, and knees, and haunches, and tummies, and—yes, Áñadhu, that's quite right, I have no tail; but then I'm not lílyo, am I? After all, I am Human, not of your species, the Damánakíppith/fü. Yes, Yútha, despite this, we are all Family here, including myself; after all, different species may still be Family, may they not? No, that's all right; no need to apologize for an honest observation. Where was I? Ah, yes.

This is a story about a very young Human named Juliana “Pink” Sévigny, who lived in an experimental interspecies space community, a space station that your species called Óllowe/Dvyénnu, the New Place, and that my species called Concord Station. Where was Concord Station, Blópi? Well, it was located roughly halfway between the Human home star-system of Sol and that of Dám/Hihívo, the star ‘round which our great friend Ámash/Bórmwu, your ancestral Shiphome, circled at that time. Yes, Blópi; Humans have a name for Shiphome's star, too; two names in fact: Rigel Kent or Alpha Centauri A. It is a very beautiful star, one of three which circle one another, in fact: Dám/Hihívo, Dám/Fnikkírh, and Dám/Bnéthu. I very much hope you will see them someday very soon.

You have gathered, I expect, that our story takes place rather long ago, before Ámash/Bórmwu migrated to the Sol system, where co is now. Oh, no, Vlíbit. No, it took many years, nearly a hundred and twenty Earth-years, in fact, for your fü to convince my fü to let Shiphome move to Sol. Why did it take so long? The answer to that question is rather complicated, I'm afraid, but I suppose, put simply, it is that we Humans were afraid of you D'/fü. I know, I know; it was very very silly of us Humans, but we did not know your fü so well back then, and we assumed that you would kill us or eat us or make us work for you. Why did Humans fear this, Pwémmi? Because Humans tend to have a sickness called fear-of-anything-different—the Brenglish word for it is xenophobia—and in the very old days, when some of us met other Humans, we would kill them or eat them or make them work for us. So some of us could not imagine that your fü would not do the same to us if you got the chance.

Attributing to others feelings we have ourselves is called projection, and it is a habit that has gotten many Humans in a lot of trouble over the millennia, let me tell you.

But let us get back to Pink. Yes, Pwémmi, “pink” is the name of a color in Brenglish, red with white mixed into it. Was Pink pink? Well, as with most Humans, her skin would turn pink when she was sunburnt or excited or embarrassed, but no, that is not why she was called that. She was called that because of the color of her hair, which was very orange. What is “orange,” Yútha? Orange is red with yellow mixed into it. You're quite right, Blópi; calling someone Pink because her hair is orange makes no sense whatsoever, but that is how it is sometimes with language; words get thrown against one another until they begin to take on shades of meaning they wouldn't otherwise have. Suffice it to say that “Pink” is often a love-name for Humans with orange hair, which, to confuse matters even more, is usually called in Brenglish “red” hair. Perhaps it is because orange-haired Humans often sunburn easily; I don't know.

How young was Pink, do you ask, Swúki? Well, we'll cover that in the story, but for now let's just say that Pink was the Human equivalent of lílyo'te, just like all of you. That's right, just like you, although of course, Áñadhu, being Human, she had no tail.

Oh, come, come, Vlíbit, you know very well what the word “she” means; no, Pwémmi, let Vlíbit answer. That's right, Vlíbit; good for you. “She” refers to the type of Human who under normal conditions keeps cos seed inside co, in contrast to the “he” type of Human who is capable of ejecting cos seed from cos body. Why do hes eject their seed, Swúki? For fun, I suppose, and sometimes to combine their seed with the seed of a she inside the she's body, so that together the combined seeds can begin forming a new Human.

No, hes don't eject their seed all the time, Vlíbit; well, most of them don't, anyhow. No, there will be no seed-ejection in this story. In any case, class, this will all be much easier to understand when we've let the dream-bath take us there to experience it directly.

Where was I? Ah, yes.

This is the story of how Pink traveled with her Work Partner Orientation Class from Concord Station to Shiphome (an historic occasion); got lost in the Tangles (an extremely easy thing to do, as you can imagine); met her new D'/fü workpartner, who nearly decapitated her with cos tail (a very near thing indeed); and encountered the Vigilant Bird, who ate her. The End.

Everyone ready for our dream-journey? Remember, we will be experiencing Pink's story from her Human point of view, which will be a little mixed up by her adventures in the Tangles; so don't worry if you don't understand everything straightaway—we'll have lots of time afterwards to talk all about it. Ready? All right, then, class, on my count, submerge yourselves in the dream-bath completely. Here we go! Vóh'te, hwépp'te, gdéss'te! Submerge! Let the dream-journey begin!

"How very exciting,” says Sister Skylark, after it is all over, patting Pink's hand in a sympathetic manner. “And how very dull life will seem now that you are back home. What is your Firster partner like?"

"Big,” says Pink. “Very, very big.” They are sitting on the bridge of the fictional starship Beatific Vision, with all the fictional crew standing ‘round: Brother Róbberámmerdoc, the Hammerhead Man, Vision's weapons specialist, all muscle and armor plate; Sacred Sib Flénya'rényarah, communications specialist, with hisher writhing head of sensor tentacles for hair; Tubular Russia Dog, the cyborg atheist science officer (handsomely scarred, half-man, half-machine, all poet—a dreadful tale); and Sister Alexandra, the chief navigator, who is so hideous (or so blindingly, maddeningly beautiful) that, according to the rules of the Order to which the crew belongs, she can never permit herself to be seen as other than a head-to-foot-enrobed blur. There is also Meep, zizzing around somewhere. They are all the same person, really—the AI of Concord Station, the space station where Pink and her mother have been living for nearly three years—but they have been Pink's favorite VR scenario since she was a toddler and she sees no reason to change this now just because she is sixteen. “Big,” Pink adds loyally, “but really sweet. Co tries really, really hard not to knock into things and break them. And co's really polite."

Sister Alexandra says, “Doessss thissss one possessss a name?"

"Slídhadhrup,” says Pink. “Slídhadhrup/Jéjno'Lílyo/fü.” [She pronounces it SLEETHE-ah-throop-JAYJ-noe?-LEEL-yoe-fü?, with a rising tone in each syllable following a “/"; the “th” voiced like the “th” in “soothe"; and the “ü” in fü like the “u” in French “tu” or the “y” in Danish “Holeby” or the ü in German “hübsch.” To pronounce the “ü” in fü, set your mouth to say a nice long “oo,” then, while you are blowing out the air to say “oo,” and without moving your lips from the “oo” position, change the inside of your mouth to try to say “ee” instead. Or just give up and pronounce it “foo,” to the scorn of all French and German persons—Danes will be far too polite to laugh at you.]

Brother Róbberámmerdoc barks a laugh. “Slither-droop,” he says, and they all laugh, then, even Sister Skylark, though she immediately apologizes for it.

"You will not be going alone, of course,” says Pink's parent. They are sitting at the breakfast table in their shared apt in the Human Habitat Area on Concord Station's Fourth Ring. Pink's parent is Doctor Andrea Sévigny, the Station's Chief Exozoologist, which is someone who studies animals from planets other than Earth. “The entire Orientation Class will be taking the trip, chaperoned by Doctor Ziomek and Mrizh Borm."

"Placid,” says Pink.

"Please, Juliana; no slang at the breakfast table.” The Orientation Class is composed of new Human Station staff who have not yet been assigned D'/fü work-partners. Pink is by far the youngest, by a good twelve Earth-years; and she is also the most experienced with Station life, the first Human subadult (as she then was) ever to join the Station staff. In the past, Shiphome has assigned D'/fü crew to their Station counterparts. But recently Shiphome's presiding te'ürye—whom, as Pink knows, are Damánakíppith/fü in their seventh, final (and from the Human viewpoint, weirdest) morphological cycle—have made an unexpected announcement. They have decided to invite this latest shipment of Humans to come to Shiphome, mingle with its inhabitants under controlled conditions, and see what pairings develop. Thus the class trip, the first of its kind.

"After all,” says Doctor Sévigny, “if the United Nations ever lets the D'/fü settle on Earth, that is how relationships among the races will form naturally. And even if this trip does not affect the outcome of all that, it is significant in its own right. Shiphome has not permitted Humans such intimate access to coself since this station was completed in 2178. That was six years before you were born, ma petite.” She smiles fondly at her daughter and takes another piece of toast from the toast-rack.

"Will you be coming with me, maman?” Pink asks.

"Non, you are a big girl, and I have my work here to do.” Pink's heart leaps. “As we have discussed, the Shiphome population in which you will find your partner will be the lilyo'te; and your partner, whoever co ends up being, will be the very first lílyo ever permitted aboard this facility. You have studied lilyó'te in Orientation, one presumes."

Pink nods rapidly, and her voice assumes a professorial tone. “They're Family in their first morphological cycle. That's why we call them Firsters. They stand, on average, three meters tall; have big tails that fall off when they get older, but no manes or wings, not yet. They also have the mass of a small commuter transport and can benchpress a quarter ton.” And they have nothing whatsoever between their legs besides sematophores, she thinks, but does not say. As recently as a year before she chattered on artlessly about the luridly hued D'/fü scent glands, and even engaged in crotch- and neck-sniffing with the friendly D'/fü around the station. But now that she is sixteen, and having her menses (which came so late the Station physicians were very worried), she is finding it difficult to speak of such matters to anyone but Sister Skylark, and she no longer leaps into Borm's arms for nuzzle-wrestling.

