"Why wouldn't it still be there?" said Os Milburn, the chief systems engineer, who was seated near the door. "Eighteen years without your smart-assing around has probably rejuvenated the place."

"Have a reorientation kit, lover." Stiebel threw a fluttering bundle of paper into Milburn's lap and began working his way around the room, distributing the sheets with unnecessary vigor and a surprising amount of noise. Hobart watched his progress with affection and respect Stiebel was completing his fifth trip to the Sirian system, which meant he was more than a hundred years old in Earth chronology, yet he showed no symptoms of dislocation. Thin, square-shouldered, invariably cheerful, he seemed determined to diffuse his normal life span over as many centuries as company regulations and Albert Einstein would allow. It was an ambition of which Hobart stood in awe.

"One for you, Denny," Stiebel said as he reached Hobart. "See what you've been missing."

"Thanks." Hobart took the proffered sheaf and began to flick through pages that clung together electrostatically. Switching off the main impulsion torch for two minutes had, as well as given the crew a warming glimpse of Earth, allowed communication to take place between the ship and the company headquarters in Montana, and the reorientation kits were part of the result. Their contents^—fired through in a ten-second information bleep— were intended to familiarize the returning starmen with the major changes that had taken place during their absence. This was Hobart's first voyage and as he glanced over the section headings on politics, world events, fashion, science, and sport, he tried to come to terms with the knowledge that in the past thirteen months of his own life the world and everybody in it had grown older by eighteen years. I've done it, he thought, bemusedly and proudly. I've traveled in space, and I've traveled in time. . ..

"Before you delve in there and start checking on skirt lengths ..." Stiebel paused long enough on his rounds to tap Hobart's shoulder. "Take a walk into George's office, will you? He wants to see you about some little thing."

"George wants to see me?" Hobart looked up at Stiebel in open surprise. As the most junior officer in the entire ship's complement, he had been assigned a number of routine tasks, most of which were connected with monitoring erosion of the hull. There had been little enough actual work for him to do during the two acceleration phases of the voyage, and during retardation—when the ship was shielded against collisions with interstellar material by its own drive torch—there had been virtually no work at all. In any case, at no stage in the journey would Hobart have expected an individual summons from Captain George A. Mercier, commander of the Longer Willow.

"What do you think George wants?" he said to Stiebel. "Did he say anything?"

For a reply, Stiebel stared at him with slightly raised eyebrows then passed on his way, performing a menial administrative duty with gusto and an air of importance, the picture of the corporate space traveler. Hoping the exchange had not been overheard, Hobart stood up and glanced around him. He was a tall man with silver-blond hair and exceptionally clear skin, and he had always found it difficult to do things without being noticed. Several of the ship's senior technical staff were watching him with amused expressions. There was no personal malice in their attitude, but he knew they were of a breed that firmly believed in the value of making life as irksome and embarrassing as possible for junior officers. Even if it were traditional at this stage of a trip for the captain to give a new man a drink and a clap on the back, nobody would have helped him by divulging the information in advance. Hobart nodded to the onlookers, left the rest room, and made his way along narrow corridors to the compartment Mercier used for office work and rare conferences. He tapped the door and immediately was told to enter.

"Sit down, Hobart," Mercier said, indicating a chair opposite the desk at which he was seated.

"Thank you, sir." Hobart lowered himself into the chair, noting as he did so that there was nobody else in attendance and that Mercier's desk was almost completely clear, as if die captain had come to the room for no reason other than the present interview. Hobart gazed at Mercier, wondering if such a thing could be possible. The captain was a strongly built man of about fifty, with conservative good looks which, had he been an actor, would have typecast him as a judge or an insurance company president. He examined Hobart with frankly puzzled blue eyes and then, unexpectedly and uncharacteristically, gave a deep sigh.

Hobart shifted in his seat. "Sir?"

Mercier seemed to reach a decision. "I contacted you through the day executive, rather than the general address system, because there's something going on here that I fail to understand, and I want to deal with it as discreetly as possible. Do you remember a junior technical officer called Craven? Wolf Craven?"

"Yes, sir." Hobart suppressed his uneasiness. The sudden mention of Craven's name had aroused feelings of guilt, but they were associated with a personal matter, one which could hardly concern his professional life. "I know him quite well." "

"Were you friendly with him?"

"I wouldn't put it as strongly as that—we just happened to be in the same intake at Langer Center and went through our pre-ops course at the same time."

Mercier looked dissatisfied, the overhead light accentuating ridges in his forehead. "Have you ever been to any parties at Colonel Langer's house?"

"Yes, sir."

"Was Craven at the same parties?"

"Yes, but . . ." Hobart developed a conviction that somehow, against all the odds, the private degradation he had experienced with Wolf Craven on that last night on Earth was leading to unforeseen consequences. "Excuse me, sir—am I entitled to know what this is all about?"

"I never went to any functions at the Langer place," Mercier said reflectively. "Made a point of staying away from that sort of thing. Even in the old days."

Hobart was reminded of the fact that, as a veteran star-man, Captain Mercier had a memory which reached far back into the previous century. It was an incomplete memory, a thinly dotted line composed of months-long periods on Earth interspersed with decades in the rela-tivistic limbo of the space traveler, but the span was there and it made Mercier different. Although the captain had lived some fifty years of body time, little more than twice as much as Hobart, he had a trick—possibly cultivated— of occasionally appearing to commune with eternity. In spite of his growing sense of alarm, Hobart was constrained to withhold his questions.

"I believe there was a party the night before this voyage began," Mercier said at length. "And that both you and Craven were present."

"Yes, but lots of company personnel were there." Hobart began to wonder if he was making a mistake in going on the defensive before any charge had been made against him, but he pressed on. "We were leaving the next day, and the Langer Rowan—that's Wolf Craven's ship—was going out the day after that. It was"—he sought a form of words that might impress the captain—"a fairly significant social occasion."

"You didn't speak to Craven at all?"

"Well, I'm bound to have spoken to him at some time, at some stage." Hobart tried to fend off an intrusive memory of Craven's dark and cleft-chinned face, the too-red lips lacquered with saliva, the eyes pleading and derisive at the same time. "Sir, I'd like to know what's going on.

"So would I, Hobart, so would I." Mercier paused again, brooding. "We entered the Solar System near the top end of our speed envelope, which is why we had to resume deceleration so soon after the confirmation report. There was only a minute or so, less the allowance for distance lag, for verbal communication—and I could have used that time in more productive ways than talking to the police."

"The police?" Hobart was both surprised and reassured, knowing there were no criminal activities on his conscience. He made a show of relaxing visibly.

"Yes—the police. This is a serious matter, Hobart."

"I can't think why the ..."

"They seem to be of the opinion that Wolf Craven was murdered during your fairly significant social occasion." Mercier paused again, giving Hobart's own phrase time to rebound on him. "And, from what was said, you appear to be the chief suspect."

Hobart suddenly became aware that the structure of the ship was alive, that stress patterns and subtle harmonics were coursing through the walls of the room, agitating the air which surrounded him, He could hear it whispering in his ears.

"That's ridiculous," he said forcibly, then secondary implications came to his mind. "Is Wolf Craven really dead?"

"I presume the police wouldn't be talking about murder otherwise."

"But I know nothing about it."

"You'd better not," Mercier said gravely. "You know my way of going by this time, Hobart—if you're innocent 111 back you all the way, and you'll get the same support I'd give to the most senior member of my crew, but if it turns out that you really are involved you'll find me a bigger enemy than the public prosecutor. The company cant afford this sort of thing."

"The company can't afford it!" A lowering of the captain's brow told Hobard he was failing to show proper deference, but such considerations no longer seemed important. "Look, I'm entitled to know exactly what was said."

"I've already told you more than I should," Mercier replied, eying Hobart with fresh appraisal, as though suspecting that insolence in a junior officer could point to a capacity for more serious faults.

Hobart shook his head. "Exactly what did the police say?"

"First they checked that you were still alive and on the ship's roster, then they requested me to put you in detention until we go into parking orbit."

"Detention?" The atmospheric whispering in Hobart's ears grew louder and more malicious. "Are you going to do it?"

"I'm obliged to." Mercier pressed a call button on his desk. "It will be done discreetly, of course. All I expect of you is that you will remain in your quarters until the parking maneuvers are completed. I'm not proposing to put a guard on you."

"Thank you, sir," Hobart said bitterly. "Will I be handcuffed to the shuttle?"

"You'll no longer be my responsibility at that stage." The puzzled look returned to Mercier's eyes as he got to his feet, terminating the interview. "I don't know what you've got yourself involved with, Hobart—but the police are going to the expense of sending up a transit vehicle just to take you off my hands."

Investigator Charles Shimming was a medium-sized, fit-looking man with a long face and intelligent, worried eyes. During conversation he had a habit of lowering his chin onto his chest, as though suppressing a series of belches, but continuing to speak anyway. This had the effect of making every utterance sound weighty and deliberate, if somewhat disjointed. It also had the effect of irritating Hobart, who wanted his information delivered quickly and clearly.

"There are two ways we can handle this thing," Shimming said in the privacy of Hobart's room. "If you are reasonable and cooperative I won't even have to place you under arrest, and we can walk—or should I say float?—out of here like two friends going off somewhere to have a couple of beers. I think that would be the best way to do it, but if you didn't want to be reasonable and cooperative I could hit you with a spider, in which case..."

"Hit me with a what?" Hobart scrutinized the policeman's neat frame, looking for weapons.

"I forgot you've been away eighteen years." Shimming opened his right hand, revealing what looked like a silver golf ball. "This is a spider. If I threw it at you it would explode on contact and wrap you up in metal ribbons— same way some spiders truss up flies. It wouldn't hurt, but you'd have to be carried off the ship all done up like a Thanksgiving turkey, and it would be bloody undignified. It would be really embarrassing for you."

"I see. Thanks for bringing me up to date." Hobart pretended not to notice the threat which had been implicit in the description of the restraint system. "I would have co-operated with you anyway."

"That's good." Shimming made no move to put the silver ball away. "Shall we go?"

"Don't I get to hear what this is all about?"

"Not now, not in here—it wouldn't be considerate."

"Considerate?"

"Yes. The ship has to remain officially sealed until I get you off, and it wouldn't be fair to all the others if we caused unnecessary delays. They must be pretty anxious to get their feet back on the ground after all this time."

"Okay." Unable to shake off a feeling he was being manipulated, Hobart detached his holdall from the spring clip which prevented it from drifting about the room. He glanced around the tiny compartment, scarcely able to believe he would not be spending the night in its familiar confines, and moved out into the corridor. It was a long time since he had walked in zero-gravity conditions with the aid of suction soles, and at first he swayed grotesquely as he made his way toward the transfer port. Shimming labored along behind him, obviously ill at ease, allowing too much suction to build up under his shoes and having to struggle to lift his feet clear of the deck. His progress was punctuated by popping noises and occasional bursts of subdued swearing.

The pilot was already waiting in the blue-and-gray police transit vehicle, which looked strangely unreal against the background of powdery green that was the Langer Line's house color. The vehicle was smaller than the company transits, too, making the cylindrical transfer port seem exceptionally roomy. Aware of the curious stares of the lock technicians in the control chamber, Hobart climbed aboard the shuttle and strapped himself into a deep chair in the midsection passenger compartment. When he looked out through the transparencies at his side he found he was now on a level with the lock crew, all of whom were gazing back at him with undisguised interest. Hobart's cheeks began to tingle. Suddenly angry, he turned to Shimming, who was hauling himself down into the next seat.

"This is an imposition," he said. "It's too muchl I ought to have a lawyer here."

Shimming frowned at the buckle on his seat belt. "You're not being denied access to a lawyer—but think of the expense of bringing one up here. And the delay."

"The company should take care of the expense— they're supposed to look after the contract officers. I should have spoken to Colonel Langer."

Shimming looked up from the buckle, which he seemed to find as tricky as a Chinese puzzle, and an odd expression appeared briefly on his long face. "How in hell do these things go together?"

"Like that." Hobart slid the metal connectors home across the other man's stomach. He thought about the reaction his mention of Colonel Langer had produced, and it crossed his mind that he might benefit by showing he had friends in high places.

"Yes," he said reflectively, striving for maximum effect, "I should have spoken to the colonel. I'll call him as soon as we touch down."

"You'll be wasting your time," Shimming said. "Colonel Langer died four years ago.'

"But that's im—" Hobart broke off in the middle of the word, gagging on his first real taste of what space travelers called time-slip. As far as he was concerned, he had been away on a voyage lasting thirteen months—but during that period a total of eighteen years had elapsed on Earth, and the effect of those years was real. No longer was it an abstract idea in Hobart's mind, a textbook paradox to be marveled at and dismissed from his thoughts. His world had run the gamut of eighteen winters, been warmed by eighteen summers, and there had been lots of time for old men to grow older still, and then to die....

". . . how you guys do ft," Shimming was saying. "Skipping ten or twenty years at a time would cut the feet out from under me—I'd be lost, if you know what I mean—but you can take it in your stride, calm as you like. Something I really admire, that."

"How did the colonel die?"

"Some say it was Bourbon, some say it was gin."

"I'm sorry to hear about that," Hobart said, deciding to pursue his original intent. "He was a good friend."

Shimming snorted. "Some friend!"

"What do you mean?"

Shimming placed his finger tips together and lowered his chin to his chest a couple of times as a preliminary to speaking. "It would be best for you, Dennis, if you didn't try to palm off some story about you and old man Langer belonging to the same social set, playing polo together, and that sort of thing. You were one of the bunch of young rams that Mrs. Langer used to invite up to the house to keep her amused, and I doubt if the colonel ever did more than say hello"and good-bye to you. Am I right?"

"Certainly not," Hobart snapped, appalled. "Colonel Langer invited me to his place personally, several times, and although we weren't all that close we had a good ..."

"Dennis," Shimming cut in, smiling apologetically, "it was Langer who started this whole thing off. He was the one who said you killed Craven."

Hobart was unable to prevent his jaw from sagging as a partial understanding of his predicament seared itself into his mind like a spark tracing a message on chemically treated paper. The colonel must have known what Wolf and I did, he thought in sudden panic. He must have seen us, or been told—and this is his revenge.

He became aware that Investigator Shimming was scanning his face with eyes as intent as those of a gambler watching the wheels of a chance machine shudder to a halt, and it came to him that he needed to protect himself. No doubt Shimming was highly skilled at reading expressions and interpreting instinctive verbal responses—so what was he to say in his own defense?

He composed his features with an effort- and retreated into youthful pomposity. "This is too ridiculous for words."

"That's unfortunate, because words are the only tools I can use," Shimming replied. "There's nothing . . ." He stopped speaking and glanced around him as the shuttle's door sprang together with a pneumatic gasp. There was a diminishing hiss as the transfer dock was bled of air, and a few seconds later the outer door slid open to reveal the blackness of space. Because of the brightness within the dock the stars appeared sparse and dim. The shuttle wallowed slightly as the berthing clamps were released. Maneuvering jets sounded faintly and the vehicle began to slide out into a boundless ocean of emptiness, forsaking the homely environment of beams, panels, and pipe runs for one in which the mind was lost for visual anchors.

Shimming gave a wan smile, and Hobart realized the investigator was highly nervous. He repressed the sympathetic grimace with which he would normally have reassured anyone who was new to space and stared straight ahead, trying to assess the likelihood of his ending up in the death chamber. A chill descended over him as he considered the proposition that his life might terminate on Earth in a few months' time, in the year 2131, instead of at some vague and postponable date centuries ahead.

The transit vehicle was moving clear of the immense bulk of the Longer Willow now, and the sunlit Earth came into view, looking huge and mysterious as it curved away on all sides, comprising almost half of the visible universe. Powerful jets began to hammer up front, reducing the transit's orbital speed and putting it into a controlled fall. Hobart watched the milky blue immensities tilt and turn, dismayed at the contrast between actuality and his imagined homecoming at the end of his first voyage. The only crumb of comfort he could find was that Shimming was too overawed and wrapped up in space tyro's misgivings to continue the interrogation for the present. He had time to get his thoughts in order....

Colonel Langer's age and failing health had forced him to give up active participation in space flight, but he had liked the company of junior officers who, because of their lowly positions, made an ideal captive audience for his reminiscing. For the most part he had kept himself occupied with his menagerie of frost animals, but there had been days when that pursuit had proved too passive and he had turned to other pastimes. One of them had been going into the strip of rough terrain at the rear of his estate to blast at snakes with antique firearms. Hobart, who had listed shooting as one of his interests, had been brought along mainly as gun-bearer on a number of the mini-expeditions.

The farewell party at the Langer house had been a rambling, multicentered affair which he had attended for a number of ill-defined reasons. He had been flattered at receiving the invitation from Colonel Langer, and inexperienced enough to entertain hopes that it could bode well for his future in the company; he had been lonely and scared on the eve of the departure for Sirius; and, underlying and coloring all other considerations, had been the possibility of sexual adventure.

The fables about Dorcie Langer had inflamed Hobart's imagination, filling him with a curious blend of contempt and yearning. He had scarcely dared meet her gaze during his previous visits to the house, and yet he had nourished a conviction—one he would not have voiced—that she had been specially aware of him, that she had singled him out as a prospect. For an unworldly and slightly repressed youngster of twenty-two, those ambiguous glances had been sufficient to trigger off lurid fantasies—none of which had correctly anticipated the event. Even after a lapse of thirteen months, he could remember the exact words with which Wolf Craven had greeted him in an upstairs corridor at the rear of the house.

I don't know how you did it, young Denny, but you've connected with our good lady—she sent me to get you.

The peremptory nature of the summons had shaken Hobart, as had the use of Craven as a messenger, but his initial shock had been swamped by the discovery of what Dorcie Langer had in mind for him.

Come on, Denny, Craven had pleaded, sinking his fingers into each of Hobart's biceps. I'm not going to let you blow this out on me, not after I've worked on her for weeks. What does it matter if. she wants both of us at once? Don't be such a kid, for Christ's sake—it all adds to the fun.

"Fun," Hobart heard himself muttering as the shuttle began to sway, to come alive as it dipped into the tenuous upper layers of the Earth's atmosphere.

Shimming leaned closer. "What was that?"

"Nothing," Hobart said, shaking his head, wresting his mind away from the recurrent vision of three bodies twined together, straining, sweating, laboring; of the languorous opening and closing of the woman's mouth; of

Craven's eyes, watchful and derisive. The subsequent events were what he had to think about and try to understand, because in them lay the source of his present danger. Hobart reviewed the rest of the fateful night and found he had nothing to work on, no memories of incidents which through hindsight had acquired new significance: The trouble was that he simply did not have enough information—while appearing to be friendly and communicative Investigator Shimming had, in fact, told him very little.

For the remainder of the brief flight Hobart forced himself to relax into his seat, trying to synthesize the feelings of pleasure and nostalgia he should have experienced on seeing familiar green horizons arise to enfold him.

It was early in the afternoon when the shuttle dropped solidly onto a runway at Langer Field. Instead of rolling the vehicle into one of the company's operations bays, the pilot swung south and taxied into the section which the city of Corona Falls rented for use as an airport. They came to a halt beside a police car which was parked at a discreet distance from the passenger terminal and the doors swung open even before the turbines had growled into silence. Hobart had time for one glimpse of sharply etched snowy peaks far beyond a line of curved hangar roofs, then he was in the rear seat of the car beside Shimming, and the airport gates were looming ahead. The uniformed driver, without speaking or being spoken to, accelerated toward the city and in a few minutes they were entering the suburbs.

Hobart studied the procession of store fronts and small business premises, backed here and there by dwellings and tree-shaded streets, looking for signs of change. He had only a sketchy knowledge of Corona Falls, acquired during his period of training at the Langer Center, and to him the lapse of eighteen years had created no striking differences in the place. Even the automobiles seemed very much as he remembered them, the designers having long ago surrendered to the dictates of aerodynamic efficiency. He strove to reorient himself as they neared the city center, but the car abruptly swerved down a ramp and stopped in an underground parking area. Shimming escorted him from the car to an elevator, through a warren of corridors, and suddenly the two men were alone in a windowless office whose walls were painted the indeterminate green favored by bureaucrats everywhere. The furniture consisted of a desk and four upright chairs. Hobart felt as though he had been cornered and driven into a pen.

"You'll have to advise me what to do next," he said firmly. "How do I contact a lawyer?"

Shimming sat down at the desk. "I told you there's no need for that, Dennis. You're not under arrest."

"It feels like it."

"I hustled you down here in case there'd be any embarrassment with reporters."

"Reporters?" Hobart selected a chair and sat down. "I didn't think there'd be..."

"Local TV, radio, and the Corona Falls Chronicle," Shimming said. "The Langers had controlling interests in the lot. Old man Langer died about four years ago, but this is still very much his show."

"But why did he start gunning for me?" Hobart examined his hands as he spoke, knowing the answer to his own question.

"That's what I want to find out. I've just had this case dumped in my lap, long after the whole thing has gone cold, but 111 sort it out even if I have to read microrec-ords in bed." Shimming continued ducking his chin, suppressing belches.

"The Langer Line is the principal employer in this area, and the city couldn't get on very well without it, but I'm damned if I'm going to be used as an instrument for settling any of the Langers' personal grievances. Now, if it turned out that Dorcie Langer had given you a grapple or two . . . and that the colonel had found out . . . that would incline me to suspect his motives . . . and it would incline me to backpedal on this investigation."

"There was nothing like that," Hobart said heatedly. "I hardly knew either of them."

Sliimming's lips twitched. "At least we're getting that much straight. Eh, Dennis?"

Hobart met his gaze squarely. "I demand to know why I'm here. For God's sake, I don't even know how Wolf Craven was killed."

"That's just the point—neither do I."

"But the body..."

"We haven't got a body."

Hobart shifted in his chair and gave an incredulous laugh. "Then what's going on? Why did you send a transit vehicle up specially for me7"

"That wasn't my idea. Somebody upstairs is putting on a bit of a show for the benefit of the Langer board." Shimming put his elbows on the desk and leaned forward with a look of concern. "Listen, Dennis, think it over carefully before you answer—are you sure there was nothing between you and Mrs. Langer?"

Hobart thought about his career ending in a single blaze of sensationalism. "Nothing. Nothing at all."

"Okay, okay." Shimming touched a button on the desk. "I'm going to record the rest of this interview, for your benefit as well as mine. You'll be given a copy of the tape on request."

"Suits me." Hobart crossed his legs, making a show of relaxing. "Perhaps now you'll tell me why I'm here."

Shimming nodded. "On the night of May 12, 2113, you—Dennis Hobart—were present at a party in Colonel Nolan Langer's house on Silverstream Heights. Also present was Wolf B. Craven, a junior engineering officer on a ship of the Langer Line. During the course of the party, at approximately midnight, you were seen by a number of witnesses having a heated argument with Craven, following which the two of you withdrew from the rest of the guests. Colonel Langer and other witnesses stated that you returned after approximately one hour, and that you were pale and uncommunicative, as though under mental stress."

"That's wrong," Hobart put in. "That last bit is wrong—I talked to lots of people."

"None of them remembers it. Anyway, do you admit to having an argument with Craven?"

"Yes, but it was nothing much. He was a bit drunk."

"What was the argument about?"

"Well, he wanted me to go out to the freezer house at the back and look at Colonel Langer's collection of frost animals, and I didn't care for the idea." Hobart heard the improvisation as though it were coming from a stranger and he felt a pang of unease. Lies, he sensed, should be kept simple and easy to manage.

"Were you afraid of the animals?"

"No—as far as I know they're harmless. It was just that I had seen them before and wasn't interested in seeing them again."

"But you went with Craven anyway?"

"Only part of the way, to humor him. As soon as we got outside in the dark I slipped away from him."

"What did you do then?"

"I walked in the gardens for about an hour—it was a fine night—then I returned to the house." "Was Wolf Craven there?" "No. Not that I remember." "Did you ever see him again?"

"No." It occurred to Hobart, for the first time, that it was strange that he had not seen Craven during the rest of that night. He had noticed Dorcie Langer more than once—drinking with friends, laughing a lot—but of Craven there had been no sign. Hobart experienced a momentary coldness, small but very real, like a single snow-flake dissolving on his skin.

"You'll be interested to hear that two days after the party Colonel LangeT visited the public prosecutor's office and made a deposition," Shimming said carefully. "In it

he said that he went outside for a short time to check on his frost animals, at about thirty minutes after midnight, and that on his way to the freezer house he overheard you and Craven, still out in the garden, still arguing and apparently having a fist fight."

"That's wrong," Hobart countered, shocked. "That's a lie."

"Why would the colonel have lied?"

"I don't know." A bizarre idea—in a way more disconcerting than anything that had yet cropped up—began to stir in the lower levels of Hobart's consciousness. "Why did he wait two days before going to the police with his story?"

"I'm told he was ¿11—a touch of arthritis in his arms, something like that." Shimming looked at Hobart with renewed interest, as though trying to tune in on his thought processes. "Does the delay seem significant to you?"

"If he thought somebody had been killed ..."

'That idea didn't get kicked around until it was discovered that Craven was missing—and by that time the Longer Willow had already departed, with you on board, and there's no way to communicate with a ship on drive."

"Neat," Hobart said, nodding, wondering if it would be possible to encourage a certain line of reasoning in Shim-ming's mind. "Convenient."

"Not for the police—we don't like eighteen-year delays in our enquiries."

"I didn't mean convenient for the police. It seems to me that. . ." Hobart stopped speaking as Shimming held up one hand in a theatrical gesture of warning and at the same time touched the control button of his unseen recorder. There was a moment of near silence dominated by the hum of the air conditioning and a fizzling noise from the light fitment on the ceiling.

"As you can see, I'm speaking off the record, as a friend," Shimming said. "It's to give you a piece of advice."

"Which is ... ?"

"Don't speculate on the record about who might have killed Wolf Craven."

"What difference does it make when the colonel's dead?"

"He has an assortment of brothers, cousins, nieces, and nephews. Old Nolan was something of an embarrassment to the family, especially after he quit playing at exploring and settled down at home, but that only makes them more sensitive than ever about anything connected with him."

"I see." Hobart considered the notion that Investigator Shimming might actually be his friend. "Does this mean you think I'm innocent?"

"It means I don't see how you could have disposed of the body in such a short time. You were on foot that night and you didn't make use of any of the other guests' cars. And we searched the whole area very thoroughly."

"Craven just vanished off the face of the Earth?"

Shimming almost smiled. "We considered that as a literal explanation. The hanger Rowan left the day after your ship, and for a long time we hoped there had been a foul-up in its papers. If Craven had got away to Alpha Centauras on board it without being properly signed on—as has happened in the past—that would have solved everything. But the Rowan got back two years ago and we established that Craven had never reported for duty."

The oppressive load began to lift from Hobart's mind. "But you're not even sure that Craven is dead?"

"I don't think he ran away to sea, do you?"

"Anything could have happened to him," Hobart said, gaining confidence. "Why, he could have decided to quit the party and walk back to the Center. A drunk driver could have zapped him and taken the body into the next state . .."

"Clever theory, that. Not plausible—but clever." Shimming brandished the index finger of his right hand to indicate he was about to start the recorder again. "Just remember what I said about implicating Colonel Langer." He pressed the button. "What were you going to say, Dennis? It seems to you that..."

"It seems to me that, even if you had proof that Wolf Craven had been killed, there's practically no case against me. Some people saw us arguing, which I admit and have explained. Colonel Langer says he heard me having a fight with Craven in the garden, which I deny. And that's it!"

"But why, out of twenty or so men who were present that night, did Colonel Langer think it was you he heard with Craven?"

"If he saw us arguing earlier he could have jumped to a wrong conclusion."

"Thank you, Mr. Hobart—I have no more questions for you for the present." Shimming stopped the recorder once more and sat back, eying Hobart with moody satisfaction. "I was scared up there today. Could you tell?"

"Most people are uneasy first time up," Hobart said, wondering how soon he would be free to leave.

"I wasn't uneasy—I was scared stiff." Shimming paused to make a ruminative movement with his chin. "I could be psychologically marked for life, just so that the commissioner can make a political grandstand play. We could have picked you up at Langer Field and got the same useless piece of tape."

"Useless?" Hobart spoke with a kind of pleasurable indignation. "You can't call it useless if it clears up an eighteen-year-old case."

"Who said the case was cleared up?"

"But you practically ..."

Shimming shook his head. "Craven was murdered, all right. I don't know who, how, or why—but I know he got himself snipped."

"Look, when can I leave here?" Hobart said, his sense of unease returning in full force.

"Any time you like," Shimming replied, getting to his feet, "but don't leave the city until you get clearance. And don't forget to let me know where you're staying."

"I imagine I'll be at the junior officers' hostel at the Center."

"You imagine that, do you?" Shimming gave Hobart a wry look. "I'll see you around, Dennis."

The Langer Line personnel manager was called Toby Martyn. He was about thirty years old, but had adopted the dress and mannerisms of a middle-aged man, possibly with the intention of showing the staid and nepotic Langer board that he was director material. His eyes, behind gold-rimmed flakes of glass, were blue and unsympathetic as he selected various slips of paper from his desk and dropped them into an envelope bearing Hobart's name and citizen number.

"As you are no doubt aware," he said primly, "junior officers are assigned very few duties on their first interstellar voyage. Its main purpose is to determine how well they stand up to the psychological stresses of both the journey itself and the associated calendaric displacement."

There's no such word as calendaric, you gasbrain, Hobart thought. He was shocked and angry, yet a detached part of his mind had noted a curious fact. With one round trip completed, he had seventeen years of timeslip under his belt and—although it was a paltry score compared to that of a veteran starman—it was already affecting his relationships with Earth-bound individuals. Martyn was about seven years his senior in actual body time, and therefore in experience, but Hobart had been bom a decade, before the other man, and on that account felt himself to be somehow the more complete of the two. He began to get an inkling of how he, as a junior officer, must have seemed to a man like Captain Mercier, and his yearning to bestride the centuries in a like manner suddenly intensified itself.

"I felt fine throughout the trip," he said. "I feel fine now."

"That's not what it says on your psychometric profile," Martyn replied, sealing the large envelope. "Take my advice, Mr. Hobart. You're a young man, with your whole life ahead of you—forget about space flying and take up some other occupation. With your engineering qualifications you should have no trouble getting into—"

"I'm not interested in other work," Hobart interrupted. "I'm doing the only thing I want to do."

"Well... perhaps with some other line."

"Some other line!" Hobart found he was almost shouting, but was past caring about propriety. "That psych report was cooked up to prevent me working anywhere."

Martyn's face underwent a subtle change. "Careful what you're saying, Mr. Hobart."

"I'm saying my assessment was faked. Do you think I don't know the real reason I'm being booted out?"

Martyn slid the envelope across to the front of his desk. "The references you have here will enable you to obtain another type of position. They contain no mention of the fact that you are suspected of having murdered a fellow officer, and that's something for which you should be grateful."