It was her menses that made Pink realize how alone she was on Station. This upset her greatly, for when she first arrived with her mother, in 2195, she thought she had died and gone to Heaven. For the first time in her life she found herself surrounded by incredibly interesting and friendly people who were interested in her not because she was a clone but because she was young, and smart, and funny, and endearingly freckled, and brave, and Human; and she made friends instantly, particularly with Borm; the Station AI (in cos Sister Skylark persona); and Nandi's father, Alan “Andy” Ziomek, Crew Relations Facilitator, the oldest Human on the Station, everybody's unofficial grandpa, and the only Human on Station besides Pink to lack a workpartner.

She soon discovered that loneliness is an emotion nearly foreign to the D'/fü. Very early on, following their emergence from their Shiphome crêches, Firsters group (or are moved to group by forces at the time of our story still improperly understood by Human biologists, psychologists, and ethnologists) into ték'te— sextets—that is, groups of six; and, barring accident, all the individuals in a given tek mature together from morphological stage to morphological stage.

Changes from one stage to another can be very dramatic even by D'/fü standards. Powers come and go; organs grow and are discarded; size gradually diminishes (though mass does not). Second Cyclers (dyéñe'te) or Seconders are randy, winged, haloed, supercurious shapechangers mad to touch, smell, lick, probe, rub, and mess with anything and everybody that takes their fancies. With discipline, however, they can make good peacekeepers, like Chiriósso, the centaur half of the Orientation Class's Security escort. Third Cyclers (nuplásta'te) or Thirders are supercreative empaths integrating and expanding upon memories and skills from prior embodiments. Many of the D'/fü counselors, artists, musicians, craftspersons, and techies on Station are Thirders. So was Borm when Pink first met co.

Fourth Cyclers (unésta'te) or Fourthers are calm, focused, controlled grown-ups (except for Borm, whom Pink cannot imagine ever becoming calm, focused, controlled, or for that matter grown up, no matter how old co gets). Many develop specialized body-shapes suited to their biologically and spiritually ordained roles in the D'/fü community. Fifth Cyclers (shórya'te) or Fifthers are semiaquatic, eyeless, web-digited, phociform hermits who spend most of their time on Station in the marine habitat on Ring Seven surfing the D'/fü Dreamtime or chatting with the porpoises and giant octopi. Sixth Cyclers (tümüta'te) or Sixthers are healer-leaders, devoted to identifying and setting right problems that disturb the harmony of the fü. Pink once heard one of the oldsters on Station refer to Sixth Cyclers as “yodas,” which resulted in her spending the better part of three workshifts scarfing popcorn with Grandpa Andy, giggling at old flatscreen vids.

The seventh morphological stage (ürye'te) is the biggest Change of all, and it is so weird Pink doesn't like to think about it. At the time of our story, even after a hundred years of Human-D'/fü contact, still very little was known about Seventh Cyclers, partly because there are very few Awake on Shiphome at any one time, and those who are, seldom communicate with anybody but Shiphome and Sixthers. It was only a year or so prior to the events of this story that Humans learned that an ürye is in fact a composite individual made up of the six merged members of a matured ték.

What would it be like to have an ürye as a workpartner? thinks Pink, watching her mother butter toast. Safer than having a Firster, probably. Because Firsters are the largest of the D'/fü, Firsters can do a lot of damage without meaning to. So lilyó'te are drilled from crêchehood in D'/fü etiquette, which consists of 374,360 Expressions of Emotional Commerce, most of them apologies.

Co will crush me like a fly, thinks Pink sadly, and weep bitter tears over my corpse. And then, of course, co will eat me, because that is what D'/fü do for one another when one of them dies, an exceedingly rare event. They do this not only as an act of spiritual homage to the deceased, but also to ingest and assimilate cos memories and experience. Not that Pink imagines she has much experience to assimilate. The image of Sven, the artist from Orientation Class, swims fetchingly into her mind, and she shoves it out of sight hurriedly.

When she does, another thought pops up in its place, one so dreadful that she has not permitted herself to entertain it until now: What if I get to Shiphome and nobody wants me? And it is this thought that causes Pink to exclaim to her toast-buttering mother something that will make Pink writhe in embarrassment for months afterwards recalling it. “But I don't have anything to wear!"

Her mother smiles. “Shall I order you a pressure suit from La Pleiáde? They are all the rage in the Lunar Republic these days, I understand.” Her daughter glowers. “Come, come, now, chérie, no need to put on such a face. We shall find you something colorful. Firsters adore color. Besides, it is high time you graduated from the gamine look.” Pink brightens, only to lapse back into sourness when her mother adds, “No implants."

In the Tangles, Pink crawls wearily through a landscape that shifts at every susurrus of her thoughts. Her makeup is smeared and she has long ago lost her shoes, wig, hat, and bulbils. Every once in a while, when she stops and yells, “Borm?” the word flies out of her mouth and manifests as three-dimensional Roman alphabetic characters, which immediately shift to Cyrillic, then Ogham rune script, and Vévrelljójodstan, then pop like soap bubbles in the blue green chartreuse yellow gold brown orange red burgundy purple violet turquoise air.

She tries to remember the precise sequence of events that has led her into this pickle, but everything seems jumbled up. She remembers talking to Sister Skylark about it all, but surely that cannot have happened yet. She remembers the children teasing her about being a clone, on the playground of the French school she attended before her mother moved them to Canada, though why that memory should come to her, here, in this place, is beyond her comprehension. She remembers walking upon the surface of a planet where the plants sing her a welcome, though she has never been anywhere but Earth and here. She remembers the Shiphome airlock opening to welcome the Bifurcated Androgyne. She remembers some sort of explosion, although (as far as she knows) she has never witnessed an explosion in her entire life. She remembers coming out of the incubator into a cold, fuzzy world peopled with careful giants. She remembers lovers, none of them Sven; playground fights; taking a bath with a bunch of gigantic Firsters; being so old she cannot lift her head. Then? Nothing; only many stars; and Borm saying, “Dorothy! Dorothy! There's no place like home,” in an obscure language not unlike Finnish.

Who in hell is Dorothy? thinks Pink. Suddenly it is all too much. She lies down on a surface that has abruptly assumed the characteristics of deep fluffy moss, if you can imagine moss composed of trillions of nose hairs. I guess this is it, she thinks. She has not eaten in a while, and you could go crazy in a place like this. Little things run over her on their way to somewhen else. She does not stir, and after a while (if you can call it that) she sleeps.

She is still sleeping when Slídhadhrup/Jéjno'Lílyo/fü, blundering blindly through the madness of the Tangles, nearly decapitates her with cos tail.

In the bathroom of the Concord Station apt she shares with her mother, Pink stares at her chest in the mirror, silently willing something, anything, to happen thereupon. Pink's chest is flat, like her mother's. Pink's hair is red, that is to say, orange, as her mother's was before it went gray. Pink's nose, like her mother's, is snubby. Pink's face, like the maternal face, is freckled, and pale (except when it is sunburnt or excited or embarrassed). Like her mother's, Pink's limbs are slender (though well-muscled), and Pink's feet, like her mother's, are immense. “I look like an elf crossed with a stork,” Pink complains to her friend Borm.

"Elf,” muses Bormwéthu/Havévno'Unésta/fü in cos three voices. “A powerful mythological creature, frequently portrayed as possessing diminutive size. Ah, just so seemed Humans to us when we first encountered you! Stork. A large wading bird of the zoological family Ciconiidae, possessing long legs and a stiff gait. I should like to see a stork one day. I experienced no storks when I visited Ohio, but of course I was only a Thirder then.” Borm has only recently gone through cos Change and consequently has been putting on airs.

"Maybe I should get implants,” says Pink.

"Forgive me for saying so, as I am merely a Nongendered Outer Space Alien with no direct experience of such matters, but it seems to me that having storks implanted upon your person would create an effect more outré than décoratif."

"Ha, ha,” says Pink. They have been trying on makeup together in Pink's bathroom. It has been a tight squeeze, even given the liberal dimensions granted by the Concord Station architects to the Human Habitat apts. Pink stands a little over one and three-quarters of a meter tall, but Borm stands over two and a third meters, with shoulders triple the average Human width, and massive, haunchlike, goddess hips. These characteristics, along with the somewhat prancing gait caused by the fact that D'/fü knees flex fully in both directions, have earned Borm and cos kin the nickname of “centaurs” among some Humans. Australians, rather unkindly, prefer to call them “'roos."

So for Pink, sharing a bathroom with Borm is a bit like sharing a bathroom with a Shetland pony, or with a big-eyed, silver-furred gamboling lamb that just happens to weigh one hundred eighty-seven and one-third kilos and in cos case smells (thanks to the D'/fü sematophores) like a very rich blend of roasting coffee beans. “More blusher?” inquires Borm. Pink eyes co critically.

"I shouldn't,” she says. “Maman always says that less is more."

"How very D'/fü of her!” exclaims the centaur, patting the girl massively on the head with cos long nailless six-fingered hand. Borm has a high fluting tenor voice, and—like all D'/fü from Seconders on up—whenever co speaks, two other voices seem to be speaking softly in unison with cos main one. “From my study of your kind I gather that there is a grammar to mammaries, and your journey—small and powerful though you may be—has barely begun. Have patience. You know not what delicious secrets your DNA may reveal in its due time."

"Yes, I do,” says Pink. “I'm a clone. I'm doomed to look just like my mother.” The one time she has mentioned this fact, casually, in her mother's hearing, Doctor Sévigny did not even look up from her cell-slide as she replied, “Consider it a blessing, chérie. Men will never be distracted from the beauty of your eyes."

Borm says, “In any case, your new fwet'héttaha will not care what size your bassoons are. Fortunate Pinklet, to be traveling to our dear Ámash/Bórmwu! I cannot wait to show you the place. Watch out for your new partner's tail,” the linguist adds, taking a powderpuff from the dresser and dusting cos harsh-planed gray face with fluorescent powder (all the rage last year on Luna). “Firsters are notoriously clumsy. Which reminds me, I have a going-to-Shiphome gift for you."

"Really?” says Pink, suspiciously. Co passes back the powderpuff, reaches into a duffle, and pulls out a lurid orange tangle. “Um, wow, Borm. Um, it isn't alive, is it?"

"Non, non, ma petite blagueuse. Behold!” Co shakes the tangle and it resolves itself into a heavy-looking henna-red dreadlocks wig. “Do not soil your knees with prostrations of thanks. Try it on!"

Pink puts on the wig, which settles down over her forehead, engulfing her head, shoulders, upper chest, and most of her back. “I can't see,” she complains.

"No matter,” says Borm gaily. Cos own silver mane, which is interlaced today with writhing turquoise ribbons, has expanded in Fourtherhood and now reaches to cos waist, a fact of which co is inordinately proud. “You will make a glorious first impression upon your poor maneless Firster. How envious co will be! Take my advice: whenever possible, let co carry you. That way, you'll run much less risk of getting stepped on."

Pink is lying on the greensward in the Human Habitat Area of Ring Four with the rest of the Orientation Class, listening to various Station workpartners talk about their experiences of meeting one another. It is nearly a month before the class is scheduled to leave for Shiphome. She is slightly bored, because little of this is new to her; and she is trying very hard not to watch the pseudosunbeams from the fake Ring Four sky glitter through the hairs on the forearms of veiny blond sculptor Sven Larssen.

A stern voice in her head reminds her that she is living on the biggest space station ever built, interacting daily with extraterrestrials; she should have better things to do with her time than mooning over some Scandinavian mesomorph. Mort XXXIX, her pet fandy, zizzes past on cos rotary wings, twurpling to beat the band. This makes Pink sad, because she knows that soon Mort, like all fánd'te, will enter cos parthenogenetic birthing stage, and be eaten up (like an Earth spider-mommy) by cos hatchlings. “And then co got so drunk, co tried to eat my chest,” someone says.

Everyone laughs, and Pink's attention perks. The speaker is a short, plump, merry, large-chested, saried Indian woman, Pooja Niruja by name, who has been serving as Concord Station's Chief Human Sociologist for some years. Her D'/fü partner, a long-maned, green-eyed Fourther named Vúdrir/Háttra'Unésta/fü, protests good-naturedly over the laughter.

"Kek, kek, kek, she is very wrong in her words to you all,” co exclaims in cos chorused tenor. “One was not attempting to consume said mammaries, but to determine whether or not they were part of ü'Pooja's person, a symbiont, a parasite of some kind, or a decorative adjunct to her clothing. And for such determinations my fü employ the tongue.” At which point all the centaurs listening ‘round about stick out their very, very, very long, bright cerulean blue tongues, which makes everybody in the class laugh even harder.

Other stories follow. Mimmi Navarrete, a Chilean cryogenicist, describes how long it took her to become used to the D'/fü's strong body odors. “When I first met Údhi,” she says, referring to her centaur partner, “I kept smelling strawberry jam all the time. ‘What is this strawberry jam?’ I thought. ‘Who is making strawberry jam?’ It turned out to be Údhi sweating.” He Pengfei, a gray-haired Chinese botanist, says that when he first met his partner, Üra, the centaur's scent put him in mind of the aroma arising from the freshly shaven root of Angelica archangelica. Aeltje Claes, a Flemish woman assigned to Station Traffic Control, pipes up that her partner, Dhórhen, made her think of smoked eel. “And that was before co showed me cos tongue,” she adds, which makes everybody laugh again.

"Pardon me.” One member of the Orientation Class, a scholarly-looking older Englishwoman named Gwendolyn Rice-Chakrabarty, who displays keen interest in everything but seldom speaks, turns heads. “Would it be an effrontery for me to ask our D'/fü friends here what Humans smelled like to you when you first met us? Of course we must each possess a distinct, er, pong or range of scents, varying with our body chemistries. But I mean in general? Did you find our scents distasteful? Reminiscent of something from your own culture? Surprising in some way? Or simply alien? I hope that my question does not offend."

All Human eyes turn to the centaurs gathered ‘round about. Quiet settles over the group. A couple of the students cough. Then long-maned, green-eyed Vúdrir/Háttra'Unésta/fü rises onto cos massive haunches. Cos partner, the Indian sociologist, smiles tenderly at co and places a hand on cos broad silver shoulder.

Vúdrir looks around. Warmth has come into the huge eyes of all the nearby centaurs, and gold highlights into their silver fur, and Pink finds herself holding her breath. “How do Humans smell to us?” the Fourther asks in cos three voices. “After our long years of seeking you in our loneliness, and having found you, Dreaming for this day when together we may talk and eat and smell and lick and embrace in harmonious enquiry? Why, you smell to us only of one general thing and that is tívi."

"Sorry, what does this tívi mean?” asks handsome rugged Sven, running a veined hand through his platinum hair.

"Joy,” says Pink Sévigny. She is feeling very small in the grass, very small and very alone in her cloneness. The big sculptor blinks down at her as though noticing her for the first time. “Tívi means joy.” And then she bursts into tears.

Sitting by herself on the edge of her Marseilles playground at l'Écôle des Enfants Surdoués, nine-year-old Juliana is putting the finishing touches on her sandpainting when a shadow falls over the work and her. “Va-t'en,” the future Pink yaps [Get lost!].

"Que peins-tu, Cigogneau?” [What are you painting, Little Stork?]

"Mêle-toi de tes oignons, Bernache.” [Mind your own beeswax, Barnacle.] Without looking Juliana knows her interlocutor is a very short, dark, muscular, extremely hostile female named Bernice Azouzi. Bernice will grow up to be a highly respected judge in northern France, but at this stage in her development she is aware only of the injustice of her height, and she vents her rage—whenever the nuns aren't looking—on Juliana, the tallest child in the form.

"Bébé-éprouvette!” taunts Bernice. [Test-tube baby!] “Ton frère est un Bunsen et ta soeur est une cornue!” [Your brother is a Bunsen burner and your sister is a chemical retort!] Titters arise from a knot of girls standing not far away. Bernice is very smart for her age. They are all very smart for their ages, and they know about Juliana being a clone, how she is not certain; probably one of the novices spilled the beans, despite the Headmistress's stern warnings to the staff and Andrea Sévigny's distant kinship (through her Italian fatherline) with the current Pope and the official opinion of the Vatican that Human cloning is permissible in cases of spousal demise and maternal infertility.

The future Pink does not respond to the short girl immediately. She is pondering what Sister Skylark would do in her position. The image of Brother Róbberámmerdoc, the Hammerhead Man, comes into her head, saying, “ADN, q'il aille au diable! Nous tous sommes l'essence des étoiles!” [DNA be damned! We are all starstuff!] So she carefully picks up her sandtray; gets to her feet; looks into the child's black eyes with her green ones; and says, “Tu as bien raison, Bernice.” [You're right, Bernice.] Then, instead of smashing the sandtray over the Barnacle's head, which was Pink's original plan, she walks away with the tray still in her hands.

Pink, lying on the turf of nosehair, senses her near-decapitation by the Firster's tail as a whoosh of wind and a loud thump and powerful vibration very close by. She also becomes aware of a strong organic scent, not dissimilar to that of recently boiled menudo in a poorly ventilated kitchen. “Madre de Buda,” she says, wrinkling her nose, and opens her eyes to find a silver-furred mountain with enormous worried liquid gold eyes peering down at her from about a meter away.

She has seen larger creatures, but none this close. She knows at once it is a Firster, and not a happy one. Cos huge, limpid eyes are lilac-lidded with anxiety; cos massive, muscular, unmaned torso is streaked with purplish-brown; and half of cos chests are undeveloped (secondary D'/fü lungs not fully maturing until Seconder—dyéñe'te—stage). The Firster is wearing a complex equipment belt-slash-rucksack, tattered and filthy, and when co sees her eyes open co says, “Zhóktet,” in a deep, deep single voice. It is precisely the sort of voice a mountain would have were it capable of speech. “Zhóktet!” The smell of boiling intestines grows stronger. [Safe! Safe! Pink translates.]

"Pleased to meet you,” says Pink, gagging slightly. She rubs the sleep out of her eyes. The scenery ‘round about has not changed—it is still completely incomprehensible—but the air is slightly colder than she remembers it having been, she is feeling very light, and the nosehairlike sward upon which she has slumbered has grown unpleasantly moist and springy. “Um, Tyénst'h'ko'dnesk djinsh, hwehbállu,” [Howdy, pal], she says, sounding the glottal stops carefully. She hopes she is using the right polite forms. “Can you speak Brenglish?"

"Brenglish, yes, yes, this one has been so schooled,” roars the mountain. “Harmed art thou, Master Small Individual? Canst thou rise? Is thy tiny wise head intact? For one came upon thee of a sudden, and one's tail, alas! Came near to bifurcating thee.” And then co breaks into an elaborate lamentation of which Pink understands perhaps three memes out of twenty.