Hobart drove forward and caught Martyn's wrist. Martyn flinched back, obviously afraid, but at the same time a look of furtive triumph appeared in his eyes, and it was that which enabled Hobart to regain his mental poise. A starship was an emotional pressure cooker, an autoclave in which certain kinds of character defect tended to trigger explosions, and no operator employed people with records of violence. The phrase "physically assaulted a company executive" appearing on his sheet, regardless of the circumstances, would be an ironclad guarantee that he would never again serve on an interstellar vessel. Hobart released Martyn's wrist, drew his lips into a numb smile, and stood up, searching for words which would make him seem cool and dignified.

"You haven't heard the last of this," he said, resorting to a formula he remembered from historical novels. Mar-tyn adjusted his glasses and stared up at him without speaking. Hobart picked up his envelope, left the office, and made his way out of the building to the plaza, where late afternoon sunlight glowed on the alloy statues and islands of shrubbery. It was a perfect spring day, exactly the sort he had visualized for his homecoming, but that fact served only to aggravate the turmoil behind his eyes. He entered a dark-seeming side street and found an even darker bar. The place was empty, engulfed in a musty stillness which preceded the rush of customers at the end of the working day.

Hobart bought a glass of beer, carried it to a table which had a small peach-colored light, and sat down to examine the contents of his envelope. The pay slip told him he had been credited with close to a hundred thousand dollars, a sum which at first seemed too much. Interstellar travel and its time anomalies had alarmed the world's bankers in the early years, and they had been quick to reach agreement that interest on any star traveler's funds should be computed on his body time and not according to Earth calendars. However, starship operators usually factorized crew salaries to compensate for inflation and timeslip, and when Hobart took that into account— along with tax refunds and severance pay—he found he had received no more than his due. He had no immediate money problems, but that was of little comfort when his career had been ruined, deliberately and with malice aforethought, by a man who had escaped into the grave after having ...

The colonel murdered Wolf Craven! The thought, which had been swamped by other considerations, struck Hobart with sudden force, awing him with its strangeness. On that night, on that fairly significant social occasion, Nolan Langer—probably driven by jealousy or hurt pride—must have killed Craven and disposed of the body. And, being a man who never did things by halves, he had rounded out the act of revenge by shifting the blame onto

Hobart, a move which would have increased his satisfaction and diverted the police investigation away from himself.

Hobart sipped his beer, reluctantly impressed. He could remember the colonel on the night of the party—tall, iron gray, limping, militarily correct—welcoming his guests, and . . . and . . . Hobart frowned as he realized he had no other recollections of the colonel on that night. Langer had absented himself at quite an early stage, which tied in with the theory that he was getting rid of cumbersome evidence, but there was an inconsistency somewhere. His memories of the party itself were all compatible, now that he understood what had been going on beneath the surface, so the discordant note must have originated during his talk with Investigator Shimming Hobart stared into the peachy orb of the table lamp, unable to pin down the vagrant idea which was tantalizing him, then he recalled Shimming's promise that he could have a record of the interview. He pushed his beer glass away, crammed the envelope into an inner pocket of his tunic, and left the bar.

The street outside was more crowded now as the city's stores and offices began to close down for the day. Hobart walked one block south to the Lewis Hotel and checked into an expensive second-floor suite with a balcony overlooking colorful tulip beds. As soon as he was alone he went to the living room's infomat, and put a call through to police headquarters, praying that Shimming would still be on duty. He relaxed somewhat as the investigator's long, serious face appeared on the screen. "I'm glad I caught you," he said. Shimming nodded. "No panic. I'm usually patched into the system—even in bed."

"Oh! I'm staying at the Lewis, by the way." "Thanks tor letting me know, Dennis.'' Shimming lowered his chin, conducting one of his silent battles against internal pressures, but his eyes remained fixed on Ho-bart's. "You decided against the Langer Center?"

Hobart gave a rueful grimace. "How did you know they were going to dump me?" "It wasn't hard to figure out."

"Well, I'm not leaving it like that. I'd like the tape you promised me earlier." "You want it now?"

"Yes." Hobart checked to make sure there was a cassette of lateral-imprinting tape in the console's bulk information receiver and pressed the intake button. On the screen he saw Shimming looking down at his own terminal as he fired through an information bleep in which the entire interview was compressed into a signal lasting a fraction of a second. A green light appeared above the bulk receiver.

"Got it," Hobart said. "Thanks."

"This sort of thing never works," Shimming commented. "Not in real life, anyway. Amateur investigators never turn up anything the police didn't know about all along."

"Is that a fact?" Hobart suppressed an impulse to issue some kind of enigmatic challenge. "You don't mind if I go over the tape a few times, do you?"

"Be my guest," Shimming said, fading himself out. Hobart took the cassette out of the receiver and dropped it into a playback slot, all at once convinced that Shimming was right, that he was only play-acting. The idea which had seemed so close to the surface of his mind in the bar had retreated to deep tiers of consciousness populated only by unremembered dreams. Voices suddenly pervaded the room, his own the strangest of the two, and he began pacing the floor to work off his tensions. In that mood he had no expectation of success and consequently he was surprised to find his attention instantly caught by a single fragment

". . . the two of you withdrew from the rest of the guests. Colonel Langer and other witnesses stated that you returned after approximately one..."

And the point was that Langer had not been around when Hobart returned to the party. Hobart was certain of his ground because, with Dorcie Langer's perfume still in his nostrils, he had been supercharged with guilt, abnormally keyed up for the first encounter with the colonel. It had never occurred.

The fact was not very important in itself, but it could be used to prove to Shimming that Colonel Langer had lied when making his deposition—and if one part of his testimony was shown to be fake the remainder could perhaps be written off. Hobart strode to the infomat, but paused before making a call. As the matter stood, it was a case of his word against the sworn statement of a member of the city's most influential family—and he had an idea Shimming was likely to be unimpressed. After a few moments of thought, Hobart asked the machine for a communications code and put a call through to Joe Armitage, a dentist who did much of the contract work for the training center. He had become friendly with Hobart when they found themselves attending the same concerts, and as youngsters with like interests they had seen each other at least once a week throughout Hobart's pre-ops course. The screen came to life almost immediately, showing a square-faced, ruddy-complexioned man in his forties against a background of antique books. Hobart stared at him in silence, filled with a curious timidity. I have traveled in space, and I have traveled in time....

"This is Joe Armitage," the stranger said. "My daughter isn't at home right now, if that's what. . ."

Hobart shook his head. "Joe! This is Denny. Denny Hobart."

Armitage frowned, his eyes taking in details of Hobart's tunic and service emblems. "I'm afraid I . . . Wait a minute—you went off on the Oak, didn't you?"

"The Langer Willow."

"That's right! I heard a ship had just come in, but I wasn't sure which one it was. I'm in private practice these days and I don't have much to do with the Langer organization."

"Neither do I," Hobart said. "I was wondering..."

"I'm sorry I didn't recognize you," Armitage cut in. "I knew so many of the Langer boys in my old hell-raising days, and . . . It's a funny thing, but when people look the same as they did eighteen or twenty years ago you can't recognize them. I have no trouble with acquaintances who've been on Earth all along and who have changed. It's as if the old brain keeps a model of them and updates it year by year, putting in the sags and bags and wrinkles and so forth, so that when I see them I know who they are, even if they don't look much like they used to. Know what I mean?"

"I think so." Hobart felt a pang of sadness at having been classed as an acquaintance rather than a friend, but he put it out of his mind. "Listen, Joe, I'm sorry about springing this on you, but I'm in a bit of trouble with the police and I need somebody to back up my statement to them."

Armitage looked interested. "Ill help you all I can."

"Thanks. It's about that party the night before I left. Colonel Langer walked out in the middle of it and didn't come back, but he swore that he did. All I need is somebody to..."

"Hold on," Armitage protested, smiling. "What party are you talking about? I don't think I was even there."

"You were," Hobart said, shocked.

"Sorry—I think you're wrong, Denny."

"But . . ." Hobart searched his memory. "Remember you spent most of the night playing poker with Mexy Gomez."

"Did I? Gomez? Was that the character with the blue chin and all the muscles?"

"Yes. Do you remember now?"

"I'm trying." Armitage gazed back at Hobart, his eyes slowly clouding, then he shook his head. "I went to quite a few of the colonel's parties in the old days, but they've all run together in my mind. That was nearly twenty years ago, Denny."

"I know," Hobart said, learning something about timeslip and the nature of loneliness. He spoke to Armitage for another minute, fending off questions about his problems, and ended the call after making an insincere promise to get in touch again. The room seemed abnormally quiet when the screen went dead. He brooded for a moment, then took a pen fron his pocket and made a list of twelve other men and women who had been guests at Colonel Langer's house on the crucial night. Seven of these were operations personnel and a series of enquiries revealed that they were all away on the Procyon run and would not be seen on Earth for another eight years or more. Of the remaining five, residents of Corona Falls, two had died of natural causes, and the others—far from being able to help—were unable even to remember knowing Hobart or having been in his company. After nearly an hour of awkwardness and embarrassment, he turned away from the infomat, went into the bedroom, and lay down.

It was growing dark outside, the sky turning a peacock blue above the varicolored glitter of the city beyond his balcony, and it came to him that by this time—had his dreams of homecoming materialized properly—he should have been bedding down with a woman. He had an intense yearning for the comfort and companionship of love. Hobart turned restlessly on the bed's pliant surface for a minute, then lay still, his eyes widening, as the idea which had lain dormant in his mind heaved upward and began to dominate all thought.

There was one person who had cause to remember the night of the party as clearlv as he did, despite the passage of time, and as far as he knew there was nothing to prevent him from contacting Dorcie Langer without further delay.

Hobart was surprised to find that the big house was in comparative darkness. Subconsciously, having previously been there only when a party was in full swing or when the colonel was organizing a foray, he had it fixed in his mind as a place where such things were the norm, and the terse instruction from Mrs. Langer's personal secretary had in an obscure way reinforced his preconceptions. As he parked his rented car in the driveway he admitted to himself that more than a year in the confines of the ship had disposed him toward a therapeutic blowout, garnished with excesses of every kind, and the insight was a disturbing one. His current troubles all stemmed from one shameful debauch, yet part of him had been ready to flirt with similar temptations and perhaps still was. The id, he suddenly realized, could be a dangerous encumbrance.

He slammed the car door and examined the house, wishing he were a smoker so that he could indulge in the ritual of lighting a cigarette. The two-story building, with its stone mullions and complex roof, looked imposingly ancient. In the gardens at the rear he could see the outlines of the freezer house where Nolan Langer had kept his menagerie of frost animals, and he was further surprised to note a bluish glow from the windows, which indicated that the refrigeration system was still functioning. The enigmatic creatures, inhabitants of Sirius VII, were troublesome to support and he would have expected the colonel's widow—whose interests were more earthly—to have rid herself of the responsibility at the earliest possible moment.

Hobart walked to the house's main entrance and- ascended the curving steps. A control system, responding to the identity code emitted by his citizenship tag, swung the door open for him and he went through into a dimly lit, spacious hall which seemed not to have altered since his last visit, The same pictures of extraterrestrial scenes— souvenirs of the colonel's travels—hung on the walls, and the same photon-sculptures glowed in the comers and recesses. He was still getting his bearings when a door on the right opened and a woman he took to be Dorcie Langer's secretary appeared in a rectangle of pink light and beckoned to him. Hobart had almost reached her before he realized his mistake.

His talk with Armitage had alerted him to the effects of timeslip and he had steeled himself to find the young Dor-cie Langer transformed into a woman in her forties, but other forces had been at work—and the person before him had an apparent age closer to sixty. She was dressed in salmon-colored silks revealing a round-shouldered figure in which the torso had plumped out while the legs had grown thin, giving her an odd sparrow-like aspect. Her face, in the flattering light, was much as he remembered it, except for a waxy, unnatural sheen. Hobart, in spite of his naivet6 in such matters, sensed that a cosmetician had all but erased the real face and used it as a canvas upon which to paint the woman who had used to be. His stride faltered.

"Hello, Dennv," she said in a burry voice. "Don't stand there gawking, Come in!"

"Of course." Hobart entered the room behind her and closed the door. "Hello, Mrs. Langer."

"Mrs. Langer he says! Vou don't need to be formal with me, Denny." She threw him a brilliant smile as she went toward a liquor cabinet. "What are you d"rinking?"

"Ah ... anything."

"Good for you. Still game for anything, eh?" She splashed two glasses of clear liquid from a decanter, came back and handed one to him. She looked closely into his face as their fingers touched, and her smile vanished. "Just as a matter of interest—what age are you?"

"Twenty-three," Hobart replied, too nonplused to avoid a direct answer which carried a whiff of danger.

"My God," Dorcie said, walking around him as though inspecting a statue. "My God! It isn't fair—you're still just a kid. How can you still be just a kid?"

Hobart strove to be diplomatic. "Age isn't important."

"Not important!" Dorcie drained her glass, wetting the side of her chin in the process. "Not important, he says. "Of course it isn't important for somebody who doesn't change in eighteen years."

"For me it's only been one year," Hobart said soothingly. "The time dilation effect—"

"Don't give me any of that scientific crap," she shouted, shilling Hobart with the abrupt contortion of her face into a mask of fury. "Time is time, for God's sakel It's the same everywhere. Nobody will ever convince me .. ." She stopped speaking, glanced around like someone who had just heard a stealthy footfall, and her smile returned in full force. "Let's have another drink."

Hobart held up his still brimming glass. "I suppose you can guess why I came to see you."

"I can guess, all right—you young spacers are all the same," Dorcie said coquettishly, appalling Hobart even further. She refilled her glass and sat down on a low-backed couch. "Don't stand around, Denny—we're old friends, aren't we?"

"Yes, indeed." Hobart sat down near her and sipped his drink, which proved to be a cloying almond-flavored liqueur. "Look, Dorcie, you don't believe I killed Wolf Craven, do you?"

"You? That's hardly your style."

"Have you any idea why Colonel Langer told the Police I did it?"

"I know exactly why." Dorcie gave a sharp laugh. "Don't you know? It's because he was a bastard. Through and through. He tried to keep me shut up as if I was a goddamn Sister of Mercy or something—but it didn't work."

"That's not what I'm getting at."

"Funny thing is, he was able to do it better after he was dead. I'm not allowed to give up the house, you know. I'm tied to this mausoleum and that damned ice box out in back, otherwise I lose three fourths of my lousy income."

Hobart shook his head impatiently. "Do you remember the party the night before I left?"

"Do I?" Dorcie rolled her eyes, put a hand on his knee, and leaned closer. "Are you trying to get me going?"

"In his deposition to the police," Hobart said steadily, repressing the urge to shrink away, "the colonel said he rejoined the party soon after midnight, but you must remember that he didn't. Nobody saw him for the rest of the—"

"I don't want to talk about that old goat," Dorcie cut in, setting her glass aside. "All right, Denny—let's go upstairs."

Hobart's mouth went dry. "Upstairs?"

"Don't act so innocent." She slid her hand along his thigh. "You've been stripping me with your eyes ever since you came in here."

Hobart disengaged by jumping to his feet. "You're the only one who can help me. Think back, please. Can you remember exactly what the colonel did that night?"

Dorcie made as if to come after him, then a slow smile appeared on her face and she settled back on the couch, spreading her legs a little. "I probably could remember— given the right sort of encouragement."

"He was missing for the rest of the night, wasn't he?"

"Down on your knees," she commanded, eyes bleak and threatening. "Down on your knees, boy."

Hobart backed away, shaking his head. "You're sick," he whispered. "Crazy."

"Crazy?" Dorcie Langer seemed to savor the word while she kneaded the flesh of her thighs. "Perhaps I am. I could be crazy enough to remember anything I wanted—good or bad. It's up to you, Denny, my love."

Hobart turned and fled the room, running with the leaden-footed ponderousness that characterizes nightmares.

Later that night Hobart experienced a real nightmare. He dreamed it was the night of the party again, the location in time and space convincingly established by a shifting montage of images and impressions—large rooms with minimal lighting; a sense of imminence—the dreadful starship waiting; trays of drinks, tables of food; intermingled wisps of music and distant laughter; the choking press of bodies in slithering nakedness. . . . Suddenly Hobart was in a silver room—it was the freezer house— watching in mute terror as the tall figure of Colonel Lan-ger stood over Wolf Craven and methodically destroyed him with an ice pick. Craven was lying on the floor, twitching and flinching under the blows, each of which added to and elaborated the pattern of blood-red, dark-centered flowers covering his body from neck to groin. His mouth was open, but the horror of the scene was increased by the fact that he did not scream. Instead, there came from his lips a thin, sad keening, a plaintive note like the beat of insect wings in summer pastures....

Hobart awoke with the sound ringing in his ears and sat up immediately, unwilling to risk failing asleep again and sinking back into the same nightmare. He checked the time, saw that it was almost six in the morning, and decided to get up. While taking a hot shower he pondered over the dream, marveling at the ways of the subconscious mind. He had a nodding acquaintance with the Faraday theory, which stated that the overt content of dreams—which psychologists had once dismissed as mere "day residue"—was more significant than the Freudian and post-Freudian interpretation of symbols and could be treated as genuine attempts at communication between different levels of the mind. But what might his subconscious be trying to say? He had already deduced that Lan-ger had killed Craven, probably in or around the freezer house, so that part was no help to him—and the strange wliining sound seemed no more than a grotesque incidental detail. Was the message simply that Craven's body was hidden in the refrigerated building, where it would be immune from decay?

Hobart considered the idea later while eating breakfast in his room and decided it was of little merit. Investigator Slumming had told him the entire area had been searched by the police, and the freezer house and associated workshop were among the first places anybody would think of checking. He was pouring a third cup of coffee when the infomat buzzed to anounce a call and Shimming's long face appeared on the screen, looking professionally impassive while he waited for two-way communication. Hobart pressed a button to accept the call.

"I was wrong about you, Dennis," the investigator said without preamble. "I had an idea you'd go up to Silver-stream last night, and I expected that you'd be totally ineffective—but I was way off the beam. You really managed to churn things up."

"Really?" Hobart kept his voice level. "In what way?"

"One of Mrs. Langer's tame lawyers spoke to the commissioner this morning. It appears that she too remembers your having a fist fight with Wolf Craven in her garden on the night he disappeared."

Hobart shook his head emphatically. 'The woman's insane. You might have warned me about that."

"Rich people don't go insane, Dennis—at most they become eccentric. In any case, we now have a second statement corroborating what Colonel Langer told us, and that makes things worse for you."

"You're not going to take it seriously, are you?" Hobart was unable to read Shimming's eyes. "I mean, why did she wait eighteen years before coming out with this?"

"The line they're taking is that she saw no point in getting involved until you were back on Earth, that nothing could be done until now."

"Garbage," Hobart snapped. "Specious garbage at that."

"Nevertheless," Shimming said, dipping his chin, "it increases the pressure on me within the department. What did you do up there last night, anyway?"

"It-was what I wouldn't do," Hobart muttered, and was instantly sorry he had spoken.

"Oh? Gone off her, have you?"

"I was never . . . Look, we've been through all that already." Hobart sought a way to wrest the conversation onto a new track. "When you were searching for Wolf Craven's body did you go through the freezer house?"

"Me? I was in my second year in the police academy in 2113."

"You know what I mean," Hobart said, refusing to think about timeslip. "Did they check the freezer house?"

"Naturally." Shimming glanced down at something on his desk. "It's all here in the report. The investigating officers—with Colonel Langer's full co-operation, by the way—went all through the workshop and the cold area itself. They looked under the refrigeration machinery housings, behind all movable wall, ceiling, and floor panels, underneath the salt storage unit..."

"What storage unit?"

Shimming inspected his records again. "It seems that those things the colonel brought back from Sirius way, the frost animals, need trays of mineral salts to keep them alive."

"I know that—but when I was in the freezer house those trays just sat around on the floor." As a synaes-thetic background to his own voice, Hobart heard the curious sound from his nightmare, and memories began to stir.

"So what?" Shimming gave an elaborate shrug. "It wouldn't have been too tidy that way, so Colonel Langer had a special unit built."

"Correction! He built it himself."

"All right—he built it himself. I'm told he liked doing things like that."

"You don't understand," Hobart said quickly, above the pounding in his chest. "I was in that freezer house only three days, or it might have been two, before the party—and at that time the trays of salts were still sitting around the floor."

Shimming pulled in his chin and looked puzzled. "What do you think you're getting at?"

"He built it the nieht of the party. During the party."

"You haven't any proof of that. It could have been . .

"I do have proof," Hobart put in, telling the lie which might not have been a lie had his conscious memory been perfect. "I remember going near the back of the house two or three hours after midnight and hearing somebody outside using a valency saw. You know that weird droning noise they make—you can't mistake it."

"It doesn't matter exactly when the unit was built," Shimming said through a silent gulp, showing his disapproval of Hobart's excitement. "The point is that the officers looked at it after Craven disappeared."

"They didn't look well enough," Hobart asserted. "That's where Craven's body has to be."

Shimming turned his gaze toward the ceiling for a few seconds, then gave Hobart a wry smile. "It says in your file that you were born way back in 2091, and that makes me forget you're just a kid."

"Kid nothing," Hobart said angrily. "I'm able to think."

"Yes, but you think the way a kid does. You think a team of trained police officers, could search a room and fail to find an object as large as a human body; you think crimes are solved by a Great Detective sucking on a pipe and making deductions—but that's not the way it is, sonny. The police success rate is very high these days, but it's because we get information. There are too many systems for acquiring data, and storing it, and processing it. That's what gives us the edge."

"What about the information I've just given you?" Hobart demanded. "Aren't you even going to ... 7" He broke off as someone knocked heavily on the door leading out to the corridor.

"That'll be my men," Shimming said. "The way the situation has developed, I have to bring you in. I'm sorry about this."

'Tm sorry, too." Hobart allowed his shoulders to droop as the pounding on the door grew more insistent. "I'll let them in." He left the informat, walked straight out to the balcony and—praying the flower beds were no further down than he remembered—vaulted over the railing.

It was growing dark when Hobart left the cover of the timber plantation and approached Silverstream Heights from the west, picking his way through the swathe of gullies and sheared ground that helped protect the big houses against intruders.

His main concern throughout the day had been that of keeping well away from store entrance scanners and any other devices which could read the signals from his citizenship tag. He might have thrown the tag away altogether, but many commercial security systems could sense the nearness of a human body and when it was not accompanied by appropriately coded radiation they tended to react loudly. Less embarrassing, but more dangerous from his point of view, was the type that remained silent and sent a microwave call to the nearest police station. Hobart's strategy had been to leave the city on foot and go into hiding at the first good opportunity, and although his day-long wait in the sanctuary of the trees had been uncomfortable and boring he had successfully retained his freedom.

He followed a track up to the fence which marked the western edge of the Langer estate and, his progress now hampered by darkness, located the gate the colonel had installed to facilitate his snake hunts. Its rails were covered with spirals of barbed wire and, predictably, it was locked. Hobart took off his tunic, wrapped it around the top bar and managed to climb over without incurring any injury. He began to retrieve the garment and then, recalling that he might need to make a rapid exit, changed his mind and knotted the jacket in place by the sleeves. An ivory-colored moon, horizontally striped with cloud, was lifting clear of the distant hills, but its luminance was weak and Hobart had to move cautiously as he went toward the house. After five minutes the exterior lamps came into view, interfering with his night vision and creating the illusion that he was nearing the edge of a black and dangerous pit. He continued to feel his way forward and it was with a considerable sense of gratitude that he reached the smooth turf of the gardens and was able to pick out the sloping roof of the freezer house and workshop. A blue glow from the square high-set windows told him the environment necessary for the survival of the frost animals was still being maintained.

Hobart felt strangely uneasy and uncertain as he approached the freezer house door. The notion of taking direct action to solve a murder mystery had seemed both logical and attractive during the day, but the reality—involving illegal night entry and, for all he knew, a risk of getting himself shot—was a different matter. He looked up at the dark bulk of the house, wondering if Dorcie Langer was in it at that very moment, and he was gripped by a desire to complete his mission as quickly as possible and slip away before his situation deteriorated in some unforeseen manner. Moving with self-conscious stealth, he opened the door, stepped inside, and stood for a moment in the small, square lobby. On his left was the insulated door of the refrigerated area, with its single viewing aperture; on the right was the workshop, with a cone of yellow light illuminating one of the workbenches. Did that mean he had been unlucky and that a maintenance engineer was actually on the premises?

He cleared his throat loudly and strode into the workshop, his mind working on a passable cover story, and found it deserted. Aware of the need for haste, he gathered up several types of screwdrivers and a hammer and carried them out to the lobby. He slid back the bolt on the insulated door and went through it into the menagerie itself. The door closed behind him with a pneumatic sigh. For a brief moment, while his clothing retained a protective layer of air, he had the impression the temperature in the room was quite moderate—then the coldness closed with him, grappling and clawing like an invisible enemy. Pain flared in his nostrils and throat.

Hobart looked around, breathing in shallow gasps, and saw one of the captive animals on the wall at his side. It resembled a beautifully symmetrical array of frost ferns, almost a meter in diameter. As he watched, its crystalline patterns began to alter—a seething of diamonds—and the flower shape grew smaller. In the space of a few seconds the creature had vanished altogether. Hobart turned nervously and saw that the alien had re-formed on the wall behind him. At the edge of his vision he saw others blossoming or shrinking on every flat surface, like glassy lichens.

Reminding himself that the frost creatures had never been known to settle on a human, he went further into the room, past the refrigerator housing, and immediately saw the fabricated unit of which Shimming had spoken. Basically, it was a squat pyramid fringed with silver laminate-covered shelves on which sat trays of the mineral salts commonly found in the deserts of Sirius VII. The structure was screwed to the floor, and Hobart's pulse quickened as he noted that the central pyramid was large enough to contain two or three bodies if required. Wishing he had retained his tunic to help ward off the cold, he began lifting the wide trays from the shelves and placing them on the floor. It seemed to him as he did so that the migratory activity of the frost animals increased slightly, but he dismissed the idea. Xenologists had been studying the creatures for some years and still had not managed to classify them or produce any behavioral responses, so it would have been fanciful for him to suppose they were reacting to his presence.

When he had disposed of the trays he lifted the heavy shelves off the brackets, stood them against a wall, and began taking up the screws which secured the pyramid to the floor. By this time he was shivering so violently that he had to use both hands to guide the screwdriver into the slots, and he realized he could remain in the subzero environment for only a few more minutes. He removed the last screw with trembling hands, slid the screwdriver under the base of the pyramid, and tilted the structure onto its side.

The interior was completely empty.

Unable to accept the evidence of his eyes, Hobart sank to his knees and tapped the laminated boards, looking for dimensional or angular discrepancies which would have betrayed a hidden compartment. Cracks of light glimmering between the boards told him the quest was hopeless—even a master magician would have found it impossible to conceal a rabbit within the simple structure. Hobart, sick with disappointment, sank back onto his heels and pressed a hand to his jaw to dampen its vibrations. He looked around the featureless wall of the room, heedless now of the transient flat rosettes of the frost animals, and cursed himself for the senseless egotism that had led him to go against a professional like Shimming. The best thing he could do now was to put things back as he had found them, in the hope his trespass would remain undetected, then go back into the city and give himself up to the police.

He got to his feet and was trying for a good grip on the toppled pyramid when there was a sharp metallic sound from the direction of the door.

Hobart froze in the act of lifting, certain he was about to be apprehended. He remained in the same attitude for a few seconds—then a more disquieting idea entered his mind.

Letting the pyramid fall, he ran to the door—seeing a pale face flicker and vanish in the dark rectangle of the viewing aperture—and tugged on the handle. As his premonition had told him it would, the metal-sheathed door refused to move.

"Dorcie!" he shouted. "It's Denny. Don't do this. Let me out!"

There was total, black-velvet silence.

He turned away from the door and cast about wildly, his breath pluming in the gelid air. The hammer he had taken from the workshop was lying on the floor. He picked it up in stiffened hands, went to the nearest window, and struck it with all his force. The head of the hammer rebounded from the toughened glass without marking it in any way. Hobart tried again and this time the hammer spun from his grasp and fell behind him He dropped to his knees and was going after the tool that represented his hope of salvation when a silent voice;— perhaps that of his superego, perhaps of the wise, worldly, and dispassionate Denny Hobart he had always hoped to become—spoke to him, commanding his attention. He listened for a moment and rose to his feet, smiling apologetically with one hand on his forehead, then gathered up the screwdrivers and went to the true source of his peril—the flanged and louvered mass of the refrigeration plant.

The main side panel was held in place by six spring-loaded screws requiring only a half-turn each. Using his two-handed technique, Hobart was able to remove the screws in a matter of seconds and to lift the sheet of metal out of his way, exposing the machinery itself. The type and its operating principle were unfamiliar to him, but he had no difficulty in identifying a thermostat which had a slide control on a scale nmning from — 40° to + 30° Centigrade, which meant the system could double up as a heater. Grunting with relief, he reached for the control, then jerked his hand back as the entire thermostat housing became enveloped in a thick coating of frost. The white crystalline layer continued to thicken and exhibit patterns, diamond petals furling out on diamond petals with bewDdering rapidity, until quite suddenly the thermostat was locked inside a shell of ice.

Hobart gaped at it, dumbfounded, then raised his head to look around the room. Most of the elaborate, jeweled rosettes of the frost animals had disappeared from the walls and ceiling. He looked back at the refrigeration machinery and saw that no part of it had been affected by the encrustation except the control he had been about to operate. Hugging himself to ease the growing pain in his chest, Hobart rocked backward and forward as he tried to make sense of what was happening. The only conclusion he could reach was that somehow, by some process he could not even begin to understand, the alien beings had divined his intention. Switching off the refrigeration would save his life, but as a consequence the frost animals would be destroyed—the temperature in the room had never been allowed to rise above —20° Centigrade in the decades of its existence—and it appeared they had taken preventative action.

Questions began to clamor in his mind. Had he, Denny Hobart, accidentally made the first intellectual contact with an extraterrestrial race? Had no xenologjcal researcher thought of testing for motivation by threatening a frost animal with death? Or, unknown to him, had progress been made in that field during his eighteen years of absence in space?

The stabbing sensation in his lungs grew worse and he realized that, at this stage, questions and answers were without relevance. His very life was at stake—and there were more ways than one of stopping a machine. He turned to reach for the fallen hammer and in that moment became aware of another phenomenon, one of silent but flurried movement. The shelves he had removed from the storage unit were still leaning against the nearest wall, and all over their sloping surfaces a number of frost animals were forming, fading away to nothingness and re-forming in a kind of regimented dance, creating fantastic, shifting, geometrical designs.

Wondering why he was squandering the short time left to him, Hobart rose painfully to his feet and approached the shelves. The activity of the beautiful enigmatic beings reached a frenzied climax, dazzling his eyes.

I can learn from you, he thought, numbly, as though his brain cells were turning to ice. The same lesson that old man Langer learned. Rigid bodies make rigid minds make rigid thinking ...