"Ke'zhéggha'a! Ke'zhéggha'a!” cries Pink [Grieve not! Grieve not!], a trifle desperately, for the nosehairs have begun sucking at her skin like little questing siphons. “Would you mind helping me up?” The creature breaks off cos lamentations and, with the slightest of efforts, tugs at her outstretched arms, whereupon she sails through the air, halting her progress by desperately grabbing the featherlike branches of something resembling a tree fern. The Firster gives another howl of despair, certain co has killed her this time, so she is forced to yell, “Ke'zhéggha'a!” several more times until co calms down.

She climbs down from the tree fern, which is filled with minute coral slugs that flee her with unsluglike rapidity, peeping their dismay. The sobbing mountain approaches her with great care, in the process knocking over or aside with cos tail three iridescent blobs, a beige cheesy hexagon the size of Pink's mother, and what appears to be a bright purple radio antenna, which screams slightly as it falls. “Hey, now,” says Pink, patting cos immense furry paw. “It's okay, truly. Low gravity plus big muscles plus stork equals flight, no prob."

"One hungers,” co says.

"That makes two of us.” She looks around. “So. Let's use equal-to-equal conversation mode, okay? Fefréllyo yoyók Pink. Fefréllthre ñeñék/donnét?” [Person-of-equal-rank, I call myself Pink. What do you call yourself?] Cos reply sounds like molasses gurgling out of a jug. Pink says, “Um, hwesh?” [Again?]

"Fefréllyo Slídhadhrup/Jéjno'Lílyo/fü yoyók,” says the Firster. [My name, person-of-equal-rank, is Slídhadhrup, Current Era, First Cycle.] “Thou art the first Human ever I have smelt. How camest thou hither? Art thou from Óllowe/Dvyénnu [The New Place]?"

"You mean Concord Station?"

"Djádthre,” co says [Agreed], and taps cos elephantine right ear [the D'/fü equivalent of a nod of assent].

"Djádthre,” replies Pink [You betcha!], doing the same. The creature's huge puppy eyes grow wider with wonder. Hastily she explains, “Vyen'jéssatye blefzhúzhü fwet'héttaha yek.” [I came here, person-of-equal-rank, to meet my worklifepartnerfriend.]

"To Kyíghenhássdrumderr [The Tangles] thou camest this one to meet?” exclaims the Firster. Cos sick lilac-browns are beginning to be replaced by healthy flushes of rose-orange.

"Here? Oh, no,” says Pink. “Kek! [No!] I mean, not on purpose. Coming here was sort of an accident. You know, a m'shyéghen.” [An unintended error.]

"My teacher say, No te'm'shyéghen there be,” roars the Firster solemnly.

"Yeah? Well, vyen'jéssatnéne Kyíghenhássdrumderr lópdhik?” [Why did you come to the Tangles, person-of-equal-rank?]

Co launches into a long and mostly incomprehensible tale involving much chest pounding and tail thrashing, which when all is said and done appears to boil down to the fact that cos teacher told co to. “But I thought,” says Pink, “that you folks—your fü—don't go walkabout until dyéñe'te [Seconderhood]?"

"Djádthre, djádthre, djádthre!” replies Slídhadhrup. [Absolutely! Correct! YES!] Co is squatting, now, before her, cos tail stretched out behind co, so that she actually comes up to the place where cos navel might have been had co had a navel. “Nonetheless, teacher saith, ‘Go find Úüv'élleblét/immo,’ and so Slídhadhrup goeth!"

"Bien," says Pink, and then falls silent, for she can think of nothing else to say. She is lost in an incomprehensible wilderness with the centaur equivalent of a bright ten-year-old, and she hasn't the slightest idea what to do next. Then she turns and looks at the creature again. “Wait a sec. Zhádnónnet-nónnet?” [What did you just say?] “Tümüta'ñék dámmas-dámmas blíspfü górmn'shde?” [Whom did your teacher tell you to find, person-of-equal-rank?]

"Úüv'élleblét/immo,” says the Firster.

"You mean the Bird? The Vigilant Bird?"

"I know not these words."

"Sorry. Sorry.” Úüv'élleblét/immo, she thinks desperately, trying to recall what she has learned in Ethnology. “Got it!” she exclaims. “Hwehbállu [buddy], can you take us to Úüv'élleblét/immo? Do you know the way?"

"Teacher saith, the Way is within us,” intones the Firster. “And all places are this place.” Then the lilac-brown leaks back into cos fur, and co buries cos huge face in cos huge paws and weeps. It is such a Human way of weeping, so deeply recognizable, that before Pink knows what she is doing she has climbed into the mountain's huge lap and is putting both her slim (yet well-muscled) arms around co. And they sit this way, the Human child holding the alien one, for ten thousand years or so.

"This sure feels familiar,” says thirty-nine-year-old skipship navigator Juliana “Pink” Sévigny, wading hipdeep through the field of singing flowers.

"Ah don't get this wet-head ceremony,” says Bad Boy Mitch. All twenty-four members of the Orientation Class are sitting around the holotable in the big briefing room on Ring Five, waiting for their facilitators to show up, and Mitch, as usual, is pretending to be stupid just because he comes from Texas. “What happens? Me and my workpartner, do we get it on, or what?” To the embarrassed silence that follows his question he replies, “Come on, you people. You cain't tell me ah'm the only one heyah who's been wonderin’ that."

"The word is fwét'het, not ‘wethead',” says a cool, cultured female voice. “And if by ‘get it on’ you mean ‘engage in genital congress,’ then I fear you face disappointment.” Professor Elena Magdalena Velasquez-Villareal, Chief of Xenoethnology for Concord Station, has walked into the chamber, followed by her partner, Vállanévra/Háttra'Unésta/fü. She is a dark-skinned, dark-haired Brazilian of astonishing beauty, attired in an impeccably tailored business suit. Her partner, who towers over her, is a pale-eyed Fourther with a disc-plaited, spinelength mane. “What precisely is your speciality, Mister Henderson?” the profesor says, fixing Mitch with her cool, cool gaze. “Plate tectonics? Olfact adhesion? Underwater basket weaving? Destroying ecosystems?"

"Ah happen to be a famous writah,” says Mitch with dignity.

"Romance holos,” pipes up Pink. “I looked it up.” Mitch gives her a glare and the rest of the class tries not to laugh, with varying degrees of success.

"I only ask,” says Velasquez-Villareal, “because if you are—with the rest of this class—to represent the Human race to the Damánakíppith/fü of Shiphome, it is important that you get some basic terms correct."

In cos three baritone voices, Vállanévra says, “As perhaps, my small friends, you have already been informed, the fwét'het is what in Brenglish may be termed the workpartner bonding ceremony. Fwet'héttaha is the term in Mánafu/túrrü for the workpartner with whom one bonds. The terms denote togetherness, opening to inclusion.” Co circles the room with the distinctive D'/fü hop-stride that Pink at first found funny but now scarcely notices, while from the alien arises a pungent, sweet scent not unlike that of lavender. “Kindly do not confuse the fwét'het with the tek bond. On Ámash/Bórmwu, the fwét'het ceremony is employed when individuals from one tek must join in intensive but temporary partnership with individuals from another tek removed in distance from the home crêche."

From her place near the door, Velasquez-Villareal says, “The ceremony involves six stages. The first stage is the gwann, the search or hunt for the suitable workpartner. When you arrive at Shiphome, most of you will be taken on a tour of those portions of Shiphome that are equivalent to your current Station departments. There you will seek out compatible potential workpartners, so it would be well to have prepared beforehand a mental list of qualities you feel would be suitable in a fwet'héttaha.

"Once you find a suitable candidate, the second stage of the ceremony begins, the tyúnsten or greeting, which traditionally consists of the ritual expression, ‘Mággizhen tívvi üwéwn,’ that is to say, ‘Health, joy, and honor!’ Thereafter follows stage three, the bórmgwann, or invitation to fwét'het."

"'Most’ of us, you say, Professor?” puts in Ndidi Nwosu, a brawny basso composer from Nairobi. “Who will not be included in the department tour?"

"That'd be I,” says Pink faintly.

"Djádthre,” says Vállanévra, hop-striding over to where Pink is sitting. Cos pale eyes are shining, and the discs on cos mane are chiming faintly. Co puts cos hands on her thin shoulders, and the scent of lavender grows stronger. “Citizen Sévigny is our very very special nem, are you not, Citizen? Great things of her we expect, I think. She will be taken on a special tour all her very own.” Pink thinks this has a slightly ominous ring to it, but nobody else seems to notice; they are all looking at her a trifle enviously, except for Mitch, who whispers loudly to the classmate seated next to him, “Special? That skinny little thing? Why, ah'v got hemorrhoids older than her."

The beauteous Velasquez-Villareal gives Mitch a cold stare, then looks at her partner. “We were speaking of the bórmgwann, I believe?” she says.

"Djádthre, djádthre,” agrees Vállanévra merrily, skip-hopping ‘round to take up a position behind Mitch's seat, which causes the Texan to crane his head up and around to catch a glimpse of the big creature's face. “Now among my fü,” proceeds the Fourther, smiling down at Mitch with cos huge moist loving eyes, “the bórmgwann or invitation to fwét'het is normally communicated via a specific cascade of te'rúllmann or sematophore expressions. Since your admirable species does not possess sematophores capable of directed emission—at least, not unless you have been consuming dried legumes—” [polite laughter here] “—each of you will be given, prior to your departure for Ámash/Bórmwu, six small vials or bulbils containing a chemical amalgam similar to the scents my fü emit for the bórmgwann.

"When you encounter an individual whom you wish to invite to come to Concord Station as your fwet'héttaha, you simply remove the bulbil from its pouch, hold the bulbil in your cupped palm for no more than three seconds to allow the warmth and scent from your hand to penetrate its membrane, then release the bulbil before your chosen candidate."

Annikki Mäkelä, a tall Finnish hydraulic engineer, raises her calloused hand. “Will we be the only ones doing the approaching, or will our hosts also be initiating the bórmgwann?” she asks.

"For this first visit,” replies Velasquez-Villareal, “Shiphome is permitting this class to take the initiative. If all goes well, subsequent visits may be coordinated differently."

"Why six bulbils?” asks Deng Bochao, a handsome young Chinese studying nanosuturing at the Station teaching hospital.

"Because as you know, we D'/fü do everything in sixes,” replies Vállanévra/Háttra'Unésta/fü. “And because six bulbils give one the opportunity to approach more than one potential fwet'héttaha. For the bormkwúnaha, the one approached, may reject or accept the bórmgwann as co wills."

Velasquez-Villareal says crisply, “The response to invitation constitutes the fourth stage of the ceremony, the zhóllaven or assessment of suitability, in which both the bormkwúnu, the approacher, and bormkwúnaha, the approachee, must spend a certain amount of time together, weighing carefully their mutual suitability. The time spent varies, but usually is taken up by conversation and mutual grooming, the object being to achieve rüzhruven and fwónnuven: intellectual and emotional intimacy. Thereafter comes stage five, the háhlhlappen or choice aye or nay; and the final stage, the fwét'het proper."

"Is that when we get it on?” quips Bad Boy Mitch.

"Now, now, honored wee one,” says Vállanévra, slapping the Texan's cheeks fondly. “You would not have us disclose all our mysteries, would you?” With long silver nailless fingers co tweaks Mitch's nose, then hops on. “The proceedings of the fwét'het vary from partnership to partnership, but one factor common to all such is paired dreaming, what my fü call hwérrik/vurráhn. I trust you have all completed your preparatory dream-practice? Yes? Ah, very good. Then you should have a very easy time of it indeed. Following the hwérrik/vurráhn, you will experience flénnen, a scent-marking by your fwet'héttaha, and with this the fwét'het ceremony will conclude."

Derek Wright, a goateed New Zealand astronomer of compact build sitting on Pink's other side, leans close to her and whispers, “What sort of dreams do you think our Texan has?” which because of his accent comes out like, “What sort of drames d'ye think our Tixan hez?"

Professor Velasquez-Villareal clears her lovely throat. “One more important matter remains to be discussed,” she says, “and that is the matter of your safety whilst you are in Shiphome. The class will be accompanied to Shiphome by your chaperones, Chief Linguists Nandi Ziomek and Bormwéthu/Havévno'Unésta/fü, and by a Security team made up of Officers Alexella Sanhueza and Chiriósso/Vevbróta'Dyéñe/fü. But as there are twenty-four of you and only four chaperones, their presence will not be sufficient to ensure your safety unless you keep the following points firmly in mind.” She stares at Mitch as she says this.

"Firstly,” she goes on, “do not wander off by yourself. Stay with the group until it is time for your Shiphome guide to lead you to meet your D'/fü work-peers. Thereafter, stay with your guide, who will accompany you as you navigate the pre-fwét'het procedures. When you settle upon a fwet'héttaha who accepts your bórmgwann, stay with co through fwét'het until flénnen, when co marks you with cos scent; then let your new partner lead you back to the disembarkation bay. The reason for these precautions is that like all lifeforms, Shiphome possesses internal defense mechanisms that guard against infection and predation by foreign organisms. Until your fwet'héttaha marks you with cos scent, you run the risk of being mistaken for an invader by Shiphome's immune system. And I assure you that cos immune system is extremely efficient in disposing of invaders.

"Remember, class: whatever you do, whatever befalls you on Shiphome, do not wander off."

They wander and wander and wander and wander and wander and wander and wander, Slídhadhrup taking very small steps so that Pink can keep up with co, until Pink can walk no more. Then Slídhadhrup picks her up and puts her upon cos wide hairy silver maneless back, and trots and trots and trots and trots and trots and trots and trots. Occasionally weird things divebomb them from the trees? giant pseudocorals? techno-organic art installation projects? towering overhead, forcing Slídhadhrup to stop, put Pink down, and fend the weird things off. It gets so cold they can see their breath in the air; then it grows so warm Pink nearly faints with the heat, though the lílyo appears unaffected. Gravity fluctuates, too, making footing and pacing dangerous. “Are you sure we're going in the right direction?” yells Pink to Slídhadhrup. (A nearby bush is screeching like a Mumbai cobra-rock band, making it difficult for her to hear herself speak.) “Saklósso brísh-brish,” is the Firster's roared reply ("The road is the road"). In other words, thinks Pink, who the hell knows?

Along the way Slídhadhrup unhappily sniffs and samples all manner of potential edibles (bdéd'zhuzhahá'te): leaves (or what look like leaves), bark (or what looks like bark), blossoms (or what look like blossoms), insectoids. Pink, figuring she might as well die full as die hungry, samples them, too, and though none of them kill her and a few taste vaguely pleasant they all go right through her and she ends up with hours of smelly diarrhea which leaves her weak and severely dehydrated. Slídhadhrup roars so many apologies over this that she ends up yelling back, “Samálla! [STOP!] Samálla, for Buddha's sake!” with such rudeness that the Firster flushes greenish-lilac with shame and sulks for what Pink's watch calls several hours. [The correct polite form ought to have been Yemállfye, “May we both stop, person-of-equal-rank."]

Sulking, Slídhadhrup leaves her under an apparently innocuous, purplish-blue, magenta-tasseled bushlike object and goes off to find them both some water. Pink falls asleep under the bush-analogue and dreams she is back on Concord Station, describing to her Orientation Class her experiences in the Tangles. She is just coming to the part where she encounters the Vigilant Bird when a U.F.O. descends into the middle of the room and a queer six-headed creature sticks its head(s) out and says, in perfect French, “Non, non, mademoiselle, au jaune! au jaune!” [No, no, Miss; to the yellow! To the yellow!]; whereupon she wakes up to find the ceiling or sky or firmament far, far above lit up green in one direction and gold in another, and the “bush” licking her legs in a leisurely manner with its “tassels."

Weeping with fear and self-disgust (she smells like a sewer), she struggles away from the pseudobush's mild attentions and trips over Slídhadhrup's tail. “Thou wakest, honorable wee insulter!” roars the Firster, not apparently unhappy to see her. “Vrórrimwa!” (Drink!) Co hands her a shining transparent globule textured like plastic, flanged by vestigial winglike bits, and possessing a sphincterlike pucker at one end. It is a smaller twin to the huge one in the Firster's other hand. “Suck at the anus, ah! Thou seest?” co instructs, demonstrating, and Pink is so thirsty she does so. Liquid trickles into her mouth, skin-temperature and very slightly salty. At first she gags, thinking of urine and menses and snot and seminal fluid and other examples of mammaliana. Then she remembers she is the daughter of an exozoologist, and sucks away womanfully. It starts to taste wonderful, and she has to force herself to drink it slowly.

Slowly her mind, fuzzed with dehydration, returns to a measure of alertness. The bag deflates until it is nothing but a limp rag in her hand. Following the Firster's example again, she sets it on the “ground” and, employing its winglike bits, it burrows swiftly out of sight. What in hell was that thing? she thinks, then decides that she does not right this moment wish to know. She touches the Firster on cos thigh. “Urrióñene, hwehbállu,” she manages [I thank thee, buddy-my-equal]. “Sorry I was rude earlier."

"K'háss'hul,” replies the Firster [Nothing, nada, forget it, no worries], with an offhand wave of cos tail. Then, on mountainous impulse, co sweeps her up in cos furry silver arms and licks her all over her face and neck with cos ridiculously phallic blue tongue. When co lets her, gasping, go, she is startled to see tears welling from the sides of its enormous golden eyes.

"Aw, don't cry,” says Pink. She lifts her hand and wipes away the tears. “Everything will be all right, I promise."

"Slídhadhrup feared thou wert dying,” blubbers the mountain. “Slídhadhrup knows not what to do for to rescue a dying one."

"I'm not dying, Slídhadhrup,” says Pink firmly, hoping it is true. “I'm just a little weak, that's all. But the water you brought me really, really helped, and I had a dream just now. I think it was an ürye. It came to me and told me to go toward the yellow.” She points toward the gilded area of the Tangles’ horizon. “I think that's where we'll find Úüv'élleblét/immo. Or it, us."

Pink is sitting in the big media room on Ring Five with the rest of the Orientation Class, plus Andréa Sévigny, who is having a mother's second thoughts about permitting her daughter to go on the class trip without her. It is the final class meeting before the big embarkation to Shiphome, and Shipnet drones are floating around recording everything for historic and P.R. purposes. Present are the two Ambassadors from Station to the Concordat Security Council, the Honorable Dvorah Franzheim and her Sixther partner, Awéwet [Honored] Píttu/Háttra'Tümüta/fü; linguists Borm and cos partner Nandi Ziomek, the class's official chaperones; Gerda Rappesdottir, the scary Concord Station P.R. Chief, with her Fourther partner, sweet lilac-eyed Fást/Hahánno'Unésta/fü; and the two Station Security reps who will be accompanying the class, Alexella Sanhueza and her Seconder partner, huge Chiriósso/Vevbróta'Dyéñe/fü.