He watched his hands reach out like servomechanisms, the blue-knuckled fingers crooking in preparation, and in that moment the frost animals vanished from the shelf he was about to touch. Hobart dug his nails under the top edge of the plank's silvery laminate and slowly peeled it downward, revealing the core material, which appeared to be a red semitransparent plastic, variegated here and there by whitish spots and areas of blue and black and brown.

Thunderous seconds passed before his mind came to grips with the mosaic of lines and chamel-house colors, imposing a pattern on them, letting him know he was looking at a longitudinal section cut through a human body. He turned away, retching, and went back to the refrigeration plant

'Tm sorry," he said aloud. "You've given me what I
wanted, but I'm not going to die. Not in this century. Not
in the next___ "

He knelt at the machine, grasped a slim feed pipe, and tugged on it with what remained of his strength. The pipe began to bend, but in that instant his breath was cut off. He fell sideways to the floor in the grip of a searing coldness unlike anything he could have imagined as the frost animals attacked, suffocating him beneath a mask of sparkling ice.

Investigator Shimming paused for a moment, nuzzling his chin down onto his chest. He remained in that attitude for a short time—perhaps coping with gastric explosions, perhaps ordering his thoughts—then activated the recorder in his desk.

"It is now obvious," he said, settling back in his chair, "that having unlawfully killed Wolf Craven, Colonel Lan-ger placed the body of the deceased in an oblong box, filled the box up with water and put it in the refrigerated room he used as an extraterrestrial menagerie. Forensic reports will reveal whether or not he added any chemicals to the water to accelerate the freezing process. As soon as the contents of the box had frozen solid he took a cutting implement—almost certainly a valency saw, which is quick in operation and generates no heat—and sliced the resultant block into longitudinal planks about three centimeters in thickness. An engineering consultant from the University of Montana has already confirmed that ordinary ice has quite good structural properties below a certain temperature, and in this case we are talking about ice which was reinforced with bone and strips of clothing.

"Colonel Langer then covered the planks with metallic laminate, to disguise their nature, and used them to build the shelf unit I referred to earlier in this report. Evidence suggests that this work was begun on the night of 12 May 2113, while the party was still in progress, and was completed late the following day—by which time Dennis Ho-bart had already departed on the Langer Willow. Having disposed of Craven's body in a manner he was confident would escape detection, Colonel Langer went to the office of the public prosecutor and made a deposition in which he attached the blame for Craven's death to Hobart.

"I have not been able to establish any motive for his desire to mcriminate Hobart, and am of the opinion that Hobart was chosen fortuitously, simply because he had been seen arguing with the deceased. That concludes my interim report on this case."

Shimming switched off the recorder, surveyed the drab green walls of his office, then allowed his gaze to settle on Hobart, who was sitting opposite him. "As you'll have gathered, I'm letting you off the hook," he said. "You know, I don't think I've ever met anybody so lucky."

"Lucky!" Pain caused Hobart's face to twist spasmodically beneath the surgical dressings and he fell silent, wishing he had not reacted so violently.

"That's what I said. You're alive when you ought to be dead, and you're getting your job back. The Langers didn't have to reinstate you."

"Didn't they? Can you think of a better way to remove an embarrassment?"

"Perhaps not." Shimming took a roll of white tablets from a drawer and began to suck one, rolling it about his mouth as though tasting a rare wine. "All the same, Dor-cie Langer could have blackballed you."

"She ought to be put away for trying to kill me."

"We have no proof of that, Dennis. She says she locked the door on an intruder, which is what any normal woman might have done in the same circumstances."

"Normal?" Hobart winced and gingerly pressed both palms to his cheeks. "The frost animals are more normal than she is."

"Could be. Have you thought about how we must appear to them? Perhaps we're the real frost animals."

Hobart nodded, waiting for the pain in his face to subside. The creatures from Sirius VJJ no longer seemed quite so enigmatic since it had been established that they were life-oriented, reacting as positively as they could against any form of killing. It was due to that facet of their nature that he was still alive—because eighteen years earlier they had attacked Nolan Langer. Nobody would ever know the precise details of what had happened that night, but it seemed that Langer had lured Craven into the freezer house to kill him, and that the frost animals had attacked their owner during the crime. The colonel had not been forestalled—he was good at killing—but he had been obliged to seek medical treatment for frostbite.

And it had been Shimming's belated discovery of this fact, hidden in a computerized medical report, which had set him wondering about the veracity of the long-dead colonel's deposition. It chastened Hobart to realize he had been allowed to get away from his hotel, and that he had actually been under long-range surveillance right up to the moment he entered the freezer house, even though the final outcome had been in his favor.

"I ought to thank you," he said, getting to his feet. "If it hadn't been for you..."

"Forget it" SUmming extended his hand. 'Tve had the pleasure of putting a couple of department politicians in their places. Come back and see me any time."

"Thanks." Hobart shook hands and paused awkwardly. "I'd like to come back, but they've assigned me to the

set in their eyes. Now it was rising again, and although she had caught one full night's sleep during the thirty-hour trip, she felt exhausted.

She turned and slipped quietly out of the hammock, flexing her shoulders in the cool, dark air. Several other hammocks in the long cabin bulged with softly snoring shapes. Spider moved along the sleepers to the hatch.

She stopped in the head, to squat, for a minute, over the toilet set into the floor. Stood, threw cold water from the tap onto her face. With long fingers she brushed back her shaggy white Afro, and contemplated her flat, thick features in the mirror. In the pale light from the bathroom's tiny window she seemed to float in the mirror like a ghost, like the afterimage of someone who has suddenly disappeared. She shivered, dried herself quickly with the rough towel, and stepped back into the corridor.

The first hatch on the left opened to her push to reveal the pilot and console silhouetted against the dawn-lit mountains. She could hear the burr of the engines more clearly here. She slid into the empty co-pilot's couch and sighed.

The pilot glanced over. "Howdy. Up already?"

"Still, you mean. Never really got to sleep. I'm your passenger for Noti."

"Oh, right." The pilot's face was serene in the dilute glow of dawn. "Well, you haven't got long to wait. We're due to touch down in about forty minutes."

"Eugene?"

The pilot shook her head. Her hair was so short it looked like fur. "No, yours is the on'v stop till we turn up the coast. I've got time to take you right to your door."

"Great! I wasn't looking forward to that three-hour bike ride."

The pilot snapped a finger against the radio mike. "Yep, it's been a real quiet night. No one to pick up till we get to Astoria. F^k" don't travel much th's time of the year. They're all at home, putting in gardens, pruning trees—"

Spider groaned. "Don't remind me! I've been gone three weeks to that G.R.C. conference in the East, and I just know that no one in my household will have gotten around to pruning my dwarf apples."

The pilot laughed. "Yeah, I know what you mean. After I'm done with this circuit I'm going to stay home for the summer. I miss my folks."

Spider put one foot up on the edge of the console, crossed it with the other. "Where's that?"

"Place in the Cumberlands. We've got a big old farm out there, sheep, chickens, soy, hemp. About twenty of us live there full time, sixteen wives and four daughters."

Spider looked over at the pilot with surprise. "You're married?"

"You bet. I like that commitment. We've got the best ten-year contract this side of the ocean." She threw a row of switches with her toes. "And yourself?"

Spider waved vaguely. "Oh, just a small extended family. My son, his father, his mother, me, my brother, his lover, his daughter. We've never wanted to get married. A few years ago we all changed names" together, but we haven't wanted anything more formal than that."

The pilot sniffed. "Sounds like a pretty tight little clan."

Spider frowned, picked at a button on her shirt. "I guess."

"You don't sound so sure."

Spider shrugged. "People change. Right now I'm closer to someone in another household." She was silent for a while. The world outside was getting lighter, the hills steeper and greener. The white peaks of the coast range were visible in the distance, where they melded with the clouds. She glanced over at the pilot. "You have any kids?"

"Hm? Yeah, like I said, we've got four on the farm—" "No, I mean—"

"Oh." The pilot frowned, adjusted a lever and snapped a switch. "Since you ask, yes, I do. Had a couple of them, years ago." She glanced up. "Boys."

"Where are they now?"

"Who knows? Wherever their father is, most likely."

Spider ran her hand across the flat of her stomach. "I got tied after Sparrow was born."

"Really?" The pilot shook her head. "Not me, sister; I don't want nobody poking around in my insides."

Spider gaped. "You mean you've had two kids and you're not tied? Godsl If you could only see the global starvation figures I have to work with every day I"

The pilot turned in her couch and cupped Spider's cheek with her hand. "Lady," she smiled wryly, "there's no way I'm going to get pregnant where I am now."

"Oh." Spider felt her face get hot, swallowed hard. "Sorry, that was stupid of—"

"Forget it." The pilot turned back to her board.

Spider searched for a way to reconnect. "My lover is pregnant," she said at last

"You don't say."

"That's why Fm coming back early from the conference. She wanted me to be there."

The pilot shrugged. "Why didn't she just postpone it?"

"No, she decided on the date more than a year ago. Today's the cusp."

The pilot snorted. "I never paid much attention to that astro stuff in school. When I had my two boys, I just went about my business and let my body handle the whole thing." She shifted several toggles on the board and Spider felt a slight descent. The hum of the distant engines rose in pitch.

"Actually," said Spider, "I feel the same way. I had my boy naturally. Walker still hasn't convinced me that controlling the gestation period doesn't harm the fetus." The pilot did not reply, and Spider sat back to watch the details appear in the landscape as they descended.

"Tell me where you live exactly," said the pilot, "so I can put this thing down."

Spider blinked, then rummaged in her shirt pocket for a pen and a scrap of paper. "Come to think of it," she said, "I'd like to ask you the same thing."

Sunlight spilled the warm syrup over Sparrow's face, blood-red through his eyelids as he squirmed on the mat. Reluctant to waken, he grasped at the melting splinters of recent dreams, but those visions, touches, and smells trickled only more swiftly between his mental fingers, leaving him beached, finally, on the broad round morning.

He blinked and rubbed his face, shifted across the mat so that the sun, shining through the eastern window, was out of his eyes. A cool morning breeze swept smells of tree blossoms gendy through the room. With dawn, the top of the little dome had opened like a flower, spreading back petals from the sun's warmth. That old familiar branch snaked across his circle of sky, shaking clusters of pinky-white blossoms in the morning breeze.

Sparrow took a deep breath of the cool mixture of smells and let it slowly sigh away. Way up in the sky, a solitary black speck drifted amid the blue. He squinted one eye. What was that bird seeing way up there? A shaggy beard of woods, most likely, spread across the mountains' face, creased by veins of streams and road. And here, in a patch of morning sun, a handful of domes like warts.

Sparrow giggled to think he was living in a wart. Was the world really like a face, like the face of the moon? When Spider used to let him sit in her lap, he liked to run his finger tip across that bump below her left ear that sprouted three thick, white hairs like cats' whiskers. He shook his head to clear away the memory. Thinking about Spider made him feel too lonely. The world was like Coyote's face, but with a green beard, not red.

He sat up, shivering as the sheet fell from his brown chest, round belly. He brushed the long squiggles of hair from his face, let his head fall back, and froze in mid-yawn. That wasn't a bird up therel The speck had grown to a blob, and now he could make out its shape, long and rounded.

Spider was home!

He jumped up from the mat and padded down the short tunnel that connected his room with the main one of the house. He flung aside his flannel door and stepped into the wide, cool room. The cozy smell of carob permeated the air. Prints and paintings, familiar pillows, and shelves stuffed with ragged books lined the main dome's wall. The thick round rug that hugged the floor was shaggy with forest colors. All the doorways that led to the other domelets wore different cloth doors, emblems of their occupants. Only three were tied back with thongs—_:Coyote's spare landscape in black brush, Swann's ancient psychedelic prints, and Fuchsia's brown fuzzy rug. The others must still be asleep. Fuchsia always got up first— he'd be up in the pottery—but Coyote and Swann...

Sparrow circled the room toward the kitchen alcove, taking the longer way around to stop in the toilet to pee. His narrow yellow stream fell away into the darkness of the composter. He remembered to close the lid after himself, rinsed his hands briefly under the tap, and shook them dry on his way to the kitchen.

He crept the last few steps and peeked around the fireplace. Swann lounged at the kitchen table sipping carob, engrossed in a book, while Coyote knelt at the garden bin peeling breakfast. He glanced up, saw Sparrow, and waved.

Sparrow walked over and plopped down on a pillow at the low table. Swann, wrapped in a thin green robe, looked up from her book and murmured something, the branching lines of her face congealing in a smile. Sparrow grinned back, savoring his secret, and poured a mug of orange juice without spilling much. The cool, thick lip of the mug met his mouth. Sweet juice.

Coyote put a bowl of sectioned fruit on the table and sat across from Sparrow. His lips moved behind his bushy red mustache: "What's new?"

Sparrow signed with his hands: / know a secret!

Coyote gaped in mock astonishment. "Well, don't keep us in suspense!"

Swann put her book down. "What is it?"

Sparrow jumped up from the table and ran a circle around the room, head down, cheeks puffed, arms straight at his sides. One quick circuit of the kitchen and he sat down again, grabbed a handful of fruit, and looked slyly at Coyote and Swann as he sucked on a piece.

Swann and Coyote looked at each other in bewilderment.

"Let's see," said Coyote thoughtfully. "You saw a bee!"

Sparrow shook his head.

"The bull in the meadow," said Swann.

Wrong again, he signed.

Then Swann leaned over and laid her hand on Coyote's shoulder. He cocked his head, frowned, then broke into a grin. "That must be the ship!" He got to his feet and went to the window, the sunlight electrifying his bush of red hair. Swann joined him, and a sudden shadow fell across the room, turning off Coyote's hair. A low, fluttery feeling was happening in Sparrow's stomach. Coyote turned around and abruptly stopped grinning.

You cheated! Sparrow's hand jerked in the air. You didn't guess, you cheated!

"Oh, come on," said Coyote, kneeling in front of him. "Don't be like that. I can't help it if I can—" He blinked, tried to grin again. "Hey, Sparrow," he said, "let's go outside and see it land!"

Sparrow set his jaw and turned away. His secret excitement had drained away, leaving him sad and tired. He wanted to see Spider land, but not with dumb old Coyote and Swann and Rabbit and the others all crowding around. His eyes started to hurt and he brushed away wetness. He tore a ragged piece of fruitflesh with his teeth and chewed it hard. When he finally looked around, both Swann and Coyote were gone.

He jumped up and ran from the kitchen, then froze for one agonizing minute in the main dome. The tremor in his stomach was stronger now, a low, pulsing vibration. He ran, then, not outside, but back through his own flannel door, down the short tunnel to his room.

His mouth fell open, slowly closed. Filling nearly half the sky was the gigantic bulge of the zeppelin, dark red in the morning light. He climbed onto his clothes trunk and stood on tiptoe, peered over the edge of the open dome. The zeppelin hovered above the meadow next to the house, two tiny figures standing underneath—that was Coyote's rusty bush of hair, Swarm's gray shag—as a bubble descended on a long cable from the shadow of the ship's belly. Sparrow caught sight of Fuchsia's dark body moving down the hill from the pottery, and Rose appeared beyond the curve of the main dome with Rabbit in his arms, strolling out to join the others.

The bubble, which had been tiny beneath the bulk of the airship, turned out to be much larger than the people standing below. It swung gently on its cable and touched down on the grass. A doorway appeared and Spider's familiar white cloud of hair popped out. She swung onto the lawn and reached back in for her bags. The bubble rose quickly into the air as everyone crowded around Spider. Sparrow chewed his lip, flexed his cramping feet. Everybody was hugging everybody else, then they turned and started back toward the house.

The zeppelin was already rising, moving away. The rumbling in Sparrow's gut began to lessen. He stepped down from the trunk and stood wavering in the middle of his room, then lunged for the window, jerked it open, and scrambled outside.

Coyote paced across the main dome rug, rubbed his palms together, and paced back again. Where had Sparrow run off to now?

"Hey," said Spider from across the room. "Will you sit down and stop worrying? He'll be okay." She sat against the wall beneath the blue Picasso print, Swann beside her and Rabbit on her lap. Rose and Fuchsia had long since gone, Rose to work in the village garden and Fuchsia back up the hill to work on his pots.

Coyote turned and recrossed the room. "It's really my fault," he said. "If I hadn't come out with that stupid remark about being able to hear, he would have gone out with us to meet you and this whole dismal business—"

"Coyote!"

He stopped.

Spider looked weary. "Come on, would you please just sit down and be quiet for a while? You're making me nervous, and I've only been home an hour. Sparrow has to work out his own problems, that's why he's not here. He's got to learn sometime that people who can hear have certain advantages over him, and hell be lucky if the lessons are only as harsh as losing guessing games. Don't be over-protective."

Coyote folded his arms and pursed his lips. "You would call it overprotectiveness, wouldn't you? Sometimes I think you don't care about Sparrow one way or the other."

Spider looked away with a tight jaw.

"Now, Coyote," said Swann quietly, "keep in mind what the doctors said about—"

"The doctors can go rape themselves!" he yelled.

Rabbit screwed up her face and began to wail. Spider hugged her saying, "There, Rabbit, it's okay," and giving Coyote an angry look over the little girl's shoulder. Swann, startled, said nothing.

Coyote took a deep breath and tried to speak more calmly. "I'm sorry I shouted, I'm just worried about Sparrow. Swann, those doctors didn't know the boy. They were just bumbling behaviorists, trying to juggle their statistics to come up with something meaningful. Professionals are all alike."

Spider made a choking noise, looked incredulous.

"The doctors did say," said Swann, "to go easy, not to push."

"Push!" Coyote shook his head. "You think I'm pushing? I'm just trying to help my child grow up emotionally balanced."

"Then you're trying too hard," said Spider.

"Don't you think I love that boy?"

"Shh!"

"You—" He turned away, turned back. "You make it seem like I'm on some kind of an ego trip." Spider looked startled, and laughed. He walked to the door.

"It's hard," came Swann's low voice behind him. He gripped the molding around the doorway, slowly inhaled. "What?" he said.

"Love," said his mother. "It's hard to share."

Coyote grunted and pushed himself outside. The sun was already halfway up the sky, scattering small clouds before its brilliance. It was going to be a warm day. Hands thrust deep in the pockets of his skirt, he shuffled around the curve of the dome. Why did he have so much trouble talking to Spider? It had been like this for months. She was distant, critical, argumentative. She ignored him; worst of all she ignored her own son.

It wasn't, he decided, that he minded taking most of the responsibility for Sparrow. After all, the boy was his son, too. And he admitted that Spider's work was demanding and liable to make her touchy, preoccupied. But . . . well, hell, just look at her now. She found lots of time to snuggle with Swann for long, intimate conversations, and she spent hours with Rabbit every week that she could have been spending with Sparrow. Coyote was sure he had caught jealous looks in Sparrow's eyes when he saw his mother and Rabbit together. And wasn't that just what an extended family was supposed to prevent— jealousy? If the cultural revolution had one major flaw, he thought, it was that it had to use the people of yesterday's world. Coyote kicked at a dirt clod and shook his head.

And then there was Walker. Wasn't there something a little perverse about Spider's relationship with her? No, not the sex—Coyote was an adult, he'd had his quota of homosexual flings in the past, there was nothing wrong with that. No, it had to do with the emotional intensity of Spider and Walker's affair. There was something unhealthy, he felt, something adolescent about their lovey-dovey manner. Their relationship was too exclusive. He felt completely and utterly left out of their lives, and was sure the others felt that way, too. It wasn't that he was jealous—Gods, it had been months since he and Spider had coupled, longer than that since they had really been friends. It wasn't his problem, it was theirs—

He rounded the side of the main dome and headed toward the garden. It was good to see it sprouting so soon. He had designed and built the garden that very first autumn after he and Spider had moved here, replacing the traditional flat garden plot that Swann had used for years. Coyote's garden rose in a slow shape of earth from the surrounding lawn, the shape, as it happened, of Spider's left breast when she slept, though he had never told her that. She would just criticize him for perpetuating some fertility goddess myth or other. Whatever the image, it was a good, functional design. Where the nipple would be, a pool of water slowly crested, fed from the household well by a windmill not far away. The water trickled through a network of stoneware pipes that fed the plants. The planting rows spiraled down from the pool, cut by several radial paths that ran straight down from the peak. Coyote mounted the shallow slope, choosing the longer, spiral route to the top. As he rounded the curve of the garden he saw Sparrow, crouched low, playing in the dirt on the other side. He paused to take three deep breaths before approaching.

Was that a weed? Sparrow leaned over the mound of dirt to study the tiny sprout. Its leaves were sharper and more jagged than the tomato leaves popping up along the row. His fingers reached out to pluck it, then paused, stroked the litde plant instead. Even dandelions were good in salads, and good for making wishes later in the year. Why was a particular plant good in some places and bad in others? Why did they call them weeds? Poor little dandelion, thought Sparrow, you're not really bad, you're just growing in the wrong place, is all. And that's not your fault. Weeds don't decide to be weeds!

A sudden shadow fell across the dirt and Sparrow jerked away. Coyote loomed over him, smiling, leaning down. Sparrow caught his breath, then glanced down again and saw that he had accidentally gouged the little weed out of the dirt with his fingers. He began to cry, and Coyote's arm came around his shoulders, but he moved out of reach and picked up the dandelion sprout carefully. Its hairlike roots held a few crumbs of dirt; already it looked like it was wilting.

He glanced reproachfully at Coyote, who looked concerned and said, "It's okay, we can plant it back again."

Sparrow shook his head and held the plant up for Coyote to see.

"Ah," said Coyote. He looked around, then pointed toward the meadow. "Let's transplant it over there."

Together they walked down the garden slope ana" across the bright green clover and grass. Coyote knelt and dug into the soft earth with his thick, stubby fingers. Carefully they filled crumbs of dirt in around the fragile roots until the sprout looked just as safe and sound as it had in the garden.

Sparrow nudged Coyote's shoulder and made signs with his hands. Will it be okay now?

Coyote smiled. "I think so. Weeds are pretty tough critters."

Sparrow sighed and sat back on his heels. This little patch of dirt, not much wider than his hand, with its single sprout, was his very own garden. He decided he preferred it to the big family plot. He would come out and water it every day, make sure his dandelion grew big leaves and a bright yellow flower. And then in the fall—

Coyote took his hand. "Come on," he said, "it's time to get cleaned up."

Sparrow frowned, signed with his free hand: What for?

Coyote pretended to swoon with amazement, making Sparrow laugh. "Have you forgotten already? This is the day of Walker's big surprise!"

Spider pulled a bicycle off the rack and wheeled it out of the shed into bright sunshine, where Fuchsia stood holding Rabbit in his arms. Spatters of slip had dried white against the rich brown flesh of his face, clung in tiny hard droplets in the hair of his chest and arms.

"Hey," he said to her, "thanks again. Rose said he wouldn't mind taking her if you changed your mind."

Spider shook her and smiled. "No, really, I'd like to. It'll be fun." She laughed, adjusted her sunglasses. "Rabbit's too young to give me any flak. Aren'tcha, girl?" She lifted Rabbit from her brother's arms, the white of her hands stark against even Rabbit's pink skin, and sat her in the babybasket between the handle bars. "Okeedoke?"

Rabbit gurgled. Fuchsia waved and started back toward the house.

"Hey!" she called. He turned his head. "You," she said, grinning, "are the only man in the world I can really get along with." Fuchsia laughed, then faltered, his dark eyes caught on something behind her. She turned and found Sparrow and Coyote walking up, hand in hand. Coyote's cheeks were sucked in, but he was smiling—she glanced back at Fuchsia, but he was gone around the curve of the dome. She blew a long breath between her teeth, attempted a smile and turned back.

"Well, hi there, Sparrow, how's my man?"

Sparrow smiled back, glanced once at Coyote, and ran the last few steps. Spider leaned down to hug him, but the top-heavy bike began to tip and she had to stagger on one foot to keep from falling. With the jolt her sunglasses fell off—she swore and clenched her eyes against the glare —and Rabbit started to cry. "Hey, Rabbit, hey," she said, hugging the little girl, then, "Sparrow, could you hand me those—oh, thanks." She took the glasses that were slipped into her hand and put them on, blinked. Coyote stood beside her, biting his lip.

"Oh, thanks," she said again. "Where's Sparrow?"

"Ran off. What do you expect? Want me to—?"

"No, no, that's okay, Til talk to him later." Gods, she thought, I'd rather he screamed at me than looked like that. She tried to smile, and immediately wished she hadn't. "Hey, look," she said. "I'm going on ahead to spend some time with Walker. The rest of you catch up later, okay?" She pushed off quickly, wasn't sure if she heard a reply, pedaled past the domes and across the meadow into the woods. As soon as she felt securely out of sight she sat back on the bike seat and coasted, trying to take deep, slow breaths. She could feel her shoulders trembling. Gods above, why did Coyote affect her like that? Rape that man anyway! she snarled to herself, and waited for the instant remorse. Nothing came. She just felt tired and relieved to be alone. At least little Rabbit wouldn't yank her into some ugly scene.

She began to pump again along the narrow paved path, sailing quietly through the soft, scattered light and sounds of the forest. Beneath the trees, the sunshine wasn't nearly so painful. The thick pine-needle bed of the woods absorbed almost all sound, exuding in return a rich, exhilarating smell, a sexual smell, a smell of lazy combustion as the acidic needles turned to warm earth. She could make out four species of bird by their calls. As she picked up speed, the breeze washed across her face and through her cloud of hair, and tired though she was laughed and put some muscle into the bike.

Rabbit was happy in her basket, swinging her legs, waving her arms in some private dance, singing to herself in minor keys. Spider topped a short rise and coasted down the other side, letting go the handle bars and spreading her arms like wings. She sang some lines from an old, sad song that Swann liked to play on her guitar. / wish I had a river soooo long, I would spread my wings and ffy-yyyy ...

At the bottom of the hill, the pavement forked at a thick, craggy-barked old fur that everyone called Douglas, the oldest in the forest. One way led to the community center where Swann and Coyote and Rose worked part time to fulfill their household's community quota. Spider took the other path, that circuitous route that passed by every other homestead on this side of the valley. From here it would be a good fiifteen-minute ride to Walker's farm.

All told, there were forty-seven households in the village of Noti, some as large as twenty or thirty people, a few triples, couples, and solitaires. Their homesteads were sprinkled over six square kilos of the valley, separated by woods and fields, joined by the bike paths and the loose, co-operative anarchy with which they conducted community affairs. Noti had been one of the first rural ghost towns repopulated with the dissolution of cities in the techno-cultural revolution, and though from time to time some of the inhabitants had fallen short of manifesting the revolution in their own lives, the community as a whole had been functioning successfully for nearly a decade.

Each of the households was self-sufficient in survival needs—food, clothing, shelter, and affection—but large groups of people can accomplish things that handfuls cannot. Not, at least, so enjoyably. The Noti neighbors came together for dome-raising, harvesting, path-paving, and well-digging, for the collective purchase of raw goods, for dances and for theater. While the majority made their living by household craft and labor, trading their surpluses within the village population, a few such as Spider worked at outside jobs.

Spider was a programmer for Global Relief, an international government corporation that designed food distribution systems and agricultural prescriptions for places hard hit by the tum-of-the-century droughts. Spider's current project was the Midwest American Desert Reclamation Project.She had a remote console at home, through which she did most of her work. The only physical manifestation of the corporation was its annual conference.

As she rode the bicycle farther down the valley, Spider left the forest and glided through the rye fields that surrounded Walker's home. She passed one or two old frame houses, relics of the early nineteen hundreds, now unusea-bly rotten and left to compost at their own easy pace. She swerved to avoid a couple of pedestrians, waved back to them, and shortly pulled up front of the main house of the farm, a tall, tetrahedral barn of rough cedar shakes. She parked the bike with the jungle of others and carried Rabbit through the cool, refreshing light of the grape arbor and into the kitchen. Several folks lounged around a table in conversation. Some looked up, waved.

"Howdy," said Spider, setting down Rabbit, who crawled away toward other children. "Hi, Walker." She bent to hug her friend. Walker's belly was huge and warm between them.

"Hey, lover, I'm glad you made it back." Walker ran her fingers over Spider's eyes, her cheeks, across the broad flat nostrils of her nose to her mouth. They kissed, tongue caressing tongue, and parted. "Until I heard the ship this morning," murmured Walker, "I'd nearly decided to wait another day."

Spider laughed. "Silly, I told you I'd be back in time. You've had your heart set on the cusp for months now." Spider stood. "Hey. I want you for myself for a while."

Walker grinned. "Twist my arm, will you!" She eased herself to her feet, brushed back her short hair, and found Spider's hand. "Be back in a while!" she called back as they walked out the door.

They crossed the stubbly lawn and stretched out beneath a cherry tree's shimmering white masses. Spider plucked a thick blade of grass and nibbled its tip, watching the subtle changes of color in Walker's eyes, cloudy as agate.

"So when's the big event?"

"I finally decided on three forty-two," said Walker. "I started the contractions this morning. I had been planning for seven this evening but I changed my mind. This way I'll lose that conjunction of Venus and Mars, but I'll get a beautiful trine, and it puts the Moon in Cancer, which is all right with me."

Spider had to laugh. "You know, I haven't the foggiest idea what you're talking about."

Walker's bushy eyebrows rose. "You should at least be aware that your Moon's in Cancer, too!"

"Great," said Spider. "We'll start a club." She leaned over to kiss Walker's cheek. "But don't you think you ought to have consulted you-know-who about the time?"

Walker frowned—"Who? Oh!"—and laughed, saying, "Silly, that's the whole point; I decided what would be the right time by tuning in on what's happening inside. I wouldn't try to force anything! This will be the most important day in this new life." She ran her hand across the fabric on her belly.

Spider bit a lip. "Hey, Walker?"

"Hmm?" Walker turned her head toward her, though her eyes seemed to look somewhere over Spider's left shoulder (Spider resisted the urge to glance back). "What is it?"

"I wanted to say... to ask... well..

Walker's finger tips found Spider's lips and pressed against them gently. "Yes," she said softly, "I've already started asking the others. I think it will be fine."

Spider kissed her palm. "You haven't read my thoughts completely."

Walker's eyebrows came together into one long, thick hedge. "I thought—I mean—don't you want to move here?"

Spider took a deep breath and let it sigh away.

"Oh," said Walker finally. "Oh. Of course." She lifted her head off the grass. "Do they bother you so much?" "Yes," said Spider at length.

"Oh, I love you dearly, but you have to understand that I can't leave my family now."

"Your family per se doesn't bother me," said Spider. "It's just the men."

"I know that's what you mean. But why?"

Spider blew out a breath, sat up, pulling at her hair and rubbing her forehead. "I don't know. I mean I do, I know the feeling inside and out; it's been getting stronger and stronger for the past year or two. Why it's come to me, that I can't say, unless it's the particular men I've been around. They just don't . . . connect, you know? With anything that's me. Call it a lack of common experience. All I know is that I don't want to live with them any more." She glanced down at Walker and shifted slightly to intersect with Walker's gaze.

"But Spider, you have to understand, here I feel like I can finally relax. I have a home for the first time in years. I would love for you to join us, I know you're not happy with Coyote and the rest, but please don't ask me to trade my family for you. Because I would have to say no." Her finger tips moved up Spider's face, the lines of her mouth, her eyes, the ridges of her brows. "Don't be sad," said Walker. "Lover, people are never happy as commodities."

Spider ripped a tuft of grass, threw it on the breeze. She felt that terrible weariness wash over her again. "But it's not as if I wanted you all for myself," she said, hearing her voice quaver. "I want a big household, I do. I'd just like it to be all women...."

Walker's finger tip on her cheek abruptly left a wet track. "Oh, Spider, Spider. . . . Look, what if my baby is a boy? Would you refuse to live with him? Spider— lover—my commitment is stronger than that. I'm settled here. That's why I decided, to have this child. I have a home. I need that."

Spider moved away slightly. "So it's settled."

"Settled! Spider, I'm settled."

She felt the muscles of her chin tug down, those above her eyes pull back. She wiped one cheek with the back of her hand, swallowed. "God damn it." Her fingers clutched cool grass. "If only I'd found you a couple years ago. If only you weren't into this pregnancy mode ..."

Walker's eyebrows arched. She shook her head slowly. "Spider, just listen to yourself! Do you realize how you'd react if any man made a crack like that? Now, come on. Be my sister today. I want you to be with me."

Spider sobbed so hard it hurt her throat, pulled Walker to her chest and held her tight.

"Hey!" cried Coyote. "I'm for a shower! Who's with?"

"Me," said Fuchsia, flecked with clay.

"Sure," said Swann, coming in dusty.

Sparrow grabbed Coyote's hand and led the way.

Water fell, like heavy light, in cold, thick blue drops. Coyote and Sparrow and Fuchsia and Swann jumped and danced in the indoor rain, rubbing each other with sponges and flinging wet hair.

"Who will scrub my back?" asked Fuchsia.

"I will," said Swann and Coyote at the same time. They laughed and set to work on either side.

"Ahhh," said Fuchsia, "you two do a heavy job."

Sparrow caught their attention with a flutter of hands. Fuchsia's peeing in the shower!

"Huh?" said Fuchsia. He blinked and looked down.

Coyote laughed and tapped Sparrow's shoulder. "Look again," he said. "That's just water running down."

Sparrow looked confused.

"Just look at me. Just look at yourself!"

Sparrow peered down across his rounded belly, then giggled delightedly. The water ran down his sleek brown skin, coursed around his navel, and dribbled off his penis, arcing through the air to the slatted floor.

Swann bent down to rub shampoo into Sparrow's frizzy hair. "Occupational hazard," she said. Like her face, her body ran with wrinkles. Her breasts hung low and bobbled in the wet light.

I didn't see that word, signed Sparrow.

"Occupational hazard," enunciated Swann. "It's an old expression that means, well, that there are certain things that happen to you as a result of what you do for a living."

What kinds of things?

Swann cleared her throat and frowned. Fuchsia knelt beside her and poked Sparrow in the belly, eliciting a giggle. "For example," he said, "you were born with knees, so whenever you fall down on something rough and hard, you skin them. That's the occupational hazard of having knees."

Swann was shaking her head. "That's the occupational hazard of running around!"

Coyote squatted, too. "And we," he said, "have peruses because we were born male, so it looks like we're peeing in the shower. Even when we're not!"

Sparrow laughed, then looked at Coyote's groin, at Fuchsia's, at Swann's, then at his own small stub.

"All done?" said Swann, rinsing under the shower.

Fuchsia stepped to the wall and turned off the water with a wisk.

"I'll get the towels," said Coyote, but Swann caught his arm.

"Not for me," she said. "It's quite warm enough outside for me to dry off." "Same here," said Fuchsia. Me, too, signed Sparrow.

Coyote shrugged. "Me, too." As a group they strolled outside, picked clothes off the line, at length chose bicycles from the rack in the shed, and pushed off down the trail.

Sparrow parked his bike with the others and wandered off alone to explore the farm. He had been here only once or twice before, never with so many people around. The largest building of the homestead was a huge pyramid made of wood. Its windows, and sections of its walls, were thrown open like so many tongues to lap up the day. Sparrow avoided the crowd of kids on the lawn and circled the house, peering into open rooms. In one, about ten people sat in a circle holding hands. They all had their eyes closed, and he guessed they must have been omming. Fuchsia had taught him to do that last fall. It made him feel good, especially when he felt it through his hands from the people next to him.

He slipped through a low arch in the hedge and came out in the garden. Flowers of all colors spread beneath the bright sun. Beyond some bushes, a thick cherry tree gnarled its way into the sky where it burst with a cloud of white blossoms. Several pairs of legs dangled down, and higher up a section shook, releasing a minor snowstorm to the breeze. Sparrow padded carefully through the bushes past the tree, grinning gleefully at the thrill of secrecy that shivered up his spine.

He ran around a corner of hedge and found himself abruptly in the middle of a group of people lounging on the grass. Several looked up at him. He couldn't move. One woman flailed at a guitar and everyone swayed, openmouthed. He couldn't make out the words: their lips didn't move enough. With an effort he jerked away and ran in another direction.

Some secrecy! He found a large bush and crawled inside, crouched in the flat, dry space surrounded by leaves. This was more like it.

He really wondered, sometimes, what it must be like to know about things you couldn't see. He could feel some things, like drums, and omming, and the zeppelin that morning. He felt those things in his stomach and with his finger tips, and when he laid his hand across the throat of someone who talked or sang. But what was it like to feel someone whose back was turned talking across the room? What was it like to feel a bird's throat ripple in the trees? To feel the wind shiver through the branches of a tree? Could other people really feel these things from far away?

His attention was caught by movement through the leaves. He leaned forward and peered out. Everyone was walking in one direction—toward the house. It must be time! But how did they know?

The kitchen was crowded and noisy when the bell began to ring, high in the apex of the house. For the space of one breath, everyone around Coyote fell silent, then began to talk again, but softly now, with a different tone. They started to move toward the door that led to the commons. Coyote set his cup of tea on the table and followed, feeling socially detached and at the same time somehow clear, inside, riveted to the moment. He smiled and nodded when his eyes met those of friends, but he didn't feel like talking to anybody, and no one tried to talk to him. The grandfather clock in the hall read three-fifteen, its long pendulum tocking slowly back and forth behind the window in its case.

-The commons was a two-story-high pointed space. Walker sat in lotus in the middle of the floor as her friends filled up the room around her, children toward the center and the tallest adults lining the three walls. Coyote sat near the middle with people his own height. It looked to him like nearly a hundred people. Some of them he recognized as members of this household. He caught sight of Swann and Fuchsia sitting together over to his right, their backs against the wall, but neither of them glanced his way. In fact, nearly everyone was facing Walker now. Coyote turned back, shifted his legs into a comfortable half-lotus, and noticed Sparrow's skinny silhouette in a doorway across the room. He wished the boy would look his way....

The group began to breathe with Walker. Her diaphragm pulled in, relaxed, her nostrils flared visibly with each inhale. The only sounds were the unison breathing and a handful of children and dogs yelping outside. Walker's vast belly shuddered. A low, whispered chant began to grow among the members of the gathering, in time with her breathing, in time with the contractions of her uterus. Coyote cleared his throat and added his own murmur to the group. They were like an ocean to Walker's moon, he thought, and tucked the conceit away in a safe place where he might find it the next time he worked on his poetry.

Like an incoming tide, the chanting rose and fell in successively stronger waves. One of the three midwives held a wristwatch in his hand and murmured occasional cues to Walker, though all of her attention seemed to be focused inward. Her eyelids were closed, her mouth half open. Several times she changed position, working into progressively higher stances till she squatted, her buttocks clear of the floor. The hands of another midwife (Coyote recognized her from the community garden—her name was Gael) rested on Walker's shoulders for balance, while a third lay on the sheet to massage Walker's belly, her groin, her enlarging vagina. The chanting reached its final peak as Walker made the sharp, high noises of ecstasy and pain, and with surprising suddenness the red, wet bulge of the baby's head appeared between Walker's thighs. Walker leaned back into Gael's arms, while the third midwife cradled the emerging baby in her hands. The hips, the knees, the tiny feet came out, and the woman brought the infant up and laid it on Walker's stomach. Walker's hand groped and found the little hands and head and briefly she smiled. Coyote thought she looked exhausted. Gael had slipped a pillow under her head. The room was quiet, remained so until after some minutes the baby began to use its lungs—a small cry escaped to mark that moment—and people began to murmur, began to talk, began to cry and laugh.

Coyote didn't stay to see the cutting of the cord or the afterbirth rite. He rose stiffly to his feet and joined several others outside. No one said very much, just smiled, or looked serene. Someone over by the garden was getting sick, helped by friends. One man Coyote didn't know laughed loud with wet cheeks and spread his arms to the sun.

Coyote began to look around for Sparrow.

"But just look at the eyes! Hey, there, little one!" Spider stroked one tiny palm with her finger tip, and the hand closed around her knuckle, the little eyes tracked, and tracked again. Spider grinned down at Walker. "See that?" She took Walker's right hand and folded it gently around the baby's hand holding her finger. "See? I mean, feel? That's an instinctive mechanism left over from when we all had hair on our bellies and backs that babies clung to."

Walker's marbled eyes were wet, seemed to look somewhere near the ceiling. "I do see," she said.

Spider grinned and kissed the woman's fingers. "You did all right for yourself, lady, you did okay! She's even a she."

Walker smiled wearily and shook her head. "You know, my love, I have long maintained that birthing is not so much a woman thing to do as a human thing. It's only to be regretted that nearly half our population are incapable of experiencing this god-awful exhaustion."

Spider laughed. "Hush, we'll talk politics later." And felt suddenly sad. The commons was nearly empty now, the sun was falling in the sky. Or rather, Spider thought, the earth is rolling up. And felt a trickle course down her cheek. "Walker?" She fumbled in her pocket till she found the scrap of paper.

"Mmm?" Walker looked almost asleep.

"I'll see you later, huh?"

She nodded dreamily.

"Say... in about a year?"

Walker opened her sightless eyes.

"I'm going," Spider said with an effort. "I don't know, East, I think. I want to see Virginia. I want to get some dust between my toes, try some other styles." She waited for Walker to say something, but no reply came. "I'll come back next spring, I promise. Just think! This little lady will be running the place by then."

Walker laughed then, with tears. "I really doubt that!"

"I love you," said Spider.

"I love you, too."

Spider bent down to kiss her cheek, her lips. She nuzzled the infant, rose, and quickly walked away.

Bike? No, walk. Leave the asphalt path and take the deer trail through the woods. Fir trees, bushes, brambles, and that thick, sweet smell of afternoon. Sparrow ran along the path until his breath got hard. He rested, pulled down his pants and stooped, watched a pale green frond that was just beginning to lift from the crumbs of earth at the base of a tall, thick tree. Baby plant, baby girl. Dying, being old. Being himself. Was Swann ever a baby? Sparrow shook his head in slow thought.

He wondered if everyone looked like that at birth. So quiet, so messy, glistening, dripping, caked with cheesy stuff, so red and blue and small! Sparrow was nearly six, a lot older than Walker's baby, but he was still a baby compared to Spider and Coyote and Fuchsia and Rose— and they were all babies compared to Swann. And Swann was a baby compared to . . . well, to Douglas. Just where did that end?

He shivered and found himself in shadow. He got to his feet jerkily, tugged up his pants, and trudged on down the path. The low red sun flickered among the tree trunks as he passed along. The trail meandered around and down and then rose steeply, rounded a ridge, and deposited him on the edge of the woods, just meters from the main dome door.

He stopped, feeling numb and old. His left cheek began to hurt, and tears ran. Sparrow ran.

The screen door slammed against the late afternoon, and footsteps pattered down the ramp. Coyote glanced up from his sewing. "Hey—" His gray eyes tracked across the room, followed Sparrow's flight through the blue flannel door. "Huh," he said. "I wonder what his hurry was."

Swann, beside him, ejected a wooden egg from a sock and cast her eyebrows toward her son. "Didn't you see the tears?"

"What?" Coyote lifted his thin shoulders against his cloud of rusty hair. "But—"

"I was watching Sparrow through the whole thing," came Fuchsia's voice from behind a pair of trousers. Flip, flop, folded, they landed with a whump on a pile of clothes. "I think Sparrow took it . . . specially. . . ." he said. "I think that in some special, five-year-old way, he really understood."

For a minute the room was silent but for sounds of
cloth against cloth. Then Coyote said, "Oh, God______ "

"I think Sparrow was touched," said Swann, "in a religious sense."

Coyote regarded her silently for a moment, then speared the patch he was sewing with his needle and stood up from the rug.

"Now, Coyote—" Swann began, but he was gone. She settled back, shaking her head and thrusting out her lower lip. "My lord, when will that man learn to leave well enough alone."

Spider pushed aside her door (a snapshot of a spiral molecule, silk-screened on burlap) and walked into the room. "Swann," she said, "I've got something to—"

"He just doesn't listen," said Swann. "And Sparrow can't."

"Swann—"

"Oh well, I suppose we'll have to just leave them to find their own answers together." She shook her head again.

Spider sighed. "I guess you're right."

Fuchsia nudged Swann, cleared his throat. "Spider?" he said. "Were you about to—"

Spider smiled wanly at her brother and shook her head. She turned and went back into her room to finish packing.

Coyote found Sparrow huddled inside a tangle of blanket against the domelet wall. "Hey," he said, gently shaking Sparrow's shoulder. "It's me." He eased the boy over onto his back and regarded the red, wet eyes. "Hey, what did you think of the birth today? I thought it was beautiful, didn't you?"

Sparrow nodded, shaking brown frizz.

"Well, what did you think? What did you feel? I really want to know."

Sparrow frowned, nearly smiled, then started to sob. Coyote found a hand and squeezed.

"Wasn't she pretty?" he said. "I've seen three births in my life—one of them was you—and each time it was just too good to believe, just too beautiful to compare."

His son turned away, crying freely into the blanket.

"Hey," said Coyote, "hey," and ran his hand along the small, skinny arm that showed. Sparrow released a long, low wail that made Coyote shiver. With care he turned the boy over again. Sparrow looked at him with bright, wet eyes, and worked his other hand free from the blanket. His fingers shook, but Coyote could still read what they said.

"Why, sure," he replied, smiling with effort. "I don't see why not. A lot of people have babies when they get old enough."

"Ah-ahhh," cried Sparrow, shaking his head, butting his head against Coyote's, skull meeting skull through scalps and soft hair. The boy made another sign, the one that stood for impossibility.

"Oh," said Coyote, "now where did you ever get that idea? Anyone can have a ba—" His jaw went slack. "Oh, God," he said, and hugged the boy to him. "Oh, Sparrow, I'm sorry, I didn't understand." He kissed his head, his face, his hands. "I'm sorry," he murmured. "I wish I could change you, if that's what you want, but I can't. We all have to live with the way we were born."

He pulled away, moved Sparrow's face so the boy

tone. You had to keep a light touch with these research types. "The President was there—she made a very nice speech—" "I was busy."

"Oh?" Something in Hart's tone put Brooks off his conversational stride. "Well. You'll be glad to hear that I had a little conference with the Board, just before the dedication. They've agreed to continue supporting your work here."

"Um."

"You must admit, they're being very fair." "As he talked Brooks threaded amid the rows of pottery, each in a plastic sleeve. This room always made him nervous. There was priceless Chinese porcelain here, Assyrian stoneware, buff-blue Roman glazes, Egyptian earthenware—and Brooks lived in mortal fear that he would trip, fall, and smash some piece of history into shards. "After all, you did miss your deadline. You got nothing out of all this"—a sweep of the hand, narrowly missing a green Persian tankard—"for the Vault."

Hart, who was studying a small brownish water jug, looked up abruptly. "What about the wheel recording?"

"Well, there was that, but—"

"The best in the world, dammitl"

"They heard it some time ago. They were very interested."

"You told them what they were hearing?" Hart asked intensely.

"Of course, I—"

"You could hear the hoofbeats of cattle, clear as day." "They heard. Several commented on it." "Good." Hart seemed satisfied, but still strangely depressed.

"But you must admit, that isn't what you promised."

Hart said sourly, "Research can't be done to a
schedule." '

Brooks had been pacing up and down the lanes of pottery. He stopped suddenly, pivoted on one foot, and pointed a finger at Hart. "You said you'd have a voice. That was the promise. Back in '98 you said you would have something for the BiMillennium celebration, and—" "Okay, okay." Hart waved away the other man's words.

"Look—" Brooks strode to a window and jerked up the blinds. From this high up in the Arts and Industries Building the BiMillennial Vault was a flat concrete slab sunk in the Washington mud; it had rained the day before. Now bulldozers scraped piles of gravel and mud into the hole, packing it in before the final encasing shield was to be laid. The Vault itself was already sheathed in sleeves of concrete, shock-resistant and immune to decay. The radio beacons inside were now set. Their radioactive power supply would automatically stir to life exactly a thousand years from now. Periodic bursts of radio waves would announce to the world of the TriMillennium that a message from the distant past awaited whoever dug down to find it. Inside the Vault were artifacts, recordings, everything the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian thought important about their age. The coup of the entire Vault was to have been a message from the First Millennium, the year 1000 a.d. Hart had promised them something far better than a mere written document from that time. He had said he could capture a living voice.

"See that?" Brooks said with sudden energy. "That Vault will outlast everything we know—all those best-selling novels and funny plays and amazing scientific discoveries. They'll all be dust, when the Vault's opened."

"Yeah," Hart said.

"Yeah? That's all you can say?"

"Well, sure, I—"

"The Vault was important. And I was stupid enough"—he rounded on Hart abruptly, anger flashing across his face—"to chew up some of the only money we had for the Vault to support you."

Hart took an involuntary step backward. "You knew it was a gamble."

"I knew." Brooks nodded ruefully. "And_we waited, and waited—"

"Well, your waiting is over," Hart said, something hardening in him.

"What?"

"I've got it. A voice."

"You have?" In the stunned silence that followed Hart bent over casually and picked up a dun-colored water jug from the racks. An elaborate, impossibly large-winged orange bird was painted on its side. Hart turned the jug in his hands, hefting its weight.

"Why . . . it's too late for the Vault, of course, but still . . ." Brooks shuffled his feet. "I'm glad the idea paid off. That's great."

"Yeah. Great." Hart smiled sourly. "And you know what it's worth? Just about this much—"

He took the jug in one hand and threw it. It struck the far wall with a splintering crash. Shards flew like a covey of frightened birds that scattered through the long ranks of pottery. Each landed with a ceramic tinkling.

"What are you doing—" Brooks began, dropping to his knees without thinking to retrieve a fragment of the jug. "That jug was worth—"

"Nothing," Hart said. "It was a fake. Almost everything the Egyptians sent was bogus."

"But why are you . . . you said you succeeded . . Brooks was shaken out of his normal role of Undersecretary to the Smithsonian.

"I did. For what it's worth."

"Well... show me."

Hart shrugged and beckoned Brooks to follow him. He threaded his way through the inventory of glazed pottery, ignoring the extravagant polished shapes that flared and twisted in elaborate, artful designs, the fruit of millienna of artisans. Glazes of feldspath, lead, tin, ruby salt. Jas-perware, soft-paste porcelain, albarelloa festooned with ivy and laurel, flaring lips and serene curved handles. A galaxy of the work of the First Millennium and after, assembled for Hart's search.

"It's on the wheel," Hart said, gesturing.

Brooks walked around the spindle fixed at the center of a horizontal disk. Hart called it a potter's wheel but it was a turntable, really, firmly buffered against the slightest tremor from external sources. A carefully arranged family of absorbers isolated the table from everything but the variable motor seated beneath it. On the turntable was an earthenware pot. It looked unremarkable to Brooks— just a dark red oxidized finish, a thick lip, and a rather crude handle, obviously molded on by a lesser artisan.

"What's its origin?" Brooks said, mostly to break the silence that lay between them.

"Southern England." Hart was logging instructions into the computer terminal nearby. Lights rippled on the staging board.

"How close to the First Mil?"

"Around 1280 A.D., apparently."

"Not really close, then. But interesting."

"Yeah."

Brooks stooped forward. When he peered closer he could see the smooth finish was an illusion. A thin thread ran around the pot, so fine the eye could scarcely make it out. The lines wound in a tight helix. In the center of each delicate line was a fine hint of blue. The jug had been incised with a precise point. Good; that was exactly what Hart had said he sought. It was an ancient, common mode of decoration—incise a seemingly infinite series of rings, as the pot turned beneath the cutting tool. The cutting tip revealed a differently colored dye underneath, a technique called sgraffito, the scratched.

It could never have occurred to the Islamic potters who invented sgraffito that they were, in fact, devising the first phonograph records.

Hart pressed a switch and the turntable began to spin. He watched it for a moment, squinting with concentration. Then he reached down to the side of the turntable housing and swung up the stylus manifold. It came up smoothly and Hart locked it in just above the spinning red surface of the pot.

"Not a particularly striking item, is it?" Brooks said conversationally.

"No."

"Who made it?"

"Near as I can determine, somebody in a co-operative of villages, barely Christian. Still used lots of pagan decorations. Got them scrambled up with the cross motif a lot."

"You've gotten... words?" "Oh, sure. In early English, even." "I'm surprised crude craftsmen could do such delicate work."

"Luck, some of it. They probably used a pointed wire, a new technique that'd been imported around that time from Saxony."

The computer board hooted a readiness call. Hart walked over to it, thumbed in instructions, and turned to watch the stylus whir in a millimeter closer to the spinning jug. "Damn," Hart said, glancing at the board. "Correlator's giving hash again."

Hart stopped the stylus and worked at the board. Brooks turned nervously and paced, unsure of what his attitude should be toward Hart. Apparently the man had discovered something, but did that excuse his surliness? Brooks glanced out the window, where the last crowds were drifting away from the Vault dedication and strolling down the Mall. There was a reception for the Board of Regents in Georgetown in an hour. Brooks would have to be there early, to see that matters were in order—

"If you'd given me enough money, I could've had a Hewlett-Packard. Wouldn't have to fool with this piece of ..." Hart's voice trailed off.

Brooks had to keep reminding himself that this foul-tempered, scrawny man was reputed to be a genius. If Hart had not come with the highest of recommendations,

Brooks would never have risked valuable Vault funding. Apparently Hart's new method for finding correlations in a noisy signal was a genuine achievement.

The basic idea was quite old, ofcourse. In the 1960s a scientist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York had applied a stylus to a rotating urn and played the signal through an audio pickup. Out came the wreeee sound of the original potter's wheel where the urn was made. It had been a Roman urn, made in the era when hand-turned wheels were the best available. The Natural History "recording" was crude, but even that long ago they could pick out a moment when the potter's hand slipped and the rhythm of the wreeee faltered.

Hart had read about that urn and seen the possibilities. He developed his new multiple-correlation analysis—a feat of programming, if nothing else—and began searching for pottery that might have acoustic detail in its surface. The sgraffito technique was the natural choice. Potters sometimes used fine wires to incise their wares. Conceivably, anything that moved the incising wire— passing footfalls, even the tiny acoustic push of sound waves—could leave its trace on the surface of the finished pot. Buried among imperfections and noise, eroded by the random bruises of history ...

"Got it," Hart said, fatigue creeping into his voice.

"Good. Good."

"Yeah. Listen."

The stylus whirred forward. It gently nudged into the jug, near the lip. Hart flipped a switch and studied the rippling, dancing yellow lines on the board oscilloscope. Electronic archaeology. "There."

A high pitched whining came from the speaker, punctuated by hollow, deep bass thumps.

"Hear that? He's using a foot pump."

"A kick wheel?"

"Right."

"I thought they came later." "No, the Arabs had them."

There came a clop clop clop, getting louder. It sounded oddly disembodied in the silence of the long room. "What . . . ?"

"Horse. I detected this two weeks ago. Checked it with the equestrian people. They say the horse is unshod, assuming we're listening to it walk on dirt. Farm animal, probably. Plow puller."

"Ah."

The hoofbeats faded. The whine of the kick wheel sang on.

"Here it comes," Hart whispered.

Brooks shuffled slightly. The ranks upon ranks of ancient pottery behind him made him nervous, as though a vast unmoving audience were in the room with them.

Thin, distant: "Alf?"

"Aye." A gruff reply.

"It slumps, sure."

"I be oct, man." A rasping, impatient voice. "T'art—" "Busy—mark?"

"Ah ha' wearied o' their laws," the thin voice persisted. "Aye—so all. What mark it?" Restrained impatience. "Their Christ. He werkes vengement an the alt spirits." "Hie yer tongue." "They'll ne hear."

"Wi' 'er Christ 'er're everywhere." A pause. Then faintly, as though a whisper: "We ha' lodged th' alt spirits."

"Ah? You? Th' rash gazer?"

"I spy stormwrack. A hue an' grie rises by this somer se'sun." "Ferwe?"

"Aye, unless we spake th' Ave maris Stella 'a theirs." "Elat. Lat fer that. Hie, I'll do it. Me knees still buckle whon they must."

"I kenned that. So shall I."

"Aye. So shall we all. But wh' of the spirits?"

"They suffer pangs, dark werkes. They are lodged."

"Ah. Where?" "S'tart."

" 'Ere? In me clay?" "In yer vessels." "Nay!"

"I chanted 'em in 'fore sunbreak." "Nay! I fain wad ye not." whir whir whir

The kick wheel thumps came rhythmically. "They sigh'd thruu in-t'wixt yer clay. 'S done." "Fer what?"

"These pots—they bear a fineness, aye?" "Aye.*"

A rumbling. "—will hie home 'er. Live in yer pots." "An?"

"Whon time werkes a'thwart 'e Christers, yon spirits of leaf an' bough will, I say, hie an' grie to yer sons, man. To yer sons sons, man."

"Me pots? Carry our kenne?"

"Aye. I investe' thy clay wi' ern'st spirit, so when's ye causes it ta dance, our law say..." whir

A hollow rattle.

"Even this 'ere, as I spin it?"

"Aye. Th' spirits innit. Speak as ye form. The dance, fwill carry yer schop word t' yer sons, yer sons sons sons."

"While it's spinnin'?"

Brooks felt his pulse thumping in his throat.

"Aye."

"Than't—"

"Speak inta it. To yer sons."

"Ah . . ." Suddenly the voice came louder. "Aye, aye! There! If ye hear me, sons! I be from yer past! The ancient dayes!"

"Tell them wha' ye must."

"Aye. Sons! Blood a' mine! Mark ye! Hie not ta strags in th' house of Lutes. They carry the red pox! An' . . .

an*, beware th' Kinseps—they bugger all they rule! An', whilst pot-charrin', mix th' fair smelt wi' greeno erst, 'ere ye'll flux it fair speedy. Ne'er leave sheep near a lean-house, ne, 'ey'll snuck down 'an it—"

whir whir thump whir

"What—what happened?" Brooks gasped.

"He must have brushed the incising wire a bit. The cut continues, but the fine touch was lost. Vibrations as subtle as a voice couldn't register."

Brooks looked around, dazed, for a place to sit. "In ... incredible."

"I suppose."

Hart seemed haggard, worn.

"They were about to convert to Christianity, weren't they?" Hart nodded.

"They thought they could seal up the—what? wood spirits?—they worshiped. Pack them away by blessing the clay or something like that. And that the clay would carry a message—to the future!"

"So it did."

'To their sons sons sons . . ." Brooks paused. "Why are you so depressed, Hart? This is a great success."

Abrupdy Hart laughed. "I'm not, really. Just, well, manic, I guess. We're so funny. So absurd. Think about it, Brooks. All that hooey the potter shouted into his damned pot. What did you make of it?"

"Well . . . gossip, mostly. I can't get over what a long shot this is—that we'd get to hear it."

"Maybe it was a common belief back then. Maybe many tried it—and maybe now I'll find more pots, with just ordinary conversation on them. Who knows?" He laughed again, a slow warm chuckle. "We're all so absurd. Maybe Henry Ford was right—history is bunk."

"I don't see why you're carrying on this way, Hart. Granted, the message was . . . obscure. That unintelligible information about making pottery, and—"

"Tips on keeping sheep."

Second evening of the sneaky-time, and Fm prepared with mop, bucket, towels, broom, soap. I start to clean up.

"I ran that ship for them centuries, centuries, while they were all asleep. D'you hear me, kid? You think they care I got them off and got them back again? You think they even think about it, kid? Do you?"

"Don't know," I say. Wring out the towel. "Expect not."

"Course not! They don't give a damn, no respect, no consideration. I've done my share, damn it. Took 'em up, brought 'em down. Ought to be left alone. Hate farming. Not fair."

"Could make an effort," I say. "Home again, new beginning. Everyone's labor needed. Important."

The captain makes a skeptical noise in her throat. "No sense of history. Hate growing things. Pigsty. Unfair to make me do it."

"I do it."

"Different, kid. Menial. Negligible."

"Menial!" I shout. Throw broken crockery in the fire. She's gone too damn far, this time. "Twenty-five years upstairs! Negligible!"

"I saved your life!" the captain roars, flings a bowl of stew against the stove. "Broken crèche-box, got you out, raised you up, taught you all you know. Saved your life, kid!"

"And I saved yours! Leaky suit, shorted vanes, went out and pulled you back. Sometimes wonder why."

"Don't give me any backfire!"

"Yeah? Then clean up your own damned mess."

And with as much dignity as I can muster, I stomp out of the kitchen, up the rickety stairs, into my room, slam the door. The top leather hinge snaps. Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn. Blast.

We've been at this for twenty years now exactly, year in, year out, ever since we set the ship down in the valley west of here, in the foothills, and unfroze everyone. They looked pretty odd to me, stumbling around in sunshine, clapping each other on the back, making cheerful noises, while the captain and I stood at the top of the ramp and watched them. I hadn't seen people for twenty-five years, didn't remember them at all. Thought everyone looked like the captain. She hadn't seen them for fifty years, but at least she remembered.

They all knew home, too. Not me. This was just another planet, running in circles around a silly little star— no big thing, not a big enough thing to land for. I'd seen better. But they got busy, built buildings, bred animals from the banks. Two thousand years gone, and they all acted as though they'd cleaned the skies all by themselves. Silly dirters.

Green stuff all over the place, growing wherever the hell it wanted. Blue upstairs instead of black, and a paltry number of stars. Hunk of yellow rock overhead. Twittery dumb things in the bushes and the trees. Unpleasant place. Wished I were upstairs again, where it's clean, but at least I made the effort. Tried to blend in. Built this falling-down house, farmed like they said to. Planted orchard. Captain didn't help at all. Just stormed around being grieved. Bitching. I agree with her, mostly, but what's to do?

Captain's gone in the morning. Stew all over the stove. I clean up, make tea, make breakfast, start to eat. She wants to go hungry, that's her business.

Half hour after sunrise, the Jansen kid comes over.

"Captain's coming into town with us," he says, not looking at me. Sneaky little monster.