Gerda the P.R. lady has taken center stage and is saying, “If any of you people screw this up I will kill you with my bare hands.” Somebody waves. “What?"

It is Mitch. “Can we take vids?” he drawls. “WorldNet's already beatin’ down mah door and I need to know what to tell mah agent."

"Recording equipment of any kind is forbidden on Shiphome,” says Gerda, “as well you know, and the transportation and discovery of same will result in your immediate dismissal from this community and deportation back to Earth.” Mitch smirks but subsides. Americans, she thinks. “Other questions?"

Sven stands up, the better to show off his two and a fifth meters of height. Sven is a platinum blond, ruggedly handsome, with ice-blue eyes, and he is dressed in worn navy blue jeans and a stained embroidered artist's smock, from which his sculptor's powerful arms and hands protrude veinily. He says, “Will we be permitted to tour the Archaics while we are visiting Shiphome? Will we be permitted to experience the Tangles?” He has a very deep voice.

"No,” says Gerda.

A brief toilet break is called. Pink finds it difficult to stand, and is glad when her mother appears at her side. Doctor Sévigny says, “Are you all right, ma chérie?” Pink replies, “Bien sûr, maman,” [of course, Mom], and tries not to fall over. Pink is wearing a smart emerald silk suit, a necklace of black cultured pearls, and high heels dyed to match the necklace. Her orange dreadlocks have been pulled back from her face a trifle, and she has a lot of fluorescent makeup on, the effect of which is slightly spoiled by the enormous peacock feather hat she is wearing. “Don't worry about me, maman,” adds Pink into her mother's shoulder (they are nearly of a height). “What could happen with Borm as chaperone?” And they both laugh in not-entirely-mock consternation.

The break is soon over. When the class has reassembled, little, old, blonde, exquisitely dressed Ambassador Franzheim says in her soft, cultured, riveting voice, “I need hardly remind you all that this is an historic occasion. For the past twenty-two years of this Station's existence, the Human staff has been assigned D'/fü partners by Shiphome. As a system, it has worked on the whole very well.” She smiles up at her partner, and Awéwet Píttu, one of the few Sixth Cyclers Pink has ever seen, smiles down at her D'/fü-style: lips pursed, dark violet eyes aglow with love and humor. Like all Sixthers, Píttu is short, only a bit over two meters tall, and winged, cos mane curiously liquid in appearance, like strands of blondish mercury. Pink thinks, And I'm going to be stuck with a stupid Firster! Then shame floods her, and she hangs her head.

"However,” Ambassador Franzheim continues, “as the United Nations Security Council winds down what we all hope will be its final session of debates on the Shiphome-to-Sol System immigration question, Shiphome has agreed to invite you, the first Orientation Class of 2200, to meet and find your D'/fü partners on their own home ground, as it were. Awéwet Píttu?"

Politely Awéwet Píttu places cos hands upon cos chests, the D'/fü equivalent of a bow, opens and closes cos silver-blond wings, and says, “All of my fü hope that you will feel yourselves as welcomed by our beloved Ámash/Bórmwu as we have felt welcomed by you here.” Co has a glorious, mellifluous triple-voice, underscored by a faint, sweet scent not unlike that of a Madonna lily Pink once smelled in the gardens of the Catholic girls’ school she attended as a child; and at cos first words the assembled class is enthralled. “It is my singular honor to convey to you a personal message from Shiphome's guiding council, Hássdruv'myémyemye Sútchdhu/Tá'Ürye/fü.” Co pronounces the honorific HASS-droov-MYAY-myay-myay, which (recalls Pink) means “The Many In One."

Gasps are heard all over the room, because everybody knows that direct Seventher communication with Humans is vastly rare. The Net-drones make a tight circle around the assembly, like sharks sensing prey. Ambassador Píttu gestures, the lights in the meeting room dim, and a holo springs up at the center of the meeting table.

The figure revolving slowly in the holo scarcely resembles a D'/fü at all. The Seventher measures a mere meter and a quarter from end to end, a height Pink herself has not enjoyed since she was five. The ürye's torso is faintly furred, and cos scent organs appear as pale lilac ovals scattered over the surface of cos translucent skin, through which Pink can see Hássdruv'myémyemye Sútchdhu/Tá'Ürye/fü's internal organs pulsing. In place of two arms and two legs co possesses four clusters of tentacles, not round like rats’ tails but flattish and flexible. And like the seraphim witnessed by the Jewish prophet Isaiah, the ürye possesses two pairs of wings: one above (that is, one wing-pair issuing from the Seventher's upper shoulders) and one below (the second wing-pair issuing from the base of cos spine).

But Sútchdhu's eyes are pure D'/fü. As Pink watches each set come around, new beauty assails her, though afterwards she cannot remember the color of any of them. One face's eyes appear supernally calm; looking into them, Pink feels her fears of the trip melt away. Another face's eyes seem sharply assessing; Pink feels herself quail as their gaze appears to fall upon her. A third face is alive with such mischief that Pink giggles. A fourth glows with such passionate love that Pink feels her cheeks burning in response. And a fifth face's eyes are so sad Pink struggles to keep from bursting into tears.

But when the sixth face comes around, Pink feels a chill pass up her spine and the hairs at the back of her neck stand erect. For the eyes of this face are closed tight, their lids silver ovals, the only parts of the creature's body that are not translucent. Yet when they turn in her direction, Pink knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that they are seeing her. This is a holo, she reminds herself. A recording. They can't be seeing you.

The face of the ürye with the closed eyelids revolves on, and she is free again. She peeks around the table. Everybody in the meeting room, Human and D'/fü, is standing as still as a statue, attention entirely absorbed by the image floating over the center of the table. Nobody is twitching. Nobody is farting. Nobody is doing or saying anything. And inexplicably, there is no sound issuing from the recording at all, but nobody seems to notice except her.

Suddenly Pink is afraid again and she does not know why.

Pink sits in her seat at the table in the petrified room, not looking at the holo, wondering why she of all those present cannot apparently hear any sound from the recording. She thinks of how Catherin Castleton, the WorldNet commentator who accompanied the First Human Expedition to Shiphome in 2117 (before skipflight, before Concord Station, before anything), described the ürye she met as “fairylike, in the oldest sense of the term” and (in one of her final recordings, when she lay dying of supercancer in a D'/fü healing annex) as “saints"—not selfless warriors of the Good, like the holy women Pink tried to emulate in her early years at school, but (Castleton explained ramblingly) “ones set apart” from normal spacetime, “whose experience and conception of reality is radically different” from anything a Human or even most D'/fü could understand.

"I am convinced,” Castleton said, “that ürye'te exist only periodically in spacetime,” about which a sarcastic professor in Pink's secondary school Physics class once remarked, “So who doesn't?"

Pink peers up at the holo again. Slowly the creature in the holo revolves, and then Pink gets the uncomfortable feeling of eyes behind her—not ürye'te eyes, but some other's. So she turns in her seat, and there, standing not a meter and a half away, is a thin, thin, tall old sunburnt Caucasian woman with a snubby nose and freckles and short white hair and beautiful green eyes saying, “Ne sortis pas! Ne sortis pas!” [Don't go! Don't go!]

"Pourquoi non, mémé?” Pink responds [Why not, Granny?], for she sees no reason why she should be respectful to an unsolicited vision addressing her in the French familiar form. She notices then that the crone is wearing some kind of uniform, tattered a bit, but with a slightly altered Concordat sigil affixed to one shoulder: Human and D'/fü hands joining, supporting not the Earth between them, as in the sigil she knows, but the Milky Way galaxy. This gives her such a strange feeling that she nearly misses the next thing the old bat says: “Parce que si tu sortis, tu n'auras ni mari ni les enfants, mais l'univers seulement!” [Because if you go, you will have neither husband nor children, but only the universe.] “Décides!” [Decide!]

There is a disjoint; a snapping. Pink jerks. The holo of Hássdruv'myémyemye Sútchdhu/Tá'Ürye/fü is gone. There is all around her the odd sound of grownups weeping. The elderly Englishwoman is looking very, very thoughtful. Mitch the class bad boy is sitting with a stunned expression, chewing on his cuticles. Handsome Sven has fallen forward onto the meeting table, his ice-blue eyes tightly shut, leaking tears out of their edges. Ambassador Franzheim and Awéwet Píttu are moving around the table, bending over this one solicitously, whispering in the ear of that one. Nandi and Borm, the chaperones, are nowhere to be seen, and all the StationNet drones are hovering near the ceiling, recording lights conspicuously OFF.

At the front of the room, Gerda the P.R. lady is in fierce sotto voce consult with her partner, Fast, and the Security team, and Gerda being Gerda, this means that her voice can be heard all over the noisy chamber, saying, “What the [slang term for sexual congress] do they expect us to do now? Look at these people! They've been traumatized, and they're [slang term for sexual congress] due to leave in half a [slang term for sexual congress] hour, for Buddha's sake!"

"Juliana?” At first Pink thinks it is the crone back again, and she flinches, but it is only her mother the exozoologist, crouching near her chair. “Oh, maman,” Pink says, and for the first time in a very long time flings herself into her mother's arms and hugs her close. “She warned me not to go!"

"Who? Who warned you not to go where?"