"Great."

"Mom says maybe you should come along." "Nope."

"Dad's worried." "Don't care."

"She might get into trouble."

"Good."

"Nobody's going to like this," he warns.

"Tough." I put down the mug and give him the kid-scare double-whammy, and he beats it. I used to like kids, until the Council said I couldn't have any. Too much radiation. Didn't want to mess up the genes of the future. Shipdreck.

Course, this kid's worse than most, I figure. Used to be a family at the Jansen place, before the Jansens moved in. Rosenwassers. Decent bunch. Used to bring over cakes and stuff, help around the orchard. Double handful of kids, liked to listen to the captain talk. None of this slithering around after dark peering in the windows, checking up on us, making nasty remarks over the back fence. Rosenwassers moved out about, what, three years ago? Four? Got the feeling they didn't want to go, but what the Council says, the Council does. Damned Jansens moved in afterward. Rosenwassers came to visit once or twice, and the Jansens always came along to spy. Looking through our shopping. Shipdreck.

Shopping list's on the wall, and I think about taking it to the captain before they leave. Next market day won't be for a month, but the hell with it. Captain's fault, should have remembered. She'll have to eat squash for the next month; serves her right.

I get the pruning shears and go into the orchard. Goddamned plums. Suckin' apples. Idiot pears. I kick the trees for a few minutes before getting down to work. Hate farming.

Captain's blind drunk when they bring her home, but so am I. Hit the apple wine before dinner, been on it steady since. Past midnight now, I guess.

Two sets of unpleasant neighbors haul her in the door, some holding her feet, some holding her arms. They sure don't look happy. Kids peer in, excited. People breed like rabbits. Look like weasels now, though, or windmills. Waving arms, talking all over each other, frowning. Must have been some show. Old Jansen tells me that she disgraced herself. Made speeches. Interrupted Council meeting. Stole bottles of wine. Urped over their damned wagon. Mess.

"So report it," I say, nasty as I can.

"I already have," says Jansen, righteous as a preacher in a whorehouse. They dump the captain on the couch and go home.

I get her out of her clothes, sponge her off. She wakes in the middle of it, thinks she's aboard ship, thinks she's in the wagon, thinks she's in the Council rooms, discovers she's at home and starts crying.

"Tried to tell them about it," she sobs. "Wouldn't listen. Won't give me my ship back. Don't care. All I've done for them."

"Nothing new," I say. I pull the lumpy gray blanket around her; no use trying to get her upstairs. But she sits up, gray hair all wild and spiky, skinny arms waving.

"I'm getting old, kid! Old, I'm drying, I want to go home again, don't want to be' here! I'm tired. I want my ship back, I want my stars back! I don't like this place! I want to go home!"

What's to say to that? Truth, truth, truth. I lay down and put my arms around her, and we cry into each other's hair.

All the next day the captain won't talk, just lies on the couch staring out the window, looking deep. Never seen her this way before; it's got me worried. But she won't' even get mad at me. Eats squash for dinner like it was something else. Goes to sleep on the couch. I don't want to leave her, don't know what's happening. Take an extra blanket and stretch out by the fireplace. The captain snores.

Something wakes hie up. I lie still and listen carefully, and it comes again, like someone trying the door. I get up, grab a stick, and sneak over to the door. I'm getting too old for this sort of thing. But if it's that damned Jansen brat, I'll cheese him.

"Kid?"

Not the brat. I lower the stick. "Who's there?"

"It's me, Ike Rosenwasser. Let me in." "Hot damn," I say, and Ike makes hissing, be-quiet noises until I open the door.

"Don't light anything," he says. "I snuck in." "What for?"

"What do you mean, what for? Last few times we tried to visit, the Jansens ran us off." He's got on a black jacket, black pants, black boots, black scarf around his head. He takes the scarf off and hangs it over a chair. Might just be the dim light, but he looks different. Older. We're all older. "Surely you know about that."

"Nope."

"People have been trying to visit you and the captain; they always get chased away. You didn't think we'd just desert you, did you? You ought to know us better than that."

"Don't know anyone," I say. The captain mumbles and thrashes around, but doesn't wake up.

"We heard about what happened in town, couple of days ago. Came to see if we could help."

"What's to help? Captain got drunk and yelled a lot."

"But the Council—"

"Offended dignity. They'll survive."

"But that's the trouble, kid. They won't." Ike paces around, raises his voice. I wave at him and he stops, starts to whisper. "They say they've had enough. Say that you two aren't pulling your own. That something's got to be done."

"Like what?"

"Easy." It's the captain. She sits up on the couch and looks at us. "Changes."

"That's what—" Ike says eagerly.

"Changes," the captain says again. "Go away, Ike. I want to sleep."

"Damn it, Captain—"

"Beat it, Rosenwasser." She lies down again and puts the pillow over her head. "Kid," Ike says, pleading.

"You heard the captain," I say. It's late, I'm so tired my eyes feel dirty. "Go on home, Ike. We don't need help."

"That's what you think," says Ike Rosenwasser. He ties the scarf around his face again, hesitates at the door, then slides into the night. I shake my head. Some of our neighbors are mean crazy and some are kind crazy, but it's crazy all the same. All of them trying to run our lives. I lock the door, tuck in the captain, and go back to sleep.

Scrungy dawn, all pink and pale. The blanket's on the floor, kitchen's full of dirty dishes, and the captain's outside, hacking at the dirt with a hoe. I rub my eyes, then go out to her.

She's got her hair combed, boots on, hat on, pile of mangled vegetables around her. Sweat on her face. She grabs some of the green stuff and shoves it at me.

"What's this?"

"Carrot," I say.

"Oh. Thought it was a weed."

She starts hacking again, between the rows this time.

"What're you looking at?"

"You."

"Stop it. Go make breakfast. Go fix the roof. Place is a mess. Got to change things."

She stoops down and touches a green stalk. Her fingers are long and gnarled.

"Carrot," she mutters. "New leaf."

I go back inside, stand by the window, watch her. She really means it, she's really working on it. Changes. By hot, sweet damn, the captain's finally home.

By dinner the garden's completely weeded, there are some new shingles on the roof, the kitchen's swept and clean. The captain draws water, cursing at the pump, and

I cook, and we both clean up after. Then sit around the kitchen table, mending things. Firelight from the wood stove. End of dusk outside. Feels pretty good to me. But I don't really trust it until the captain gets up without saying anything, goes outside, comes back with an armload of wood. For some reason, this makes it all real.

"Might as well," she says, and dumps the wood in the bin. She stands taller, lighter. "Can't live without it, might as well live with it. Getting too old and tired to yell."

All for the best, I suppose. Life will be duller, but that's the price. We're both old.

Then there's the sound of a buggy, and knocking on the door. I go open it, not knowing what to expect.

It's the Council, or part of it. A short one, a fat one, a fall one, wearing Council ribbons, holding their hats in their hands. Serious expressions. They look so official that the captain gets courtly and dignified, invites them in, offers tea, takes their hats and jackets.

"I'm glad you dropped by," she says, bending forward, serious. "I was out in the garden today, working, and I noticed these little bugs all over the, um, what in hell were those things, kid?"

"Cabbages."

"Right. Cabbages. Little white buggers, about so long, eating every goddamned thing in sight," says the captain, very serious, very courtly. "Got any idea what they are? I tried squishing them, but there's forty billion of the suckers. You gentlepeople have any suggestions?"

"Well, Captain, uh, we didn't actually, what I mean to say is—"

"What he means to say," says the short one, "is that we didn't come all the way out here to discuss squishing bugs." The tall one bobs his head and scalds his mouth on the tea. The captain raises her eyebrows.

"The village is growing," the fat one says. The others nod. Population's expanding. Need for more room. Need for more growing space. The captain sits and sips and looks grave and interested. I try not to look suspicious.

The Council is pleased that we understand, says the short one. Understand what? But she doesn't give me a chance to talk. Repopulating the homeworld, she says. Greater glory of humanity. All working together. The captain nods again, all reformed.

Seeing as how we're so sympathetic, the tall one says, they're sure we'll understand and agree. The captain assures them that we definitely want to help. I begin to feel like I've been abandoned.

Well, then, the Fukikos will be expecting us tomorrow, and they'll send over a cart and Old Jelly, the mule.

Fukikos? Cart? Mule? Tomorrow? The captain starts frowning. Our visitors look even more nervous. A cart to move things in, they explain. Surely we'll want to move our old stuff to our new home.

New home?

Of course. We're not farming the land productively. That's obvious. Our orchards are in terrible condition, precious resources going to waste. The farm needs young people, willing to work. Good arable land we've got here, doing nothing, and the Council has set up a nice young couple to take it all over tomorrow. They might even use our house. And the Fukikos have a cabin in the far eastern end of their fields, just the place for us. We'll like it there. They promise.

"But there's no running water there," says the captain, still reasonable.

"You can dig a well," says the tall one.

"If we're too damned old to farm, why are we young enough to dig a well?"

"Besides," says the short one, "it's private."

"Private!" I shout. "It's damn near forty kilometers from town and seven from the road! It's out in the suckin' wilderness!"

"And it's got a lovely view," says Fatty.

"But—" I say, and stop. But you can't see the mountains from the eastern end of the settlement. You can't see Ship's Valley. The captain can't have her ship, but at least she can see the place where it landed. If the captain can't see Ship's Valley, the captain's going to die.

Maybe that's what they have in mind.

"And the land will be just perfect for you," says the tall one.

"It's full of stones and trees," says the captain, rather quiet. "Well—"

"You trying to starve us to death?" Still quiet Well, of course, we understand that people have to pull their own loads, that's obvious, stated policy of the colony since return. We can't expect to be fed for free, now, can we?

"Get the suckin' hell off my ship!" the captain yells, and they jump up fast. They'll send someone over with the cart tomorrow, they say, edging toward the door. Captain tells them where to put their cart, says we're not moving. They say they'll send people to move us, whether we want to or not. Needs of the colony. They reach the door, and the captain grabs a big stick and chases them into the yard.

"You can't do this to me!" she howls as they rush to the buggy. "I'm a historical monument!"

The buggy moves so fast it sounds like it's coming apart, and the captain stands at the door cursing them and shaking her stick. After a while, I take the stick away and close the door. The captain looks at me like death itself, and I go fetch the apple wine.

The captain's all trim and vigor the next morning, has tea made by the time I get up. I've got a headache and my eyes are red. Captain squats by the fire while I stagger around trying to keep my head on, and finally I see what she's doing.

"Hey, that's—"

"Burning the Gold Watch," she says smugly. I go over to see.

The Gold Watch is a piece of paper the Council gave us, fifteen or more years ago, after the captain's first performance. Thick paper, creamy-colored, with black ink.

in deep appreciation, it Says, of a job well done.

And a bunch of autographs. Supposed to show us that we were thought of highly. Piece of shipdreck. They made a ceremony of it, two or three of them brought it around, had a glass of wine, made a speech, hurried off.

"Thanks for the goddamned Gold Watch," the captain shouted after them, but they didn't get it. Neither did I, until she explained it to me.

So far, three signatures have burned. It's tough paper.

"Think you ought to do that?"

"Sure. All it's good for."

ll done, up in smoke.

"It's all we've got."

"Good."

p appre

"You're pretty cheerful," I say gloomily. She's grinning and bouncing on her heels. I can barely see.

"I've got a plan," says the captain, and since she says it sort of crazy, I take her seriously. It's when she says things sober that you've got to watch it

"What plan?"

The captain holds the Gold Watch until the last scrap singes her fingers. She stands up, wipes her hands on the seat of her pants, and goes to pour tea.

"I've got a plan," she says again, and for the first time I notice she's in uniform.

Some of them had wanted to dismantle the ship, some hadn't. Some argued that the ship was a relic of the terrible, polluting past, and we shouldn't keep it around. Bad karma, maybe. Others pointed out that it was our only escape and only defense, should we ever need it. The argument got pretty hot for a while, but they finally compromised. The first set put signs all over the ship telling about what a terrible place home had been before, and how it got that way, and stuff like that. The second set kept the ship cleaned and in good condition, just in case. Neither group would let us near it. We tried once, ten years back, after they told me I couldn't have kids. We damn near got through the guards before they caught us and hauled us away.

This time we do it differently. Cart, mule, and neighbor arrive in the morning, and the captain's got a pile of junk sitting by the door. Tells the neighbor that we can cart the stuff ourselves and chases him with a stick until he beats it. Then we unhitch Old Jelly and head for the mountains. Takes us most of the morning, going through the bushes, having to kick Old Jelly when he decides he's had enough. We reach the valley by noon, have a bite to eat, and go down to spy on our ship.

They've got her chained down now, the idiots. Poor old lady, battered along her sides, burns slashed up her fins, craters and pocks and pings and dents, and chains round and up and down and about, leading to rocks, trees, the hut, every damned thing. She sits there like some old monarch come on evil times, but she'll shake those chains as easily as the captain shakes her fist.

Two guards nearby, probably to keep kids from being silly on the acceleration couches. They sit against trees, batons across their knees, not talking to each other. Looks good. The captain tugs Old Jelly up, then makes her lips all straight and thin and kicks Jelly in the right places. Jelly hollers and takes off down the slope straight at the guards, and they scramble up and chase him. Captain and I run down through the trees and get behind them, Jelly's howling and kicking, guards are shouting, captain and I sneak up and whap them with their own batons, and they go down like lumps. We truss them up and drag them over the hill out of blast range. Then we pelt up the ramp and slam the locks, and we're safe.

Captain heads into the bridge to start check-down, and I take a quick look-through. Someone's taken good care of our ship: galley's stocked, locks tight, reactors all engaged, and it's easy to slip the cores into place and cinch them.

God, she's pretty inside. Curved corridors with handholds all around for freefall, big bright screens in the forward cabins, the patches on seats that I made myself, circling one star or another. Grease stains in the engine rooms and smudges on the controls—my smudges, and they still fit my hands. The sound of my footsteps echoing in the corridors. The bright, even lights. Oh, I love her, I love her, I hadn't realized that I missed her so much. Ship. Home. Stars.

The engines start humming, then the captain yells through the com and I head up toward the bridge, double time. I'm panting when I get there, and the captain points her chin at the downscreen and keeps working the controls. I walk over and take a look.

The valley's filling with dirters, tens of them, some of them carrying bundles and babies, and they wave their arms at us and move their mouths, and I can't hear a word of it. More of them every minute, too. Must be near fifty, sixty of them down there, all in blast range, jumping up and down and being silly.

"What do they want?" I say.

"To stop us," says the captain, grimly. She slaps a set of toggles and the engines hum louder. "What for?" "Suckers."

I look out again. The people have backed off, and someone's pushing through the crowd.

"Three minutes," says the captain. "Get webbed."

"Wait," I say. "That's Ike, and Tisha. Hold off a minute."

"What for?"

"Come on, Captain. I want to hear him."

The captain grumbles and slaps a knob, and the bridge is filled with voices. Then Ike waves his arms hard until everyone shuts up, and turns and hollers at the ship.

"Captain! Kid! Want to talk with you!"

"About what?" I say into the phone. "Are you taking off? Are you leaving?" "No business of yours."

"Yes it is," he says. Old Ike looks pretty nervous himself, and people keep glancing down the road into town. Waiting for help, probably.

"Get clear or well blast you," says the captain.

"Listen to mel We want to come along!"

"Dreck," says the captain. "You want to hold us up until the rest of them get here. Clear out!-"

"Goddamn it!" Ike yells. First time I've ever heard Ike curse like that. "Listen up, you selfish old cow. You're not the only one snapped off on this planet; there's plenty of us, too, and we're sick and tired of it, and we've waited pretty damned long for you to get off it and get us the hell out of here."

"What did you call me?" the captain shouts.

"Fukiko came into town three hours ago and said you'd chased him off, and we figured you were making a break for it. So did the Council, probably, and if you don't let us aboard they'll be on our heads in no time, and well all be in for it, and it will be your own damned foolish fault So open up that crate and let us aboard, hear?"

"Let 'em in," I say. I turn toward the main corridor, to open the lock."

"I'm not letting anyone in my ship calls me a cow!" the captain shouts. "I'm the captain, you understand?"

"Come on—"

"I'm the suckin' captain and I run this suckin' ship and nobody gets aboard until every damned one of you understands! Hear me?"

"Yes," the people shout.

"So what in hell am I?"

"The captain!"

"And who runs this ship?"

"The captain!"

"And who gives the orders around here?" "the captain!"

"And who's Rosenwasser?" "selfish old cow!"

"Then get off 'em and haul 'em aboard," the captain says. "Think we've got all day?"

Made it just in time, too. They scramble up the ramp and into the lock, I get them stowed in the sleep couches and make it to the navigator's couch just as the Council and their dirters come spilling over the hill. The captain gives them a good warning roar of the engines, they hit the dirt, and we pull up and out, and out, and out, until Ship's Valley and the village and the farms are patches of brown and green on a bigger patch of land by a bigger patch of ocean on a patch of planet in a patch of space. And the sky is filled with seventy zillion stars.

I unweb and float off the couch, turn a couple of cartwheels in the air, grab a handhold, and grin down at the captain, upside down.

"Well, kid?"

"Well, Captain? Where do we go from here?" She stretches her arms above her head and grins. "Nice little planet, off by Centauri. Green and blue and kind of pretty-looking. We can drop them off there." "Sounds good. Think they'll like it?" "They'll like it." "And then?"

"Dunno. Ever seen the Coalsack, close up?" "Nope."

The captain grins again, all wrinkles and glee, and pushes the ship around toward the stars.

WILL THE CHILL

John Shirley

"I refuse to speak to him," Tondius Will declared.

"If you don't, there will be no more sponsor," replied Great Senses. The biocyber computer paused, its wall of lights changed from considering-yellow to assertion-blue; the programming room's shadows fled before the brighter glow of blue so that the oval chamber resembled the interior of a great turquoise egg.

The ship's computer asserted: "Sports-eyes is serious. No interview, no sponsorship."

"Very well. Let there be an end to it."

"Nonsense. You cannot live without Contest. Mina's death proved that. You are a hookup addict," Great Senses said, its fifty-by-fifty-meter panel of honeycomb-crystal glowing red for regret amid the blue of assertion.

You are an addict. A simple statement of fact. It hurt, because it meant that Will was tied to Sports-eyes. But he couldn't deny it.

"You cannot live without Contest and you cannot Con-128 test without a contestship. And this starship is owned by Sports-eyes. And there is the immense cost of the planet-push-coils to consider. . . ."

"I'll find a way to sponsor it myself." But even as he said it, Tondius Will knew it was impossible.

"Sports-eyes has legal access to this ship. If you refuse to speak with the reporter, you'll have to talk to the show's director. And he'll come here personally. And you know how they like to touch you in greeting—on the lips. Latest homeworld fad."

Will the Chill spat in disgust. The self-cleaning walls of the ship absorbed the spittle.

"All right," said Will. "I'll speak to the reporter. But only on the screen. Should I dress? What is the present custom?"

"No need. Nudity is sanctioned."

Will turned and strode to the lift, rode the compression tube to tertiary level, communications. He glimpsed his reflection in the glass of the communication room's inactive screen. He was golden-skinned, compact but muscular, utterly hairless, his bald scalp gleaming with metal hookup panels—for his physical guidance-rapport with Great Senses and the contestship—set flush with his cranium. His dark-eyed, pensive features, already cold, intensified as he approached the screen. His full hps hardened to thin lines; his hairless brows creased.

A nulgrav cushion darted from a wall niche to uphold him as he sat. The screen flickered alive. The Sports-eyes communications ensign, a spaceship shaped like an eye, flashed onto the screen. The sign faded, and Will faced a spindly, nude, gray-haired man with tiny, restive blue eyes and lips that seemed permanently puckered.

The stranger ceremoniously blew Will a kiss. Will merely nodded. The man moved uneasily in his seat; his^ shoulders bobbed, his thin cheeks ticked, his prominent Adam's apple bounced. "Eric Blue here." He spoke rapidly. "They call me Blue the Glue. This is a guh-reat honor for me, Tondius Will. A very great honor."

Will shrugged.

Blue the Glue pounced on Will the Chill. "Will, it's my understanding that you didn't want to give this interview. Correct?"

Will nodded slightly.

"Well, uh, Will—heh—why is that? Can you be frank? I mean, you're Titleholder for four Contests, you've been a planet-hurlin' waverider for many longuns now. Twice my lifetime. You've earned two replenishings, so you'll live another century at least. Is this the last interview for another century? As far as I know only one other SprtZ NewZ holorag has spoken to you in your entire—"

"What is the pertinence of this?" Will asked sharply. Blue's voice was abundant with hidden meanings. His face was not his face. Will wished he were back on Five, listening to those who spoke with no faces at all.

"It's relevant to your image. And your image is important to your audience-draw. And your audience-draw is dropping off, Will. Though some say you're the best damn planet-hurler since Elessar in 2270. Still, you don't—**

"I don't caper and jape for the cameras like Svodba? I don't brag endlessly on my prowess and gossip about lovers like Browning? I don't soak up publicity like Munger? Is that your complaint?"

"Look, Will, there's a difference between, uh, maintaining dignity—and being cold. And you're cold, man. They's why they call you Will the—"

"There's a different between being emotive and artistic, Blue."

"Look here, let me put it to you in the plainest terms. I'm a Sportsize reporter, my job is public relations— you've failed to give me anything to relate to that public, Will. Sportsize stars need audience appeal. They have to be likable characters. They have to be likable—ah— folks. They have to be fellows people can identify with. Not cold and distant automatons—"

"AH waveriders are cold and distant, as you put it, Blue," said Will, coldly and distandy. "But most of them pretend they're not, in order to maintain themselves in the public eye. But it is not coldness, not really. Not inside. It is the aura of unflinching and unremitting dedication."

Blue the Glue looked startled. "Well. Now we're making progress. The Philosophical Waverider? Image BoyZ might be able to do something with that."

Will snorted.

"Will, I wonder if you'll be kind enough to examine a holotape I have with me and give me your analysis of it. I'll feed it into your screen, with your permission." Without waiting for permission, Blue punched a button and the screen was filled with a simplified holoimage of the final weeks (time-lapsed, sped-up to twenty minutes condensed action) of Will's Contest with Opponent Brigg in system GV-5498. Two planets approached one another, one brown-black, crescent-edged with silver, its atmosphere swirling turmoil; the other, Will's masspiece, shining chrome-blue like the shield of Theseus. Both were approximately Earth-sized and devoid of life, as was customary. Relative to the viewer's plane of perspective, the planets closed obliquely, Brigg's from the lower left-hand corner and Will's from the upper right-hand corner of the rectangular screen.

How diluted the public impression of Contest! Will thought.

The right-hand planet, GV5498 Number Four, showed white pushcoil flares at its equator and Southern Pole. Atmospheric disturbances and volcanic explosions roiled the contiguous faces of the planets as gravitational fields meshed and struggled.

Involuntarily, Will twitched and flexed his arms as if he were in hookup again, adjusting pushcoils, controlling the tilt, impetus, spin, momentum, and mass resistance of his masspiece.

Seconds before impact, as dead seas boiled and ice caps fractured, as continents buckled like children flinching back before a blow, the pushcoil on the South Polar face toward Will's Opponent flared and forced the pole to swing back, tilting the axis, lobbing the North Polar bulge forward, precipitating collision before Opponent expected it.

Opponent's planet took the worst of the collision forces. And after the impact, orgasmic rending of two worlds: more of Will's masspiece remained intact than remained on Opponent's. So Tondius Will won the Contest And took Title from Brigg.

The two Sports-eyes contestships, Will's and Brigg's, wre glimpsed speeding to safety from the still-exploding bodies—

The image vanished, the face of Blue the Glue returned. "Now," said Blue, "why did you fire that pushcoil on your South Pole, the face toward Opponent, during the last stage's final—"

"It should be obvious," Will interrupted wearily. "The ploy's success supplies its logic. You must have noticed that my mass-piece had a more irregular spherism than Brigg's. There was more mass in the North Polar hemispheres. It was like an inverted pear, relative to the viewer's perspective of impact zone. I applied torque in order to use the club-end of the planet with the greatest force of momentum—this can be useful only in rare instances, and Brigg probably hadn't seen it before. Most impacts are initiated along the equatorial swell."

"I see. Beautiful. Uh, such niceties are too often lost on the Sports-eyes viewer who sees—"

"Niceties! It was the most obvious ploy of the game. Brigg perceived it instantly but too late; he couldn't compensate in time. Niceties! The most important plays of the game are the early stages when masspieces are moved into place for the final approach to designated impact zone. If one misapprehends the earliest adjustments of trajectory of Opponent's masspiece—or mistakes its accruence level of mass energy and the modifying attributes of the surrounding fields—well, one has lost the game long before entering impact zone. What do you know of subtlety beyond your techniques for interrogation? What is this whole affair to you, Blue? What can you know of the exquisite visions of hookup? You see only very limited aspects of Contest. You observe, and not scrupulously, the composite images drawn from a thousand Sports cameras and you see them in timelapse and you see only brief flashes of the months of preparation. There is no comprehension of the internal artistry requisite—we spend weeks at a time in hookup, assessing and tasting and physically experiencing every known factor in hundreds of millions of cubic kilometers of space!" Will was not aware that he was shouting. "What is it to you? A contest between two waveriders hovering off dead planets which they seem to—to shove about by remote control, kicking —kicking!—the planets out of orbit and tossing them at one another—and the piece surviving impact with the greatest mass determines winner. That's all it is, to you. And in the timelapse you thrill to a few adjustments out of the hundreds of thousands we make, the few that are visible to you. You huzzah at the fight' of planets, their gargantuan turnings; they seem like colossal bowling balls in the hands of mites riding tiny specks and you swill your drink and clap your hands with juvenescent glee when you see the wracking and cracking of impact. You enjoy the sight of planets cracked like eggshells! Idiots! What do you know of the possession of men by worlds? Can you even for an instant imagine—"

Will stopped. He swallowed, sat back, untensing. Specks of black swarmed his vision.

Blue was grinning.

'T suppose," said Tondius Will ruefully, "that you're proud of yourself now, eh, Blue? You recorded my little tirade, no doubt. You'll crow about it at the SprtZwrtrZ Club. How you got a rise out of Will the Chill." Will's tone was bitter ice.

"It's good to see passion in you, Will! Though I have to admit I don't entirely get your meaning. But why are you so tight with your enthusiasm, Will? We can build your ratings if youll give me more of that. And, really, can't you leak us just a littie of your love life?"

"I have no lover: male, female, or bimale. None."

"No? None? Except your masspieces and playing fields, perhaps. . . . But you had a lover once, didn't you, Tondius?"

Will felt his face growing hard and dark with anger.

Blue spoke rapidly. "Just for the sake of accurate historical perspective, listen, please, and answer my question—a yes or no will do. I have a document here I'd like to read to you. I want to know if what it states is true or false. Is this true? 'In a.d. 2649 Tondius Will's fouth confrontation with Enphon brought him at last into public eyes and put him in the running for Title. It was said he had prepared for this Contest for eight years; Enphon's reputation doubtless warranted this, but eight years is unprecedented even for a waverider.

'"It is known that at this time Will's lover, Mina Threeface, was not permitted to visit the waverider—he avoided all distractions. For eight years he refused to screen to her for more than a period of ten minutes once a month. The lover of a waverider is best advised to understand his need for utter concentration. Apparently, Mina did not understand. She hovered just out of scanrange in her father's yacht and, minutes before impact, she dove on a sure course for the impact zone between masspieces, dispatching an emergency transmission to Tondius Will: I've gone to Impact Zone. Avert your masspiece, lose Contest because you love me. Or I die. His Great Senses dutifully relayed this message to Will. Tondius Will's thoughts can only be conjectured. He had to measure the scope of two loves. He found he could not permit himself to surrender or even stalemate Contest simply to save Mina. She was trapped between impacting planets, she died there and, though Will won Contest, it was this victory that also won him the cognomen Will the Chill—'"

"Yes," Will said softly, though inwardly he shook with the effort at self-control. "It's all true. It's true." And he added: "Your heart, Blue—your heart is far more chill than mine will ever be."

Will broke contact and strode to the hookup chambers.

Hookup flushed Will's circulation, winnowing fatigue poisons from his blood, unclouding his brain. Refreshed, he adjusted hookup from yoga to extern. The cushions at his back, the cups gripping his shaven pate, the crowded instrument panel—all seemed to vanish. He closed his eyes and saw the universe.

The senses (but not the mind) of Great Senses were his, now. He scanned first through visible light. He had been orbiting Roche Five for two months; the alien constellations overwheeling the Roche system seemed almost natively familiar. He observed nine of the ten-planet system, each in its respective orbit, hookup magnifying automatically; Roche's Star occluded Number Two. Dominating the right-hand scope of his vision: Five, fifth planet from Roche's Star, bullring half in golden-red light, half in shadow. Five was Will's Contest masspiece. And patching into a drifting Sportseyes camera satellite's signal, he could see himself: his contestship soaring above the twilight border, north-south over the face of the Earth-sized planet. The contestship, with its outspread solar panels and the beaked globe at its forward end, resembled a metallic vulture scanning the barren planet face beneath.

Not quite barren, thought Will the Chill. The survey crew was wrong—there's more than desert and ruins down there.

He looked up from Five, and sought for Opponent. Focusing away from visible fight, he worked his way down ("down") through infrared's multifarious blaze, down through the longer wave lengths, seeking a certain radio transmission. He sorted through the transmissions of the star itself, discarded background sources, letting frequencies riffle by like an endless deck of cards, each card with its wave-length-identifying signet He was looking for a Queen of Diamonds. She wasn't transmitting. He worked his way up ("up"), toward shorter wave lengths, and ten thousand hairs split themselves ten thousand times apiece. He skimmed X-rays, and, through hookup's multifaceted neutrino-focused eyes, spotted her, traced her spoor of nuclear radiation—she was using a hydrogen-scoop, fusing, traveling overspace, so Will's Great Senses (constantly monitoring gravwave ripplings) wouldn't notice her change of position. She was far from Three, her own masspiece.

What was she doing? Then—Will shuddered. A strong probe signal had bounced from his contestship. He felt it again, and again. He waited. It came no more. He traced the signals to their sources—and found that the source was Opponent's contestship, fusing to travel unnoticed in ordinary space. Will tied in with Great Senses. "Did you feel that?"

"Someone tasted our defense screens with a probe signal," Great Senses replied, voice particularly mechanical coming through hookup channels. "Who was it?"

"It was Opponent! She's traveling through upper space so we wouldn't be likely to think the probe came from her ... no reason for her to assess us from that direction, surreptitiously. She knew in this stage we'd expect to find her wave-riding. What do you think? Is she testing our reflexes or trying to kill us?"

"Three sleeps gone there was a disguised Opponent drone—I recognized it for what it was, though it was designed to appear as a Sports-eyes camera, because it was maneuvering in a pattern for which a Sports-eyes vehicle would have no use. It was probing our defense systems."

"You didn't tell me."

"I was waiting for confirmation of my suspicions. We have it now."

"She plans to kill me."

That's within the scope of Contest rules. She has the right to kill you. Under certain conditions."

"It's accepted technically but it's not considered sporting. No one's killed an Opponent for half a thousand Contests."

"Shall we kill her first?"

"No. I shall Contest, and 111 defend myself. She's inexperienced. Luck brought her this far. She's too impulsive to take the Title."

"But she has innersight. Admittedly she's unjudicious, little precision as yet. Her Opponent second to last died in deep space. .. . She admitted nothing. They said it was a leak."

"I didn't know." Will snorted. "So, she's a killer. Let her kill if she can. That's all—I'm going back to scanning—"

"One moment. Do you want me to maintain ship's gravity?"

"Yes. Ill be going planetside. After hookup. I've got to go down to—ah—" He hesitated. Why lie to Great Senses? But he couldn't bring himself to voice the truth. So he said: "I'm going down to inspect the fusion scoops. All that dust—there may be corrosion on the pushcoils. And well keep the planet in this orbit for another sleep. Until then, maintain gravity. I want to be gravadjust-ed—I might be going planetside fairly often."

He broke contact with Great Senses.

But in the programming room the lights of Great Senses went from questioning-green to doubting-orange.

The atmosphere of Five was breathable, but too rarefied to nourish him long. So he wore a respirator. Also, a thermalsuit against the bitter cold, the cutting winds. That was all. Unweaponed (against the advice of Great Senses: Opponent skulked nearer), he leaped from the airlock of the lander. He stretched, getting the wieldiness of planetside back into his limbs. He walked a few meters to a large boulder, clambered atop it, and looked about him.

Just below, the double-domed lander squatted on spidery limbs. Beyond the lander, many kilometers across the battered yellow plain, rose the shining column of the nearest pushcoil, the planetmover.

Anemic sunlight glanced from its argent hide, light streaks chasing the shadows of striated dust clouds skating low in the bluegray sky. It was afternoon, but overhead a few stars guttered, visible in thin atmosphere.

The pushcoil column towered, broad and austere, into the clouds and beyond. Its lower end widened into a compression skirt that uniformly clamped the ground; steams and fumes trailed from vents in the conical skirt: the column was converting minerals into energy, building power for conversion into magnetic push. There were ten such columns placed at regular intervals about the planet. Put there by the Sports-eyes Corporation for Will the Chill's exclusive use.

Made from metals extracted from Five's core, the columns were powered geothermally. Sports-eyes had built hundreds—on hundreds of worlds. Worlds now asteroid belts and clouds of dust; crushed and dispersed for the amusement of jaded millions on the homeworld.

The Sports-eyes crew had departed months before; Will was glad that they were gone. He hadn't spoken to another human being, except on screen, since Mina's death, years before.

Will turned and gazed west. Roche's Star was low, opposite the column. Long shadows reached from the endless scatter of boulders and crater rims. The meteorite-scored hills to the north stretched to him like the pitted, skeletal fingers of a dead giant

Will strode into the grasp of those peninsular fingers.

In those hills were the ruins, and the sunharp, and the voices. Will began to climb, anticipation growing.

In the ship. In the hookup chamber. In the hookup seat. In hookup.

Time to re-examine the playing field. He tested the solar wind, noted its slant and strength.

Then he immersed himself in somatic-eidedc impressions of gravitational energy. An exquisitely fine and resiliently powerful fabric flexed between star systems. On this skein a star and ten planets moved like monstrous spiders, electromagnetic grips adhering them to the field, bending the webwork, reverberating the field so that the positioning procress of each planet was integral to the status of each of the others. The gravitational field was the chief turf of the playing field, and Will examined the attributes of each obstacle on the field, assessing each component's interaction with the whole, synthesizing his strategy.

Will needed no numerical calculation. No holotrigono-metry. He had never got beyond the multiplication tables. All he needed was hookup and Great Senses and the skill, the innersight. Great Senses was navigator, astrogator, life-systems watch. Hookup was Will's cerebral connection with the ship's electronic nerves, a binding of synthetic and biological neural systems. Will's was the instinct, the athleticism, the determination. Determiner of destinations.

He knew the ship physically.

The ship's cognizance of (and interaction with) visible light, cosmic rays, gamma rays, unclear forces—these he felt in his loins. Physically.

De hipbone is connected to de backbone; the electro is connected to the magnetic. The seat of his magnetic sen-sorium was his spine. This chakra he experienced in the region of his heart. Electricity in his heart. Physically.

He comprehended the gravitional field through shoulders, legs, arms. Very physically.

In loins, light-packets. In heart, electromagnetism. In limbs, gravity.

In hookup they integrated as variations on the wave-particle theme: in his brain. Sometimes, Tondius Will remembered a poem, one of many the ship's library had recited to him. It was Blake....

Energy is the only life and is

from the body: and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight.

Innersight hookup. On one level he knew the vast gravitational field in terms of mass and weight, gross proportions.

Take it down, another and broader condition of unity.

He penetrated the vacillation of gravitrons, the endless alternation between wave and particle forms, slipped the knife edge of his innersight into the transitory sequence between wave into particle and particle into wave; waves, here, revealed as particles and particles exposed: packets of waves. This particularization arranged in resonations distinctive to the gravitional field of Roche's star system.

He caused his perception of the gravitational spectrum to click with his perception of the electromagnetic spectrum, his limbs throbbing in concert with pulsings in heart-spine. And this light with his loins. All together now.

His brain took a picture, recorded and filed it. He had memorized the playing field.

And that was enough for now. He willed internalization. Hookup shut down his connection with Great Senses. He sat up and yawned. But his eyes glittered.

He was hungry, and there was no hookup here to feed and refresh him. He was weary, but the hills drew him on. There was only the sighing wind, hiss of breath in respirator, clink of small air tanks on his belt, crunch of his boot steps in sand. And the wide-open, the empty. He trudged the rim of a crater, admiring the crystalline glitter streaking its slopes, the red nipple of iron oxides in the impact basin. On the far side of this crater were the ruins, up-thrusting along the broken ridges like exposed spinal segments. Light splashed off the sunharp, still half a kilometer away.

The sun was westering behind the mesas, the jet sky overhead spread shadow wings to enfold the bluer horizons.

Will slid down the embankment, enjoying the earthy heft of hillside resisting his boots. He reached the floor of the gulley and picked his way over rough shin-high boulders to the base of the hill whose crown exposed the first stretch of ragged ruins, uneven walls like battlements above.

The hills were not simple hills—they were barrows, grave mounds cloaking the remains of a once-city. Here, an earthslide triggered by a meteorite strike had exposed a portion of the city's skeleton. The walls of rusted metal and cracked glass and tired plastics, throwing jagged shadows in the fading daylight, were notched and scored with age, erosion.

But there were no signs of war, on the ruins. These were not broken battlements. . . . Genetic Manipulation experiments had released an unstoppable plague, robbing the world of most of its life and all its fertility. No offspring were born to lower life forms, or to the world's people. People they were, of a sort, with tendrills instead of boned fingers and large golden whiteless eyes like polished stones. The plants withered, the air thinned, the land died. Those who survived, one hundred thousand living on chemically synthesized food, were so long-lived they were nearly immortal. Childless, living without societal evolution in an endlessly bleak landscape, they surrendered to a growing collective sense of futility. A new religion arose, preaching fulfillment beyond the veil of death, advocating mass suicide. A vote was taken, its tally unanimous. The remaining one hundred thousand decided to die. To die by poison, together, and all at once....

For so Will had been told. The voices in the sunharp told him this.

He passed through the maze of roofless ruins, coming to the broad square at their radial center. He beheld the sunharp. Everything here had decayed but the sunharp. It had been built at the end, as a monument. Built to endure a nova.

The diamond-shaped sunsharp's frame was constructed of light silvery tubing crisscrossing in equilateral parallelograms based in common on a wire-veined cube of crystal which was two meters to a side. The horizontal axis of each silvery rhombus was at right angles to the others, the tube frames meeting at the peak of the diamond form three meters over the base. A coppery netting was woven densely between the frames, a four-faced crystal form of webbing, basket for sifting and carrying light impulses.

The final rays of sunset; veering lances of red, broke the thin dust cloud and struck the coppery sunharp wires. Till now it had been singing in the subsonic. Struck full by corpuscular rays, its netting vibrated visibly, resonated internally, interpreted the sun shiver according to strict aural formulas. Translated into sound waves, photons sang out. Choirs of alien races, chorus of human voices, subhuman voices, wolves baying and birds singing: all in concert. The wind sounds of thousands of landscapes (each landscape altering the wind song as Bach's inventions vary the hymnal theme) combining into a single voice. The nature of rippling endlessly defined in song.

Will listened, and more than listening: he heeded. And if Blue the Glue had seen Will's face just then, he might not have recognized him; he did not associate joy with Will the Chill.

Royal purple gathered in the ground hollows, dusty darkness collected in the dead windows of the ruins, the stars shone more fiercely, the mesas at the horizon swallowed the sun. The sunharp's call dwindled to lower frequencies, softly moaning to starlight and occasionally pinging to cosmic rays. Other sighs came to replace the sunharp's voice. Will shuddered and, for an instant, dread enfolded his heart. But the fear left him abruptly, as it always did before they spoke to him. He smiled. "Hello," he said aloud.

There came a reply, one hundred thousand voices speaking the same word at once, a mighty susurration in an alien tongue. A greeting.

Then they spoke subvocally, in his own tongue, echoes within the skull:

For the fifth time you have returned to us (said the voices). But the first time and the three thereafter you came alone. Why have you now brought a companion?

"I have no companions," said Tondius Will.

We see now that you do not know about the one who follows you. It is a lurking he who does the bidding of a distant she. The he comes to destroy you.

"Then he is an assassin," said WU1 sadly, "sent by my Opponent. She becomes reckless. She has breached the rules of Contest. Death-dealing must be done by Opponent or by her machines only. Still, I will not protest. Let him come."

The time is not yet, Tondius Will.

"Will the time be soon?"

You doubt us. You wonder if you are the One prophesied by the Gatekeeper. You are he. Ten thousand times in ten thousand millenniums we have attempted transit to the fuller spheres. Ten thousand times we have been denied. One hundred thousand cannot enter as one, said the Gatekeeper, unless they become onemind, or unless they are guided by a sailor of inner seeing. We were bound together by a united death. Simultaneity. We plunged together into that tenuous Place, this between. We need a guide to lead us out. Do not doubt us. You are He. The Gatekeeper whose seven stony visages exhale backlight said to us: One who wields spheres below can guide you through spheres above. . . . You are He. We know your history, Tondius Will.

"My father..."

Was an orbitglider, a great athlete of space race. "My mother ..."

Was a freefall ballerina for a space-station ballet company.

*'My grandfather..."

Was an Earthborn snow skier of Earth who journeyed to the ultimate ski course on mountainous Reginald IV, and died on Thornslope.

"My great-grandfather ..."

Was a Terran trapeze artist

"My great-grandmother..."

Was a surfer on the vast seas of terra-formed Venus, and once rode a wave for seven days. "And I came to waveriding..."

When your mother killed herself en route to Earth from your father's doom on Reginald IV, and the captain of the transport adopted you; he was himself a retired waverider.

"And I know your history, and how you came to die, one hundred thousand at a single stroke, trapped by imperfect unity...."

We are as one hundred thousand waves...

"On a single sea."

The ritual done, the understanding forged anew, the voices hushed. The air about him began to course and whirl, a dust-devil rose up and the spirit host—seen in the dark of his closed eyes as endless banners of unfurling white—enclosed Tondius Will. He wept in unbridled joy and relief as they entered him, and swept him up. . . . He could not abide the touch of flesh on flesh, not since he had crushed Mina between two worlds. Trapped in his anomic flesh, unable to feel others, utterly alone and apart like a Djinn in a bottle. Until the voices in the sunharp came and entered him, spirit on spirt, transcending the barriers in his flesh. They took him with them, for a while, and let him incorporeaUy ride, like a surfer on a sea constituted of the ectoplasm of one hundred thousand souls. For this time of merging, loneliness was beyond conception. For this time of— But it ended.

Returned to his body, he felt like an infant coughed from the womb into a snowdrift.

He screamed. He begged. "Please!"

No longer (the voices said), for now. If we kept you from your body any longer, you'd wither, and pass on to us. It would be too soon. You're not quite ready to lead us yet, though you have the innersight of energies, particles, and planes. You are a born sailor of upper spheres. But not quite yet. Next time. Soon.

"Wait! One thing! You said you would search for her. Have you found her? Was she too far away?"

Linear distances don't impede our call. We have found her. She was very much alone. She is coming. Next time. Soon. (The voices faded.)

They were gone. Will was alone in the dark.

The sunharp moaned faintly. Distant whispers; starlight rumors stirred its webwork.

He shivered in sudden awareness of the night's cold. Stretching, he fought numbness from his limbs. He turned up the heat in his thermalsuit, checked his air tanks' reading. Best get back to the landing pod, and soon.

He turned and began to descend the hillside. At the outermost finger of the ragged walls, he stopped and listened. He nodded to himself.

He took-an electric light from his belt, flicked it alive, and set the small beacon on a ledge of the crumbling wall. "Come out and face me as you shoot me!" he called.

Silence, except for the echo of his shout.

Then, a squeak of boot steps on gravel. A broad, dark figure in a gray thermalsuit stepped warily from a murky doorway. He was two meters from Will. Most of the assassin's face was concealed by goggles and respirator mask. "You are one of the guild," Tondius Will observed. The assassin nodded. He held a small silver tube lightly in his right hand. The tube's muzzle was directed at Will's chest. Will said, "It is a tenet of your guild that if your quarry discovers you and challenges you then you are compelled to face him. Yes?" The assassin nodded.

"Well then, come into the light of my lamp. I want to see some of your face as you kill me. You can't begrudge me that, surely."

The assassin came two strides forward, stepping into the ring of light. His lips were compressed, his eyes were gray as the ice a thousand meters beneath the ice cap. His thick legs were well apart and braced.

Will the Chill fastened his eyes on those of the assassin. The stranger frowned.

Tondius Will spoke in a voice compelling; it was compelling because his voice was the raiment of his will power, and his will was backed by the unspeakable mass of all the planets he had hurled. He said: "I am going to move my arm quickly in order to show you something. Do not fire the weapon, I am not going to reach for you. I'm going to reach into this wall. . . . The guild of assassins esteems its members greatly skilled in martial arts. ..."

To his left was a high wall of transparent bricks backed by old metal. Ancient but solid. Will had explored these ruins thoroughly. He knew that there was a metal urn on the other side of the wall, lying on a shelf; he knew just -where it was. He moved, visualizing his left hend passing through the obstruction as if through a cloud, fingers closing about the small urn; he pitted perfect form against the mass resistance of the wall.

There was a crack! and a small explosion in the wall side; dust billowed, chips of glass rained. The assassin twitched but did not fire. Will withdrew his arm from the hole he'd made. He held something in his bare hand. A stoppered urn of age-dulled gold. "Waveriders learn that masses are merely electron-bounded fields of space-influence," he remarked casually, examining the um in the dim light, "and all fields have a weak point, where that which seems impenetrable may be penetrated." He paused, glanced up, murmuring, "That's the principle behind the traversing of space between stars: knowledge of secret passages through the fabric of spacestuff. And it's the principle behind what you've just seen, assassin." Will reached out with his right hand, poised it over the urn, and, with a motion outspeeding the eye, he stabbed a rigid thumb at the metal casing held in his other hand. The urn split neady in two; half of it dropped to the ground. The assassin took a step backward; his eyes dancing with wonder, he held his fire.

Tondius Will reached into the half of the urn in his left hand and extracted something that had lain there for ten thousand millennia. A tiny skeleton to which a thin shroud of skin clung; a miniature mummy. "It's an infant who died at birth," Will muttered. "The urn was his sarcophagus. A shame to disturb it. So . . ." He bent, retrieved the fallen half, replaced it over the mummy. Clamping the two halves snug with his left hand, with the thumb of his right he pressed the seams of the urn, all the way around, fusing it shut. Moving slowly and easily, he replaced the urn in the hole he had made in the wall. Then he returned his gaze to the eyes of the assassin. "Now: can you match what I have just done?"

The assassin slowly shook his head.

"Then, you know that I could kill you," said Will lightly, taking a cautious step forward so that he was within striking distance. "I could kill you even before you pressed the fire stud of your charge gun." Will smiled. "Yes?"

Looking stooped and weary, the assassin nodded. 'Therefore, your mission is useless. Depart now, in peace."

The assassin shook his head.. . . The tenets of the assassin's guild.

Will saw the man's eyes narrow. Will knew, a split-second realization, that the assassin was depressing the stud of his charge gun.

Will struck, doubly. One hand struck aside the charge gun, the other dipped into the assassin's chest. Just as that hand had penetrated the wall

Will took something from the man's chest and held it up for him to see.

Spurting blood from the gaping crater in his chest, the assassin took two seconds to collapse, two more to die.

But before he fell he had a glimpse of his heart, his own heart torn still pumping from his chest, wet-red and steaming in Will the Chill's outthrust hand.

In A.D. 1976 the physicist-philosopher Denis Postle said: "Mass-energy tells space-time how to curve and curved space-time tells mass-energy how to move."

Imagine that you are involved in a competition which requires that, with your right hand, you throw a discus with Olympic skill, while your legs are performing an elaborate ballet choreography and with your left hand you are playing the world tennis champion (and winning), and in between racquet strokes you must move a piece to attack a champion chessmaster effectively on a three-dimensional chessboard. If you can imagine doing all that in near simultaneity, then you know something of what it is to be a waverider.

Externally. In hookup, Will's eyes were closed, his hands were clamped rigidly on armrests, his legs flexed and poised; except for his heaving chest, he seemed inert—about to fly to activity like a drawn bowstring.

Internally. He saw himself, in his mind's eye, floating naked in space; outside him were luminous matrices, the energy fields, flickering in and out of ken as he looked up and down the spectrum. He approached a pulsing sphere—to innersight, the sphere seemed only ten meters across. It traveled in preordained paths through the matrix. Paths he had ordained. He had set his globe on the road it was taking by manipulating pushcoils situated about the vast surface of its genuine counterpart, Roche Five.

He felt the presence of Opponent, though he could not yet see her. He sensed her position as a man with closed eyes knows the whereabouts of the sun by the feel of its glare on his eyelids. She had not yet moved Roche Three from tertiary-stage orbit. But she was there, satelliting Three eUiptically, just within pushcoil-control range. She was waiting for Will to serve.

Will served. He reached out, mentally, for the imaged sphere. He didn't touch Roche Five directly, just as Great Senses kept out of range of the planet's gravdrag so that orbitshift wouldn't wrench the ship. He placed his hand near the Eastcenter South Polar pushcoil, poised over the pushcoil column (externally he remained in his seat—but his muscles flexed accordingly) in a hand posture that told Great Senses exactly how much push should be exerted by the coil, and for how long, and at what intervals. Through hookup, Great Senses drank Will's muscular expressions, translated them into mathematical formulas. Great Senses knew Will's flesh, though Will denied that flesh to humanity.

Except for autonomic functions, breathing and blood moving, Will's every movement (as visualized on the noumenon plane, hookup) represented, to Great Senses, a signal to be transmitted to the pushcoil control units on Five.

Externally. He was rippling like an eel, rippling purposefully, sending three dozen signals in one dozen seconds. Sometimes several pushcoils were activated simultaneously, sometimes one at a time; on each occasion the activation signal carried a precisely quantified regulation of the thrust applied.

Roche Five moved out of orbit.

A man about 1.8 meters high and weighing 170 pounds moved a mass of about 6 billion trillion tons, some 11,000 kilometers in diameter. And he did this (apparently) by rotating his hips and flexing shoulder muscles.

He did this very swiftly—but very warily. Because the wrong nudge could conflict impetus with the planet's rotational force, sundering the masspiece.

Internally. Swimming through space after the sphere, waving his hands about it in intricate patterns like a wizard invoking visions from a crystal ball, he swept it easily (but not effortlessly) in a wide arc, ninety degrees from the solar system's orbital plane, right angles from its former path.

This was stage three-fifty in Contest. Six months since stage one.

The greater the scope entailed in implementing an activity, the greater the need for strict attention to small details.

Each split-second decision taking into account all that Will read of gravitational fields, electromagnetic and heat-energy factors, gravdrag on nearby asteroids, influence of solar wind—the consequences of interaction with these factors.

Will struggled with ecstasy. Each aspect of the celestial field had its own musics, in Will's mind, and its own fireworks, exquisite and hypnotic: a threat of distraction.

. . . Opponent drew Roche Three in ever-widening spi-
rals, never quite breaking free of the gravitational field of
the sun. She used the pull of the sun, increasing her speed
as she neared it, profiting in impetus accumulated with
one pass after another. She expended weeks in each
strategic repositioning, always moving with strict reference
to the ploys of Will the Chill____

Concentration opaqued time; Will's fixation on Contest never faltered. The weeks collapsed upon themselves; Three and Five spun nearer, and nearer.

Hookup fed and cleansed him. In place of sleep it washed his unconcious and hung it to dry in the winds of dreaming. Weeks melted into minutes. Sports-eyes recorded all. Sports-eyes staring from a thousand angles, a thousand droneships with camera snouts preparing the composite time-lapse film reducing Contest to the relative simplicity of a bullfight.

They entered the specified ninety thousand cubic kilometers of space agreed upon as Impact Zone.

Like macrocosmic Sumo wrestlers, the planets closed, bulk upon bulk. Sadly, as with Sumo wrestlers, the naked eye made them seem mindlessly charging brutes, naked force versus naked force; but Sumo artists know their wrestle as a kind of dance, a finely pivotal judo, intricate in calculation and performance.

The masspieces were ten thousand kilometers apart.

She was closing fast, impulsively, driving straight as a billiard ball, utilizing the equatorial bulge as impending impact point. She was overconfident, perhaps, because Will had not been performing as well as in the past; his mind was troubled, divided. He had to struggle to keep from thinking of the ruins, the sunharp, the voices, and Mina.

This was his final Contest, and his heart pleaded with him to play it to denouement.

But as the two planets engaged for impact—each making minute split-second adjustments in trajectory, rate of spin, and lean of axis—Will rose up from hookup, thinking: Sports-eyes, this time you're cheated. Crack your own eggshells.

Great Senses was not capable of surprise. But it was capable of alarm. Alarmed by Will's withdrawal from hookup, the computer spoke to him through ship's intercom. "What's wrong? Impact is in—"

"I know. Less than two hours. So it is scheduled, and so Opponent expects. But there will be no impact. We are stalemating; no one wins. Ill back out of the approach pattern as if I'm preparing another. But Five will never collide with Three."

Will was capable of surprise. "You aren't supposed to read my mind."

"Because of the voices in the ruins?"

"I read only what hookup leaks to me. I know you want to preserve the planet for the voices. The dead one hundred thousand. Why? They're already dead. Do you want to preserve Five intact as a monument to them?"

"In a way, it will be a monument. But—do you know what they require of me?"

"They want you to guide them upspectrum. Beyond the shortest known wavelengths, the highest frequencies. Into the fuller spheres."

"I want to go. I want to see upspectrum. And I want Mina. ... It is a condition of their advancement that there must be a solid point of departure. We have to depart from an intact planet; it's like a door into the Farther Place. If the game were consummated, most of Five would be destroyed. . . . The only reason—beyond my love of Contest—that I've played this far was to be near Five. I had to Contest to stay near, since this is sponsor's ship."

"Within an hour the quakes on Five will begin. If you want to preserve the ruins—"

"Fve programmed the backup navigator. You won't have to do a thing. In forty-five minutes the pushcoil will veer Five. Opponent's momentum will prevent her from coming about to strike. As soon as we're out of impact zone, on that instant, transmit a message to her, tell her, as is my right at this point, I declare stalemate, by right of points accrued. That will infuriate her."

"And you'll go to the surface of Five."

"Yes ... and you'll go to serve another waverider."

"And on Five you'll die and go with them."

"Yes."

"How? Will you crash the lander?" "No. I've got to be in sunharp rapport with them when I die."

"Then—you'll remove your respirator? An uglv death."

"I don't think that will be necessary. She's proved herself to be vindictive. When she discovers the stalemate she'll come after me. She'll find me in rapport."

That was where she found him.

The sudden change in orbital trajectory had riven the surface of Five. The sky was mordant with volcanic smog. Some of the ruins crumbled. The sunharp survived.

Roche Five was moving into a wide, cold, permanent orbit. The pushcoil column, in the waning light like a colossal mailed fist and forearm, flared for the last time.

He stood before the sunharp, tranced by its distant hum. The voices whispered, sang louder, a cry touched by exultation.

"Hello," he said.

Again you have not come alone (said the voices). A she comes in a small, armed ship. Just out of sight, in the clouds. She approaches.

"I know. She will be the instrument of our union."

Tondius...

"Mina!" shouted Will the Chill warmly. Tm here.

The planet was rotating into darkness. Light diminished, night engulfed Five. But Tondius Will had no lack of light: "Mina!" he breathed.

She touched him before the others, a chill breath, a kiss of ether. Then the others came and he was borne up, the surfer deliquesced; a sea of one hundred thousand and two waves. His body, still standing, remained alive and for a few moments it tethered him to that plane.

Something metallic broke from the clouds. A chip of light glittered low in the black sky, growing. It was a con-testship, diving like a vulture. It spat a beam of harsh red light; the laser passed through Will's chest and through his heart—but before his body crumpled his ears resounded with a joyous cry, the song of the sunharp: struck by the laser blade passed through his flesh.

One wavelength, infinitely divisible.

Freed of his body Will had no need of hookup. He showed them the way. In a moment, the one hundred thousand and two had gone.

. . . Far over the surface of Five, Will's Great Senses
surveyed the planet. Its face of honeycombed crystal was
a mixture of three colors; red for regret, blue for con-
sidering, green for triumph____

Great Senses veered from Five and departed the system.

Opponent's ship departed as well.

Now, Roche Five, icing over, a frigid forever monument to a transcended race, was utterly empty. Except for the lonely ghost of a forgotten assassin.

"Was a hot day. Must have been hot in school," he said.

"They got air conditioning." "So they do, now. How old are you?" "Seven," I said. "Well, almost eight." "Mother told you never to talk to strangers?" "And Dad, too."

"Good advice. But haven't you seen me around here before?" I looked him over. "No."

"Closely. Look at my clothes. What color are they?"

His shirt was gray, like the rock he was sitting on. The cuffs, where they peeped from under a russet jacket, were white. He didn't smell bad, but he didn't look particularly clean. He was smooth-shaven, though. His hair was white and his pants were the color of the dirt below the rock. "All kinds of colors," I said.

"But mostly I partake of the landscape, no?"

"I guess so," I said.

"That's because I'm not here. You're imagining me, at least part of me. Don't I look like somebody you might have heard of?"

"Who are you supposed to look like?" I asked.

"Well, Tm full of stories," he said. "Have lots of stories to tell little boys, little girls, even big folk, if they'll listen."

I started to walk away.

"But only if they'll listen," he said. I ran. When I got home, I told my older sister about the man on the road, but she only got a worried look and told me to stay away from strangers. I took her advice. For some time afterward, into my eighth year, I avoided that road and did not speak with strangers more than I had to.

The house that I lived in, with the five other members of my family and two dogs and one beleaguered cat, was white and square and comfortable. The stairs were rich, dark wood overlaid with worn carpet. The walls were dark oak paneling up to a foot above my head, then white plaster, with a white plaster ceiling. The air was full of smells—bacon when I woke up, bread and soup and dinner when I came home from school, dust on weekends when we helped clean.

Sometimes my parents argued, and not just about money, and those were bad times; but usually we were happy. There was talk about selling the farm and the house and going to Mitchell where Dad could work in a computerized feed-mixing plant, but it was only talk.

It was early summer when I took to the dirt road again. I'd forgotten about the old man. But in almost the same way, when the sun was cooling and the air was haunted by lazy bees, I saw an old woman. Women strangers are less malevolent than men, and rarer. She was sitting on the gray rock, in a long green skirt summer-dusty, with a daisy-colored shawl and a blouse the precise hue of cot-tonwoods seen in a late hazy day's muted light. "Hello, boy," she said.

"I don't recognize you, either," I blurted, and she smiled.

"Of course not. If you didn't recognize him, you'd hardly know me."

"Do you know him?" I asked. She nodded. "Who was he? Who are you?"

"We're both full of stories. Just tell them from different angles. You aren't afraid of us, are you?"

I was, but having a woman ask the question made all the difference. "No," I said. "But what are you doing here? And how do you know—?"

"Ask for a story," she said. "One you've never heard of before." Her eyes were the color of baked chestnuts, and she squinted into the sun so that I couldn't see her whites. When she opened them wider to look at me, she didn't have any whites.

"I don't want to hear stories," I said softly.

"Sure you do. Just ask."

"It's late. I got to be home."

"I knew a man who became a house," she said. "He didn't like it. He stayed quiet for thirty years, and watched all the people inside grow up, and be just like their folks, all nasty and dirty and leaving his walls to fake, and the bathrooms were unbearable. So he spit them out one morning, furniture and all, and shut bis doors and locked them." "What?"

"You heard me. Upchucked. The poor house was so disgusted he changed back into a man, but he was older and he had a cancer and his heart was bad because of all the abuse he had lived with. He died soon after."

I laughed, not because the man had died but because I knew such things were lies. "That's silly," I said.

"Then here's another. There was a cat who wanted to eat butterflies. Nothing finer in the world for a cat than to stalk the grass, waiting for black and pumpkin butterflies. It crouches down and wriggles its rump to dig in the hind paws, then it jumps. But a butterfly is no sustenance for a cat. It's practice. There was a little girl about your age— might have been your sister, but she won't admit it—who saw the cat and decided to teach it a lesson. She hid in the taller grass with two old kites under each arm and waited for the cat to come by stalking. When it got real close, she put on her mother's dark glasses, to look all bug-eyed, and she jumped up flapping the kites. Well, it was just a little too real, because in a trice she found herself flying, and she was much smaller than she had been, and the cat jumped at her. Almost got her, too. Ask your sister about that sometime. See if she doesn't deny it."

"How'd she get back to be my sister again?"

"She became too scared to fly. She lit on a flower and found herself crushing it. The glasses broke, too."

"My sister did break a pair of Mom's glasses once."

The woman smiled.

"I got to be going home."

"Tomorrow you bring me a story, okay?"

I ran off without answering. But in my head, monsters were already rising. If she thought I was scared, wait until she heard the story I had to tell! When I got home my oldest sister, Barbara, was fixing lemonade in the kitchen. She was a year older than I, but acted as if she were grown-up. She was a good six inches taller and I could beat her if I got in a lucky punch, but no other way—so her power over me was awesome. But we were usually friendly.

"Where you been?" she asked, like a mother.

"Somebody tattled on you," I said.

Her eyes went doe-scared, then wizened down to slits. "What're you talking about?"