"The old lady,” Pink replies. “She warned me that if I went on the class trip today, I would be given the universe but denied a husband and children."

"An old woman appeared to you?” Pink nods. “And she told you you must choose between the universe and a family?” Pink nods. An odd look comes over Andrea Sévigny's face.

"Maman,” says Pink, “I think that the ürye, or maybe Awéwet Píttu, did something to us.” Pink points with her chin across the room, to where Ambassador Píttu is stroking the hair of a sobbing, bull-necked young military type whose name, Pink recalls vaguely, is Vanya.

"So it would appear,” says the exozoologist. “And to answer the question on your face, no, I experienced nothing extraordinary beyond witnessing the holo of a Seventher with the most exquisite voices imaginable speaking incomprehensibly in Adult Mánafut."

"Pardon.” The Sévignies turn and give Ambassador Franzheim identical looks of mutually protective belligerence. She blinks. “I'm sorry. May I speak with you?"

"No,” says Andrea Sévigny, at the same time Pink says, “Okay.” Pink hesitates, then, but seeing her mother clamping lips tight, Pink throws caution to the winds. “Ambassador,” says the elf-stork. “Was this some kind of test? Was that really an ürye who spoke with us?"

The trim old blonde woman nods. “Disorientating, I'm afraid. But thrilling, thrilling! History is made here once more! Did you, too, Miss Sévigny, have a numinous experience during Sútchdhu/Tá'Ürye/fü's message?"

"I'm not sure,” replies Pink, partly because it is the truth, and partly because she is unwilling to admit that she does not know what “numinous” means. So she tells Ambassador Franzheim all about it.

As Pink relates her vision, the Ambassador's eyes grow brighter and brighter and more and more intent. When Pink is finished, Franzheim says, “And what is your response, Miss Sévigny? Will you choose les enfants et un mari or l'univers? Hássdruv'myémyemye Sútchdhu/Tá'Ürye/fü is waiting for your answer."

The journey to Shiphome from Concord Station on the skipship Bifurcated Androgyne takes, relativistically speaking, no time at all. Most of the time that elapses during the trip is taken up with getting the twenty-four classmembers and their chaperones aboard; settling everybody into their seats along the walls of the communal passenger bay; seeing to passenger hydration ("Nipple's on the wall"); putting the Human passengers to sleep so their untrained monkeybrains won't interfere with the slédhdha/máttawi [skiptrance, mystical skipunion] of the sledh [six-member skipcrew, three D'/fü, three augmented Human]; and revving up the impulse engines so the Androgyne can get far enough away from Station to cause no untidiness when the skipshift occurs. Elena Belicista, a particle physicist from Spain, explains to Pink that the ship is driven by “what we in Spain call an NVAC drive."

"NVAC? What's that stand for?” asks Pink.

"No Viene Al Caso," says the physicist, a motherly middle-aged woman who, despite possessing similarly glossy black hair and similarly snapping dark eyes, is as approachable as Velasquez-Villareal is terrifying. “Which means in English, Beside-the-Point."

The skip is uneventful. Pink closes her eyes, having taken off her shoes and hat and permitted her seat's webbing to envelop her snugly; and the next thing she knows Borm is saying, “Look, wee powerful Human friends, look!” The webbing has dissolved, and there, filling the bay's realtime holoscreen, is Shiphome, with yellow Rigel Kent and its red dwarf partner Alpha Centauri B hanging not far off in the close, star-smeared distance. (The third partner, Alpha C, is too far away for easy notice.) Pink cannot speak at first; it is all too thrilling and beautiful for words: Shiphome, Ámash/Bórmwu, the artificial living planet in which the Damánakíppith/fü have traveled the galaxy for thousands of Human years.

"Madre de Buda,” whispers the particle physicist.

The Androgyne's impulse engines chug onward. It takes about an hour to come within docking distance of the satellite, and long before then Shiphome has ceased to resemble a perfect, glowing, featureless, iridescent pearl and has been revealed as coated with three thousand years’ worth of accretions, add-ons, and detritus: some resembling Human-comprehensible huts, waystations, tracks, and portholes, others incomprehensibly writhing with cilia, or puffing with balloonlike attachments that expand and collapse at regular intervals, or fluttering, fluttering, fluttering in the solar winds. Closer still, and Pink is able to point out to the physicist spacesuited D'/fü applying starglop in wide shining smears to the shining hull. “Star glop?” says the Spaniard.

"Plasta de las estrellas,” manages Pink, who knows just enough Spanish to get by. “It's a kind of biomedicine and growth stimulant some of the unésta'te make to help heal Shiphome's skin when it gets burned or punctured."

Belicista observes her with bright eyes. “How strange it must have been for you these past few years, on this Station all alone with only your mother and other adults and los centauros."

"It's been okay,” says Pink, wishing this part of the conversation were over. As if sensing this, the woman does not speak again, and they sit in silence watching the living planet grow larger and larger and larger until it is swallowing them and the Androgyne and the universe beyond.

The old woman peers out from the protective cover of the tanglefern, watching her younger self snore. Borm was right, she thinks, smiling. There is a grammar to mammaries.

In her hand she cups the thing with which she has intended to slay the past. She is still not sure she will use it. If she does, then sleeping Pink will never know the worlds upon worlds which the old woman and her sledh have found, explored, mapped. She will never know the excitement of observing sentient races in their infancies, adolescences, maturities, or of being the first to welcome the three who have joined the Concordat. The old woman smiles again, thinking of Sister Skylark. The Flex!tibb, the Údh, and the Háharaháhahárraha do not resemble in the slightest the crew of the Beatific Vision, or, for that matter, the crew of the Indolent Tesseract, her own vessel. How very provincial of us to have always assumed that alien sentients would have faces, she thinks wryly.

She is irritated to realize that she is weeping. They have always been an embarrassment to her, her sudden tears. Sleeping Pink mutters and turns over in the circle of young Slídhadhrup's protective tail. Seeing co alive and well has been the hardest thing of all, for adult Juliana knows the terrible fate that awaits co if she does not release the thing she holds. Whom do I love most, she thinks, myself as I am, myself as I was, or Slídha? God damn Sútchdhu for Dreaming up this little scenario! There is no hope for it. She must decide, and very soon, before the Tesseract falls out of phase with this nexus of the Tangles.

On cue, she feels a touch on her right shoulder, and a faint perfume of curry. Yes, yes, I'm coming, Vuwénno, she subvocalizes.

Her partner's soft voices sound in her cerebrum. We love you, dearest lung, but Taugie's anxious to be gone, and Pléppli does not wish to go through cos Change here in the Tangles. Let us know soon, add the voices, what you decide. Are you going to kill us all, or aren't you? Then the voices, the touch, and the curry are withdrawn.

Are you going to kill us all? A simple enough question, thinks old Juliana. For weeks, Tesseract-time, she has hiked the Tangles, seeking the proper nexi, planting her warnings throughout Pink's main probability-lines; and now, here before her old eyes lies ur-Pink, the most probable Pink, the Pink who most closely resembles the Pink she recalls herself as having been: Pink, lying leggy and logey before her. All it will take is for old Juliana to release the nanoplex carried in her hand, and it will seek out just the right neural bundle in little Pink's orange cranium, and sleeping Pink will wake, shorn of the curious brain-tweak that might have made her into the most highly skilled Human skip-navigator known to history so far. Then Pink and dear Slídha will find their way back to their disembarkation bay and go on to live long, long, productive, domestic lives. Old Juliana finds that she cannot imagine Slídha as an unésta.

It was, she realizes, an impossible choice. Impossible. On the one hand, Slídha. And some sweet handsome Human, someone like what-was-his-name, perhaps: Swann? Hans? Sven, that was it, Sven, with the veins—and then, bébés born of their mutual conjoined DNA, luck-of-the-gloriously-random-draw progeny, not test-tube monuments to an exozoologist's vanity and fear of surprises. On the other hand, Vuwénno. Thájjarup. Andrew. Pléppilil. Taugie. Herself, too, of course. And one thousand seventy-nine worlds of wonder.

Time to choose, thinks Juliana. “Au revoir, ma chérie,” she whispers to the sleeping elf-stork, and makes her decision.

"But what about the Bird?” demands Bad Boy Mitch “The what-d'you-call-it, the Vigilante Bird? And how could y'all have these so-called adventures in the five whole minutes from the tahm we-all first stepped into Shiphome's disembarkation bay from the An-dro-gyne and the tahm you caught up with us from the rear?” (He pronounces it “re-yah.")

"It's Vigilant Bird,” snaps Gwendolyn Rice-Chakrabarty, who by now thinks she has had enough of Texas to last her a lifetime. “And the Tangles is not a reality so much as a kind of dream. Isn't that correct, Mrizh Borm?"

"But ah thought the Tangles wuz a place,” complains Mitch.

"Pink?” says Borm with cos three tenor voices. Cos eyes are bright, bright. Pink looks down, flustered; then up again, directly into the centaur's face.

"It's a sort of place,” she says. “But it's an indecisive place. It's a place that hasn't made up its mind what to be, or when."

"And how did you get out?” asks Elena Belicista, who is wondering, in an offhand way, why the girl smells distinctly of menudo.

Pink shrugs her thin shoulders. They are back on the Androgyne, all twenty-four classmembers and their chaperones, awaiting departure for Concord Station. Everybody stinks. “I'm not really sure. Slídha and I kept walking toward the yellow, as the dream told me to, and then, when we couldn't walk any farther, we sat down and waited for the Bird to find us. I guess we fell asleep waiting."