"Somebody tattled about what you did to Mom's sunglasses."

"I already been whipped for that," she said nonchalantly. "Not much more to tell." "Oh, but I know more."

"Was not playing doctor," she said. The youngest, Sue-Ann, weakest and most full of guile, had a habit of telling the folks somebody or .other was playing doctor. She didn't know what it meant—I just barely did—but it had been true once, and she held it over everybody as her only vestige of power.

"No," I said, "but I know what you were doing. And I won't tell anybody."

"You don't know nothing," she said. Then she accidentally poured half a pitcher of lemonade across the side of my head and down my front. When Mom came in I was screaming and swearing like Dad did when he fixed the cars, and I was put away for life plus ninety years in the bedroom I shared with younger brother Michael. Dinner smelled better than usual that evening, but I had none of it. Somehow, I wasn't brokenhearted. It gave me time to think of a scary story for the country-colored woman on the rock.

School was the usual mix of hell and purgatory the next day. Then the hot, dry winds cooled and the bells rang and I was on the dirt road again, across the southern hundred acres, walking in the lees and shadows of the big cottonwoods. I carried my Road-Runner lunch pail and my pencil box and one book—a handwriting manual I hated so much I tore pieces out of it at night, to shorten its lifetime—and I walked slowly, to give my story time to gel.

She was leaning up against a tree, not far from the rock. Looking back, I can see she was not so old as a boy of eight years thought. Now I see her lissome beauty and grace, despite the dominanace of gray in her reddish hair, despite the crow's-feet around her eyes and the smile-haunts around her lips. But to the eight-year-old she was simply a peculiar crone. And he had a story to tell her, he thought, that would age her unto graveside.

"Hello, boy," she said.

"Hi." I sat on the rock.

"I can see you've been thinking," she said.

I squinted into the tree shadow to make her out better. "How'd you know?"

"You have the look of a boy that's been thinking. Are you here to listen to another story?"

"Got one to tell, this time," I said.

"Who goes first?"

It was always polite to let the woman go first so I quelled my haste and told her she could. She motioned me to come by the tree and sit on a smaller rock, half-hidden by grass. And while the crickets in the shadow tuned up for the evening, she said, "Once there was a dog. This dog was a pretty usual dog, like the ones that would chase you around home if they thought they could get away with it—if they didn't know you, or thought you were up to something the big people might disapprove of. But this dog lived in a graveyard. That is, he belonged to the caretaker. You've seen a graveyard before, haven't you?"

"Like where they took Grandpa."

"Exactly," she said. "With pretty lawns, and big white and gray stones, and for those who've died recently, smaller gray stones with names and flowers and years cut into them. And trees in some places, with a mortuary nearby made of brick, and a garage full of black cars, and a place behind the garage where you wonder what goes on." She knew the place, all right. "This dog had a pretty good life. It was his job to keep the grounds clear of animals at night. After the gates were locked, he'd be set loose, and he wandered all night long. He was almost white, you see. Anybody human who wasn't supposed to be there would think he was a ghost, and they'd run away.

"But this dog had a problem. His problem was, there were rats that didn't pay much attention to him. A whole gang of rats. The leader was a big one, a good yard from nose to tail. These rats made their living by burrowing under the ground in the old section of the cemetery."

That did it. I didn't want to hear any more. The air was a lot colder than it should have been, and I wanted to get home in time for dinner and still be able to eat it. But I couldn't go just then.

"Now the dog didn't know what the rats did, and just like you and I, probably, he didn't much care to know. But it was his job to keep them under control. So one day he made a truce with a couple of cats that he normally tormented and told them about the rats. These cats were scrappy old toms and they'd long since cleared out the competition of other cats, but they were friends themselves. So the dog made them a proposition. He said he'd let them use the cemetery any time they wanted, to prowl or hunt in or whatever, if they would put the fear of God into a few of the rats. The cats toojr. him up on it. 'We get to do whatever we want,' they said, "whenever we want, and you won't bother us.' The dog agreed.

"That night the dog waited for the sounds of battle. But they never came. Nary a yowl." She glared at me for emphasis. "Not a claw scratch. Not even a twitch of tail in the wind." She took a deep breath, and so did I. "Round about midnight the dog went out into the graveyard. It was very dark and there wasn't wind, or bird, or speck of star to relieve the quiet and the dismal, inside-of-a-box-camera blackness. He sniffed his way to the old part of the graveyard, and met with the head rat, who was sitting on a slanty, cracked wooden grave marker. Only his eyes and a tip of tail showed in the dark, but the dog could smell him. 'What happened to the cats?' he asked. The rat shrugged his haunches. 'Ain't seen any cats,' he said. 'What did you think—that you could scare us out with a couple of cats? Ha. Listen—if there had been any cats here tonight, they'd have been strung and hung like meat in a shed, and my youn'uns would have grown fat on—"

"No-o-o!" I screamed, and I ran away from the woman and the tree until I couldn't hear the story any more.

"What's the matter?" she called after me. "Aren't you going to tell me your story?" Her voice followed me as I ran.

It was funny. That night, I wanted to know what happened to the cats. Maybe nothing had happened to them. Not knowing made my visions even worse—and I didn't sleep well. But my brain worked like it had never worked before.

The next day, a Saturday, I had an ending—not a very good one in retrospect—but it served to frighten Michael so badly he threatened to tell Mom on me.

"What would you want to do that for?" I asked. "Cripes, I won't ever tell you a story again if you tell Mom!"

Michael was a year younger and didn't worry about the future. "You never told me stories before," he said, "and everything was fine. I won't miss them."

He ran down the stairs to the living room. Dad was smoking a pipe and reading the paper, relaxing before checking the irrigation on the north thirty. Michael stood at the foot of the stairs, thinking. I was almost down to grab him and haul him upstairs when he made his decision and headed for the kitchen. I knew exactly what he was considering—that Dad would probably laugh and call him a little scaredy cat. But Mom would get upset and do me in proper.

She was putting a paper form over the kitchen table to mark it for fitting a tablecloth. Michael ran up to her and hung onto a pants leg while I halted at the kitchen door, breathing hard, eyes threatening eternal torture if he so much as peeped. But Michael didn't worry about the future much.

"Mom," he said.

"Cripes!" I shouted, high-pitching on the i. Refuge awaited me in the tractor shed. It was an agreed-upon hiding place. Mom didn't know I'd be there, but Dad did, and he could mediate.

It took him a half-hour to get to me. I sat in the dark behind a workbench, practicing my pouts. He stood in the shaft of light falling from the unpatched chink in the roof. Dust motes May-poled around his legs. "Son," he said. "Mom wants to know where you got that story."

Now, this was a peculiar thing to be asked. The question I'd expected had been, "Why did you scare Michael?" or maybe, "What made you think of such a thing?" But no. Somehow, she had plumbed the problem, planted the words in Dad's mouth, and impressed upon him that father-son relationships were temporarily suspended.

"I made it up," I said.

"You've never made up that kind of story before." "I just started."

He took a deep breath. "Son, we get along real good, except when you lie to me. We know better. Who told you that story?"

This was uncanny. There was more going on than I could understand—there was a mysterious, adult thing happening. I had no way around the truth. "An old woman," I said.

Dad sighed even deeper. "What was she wearing?"

"Green dress," I said.

"Was there an old man?"

I nodded.

"Christ," he said softly. He turned and walked out of the shed. From outside, he called me to come into the house. I dusted off my overalls and followed him. Michael sneered at me.

" 'Locked them in coffins with old dead bodies,'" he mimicked. "Phhht! You're going to get it."

The folks closed the folding door to the kitchen with both of us outside. This disturbed Michael, who'd expected instant vengeance. I was too curious and worried to take my revenge on him, so he skulked out the screen door and chased the cat around the house. "Lock you in a coffin!" he screamed.

Mom's voice drifted from behind the louvred doors. "Do you hear that? The poor child's going to have nightmares. It'll warp him."

"Don't exaggerate," Dad said.

"Exaggerate what? That those filthy people are back? Ben, they must be a hundred years old now! They're trying to do the same thing to your son that they did to your brother . . . and just look at him! Living in sin, writing for those hell-spawned girlie magazines."

"He ain't living in sin, he's living alone in an apartment in New York City. And he writes for all kinds of places."

"They tried to do it to you, too! Just thank God your aunt sayed you."

"Margie, I hope you don't intend—"

"Certainly do. She knows all about them kind of people. She chased them off once, she can sure do it again!"

All hell had broken loose. I didn't understand half of it, but I could feel the presence of Great Aunt Sybil Danser. I could almost hear her crackling voice and the shustle of her satchel of Billy Grahams and Zondervans and little tiny pamphlets with shining light in blue offset on their covers.

I knew there was no way to get the full story from the folks short of listening in, but they'd stopped talking and were sitting in that stony kind of silence that indicated Dad's disgust and Mom's determination. I was mad that nobody was blaming me, as if I were some idiot child not capable of being bad on my own. I was mad at Michael for precipitating the whole mess.

And I was curious. Were the man and woman more than a hundred years old? Why hadn't I seen them before, in town, or heard about them from other kids? Surely I wasn't the only one they'd seen on the road and told stories to. I decided to get to the source. I walked up to the louvred doors and leaned my cheek against them. "Can I go play at George's?"

"Yes," Mom said. "Be back for evening chores."

George lived on the next farm, a mile and a half east. I took my bike and rode down the old dirt road going south.

They were both under the tree, eating a picnic lunch from a wicker basket. I pulled my bike over and leaned it against the gray rock, shading my eyes to see them more clearly.

"Hello, boy," the old man said. "Ain't seen you in a while."

I couldn't think of anything to say. The woman offered me a cookie and I refused with a muttered, "No, thank you, ma'am."

"Well then, perhaps you'd like to tell us your story."

"No, ma'am."

"No story to tell us? That's odd. Meg was sure you had a story in you someplace. Peeking out from behind your ears maybe, thumbing its nose at us."

The woman smiled ingratiatingly. "Tea?"

"There's going to be trouble," I said.

"Already?" The woman smoothed the skirt in her lap and set a plate of nut bread into it. "Well, it comes sooner or later, this time sooner. What do you think of it, boy?"

"I think I got into a lot of trouble for not much being bad," I said. "I don't know why."

"Sit down then," the old man said. "Listen to a tale, then tell us what's going on."

I sat down, not too keen about hearing another story but out of politeness. I took a piece of nut bread and nibbled on it as the woman sipped her tea and cleared her throat. "Once there was a city on the shore of a broad, blue sea. In the city lived five hundred children and nobody else, because the wind from the sea wouldn't let anyone grow old. Well, children don't have kids of their own, of course, so when the wind came up in the first year the city never grew any larger."

"Where'd all the grownups go?" I asked. The old man held his fingers to his lips and shook his head.

"The children tried to play all day, but it wasn't enough. They became frightened at night and had bad dreams. There was nobody to comfort them because only grownups are really good at making nightmares go away. Now, sometimes nightmares are white horses that come out of the sea, so they set up guards along the beaches, and fought them back with wands made of blackthorn. But there was another kind of nightmare, one that was black and rose out of the ground, and those were impossible to guard against. So the children got together one day and decided to tell all the scary stories there were to tell, to prepare themselves for all the nightmares. They found it was pretty easy to think up scary stories, and every one of them had a story or two to tell. They stayed up all night spinning yarns about ghosts and dead things, and live things that shouldn't have been, and things that were neither. They talked about death and about monsters that suck blood, about things that live way deep in the earth and long, thin things that sneak through cracks in doors to lean over the beds at night and speak in tongues no one could understand. They talked about eyes without heads, and vice versa, and little blue shoes that walk across a cold empty white room, with no one in them, and a bunk bed that creaks when it's empty, and a printing press that produces newspapers from a city that never was. Pretty soon, by morning, they'd told all the scary stories. When the black horses came out of the ground the next night, and the white horses from the sea, the children greeted them with cakes and ginger ale, and they held a big party. They also invited the pale sheet-things from the clouds, and everyone ate hearty and had a good time. One white horse let a little boy ride on it, and took him wherever he wanted to go. So there were no more bad-dreams in the city of children by the sea."

I finished the piece of bread and wiped my hands on my crossed legs. "So that's why you tried to scare me," I said.

She shook her head. "No. I never had a reason for telling a story, and neither should you."

"I don't think I'm going to tell stories any more," I said. "The folks get too upset."

"Philistines," the old man said, looking off across the fields.

"Listen, young man. There is nothing finer in the world than the telling of tales. Split atoms if you wish, but splitting an infinitive—and getting away with it—is far nobler. Lance boils if you wish, but pricking pretensions is often cleaner and always more fun."

"Then why are Mom and Dad so mad?"

The old man shook his head. "An eternal mystery."

"Well, I'm not so sure," I said. "I scared my litde brother pretty bad and that's not nice."

"Being scared is nothing," the old woman said. "Being bored, or ignorant—now that's a crime."

"I still don't know. My folks say you have to be a hundred years old. You did something to my uncle they didn't like, and that was a long time ago. What kind of people are you, anyway?"

The old man smiled. "Old, yes. But not a hundred."

"I just came out here to warn you. Mom and Dad are bringing out my great aunt, and she's no fun for anyone. You better go away." With that said, I ran back to my bike and rode off, pumping for all I was worth. I was between a rock and a hard place. I loved my folks but I itched to hear more stories. Why wasn't it easier to make decisions?

That night I slept restlessly. I didn't have any dreams, but I kept waking up with something pounding at the back of my head, like it wanted to be let in. I scrunched my face up and pressed it back.

At Sunday breakfast, Mom looked across the table at me and put on a kind face. "We're going to pick up Auntie Danser this afternoon, at the airport," she said.

My face went like warm butter.

"You'll come with us, won't you?" she asked. "You always did like the airport."

"All the way from where she lives?" I asked. "From Omaha," Dad said.

I didn't want to go, but it was more a command than a request. I nodded and Dad smiled at me around his pipe.

"Don't eat too many biscuits," Mom warned him. "You're putting orfweight again."

"Ill wear it off come harvest. You cook as if the whole crew was here, anyway."

"Auntie Danser will straighten it all out," Mom said, her mind elsewhere. I caught the suggestion of a grimace on Dad's face, and the pipe wriggled as he bit down on it harder.

The airport was something out of a TV space movie. It went on forever, with stairways going up to restaurants and big smoky windows which looked out on the screaming jets, and crowds of people, all leaving, except for one pear-shaped figure in a cotton print dress with fat ankles and glasses thick as headlamps. I knew her from a hundred yards.

When we met, she shook hands with Mom, hugged Dad as if she didn't want to, then bent down and gave me a smile. Her teeth were yellow and even, sound as a horse's. She was the ugliest woman I'd ever seen. She smelled of lilacs. To this day lilacs take my appetite away.

She carried a bag. Part of it was filled with knitting, part with books and pamphlets. I always wondered why she never carried a Bible—just Billy Grahams and Zondervans. One pamphlet fell out and Dad bent to pick it up.

"Keep it, read it," Auntie Danser instructed him. "Do you good." She turned to Mom and scrutinized her from the bottom of a swimming pool. "You're looking good. He must be treating you right"

Dad ushered us out the automatic doors into the dry heat. Her one suitcase was light as a mummy and probably just as empty. I carried it and it didn't even bring sweat to my brow. Her life was not in clothes and toiletry but in the plastic knitting bag.

We drove back to the farm in the big white station wagon. I leaned my head against the cool glass of the rear seat window and considered puking. Auntie Danser, I told myself, was like a mental dose of castor oil. Or like a visit to the dentist. Even if nothing was going to happen her smell presaged disaster, and like a horse sniffing a storm, my entrails worried.

Mom looked across the seat at me—Auntie Danser was riding up front with Dad—and asked, "You feeling okay7 Did they give you anything to eat? Anything funny?"

I said they'd given me a piece of nut bread. Mom went, "Oh, Lord."

"Margie, they don't work like that. They got other ways." Auntie Danser leaned over the back seat and goggled at me. "Boy's just worried. I know all about it. These people and I have had it out before."

Through those murky glasses, her flat eyes knew me to my young, pithy core. I didn't like being known so well. I could see that Auntie Darner's life was firm and predictable, and I made a sudden commitment. I liked the man and woman. They caused trouble, but they were the exact opposite of my great-aunt. I felt better, and I gave her a reassuring grin. "Boy will be okay," she said. "Just a colic of the upset mind."

Michael and Barbara sat on the front porch as the car drove up. Somehow a visit by Auntie Danser didn't bother them as much as it did me. They didn't fawn over her but they accepted her without complaining—even out of adult earshot. That made me think more carefully about them. I decided I didn't love them any the less, but I couldn't trust them, either. The world was taking sides and so far on my side I was very lonely. I didn't count the two old people on my side, because I wasn't sure they were—but they came a lot closer than anybody in the family.

Auntie Danser wanted to read Billy Graham books to us after dinner, but Dad snuck us out before Mom could gather us together—all but Barbara, who stayed to listen. We watched the sunset from the loft of the old wood barn, then tried to catch the little birds that lived in the rafters. By dark and bedtime I was hungry, but not for food. I asked Dad if he'd tell me a story before bed.

"You know your Mom doesn't approve of all that fairy-tale stuff," he said.

"Then no fairy tales. Just a story."

"I'm out of practice, son," he confided. He looked very sad. "Your mom says we should concentrate on things that are real and not waste our time with make-believe. Life's hard. I may have to sell the farm, you know, and work for that feed-mixer in Mitchell."

I went to bed and felt like crying. A whole lot of my family had died that night, I didn't know exactly how, or why. But I was mad.

I didn't go to school the next day. During the night I'd had a dream, which came so true and whole to me that I had to rush to the stand of cottonwoods and tell the old people. I took my lunch box and walked rapidly down the road.

They weren't there. On a piece of wire braided to the biggest tree they'd left a note on faded brown paper. It was in a strong, feminine hand, sepia-inked, delicately scribed with what could have been a goose-quill pen. It said: "We're at the old Hauskopf farm. Come if you must."

Not "Come if you can." I felt a twinge. The Hauskopf farm, abandoned fifteen years ago and never sold, was three miles farther down the road and left on a deep-rutted fork. It took me an hour to get there.

The house still looked deserted. All the white paint was flaking, leaving dead gray wood. The windows stared. I walked up the porch steps and knocked on the heavy oak door. For a moment I thought no one was going to answer. Then I heard what sounded like a gust of wind, but inside the house, and the old woman opened the door. "Hello, boy," she said. "Come for more stories?"

She invited me in. Wildflowers were growing along the baseboards and tiny roses peered from the brambles that covered the walls. A quail led her train of inch-and-a-half fluffball chicks from under the stairs, into the living room. The floor was carpeted but the flowers in the weave seemed more than patterns. I could stare down and keep picking out detail for minutes. "This way, boy," the woman said. She took my hand. Hers was smooth and warm but I had the impression it was also hard as wood.

A tree stood in the living room, growing out of the floor and sending its branches up to support the ceiling. Rabbits and quail and a lazy-looking brindle cat looked at me from tangles of roots. A wooden bench surrounded the base of the tree. On the side away from us, I heard someone breathing. The old man poked his head around, and smiled at me, lifting his long pipe in greeting. "Hello, boy," he said.

"The boy looks like he's ready to tell us a story, this time," the woman said.

"Of course, Meg. Have a seat, boy. Cup of cider for you? Tea? Herb biscuit?"

"Cider, please," I said.

The old man stood and went down the hall to the kitchen. He came back with a wooden tray and three steaming cups of mulled cider. The cinnamon tickled my nose as I sipped.

"Now. What's your story?"

"It's about two hawks," I said. I hesitated.

"Go on."

"Brother hawks. Never did like each other. Fought for a strip of land where they could hunt." "Yes?"

"Finally, one hawk met an old, crippled bobcat that had set up a place for itself in a rockpile. The bobcat was learning itself magic so it wouldn't have to* go out and catch dinner, which was awful hard for it now. The hawk landed near the bobcat and told it about his brother, and how cruel he was. So the bobcat said, 'Why not give him the land for the day? Here's what you can do.' The bobcat told him how he could rum into a rabbit, but a very strong rabbit no hawk could hurt."

"Wily bobcat," the old man said, smiling.

" *You mean, my brother wouldn't be able to catch me?' the hawk asked. 'Course not,' the bobcat said. 'And you can teach him a lesson. Youll tussle with him, scare him real bad—show him what tough animals there are on the land he wants. Then hell go away and hunt some-wheres else.' The hawk thought that sounded like a fine idea. So he let the bobcat turn him into a rabbit and he hopped back to the land and waited in a patch of grass. Sure enough, his brother's shadow passed by soon, and then he heard a swoop and saw the claws held out. So he filled himself with being mad and jumped up and practically bit all the tail feathers off his brother. The hawk just flapped up and rolled over on the ground, blinking and gawking with his beak wide. 'Rabbit,' he said, 'that's not natural. Rabbits don't act that way.'

" 'Round here they do,' the hawk-rabbit said. 'This is a tough old land, and all the animals here know the tricks of escaping from bad birds like you.' This scared the brother hawk, and he flew away as best he could, and never came back again. The hawk-rabbit hopped to the rockpile and stood up before the bobcat, saying, 'It worked real fine. I thank you. Now turn me back and 111 go hunt my land.' But the bobcat only grinned and reached out with a paw and broke the rabbit's neck. Then he ate him, and said, 'Now the land's mine, and no hawks can take away the easy game.' And that's how the greed of two hawks turned their land over to a bobcat."

The old woman looked at me with wide, baked-chest-nut eyes and smiled. "You've got it," she said. "Just like your uncle. Hasn't he got it, Jack?" The old man nodded and took his pipe from his mouth. "He's got it fine. Hell make a good one."

"Now, boy, why did you make up that story?"

I thought for a moment, then shook my head. "I don't know," I said. "It just came up."

"What are you going to do with the story?"

I didn't have an answer for that question, either.

"Got any other stories in you?"

I considered, then said, "Think so."

A car drove up outside and Mom called my name. The old woman stood and straightened her dress. "Follow me," she said. "Go out the back door, walk around the house. Return home with them. Tomorrow, go to school like you're supposed to do. Next Saturday, come back and we'll talk some more."

"Son? You in there?"

I walked out the back and came around to the front of the house. Mom and Auntie Danser waited in the station wagon. "You aren't allowed out here. Were you in that house?" Mom asked. I shook my head.

My great aunt looked at me with her glassed-in flat eyes and lifted the corners of her lips a littie. "Margie," she said, "go have a look in the windows."

Mom got out of the car and walked up the porch to peer through the dusty panes. "It's empty, Sybil."

"Empty, boy, right?"

"I don't know," I said. "I wasn't inside."

"I could hear you, boy," she said. "Last night. Talking in your sleep. Rabbits and hawks don't behave that way. You know it, and I know it. So it ain't no good thinking about them that way, is it?"

"I don't remember talking in my sleep," I said.

"Margie, let's go home. This boy needs some pamphlets read into him."

Mom got into the car and looked back at me before starting the engine. "You ever skip school again, I'll strap you black and blue. It's real embarrassing having the school call, and not knowing where you are. Hear me?"

I nodded.

Everything was quiet that week. I went to school and tried not to dream at night, and did everything boys are supposed to do. But I didn't feel like a boy. I felt something big inside, and no amount of Billy Grahams and Zondervans read at me could change that feeling.

I made one mistake, though. I asked Auntie Danser why she never read the Bible. This was in the parlor one evening after dinner and cleaning up the dishes. "Why do you want to know, boy?" she asked.

"Well, the Bible seems to be full of fine stories, but you don't carry it around with you. I just wondered why."

"Bible is a good book," she said. "The only good book. But it's difficult. It has lots of camouflage. Sometimes—" She stopped. "Who put you up to asking that question?"

"Nobody," I said.

"I heard that question before, you know," she said. "Ain't the first time I been asked. Somebody else asked me, once."

I sat in my chair, stiff as a ham.

"Your father's brother asked me that once. But we won't talk about him, will we?" I shook my head.

Next Saturday I waited until it was dark and everyone was in bed The night air was warm but I was sweating more than the warm could cause as I rode my bike down the dirt road, lamp beam swinging back and forth. The sky was crawling with stars, all of them looking at me. The Milky Way seemed to touch down just beyond the road, like I might ride straight up it if I went far enough.

I knocked on the heavy door. There were no lights in the windows and it was late for old folks to be up, but I knew these two didn't behave like normal people. And I knew that just because the house looked empty from the outside didn't mean it was empty within. The wind rose up and beat against the door, making me shiver. Then it opened. It was dark for a moment and the breath went out of me. Two pairs of eyes stared from the black. They seemed a lot taller this time. "Come in, boy," Jack whispered.

Fireflies lit up the tree in the living room. The brambles and wildflowers glowed like weeds on a sea floor. The carpet crawled, but not to my feet. I was shivering in earnest now and my teeth chattered.

I only saw their shadows as they sat on the bench in front of me. "Sit," Meg said. "Listen close. You've taken the fire and it glows bright. You're only a boy but you're just like a pregnant woman now. For the rest of your life youll be cursed with the worst affliction known to humans. Your skin will twitch at night. Your eyes will see things in the dark. Beasts will come to you and beg to be ridden. You'll never know one truth from another. You might starve, because few will want to encourage you. And if you do make good in this world, you might lose the gift and search forever after, in vain. Some will say the gift isn't special. Beware them. Some will say it is special and beware them, too. And some—"

There was a scratching at the door. I thought it was an animal for a moment. Then it cleared its throat. It was my great-aunt.

"Some will say you're damned. Perhaps they're right. But you're also enthused. Carry it lightly, and responsibly."

"Listen in there. This is Sybil Danser. You know me. Open up."

"Now stand by the stairs, in the dark where she can't see," Jack said. I did as I was told. One of them—I couldn't tell which—opened the door and the lights went out in the tree, the carpet stilled, and the brambles were snuffed. Auntie Danser stood in the doorway, outlined by star glow, carrying her knitting bag. "Boy?" she asked. I held my breath.

"And you others, too."

The wind in the house seemed to answer. "I'm not too late," she said. "Damn you, in truth, damn you to hell! You come to our towns, and you plague us with thoughts no decent person wants to think. Not just fairy stories, but telling the way people live, and why they shouldn't live that way! Your very breath is tainted! Hear me?" She walked slowly into the empty living room, feet clonking on the wooden floor. "You make them write about us, and make others laugh at us. Question the way we think. Condemn our deepest prides. Pull out our mistakes and amplify them beyond all truth. What right do you have to take young children and twist their minds?"

The wind sang through the cracks in the walls. I tried to see if Jack or Meg was there, but only shadows remained.

"I know where you come from, don't forget that! Out of the ground! Out of the bones of old, wicked Indians! Shamans and pagan dances and worshiping dirt and filth! I heard about you from the old squaws on the reservation. Frost and Spring, they called you, signs of the turning year. Well, now you got a different name! Death and demons, I call you, hear me?"

She seemed to jump at a sound but I couldn't hear it. "Don't you argue with me!" she shrieked. She took her glasses off and held out both hands. "Think I'm a weak old woman, do you? You don't know how deep I run in these communitites! Fm the one who had them books taken off the shelves. Remember me? Oh, you hated it— not being able to fill young minds with your pestilence. Took them off high school shelves, and out of lists—burned them for junk! Remember? That was me. I'm not dead yet! Boy, where are you?"

"Enchant her," I whispered to the air. "Magic her. Make her go away. Let me live here with you."

"Is that you, boy? Come with your aunt, now. Come with, come away!"

"Go with her," the wind told me. "Send your children this way, years from now. But go with her."

I felt a kind of tingly warmth and knew it was time to get home. I snuck out the back way and came around to the front of the house. There was no car. She'd followed me on foot all the way from the farm. I wanted to leave her there in the old house, shouting at the dead rafters, but instead I called her name and waited.

She came out crying. She knew.

"You poor, sinning boy," she said, pulling me to her lilac bosom.

OPTIONS

John Varley

Cleo hated breakfast

Her energy level was lowest in the morning, but not so the children's. There was always some school crisis, something that had to be located at the last minute, some argument that had to be settled.

This morning it was a bowl of cereal spilled in Lilli's lap. Cleo hadn't seen it happen; her attention had been diverted momentarily by Feather, her youngest.

And of course it had to happen after Lilli was dressed.

"Mom, this was the last outfit I had."

"Well, if you wouldn't use them so hard they might last more than three days, and if you didn't. . ." She stopped before she lost her temper. "Just take it off and go as you are."

"But Mom, nobody goes to school naked. Nobody. Give me some money and I'll stop at the store on—" Cleo raised her voice, something she tried never to do. 188

"Child, I know there are kids in your class whose parents can't afford to buy clothes at all."

"All right, so the poor kids don't—"

"That's enough. You're late already. Get going."

Lilli stalked from the room. Cleo heard the door slam.

Through it all Jules was an island of calm at the other end of the table, his nose in his newspad, sipping his second cup of coffee. Cleo glanced at her own bacon and eggs cooling on the plate, poured herself a first cup of coffee, then had to get up and help Paul find his other shoe.

By then Feather was wet again, so she put her on the table and peeled off the sopping diaper.

"Hey, listen to this," Jules said. " 'The City Council today passed without objection an ordinance requiring—'"

"Jules, aren't you a little behind schedule?"

He glanced at his thumbnail. "You're right. Thanks.** He finished his coffee, folded his newspad and tucked it under his arm, bent over to kiss her, then frowned.

"You really ought to eat more, honey," he said, indicating the untouched eggs. "Eating for two, you know. 'By, now."

"Good-by," Cleo said, through clenched teeth. "And if I hear that 'eating for two' business again, I'll . . ." But he was gone.

She had time to scorch her lip on the coffee, then was out the door, hurrying to catch the train.

There were seats on the sun car, but of course Feather was with her and the UV wasn't good for her tender skin. After a longing look at the passengers reclining with the dark cups strapped over their eyes—and a rueful glance down at her own pale skin—Cleo boarded the next car and found a seat by a large man wearing a hardhat. She settled down in the cushions, adjusted the straps on the carrier slung in front of her, and let Feather have a nipple. She unfolded her newspad and spread it out in her lap.

"Cute," the man said. "How old is he?"

"She," Cleo said, without looking up. "Eleven days." And five hours and thirty-six minutes....

She shifted in the seat, pointedly turning her shoulder to him, and made a show of activating her newspad and scanning the day's contents. She did not glance up as the train left the underground tunnel and emerged on the gently rolling, airless plain of Mendeleev. There was little enough out there to interest her, considering she made the forty-minute commute run to Hartman crater twice a day. They had discussed moving to Hartman, but Jules liked living in King City near his work, and of course the kids would have missed all their school friends.

There wasn't much in the news storage that morning. She queried when the red light flashed for an update. The pad printed some routine city business. Three sentences into the story she punched the reject key.

There was an Invasion Centennial parade listed for 1900 hours that evening. Parades bored her, and so did the Centennial. If you've heard one speech about how liberation of Earth is just around the corner if we all pull together, you've heard them all. Semantic content zero, nonsense quotient high.