Silence drops over the group. They have all found their partners, even Mitch (an exuberant dyéñe much given to poking and grabbing and licking and rubbing), and they are all excited; but something else has happened; they all feel it. Pink wonders whether the Bird came and found them asleep and went away again, but Slídha has explained kek! kek! [no, no!], that is not how it occurs, when one encounters Úüv'élleblét/immo one is always consumed, always. Though what precisely that means, if it means anything, Slídha has not been able to explain to her.

The skip-navigator's voices sound over the comm. “Time to strap in, friends. We shall have you back home before you can grow an hour older. Goodnight for now.” Straps slide into place all over the passenger bay. The workpartners will be following in a separate skip.

A fog of nano mist rises briefly around them: sleeptime! In the berth next to Pink's, the Spanish particle physicist says to Pink sleepily, “And your partner? Slídhadhrup? What is co like, niña?"

"Big,” murmurs Pink. “Really, really big.” And she falls asleep, but not before she is pierced with an inexplicable deep sorrow. Then night falls, and the starfields open wide before her, familiar and unknown.

"Qu'est-ce que c'est un clone, maman?” [What's a clone, Mama?] asks little Juliana. It is New Year's Eve, 2188. Pink is a few days shy of five years old, and the two of them are sitting together in the parlour of Professor Sévigny's Paris apt, while fireworks burst over the Seine and the Turtle rattles dishes in the kitchen.

Andrea Sévigny stiffens at her daughter's question, then asks, “Où entends-tu parler de ce mot-là?” [Where did you hear that word?]

"De la Tortue.” [From the Turtle.] The Turtle is their teenage au pair. Juliana's red red hair is sticking out all over her head as she plays with her Doufí-Bébé, her D'/fü doll. “Il dit que je suis ton clone. Qu'est-ce que c'est un clone?” [He says that I'm a clone of you. What's a clone?]

From the kitchen there comes the sound of something frangible being dropped upon a hard surface. Andrea kisses her daughter on the top of her head and smoothes her fine hair. “Eh bien,” says the soon-to-be-tenured Professor Sévigny. “Sais-tu bien que Pierre jamais fait pousser une rose d'une bouture? Souviens-toi cela?” [Well, you know how Peter always makes a rose grow from a cutting? Remember that?]

"Oui,” says little Pink. “Dans le jardin.” [Yes. In the garden.] Peter is the gardener in charge of the building's rooftop gardens.

"C'est exact,” says her mother. [Just so.] “Pierre enleve une pièce de la rose-maman, et il plonge la pièce dans le gel de bouture. [He takes a piece of the mama rose and he dips the piece into rooting gel.] Il nourrît la pièce afin qu'elle développe les racines, et finalement, voilà! Une petite belle rose précisement comme sa maman!” [He nourishes the piece so that it develops roots, and eventually, look! A little pretty rose exactly like her mama!] “Comprends-tu?” [Understand?]

Her daughter has not looked up from her doll. Eventually she says, “A-t'elle un papa?” [Has she a daddy?]

"Qui, ma chérie?” [Who, my dear?]

"La petite belle rose.” [The little pretty rose.]

"Non. Elle vient de sa maman toute seule. Voilà pourquoi la petite et sa maman se ressemblent.” [No. She comes from her mama only. That's why the little one and her mama look alike.]

"Jésus vint de sa maman tout seul. Les soeurs le dirent à moi.” [Jesus came from his mama only. The nuns told me.] “Jésus et sa maman, se ressemblent-t'ils?” [Do Jesus and his mother look alike?] Pink looks up at her mother then. Her innocent green eyes are the color of a Petri dish culture. Andrea shrinks ever so slightly away from her daughter, then immediately readjusts, wrapping her arms even more tightly about her; but Pink unconsciously notes the momentary withdrawal, and many years later she will remember the entire scene vividly as she raises the nanoplex capsule and makes her irrevocable choice.

When she gets back to the Indolent Tesseract, old Juliana is greeted by the others with licks, caresses, nuzzles, sematophore farts, warm voices of pleasure. For a crew that has placed their entire probability-line in the hands of a flat-chested madwoman, they are remarkably cheerful. Lying back in their dreamchairs, the five observe her calmly while she silently plugs herself into the nav console.

"Right,” says Taugie in his Scots burr. “We're still here, it seems.” Old Juliana smiles fondly at him, her old, old friend, and thinks, How could I have ever thought I could give them up, my five sweetest loves, for a load of soiled nappies and a bloody pension? Forgive me, dearest Slídha. Dear Buddha, forgive me.

Vuwénno rustles cos golden wings. “Brúshfye/ásvyennu, Bórmwu/te'dámik?” [Where to, star-swimmer?]

"Óllowe/dvyénnu,” replies the old woman. [Somewhere new.]

And off they go again.

BOOKS-MAGAZINES

S-F FANTASY MAGAZINES, pulps, books, fanzines. 96 page catalog. $5.00. Robert Madle, 4406 Bestor Dr., Rockville, MD 20853

20-time Hugo nominee. The New York Review of Science Fiction. www.nyrsf.com Reviews and essays. $4.00 or $40 for 12 issues, checks only. Dragon Press, PO Box 78, Pleasantville, NY 10570.

Spiffy, jammy, deluxy, bouncy—subscribe to Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. $20/4 issues. Small Beer Press, 176 Prospect Ave., Northampton, MA 01060.

The Ring of Knowledge delivers! Visit: www.eloquentbooks.com/TheRingOfKnowledge.html

SPANKING STORIES: For a 38 page catalog, send $3 to CF Publications, POB 706F, Setauket, NY 11733

Winner of the 2009 National Indie Excellence Award for best S.F.! In Memory of Central Park, a green novel set in N.Y.C. circa 2050, is as bleakly terrifying as George Orwell's 1984. www.CentralParkNovel.com

The Visitors. $14.95 Check/MO

OhlmBooks Publications

Box 125

Walsenburg CO 81089

Rules of ‘48 by Jack Cady. www.nightshadebooks.com

The Star Sailors (Gary L. Bennett). Prometheus Award nominee. “Highly recommended”—Library Journal. $15.95 trade ppb. Major bookstores or 1-800-AUTHORS (www.iuniverse .com).

C.M. KORNBLUTH major new biography; 439 pages; photos. $44.95 postpaid. McFarland Publishers, 800-253-2187, www.mcfarland pub.com

For Sale: The Lost World by Saffron Genève, 1st ed., inscr. To Dr. Q. Corman, $100.

From book publisher NEW LINE PRESS: Bay City Tower by Eric Emery

157 pages. ISBN 978-1-892851-19-2. $5.99

In San Francisco, year 2036, one thing that hasn't changed are music fans. Dahlia has an opportunity to finally meet her idol, Reina Way, a hopeful pop-electronica music star. But strangeness and a mysterious quantum device are in the way.

"Brilliant!” -James Halon, Bestselling Author.

www.newlinepress.com or Amazon

Just released from new Line Press: Cold Soup by Eric Emery.

MISCELLANEOUS

If stress can change the brain, all experience can change the brain. www.undoingstress.com

Space Studies Masters degree. Accredited University program. Campus and distance classes. For details visit www.space.edu.

Dragon, Fairy & Medieval decor and collectibles. Huge selection of statues, swords, wall plaques and more. www.paperstreetgift co.com

Written a Book?

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www.AuthorHouse.com

F&SF classifieds work because the cost is low: only $2.00 per word (minimum of 10 words). 10% discount for 6 consecutive insertions, 15% for 12. You'll reach 100,000 high-income, highly educated readers each of whom spends hundreds of dollars a year on books, magazines, games, collectibles, audio and video tapes. Send copy and remittance to: F&SF Market Place, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030.

This story of intelligent cats is still fun to read today. It is almost science fiction—if you will admit alchemy as a science. What if alchemy allowed someone to understand the language of cats?

The cats have their own society, history, and motives, which resemble what many an unsentimental cat person has imagined as the secret life of their own cat. The alchemy is treated seriously. Instructions for understanding the language of cats are given in detail. “I tarried till ten o'clock before dinner, what time Mercury began his lucky reign. And then I took a piece of the cat's liver and a piece of the kidney, a piece of the milt and the whole heart, the fox's heart and the lights, the hare's brain, the kite's maw, and the urchin's kidneys. All these I beat in a mortar together until it were small, and then made a cake of it."

The body of the story consists of several reports of conversations of cats overheard. Some of the stories have a strong anti-Papist theme.

A 1995 edition edited by William A. Ringler, Jr. and Michael Flachmann has an introduction giving reasons for considering Beware the Cat to be the first novel in English, and an appendix lists all of the candidates for “first English novel.” At slightly more than fifty pages, we would today consider Beware the Cat a very short novel at best, but it is longer than most of the other candidates, and more original.

—Rick Norwood

Coming soon to an issue of F&SF near you, we'll have:

* “The Crocodiles” by Steven Popkes, a moving story of life during wartime

* “Why that Crazy Old Lady Goes up the Mountain” by Michael Libling, a mindbending story with everything: adventure, romance, and philosophical questions. But no zombies. A mindbending story with everything except zombies.

* “Doctor Death vs. the Vampire” by Aaron Schutz. With a title like that, do you really need to know more?

We've also got new stories coming soon from Alex Irvine, Robert Onopa, Rachel Pollack, Kate Wilhelm, and a satire that was discovered in the papers of the late John Sladek. Subscribe now so you won't miss any of the next issues.