She glanced wistfully at sports, noting that the J Sector jumpball team was doing poorly in the intracity tournament without her. Cleo's small stature and powerful legs had served her well as a starting sprint-wing in her playing days, but it just didn't seem possible to make practices any more.

As a last resort, she called up the articles, digests, and analysis listings, the newspad's Sunday Supplement and Op-Ed department. A title caught her eye, and she punched it up.

Changing: The Revolution in Sex Roles (Or, Who's on Top?)

Twenty years ago, when cheap and easy sex changes first became available to the general public, it was seen as the beginning of a revolution that would change the shape of human society in ways impossible to foresee. Sexual equality is one thing, the sociologists pointed out, but certain residual inequities—based on biological imperatives or on upbringing, depending on your politics—have proved impossible to weed out. Changing was going to end all that. Men and women would be able to see what it was like from the other side of the barrier that divides humanity. How could sex roles survive that?

Ten years later the answer is obvious. Changing had appealed to only a tiny minority. It was soon seen as a harmless aberration, practiced by only 1 per cent of the population. Everyone promptly forgot about the tumbling of barriers.

But in the intervening ten years a quieter revolution has been building. Almost unnoticed on the broad scale because it is an invisible phenomenon (how do you know the next woman you meet was not a man last week?), changing has been gaining growing, matter-of-fact acceptance among the children of the generation that rejected it. The chances are now better than even that you know someone who has had at least one sex change. The chances are better than one out of fifteen that you yourself have changed; if you are under twenty, the chance is one in three.

The article went on to describe the underground society which was springing up around changing. Changers tended to band together, frequenting their own taprooms, staging their own social events, remaining aloof from the larger society which many of them saw as outmoded and irrelevant. Changers tended to marry other changers. They divided the childbearing equally, each preferring to mother only one child. The author viewed this tendency with alarm, since it went against the socially approved custom of large families. Changers retorted that the time for that was past, pointing out that Luna had been tamed long ago. They quoted statistics proving that at present rates of expansion, Luna's population, would be in the billions in an amazingly short time.

There were interviews with changers, and psychological profiles. Cleo read that the males had originally been the heaviest users of the new technology, stating sexual reasons for their decision, and the change had often been permanent Today, the changer was slightly more likely to have been bom female, and to give social reasons, the most common of which was pressure to bear children. But the modem changer committed him/herself to neither role. The average time between changes in an individual was two years, and declining.

Cleo read the whole article, then thought about using some of the reading references at the end. Not that much of it was really new to her. She had been aware of changing, without thinking about it much. The idea had never attracted her, and Jules was against it But for some reason it had struck a chord this morning.

Feather had gone to sleep. Cleo carefully pulled the blanket down around the child's face, then wiped milk from her nipple. She folded her newspad and stowed it in her purse, then rested her chin on her palm and looked out the window for the rest of the trip.

Cleo was chief on-site architect for the new Food Systems, Inc., plantation that was going down in Hartman. As such, she was in charge of three junior architects, five construction bosses, and an army of drafters and workers. It was a big project, the biggest Cleo had ever handled.

She liked her work, but the best part had always been being there on the site when things were happening, actually supervising construction instead of running a desk. That had been difficult in the last months of carrying

Feather, but at least there were maternity pressure suits. It was even harder now.

She had been through it all before, with Lilli and Paul. Everybody works. That had been the rule for a century, since the Invasion. There was no labor to spare for babysitters, so having children meant the mother or father must do the same job they had been doing before, but do it while taking care of the child. In practice, it was usually the mother, since she had the milk.

Cleo had tried leaving Feather with one of the women in the office, but each had her own work to do, and not unreasonably felt Cleo should bear the burden of her own offspring. And Feather never seemed to respond well to another person. Cleo would return from her visit to the site to find the child had been crying the whole time, disrupting everyone's work. She had taken Feather in a crawler a few times, but it wasn't the same.

That morning was taken up with a meeting. Geo and the other section chiefs sat around the big table for three hours, discussing ways of dealing with the cost overrun, then broke for lunch only to return to the problem in the afternoon. Cleo's back was aching and she had a headache she couldn't shake, so Feather chose that day to be cranky. After ten minutes of increasingly hostile looks, Cleo had to retire to the booth with Leah Farnham, the accountant, and her three-year-old son, Eddie. The two of them followed the proceedings through earphones while trying to cope with their children, and make their remarks through throat mikes. Half the people at the conference table either had to turn around when she spoke, or ignore her, and Cleo was hesitant to force them to that choice. As a result, she chose her remarks with extreme care. More often, she said nothing.

There was something at the core of the world of business that refused to adjust to children in the board room, while appearing to make every effort to accommodate the working mother. Cleo brooded about it, not for the first time.

But what did she want? Honestly, she could not see what else could be done. It certainly wasn't fair to disrupt the entire meeting with a crying baby. She wished she knew the answer. Those were her friends out there, yet her feeling of alienation was intense, staring through the glass wall that Eddie was smudging with his dirty fingers.

Luckily, Feather was a perfect angel on the trip home. She gurgled and smiled toothlessly at a woman who had stopped to admire her, and Cleo warmed to the infant for the first time that day. She spent the trip playing games with her, surrounded by the approving smiles of other passengers.

"Jules, I read the most interesting article on the pad this morning." There, it was out, anyway. She had decided the direct approach would be best.

"Hum?"

"It was about changing. It's getting more and more popular."

"Is that so?" He did not look up from his book.

Jules and Cleo were in the habit of sitting up in bed for a few hours after the children were asleep. They spurned the video programs that were designed to lull workers after a hard day, prefering to use the time to catch up on reading, or to talk if either of them had anything to say. Over the last few years, they had read more and talked less.

Cleo reached over Feather's crib and got a packet of dope-sticks. She flicked one to light with her thumbnail, drew on it, and exhaled a cloud of lavender smoke. She drew her legs up under her and leaned back against the wall.

"I just thought we might talk about it. That's all."

Jules put his book down. "All right. But what's to talk about? We're not into that."

She shrugged and picked at a cuticle. "I know. We did talk about it, way back. I just wondered if you still felt the same, I guess." She offered him the stick and he took a drag.

"As far as I know, I do," he said easily. '"It's not something I spend a great deal of thought on. What's the matter?" He looked at her suspiciously. "You weren't having any thoughts in that direction, were you?"

"Well, no, not exactly. No. But you really ought to read the article. More people are doing it. I just thought we ought to be aware of it."

"Yeah, I've heard that," Jules conceded. He laced his hands behind his head. "No way to tell unless you've worked with them and suddenly one day they've got a new set of equipment." He laughed. "First time it was sort of hard for me to get used to. Now I hardly think about it."

"Me, either."

"They don't cause any problem," Jules said with an air of finality. "Live and let live."

"Yeah." Cleo smoked in silence for a time and let Jules get back to his reading, but she still felt uncomfortable. "Jules?"

"What is it now?"

"Don't you ever wonder what it would be like?"

He sighed and closed his book, then turned to face her.

"I don't quite understand you tonight," he said.

"Well, maybe I don't, either, but we could talk—"

"Listen. Have you thought about what it would do to the kids? I mean, even if I was willing to seriously consider it, which I'm not."

"I talked to Lilli about that. Just theoretically, you understand. She said she has two teachers who change, and one of her best friends used to be a boy. There's quite a few kids at school who've changed. She takes it in stride."

"Yes, but she's older. What about Paul? What would it do to his concept of himself as a young man? HI tell you, Cleo, in the back of my mind I keep thinking this business is a little sick. I feel it would have a bad effect on the children."

"Not according to—"

"Cleo, Cleo. Let's not get into an argument. Number one, I have no intention of getting a change, now or in the future. Two, if only one of us was changed, it would sure play hell with our sex life, wouldn't it? And three, I like you too much as you are." He leaned over and began to kiss her.

She was more than a little annoyed, but said nothing as his kisses became more intense. It was a damnably effective way of shutting off debate. And she could not stay angry: she was responding in spite of herself, easily, naturally.

It was as good as it always was with Jules. The ceiling, so familiar, once again became a calming blankness that absorbed her thoughts.

No, she had no complaints about being female, no sexual dissatisfactions. It was nothing as simple as that.

Afterward she lay on her side with her legs drawn up, her knees together. She faced Jules, who absently stroked her leg with one hand. Her eyes were closed, but she was not sleepy. She was savoring the warmth she cherished so much after sex; the slipperiness between her legs, holding his semen inside.

She felt the bed move as he shifted his weight.

"You did make it, didn't you?"

She opened one eye enough to squint at him.

"Of course I did. I always do. You know I never have any trouble in that direction."

He relaxed back onto the pillow. "I'm sorry for . . . well, for springing on you like that."

"It's okay. It was nice."

"I had just thought you might have been . . . faking it. I'm not sure why I would think that."

She opened the other eye and patted him gently on the cheek.

"Jules, I'd never be that protective of your poor ego. If you don't satisfy me, I promise you'll be the second to know."

He chuckled, then turned on his side to kiss her.

"Good night, babe.''

"G'night."

She loved him. He loved her. Their sex life was good— with the slight mental reservation that he always seemed to initiate it—and she was happy with her body.

So why was she still awake three hours later?

Shopping took a few hours on the vidphone Saturday morning. Cleo bought the household necessities for delivery that afternoon, then left the house to do the shopping she fancied: going from store to store, looking at things she didn't really need.

Feather was with Jules on Saturdays. She savored a quiet lunch alone at a table in the park plaza, then found herself walking down Brazil Avenue in the heart of the medical district. On impulse, she stepped into the New Heredity Body Salon.

It was only after she was inside that she admitted to herself she had spent most of the morning arranging for the impulse.

She was on edge as she was taken down a hallway to a consulting room, and had to force a smile for the handsome young man behind the desk. She sat, put her packages on the floor, and folded her hands in her lap. He asked what he could do for her.

"I'm not actually here for any work," she said. "I wanted to look into the costs, and maybe learn a little more about the procedures involved in changing."

He nodded understandingly, and got up.

"There's no charge for the initial consultation," he said. "We're happy to answer your questions. By the way, I'm Marion, spelled with an 'O' this month." He smiled at her and motioned for her to follow him. He stood her in front of a full-length mirror mounted on the wall.

"I know it's hard to make that first step. It was hard for me, and I do it for a living. So we've arranged this demonstration that won't cost you anything, either in money or worry. It's a non-threatening way to see some of what it's all about, but it might startle you a little, so be prepared." He touched a button in the wall beside the mirror, and Cleo saw her clothes fade away. She realized it was not really a muror, but a holographic screen linked to a computer.

The computer introduced changes in the image. In thirty seconds she faced a male stranger. There was no doubt the face was her own, but it was more angular, perhaps a little larger in its underlying bony structure. The skin on the stranger's jaw was rough, as if it needed shaving.

The rest of the body as she might expect, though overly muscled for her tastes. She did little more than glance at the penis; somehow that didn't seem to matter so much. She spent more time studying the hair on the chest, the tiny nipples, and the ridges that had appeared on the hands and feet. The image mimicked her every movement.

"Why all the brawn?" she asked Marion. "If you're trying to sell me on this, you've taken the wrong approach."

Marion punched some more buttons. "I didn't choose this image," he explained. "The computer takes what it sees, and extrapolates. You're more muscular than the average woman. You probably exercise. This is what a comparable amount of training would have produced with male hormones to fix nitrogen in the muscles. But we're not bound by that.

The image lost about eight kilos of mass, mostly in the shoulders and thighs. Cleo felt a little more comfortable, but still missed the smoothness she was accustomed to seeing in her mirror.

She turned from the display and went back to her chair. Marion sat across from her and folded his hands on the desk.

"Basically, what we do is produce a cloned body from one of your own cells. Through a process called Y-Recombinant Viral Substitution we remove one of your X chromosomes and replace it with a Y.

"The clone is forced to maturity in the usual way, which takes about six months. After that, it's just a simple non-rejection-hazard brain transplant. You walk in as a woman, and leave an hour later as a man. Easy as that."

Cleo said nothing, wondering again what she was doing here.

"From there we can modify the body. We can make you taller or shorter, rearrange your face, virtually anything you like." He raised his eyebrows, then smiled ruefully and spread his hands.

"All right, Ms. King," he said. "I'm not trying to pressure you. You'll need to think about it. In the meantime, there's a process that would cost you very little, and might be just the thing to let you test the waters. Am I right in thinking your husband opposes this?"

She nodded, and he looked sympathetic.

"Not uncommon, not uncommon at all," he assured her. "It brings out castration fears in men who didn't even suspect they had them. Of course, we do nothing of the sort. His male body would be kept in a tank, ready for him to move back whenever he wanted to."

Cleo shifted in her chair. "What was this process you were talking about?"

"Just a bit of minor surgery. It can be done in ten minutes, and corrected in the same time before you even leave the office if you find you don't care for it. It's a good way to get husbands thinking about changing; sort of a signal you can send him. You've heard of the andro-genous look. It's in all the fashion tapes. Many women, especially if they have large breasts like you do, find it an interesting change."

"You say it's cheap? And reversible?"

"All our processes are reversible. Changing the size or shape of breasts is our most common body operation."

Cleo sat on the examining table while the attendant gave her a quick physical.

"I don't know if Marion realized you're nursing," the woman said. "Are you sure this is what you want?"

How the hell should I know? Cleo thought. She wished the feeling of confusion and uncertainty would pass.

"Just do it"

Jules hated it.

He didn't yell or slam doors or storm out of the house; that had never been his style. He voiced his objections coldly and quietly at the dinner table, after saying practically nothing since she walked in the door.

"I just would like to know why you thought you should do this without even talking to me about it. I don't demand that you ask me, just discuss it with me."

Cleo felt miserable, but was determined not to let it show. She held Feather in .her arm, the botde in her other hand, and ignored the food cooling on her plate. She was hungry but at least she was not eating for two.

"Jules, I'd ask you before I rearranged the furniture. We both own this apartment. I'd ask you before I put Lilli or Paul in another school. We share the responsibility for their upbringing. But I don't ask you when I put on lipstick or cut my hair. It's my body."

"I like it, Mom," Lilli said. "You look like me."

Cleo smiled at her, reached over and tousled her hair.

"What do you like?" Paul asked, around a mouthful of food.

"See?" said Cleo. "It's not that important."

"I don't see how you can say that. And I said you didn't have to ask me. I just would . . . you should have ... I should have known."

"It was an impulse, Jules."

"An impulse. An impulse." For the first time, he raised his voice, and Cleo knew how upset he really was. Lilli and Paul fell silent, and even Feather squirmed.

But Cleo liked it. Oh, not forever and ever: as an interesting change. It gave her a feeling of freedom to be that much in control of her body, to be able to decide how large she wished her breasts to be. Did it have anything to do with changing? She really didn't think so. She didn't feel the least bit like a man.

And what was a breast, anyway? It was anything from a nipple sitting flush with the rib cage to a mammoth hunk of fat and milk gland. Cleo realized Jules was suffering from the more-is-better syndrome, thinking of Cleo's action as the removal of her breasts, as if they had to be large to exist at all. What she had actually done was reduce their size.

No more was said at the table, but Cleo knew it was for the children's sake. As soon as they got into bed, she could feel the tension again.

"I can't understand why you did it now. What about Feather?"

"What about her?"

"Well, do you expect me to nurse her?"

Cleo finally got angry. "Damn it, that's exactly what I expect you to do. Don't tell me you don't know what I'm talking about. You think it's all fun and games, having to carry a child around all day because she needs the milk in your breasts?"

"You never complained before."

"I . . ." She stopped. He was right, of course. It amazed even Cleo that this had all come up so suddenly, but here it was, and she had to deal with it. They had to deal with it.

"That's because it isn't an awful thing. It's great to nourish another human being at your breast. I loved every minute of it with Lilli. Sometimes it was a headache, having her there all the time, but it was worth it. The same with Paul." She sighed. "The same with Feather, too, most of the time. You hardly think about it."

"Then why the revolt now? With no warning?"

"It's not a revolt, honey. Do you see it as that? I just ... I'd like you to try it. Take Feather for a few months.

Take her to work like I do. Then you'd . . . you'd see a little of what I go through." She rolled on her side and playfully punched his arm, trying to lighten it in some way. "You might even like it. It feels real good." He snorted. "I'd feel silly."

She jumped from the bed and paced toward the living room, then turned, more angry than ever. "Silly? Nursing is silly? Breasts are silly? Then why the hell do you wonder why I did what I did?"

"Being a man is what makes it silly," he retorted. "It doesn't look right. I almost laugh every time I see a man with breasts. The hormones mess up your system, I heard, and—"

"That's not true! Not any more. You can lactate—"

"—and besides, it's my body, as you pointed out. Ill do with it what pleases me."

She sat on the edge of the bed with her back to him. He reached out and stroked her, but she moved away.

"All right," she said. "I was just suggesting it. I thought you might like to try it. I'm not going to nurse her. She goes on the bottle from now on."

"If that's the way it has to be."

"It is. I want you to start taking Feather to work with you. Since she's going to be a bottle baby, it hardly matters which of us cares for her. I think you owe it to me, since I carried the burden alone with LiTli and Paul."

"All right."

She got into bed and pulled the covers up around her, her back to him. She didn't want him to see how close she was to tears.

But the feeling passed. The tension drained from her, and she felt good. She thought she had won a victory, and it was worth the cost. Jules would not stay angry at her.

She fell asleep easily, but woke up several times during the night as Jules tossed and turned.

He did adjust to it. It was impossible for him to say so all at once, but after a week without love-making he admitted grudgingly that she looked good. He began to touch her in the mornings and when they kissed after getting home from work. Jules had always admired her slim muscularity, her athlete's arms and legs. The slim chest looked so natural on her, it fit the rest of her so well that he began to wonder what all the fuss had been about.

One night while they were clearing the dinner dishes, Jules touched her nipples for the first time in a week. He asked her if it felt any different.

"There is very little feeling anywhere but the nipples," she pointed out, "no matter how big a woman is. You know that"

"Yeah, I guess I do."

She knew they would make love that night and determined it would be on her terms.

She spent a long time in the bathroom, letting him get settled with his book, then came out and took it away. She got on top of him and pressed close, kissing and tickling his nipples with her fingers.

She was aggressive and insistent. At first he seemed reluctant, but soon he was responding as she pessed her hps hard against his, forcing his head back into the pillow.

"I love you," he said, and raised his head to kiss her nose. "Are you ready?"

"I'm ready." He put his arms around her and held her close, then rolled over and hovered above her.

"Jules. Jules. Stop it." She squirmed onto her side, her legs held firmly together.

"What's wrong?"

"I want to be on top tonight."

"Oh. All right." He turned over again and reclined passively as she repositioned herself. Her heart was pounding. There had been no reason to think he would object—they had made love in any and all positions, but basically the exotic ones were a change of pace from the "natural" one with her on her back. Tonight she had wanted to feel in control.

"Open your legs, darling," she said, with a smile. He did, but didn't return the smile. She raised herself on her hands and knees and prepared for the tricky insertion.

"Cleo."

"What is it? This will take a little effort, but I think I can make it worth your while, so if you'd just—"

"Cleo, what the hell is the purpose of this?"

She stopped dead and let her head sag between her shoulders.

"What's the matter? Are you feeling silly with your feet in the air?"

"Maybe. Is that what you wanted?"

"Jules, humiliating you was the farthest thing from my mind."

"Then what was on your mind? It's not like we've never done it this way before. It's—"

"Only when you chose to do so. It's always your decision."

"It's not degrading to be on the bottom."

"Then why were you feeling silly?"

He didn't answer, and she wearily lifted herself away from him, sitting on her knees at his feet. She waited, but he didn't seem to want to talk about it.

"I've never complained about that position," she ventured. "I don't have any complaints about it. It works pretty well." Still he said nothing. "All right. I wanted to see what it looked like from up there. I was tired of looking at the ceiling. I was curious."

"And that's why I felt silly. I never minded you being on top before, have I? But before . . . well, it's never been in the context of the last couple of weeks. I know what's on your mind."

"And you feel threatened by it. By the fact that I'm curious about changing, that I want to know what it's like to take charge. You know I can't—and wouldn't if I could—force a change on you."

"But your curiosity is wrecking our marriage."

She felt like crying again, but didn't let it show except for a trembling of the lower lip. She didn't want him to try and soothe her; that was all too likely to work, and she would find herself on her back with her legs in the air. She looked down at the bed and nodded slowly, then got up. She went to the mirror and took the brush, began running it through her hair.

"What are you doing now? Can't we talk about this?"

"I don't feel much like talking right now." She leaned forward and examined her face as she brushed, then dabbed at the corners of her eyes with a tissue. "I'm going out. I'm still curious."

He said nothing as she started for the door.

"I may be a little late."

The place was called Oophyte. The capital "O" had a plus sign hanging from it, and an arrow in the upper right side. The sign was built so that the symbols revolved; one moment the plus was inside and the arrow out, the next moment the reverse.

Cleo moved in a pleasant haze across the crowded dance floor, pausing now and then to draw on her dope-stick. The air in the room was thick with lavender smoke, illuminated by flashing blue lights. She danced when the mood took her. The music was so loud that she didn't have to think about it; the noise gripped her bones and animated her arms and legs. She glided through a forest of naked skin, feeling the occasional roughness of a paper suit and, rarely, expensive cotton clothing. It was like moving underwater, like wading through molasses.

She saw him across the floor and began moving in his direction. He took no notice of her for some time, though she danced right in front of him. Few of the dancers had partners in more than the transitory sense. Some were celebrating life, others were displaying themselves, but all were looking for partners, so eventually he realized she had been there an unusual length of time. He was easily as stoned as she was.

She told him what she wanted.

"Sure. Where do you want to go? Your place?"

She took him down the hall in back and touched her credit bracelet to the lock on one of the doors. The room was simple, but clean.

He looked a lot like her phantom twin in the mirror, she noted with one part of her mind. It was probably why she had chosen him. She embraced him and lowered him gently to the bed.

"Do you want to exchange names?" he asked. The grin on his face kept getting sillier as she toyed with him.

"I don't care. Mosdy I think I want to use you."

"Use away. My name's Saffron."

"I'm Cleopatra. Would you get on your back, please?"

He did, and they did. It was hot in the little room, but neither of them minded it. It was healthy exertion, the physical sensations were great, and when Cleo was through she had learned nothing. She collapsed on top of him. He did not seem surprised when tears began falling on his shoulder.

"I'm sorry," she said, sitting up and getting ready to leave.

"Don't go," he said, putting his hand on her shoulder.. "Now that you've got that out of your system, maybe we can make love."

She didn't want to smile, but she had to, then she was crying harder, putting her face to bis chest and feeling the warmth of his arms around her and the hair tickling her nose. She realized what she was doing, and tried to pull away.

"For God's sake, don't be ashamed that you need someone to cry on."

"It's weak. I... I just didn't want to be weak." "We're all weak."

She gave up struggling and nestled there until the tears stopped. She sniffed, wiped her nose, and faced him.

"What's it like? Can you tell me?" She was about to explain what she meant, but he seemed to understand.

"It's like ... nothing special."

"You were born female, weren't you? I mean, you . . . I thought I might be able to tell."

"It's no longer important how I was born. I've been both. It's still me, on the inside. You understand?"

"I'm not sure I do."

They were quiet for a long time. Cleo thought of a thousand things to say, questions to ask, but could do nothing.

"You've been coming to a decision, haven't you?" he said, at last. "Are you any closer after tonight?" "I'm not sure."

"It's not going to solve any problems, you know. It might even create some."

She pulled away from him and got up. She shook her hair and wished for a comb.

"Thank you, Cleopatra," he said.

"Oh. Uh, thank you . . ." She had forgotten his name. She smiled again to cover her embarrassment, and shut the door behind her.

"Hello?"

"Yes. This is Cleopatra King. I had a consultation with one of your staff. I believe it was ten days ago."

"Yes, Ms. King. I have your file. What can I do for you?"

She took a deep breath. "I want you to start the clone. I left a tissue sample."

"Very well, Ms. King. Did you have any instructions concerning the chromosone donor?"

"Do you need consent?"

"Not as long as there's a sample in the bank."

"Use my husband, Jules La Rhin. Security number 4454390."

"Very good. We'll be in contact with you."

Cleo hung up the phone and rested her forehead against the cool metal. She should never get this stoned, she realized. What had she done?

But it was not final. It would be six months before she had to decide if she would ever use the clone. Damn Jules. Why did he have to make such a big thing of it?

Jules did not make a big thing of it when she told him what she had done. He took it quietly and calmly, as if he had been expecting it.

"You know I won't follow you in this?"

"I know you feel that way. I'm interested to see if you change your mind."

"Don't count on it. I want to see if you change yours."

"I haven't made up my mind. But I'm giving myself the option."

"All I ask is that you bear in mind what this could do to our relationship. I love you, Cleo. I don't think that will ever change. But if you walk into this house as a man, I don't think ITl be able to see you as the person I've always loved."

"You could if you were a woman."

"But I won't be."

"And 111 be the same person I always was." But would she be? What the hell was wrong? What had Jules ever done that he should deserve this? She made up her mind never to go through with it, and they made love that night and it was very, very good.

But somehow she never got around to calling the vivarium and telling them to abort the clone. She made the decision not to go through with it a dozen times over the next six months, and never had the clone destroyed.

Their relationship in bed became uneasy as time passed. At first, it was good. Jules made no objections when she initiated sex, and was willing to do it any way she preferred. Once that was accomplished she no longer cared whether she was on top or underneath. The important thing had been having the option of making love when she wanted to, the way she wanted to.

"That's what this is all about," she told him one night, in a moment of clarity when everything seemed to make sense except his refusal to see things from her side. "It's the option I want. I'm not unhappy being female. I don't like the feeling that there's anything I can't be. I want to know how much of me is hormones, how much is genetics, how much is upbringing. I want to know if I feel more secure being aggressive as a man, because I don't, most of the time, as a woman. Or do men feel the same insecurities I feel? Would Cleo the man feel free to cry? I don't know any of those things."

"But you said it yourself. You'll still be the same person."

They began to drift apart in small ways. A few weeks after her outing to Oophyte she returned home one Sunday afternoon to find him in bed with a woman. It was not like him to do it like that; their custom had been to bring lovers home and introduce them, to keep it friendly and open. Cleo was amused, because she saw it as his way of getting back at her for her trip to the encounter bar.

So she was the perfect hostess, joining them in bed, which seemed to disconcert Jules. The woman's name was Harriet, and Cleo found herself liking her. She was a changer—something Jules had not known or he certainly would not have chosen her to make Cleo feel bad. Harriet was uncomfortable when she realized why she was there. Cleo managed to put her at ease by making love to her, something that surprised Cleo a lirde and Jules considerably, since she had never done it before.

Cleo enjoyed it; she found Harriet's smooth body to be a whole new world. And she felt she had neatly turned the tables on Jules, making him confront once more the idea of his wife in the man's role.

The worst part was the children. They had discussed the possible impending change with Lilli and Paul.

Lilli could not see what all the fuss was about; it was a part of her life, something that was all around her which she took for granted as something she herself would do when she was old enough. But when she began picking up the concern from her father, she drew subtly closer to her mother. Cleo was tremendously relieved. She didn't think she could have held to it in the face of Lilli's displeasure. Lilli was her first born, and though she hated to admit it and did her best not to play favorites, her darling. She had taken a year's leave from her job at appalling expense to the household budget so she could devote all her time to her infant daughter. She often wished she could somehow return to those simpler days, when motherhood had been her whole life.

Feather, of course, was not consulted. Jules had assumed the responsibility for her nurture without complaint, and seemed to be enjoying it. It was fine with Cleo, though it maddened her that he was so willing about taking over the mothering role without being willing to try it as a female. Cleo loved Feather as much as the other two, but sometimes had trouble recalling why they had decided to have her. She felt she had gotten the procreation impulse out of her system with Paul, and yet there Feather was.

Paul was the problem.

Things could get tense when Paul expressed doubts about how he would feel if his mother were to become a man. Jules's face would darken and he might not speak for days. When he did speak, often in the middle of the night when neither of them could sleep, it would be in a verbal explosion that was as close to violence as she had ever seen him.

It frightened her, because she was by no means sure of herself when it came to Paul. Would it hurt him? Jules spoke of gender identity crises, of the need for stable role models, and finally, in naked honesty, of the fear that his son would grow up to be somehow less than a man.

Cleo didn't know, but cried herself to sleep over it many nights. They had read articles about it and found that psychologists were divided. Traditionalists made much of the importance of sex roles, while changers felt sex roles were important only to those who were trapped in them; with the breaking of the sexual barrier, the concept of roles vanished.

The day finally came when the clone body was ready. Cleo still did not know what she should do.

"Are you feeling comfortable now? Just nod if you can't talk." "Wha..."

"Relax. It's all over. You'll be feeling like walking in a few minutes. We'll have someone take you home. You may feel drunk for a while, but there's no drugs in your system."

"Wha'... happen?"

"It's over. Just relax."

Cleo did, curling up in a ball. Eventually he began to laugh.

Drunk was not the word for it. He sprawled on the bed, trying on pronouns for size. It was all so funny. He was on his back with his hands in his lap. He giggled and rolled back and forth, over and over, fell on the floor in hysterics.

He raised his head.

"Is that you, Jules?"

"Yes, it's me." He helped Cleo back onto the bed, then sat on the edge, not too near, but not unreachably far away. "How do you feel?"

He snorted. "Drunker 'n a skunk." He narrowed his eyes, forced them to focus on Jules. "You must call me Leo now. Cleo is a woman's name. You shouldn't have called me Cleo then."

"All right. I didn't call you Cleo, though."

"You didn't? Are you sure?"

"I'm very sure it's something I wouldn't have said."

"Oh. Okay." He lifted his head and looked confused for a moment. "You know what? I'm gonna be sick."

Leo felt much better an hour later. He sat in the living room with Jules, both of them on the big pillows that were the only furniture.

They spoke of inconsequential matters for a time, punctuated by long silences. Leo was no more used to the sound of his new voice than Jules was.

"Well," Jules said, finally, slapping his hands on his knees and standing up. "I really don't know what your plans are from here. Did you want to go out tonight? Find a woman, see what it's like?"

Leo shook his head. "I tried that out as soon as I got home." he said. "The male orgasm, I mean."

"What was it like?"

He laughed. "Certainly you know that by now."

"No, I meant, after being a woman—"

"I know what you mean." He shrugged. "The erection is interesting. So much larger than what I'm used to. Otherwise . . ." He frowned for a moment. "A lot the same. Some different. More localized. Messier."

"Urn." Jules looked away, studying the electric fireplace as if seeing it for the first time. "Had you planned to move out? It isn't necessary, you know. We could move people around. I can go in with Paul, or we could move him in with me in ... in our old room. You could have his." He turned away from Leo, and put his hand to his face.

Leo ached to get up and comfort him, but felt it would be exactly the wrong thing to do. He let Jules get himself under control.

"If you'll have me, I'd like to continue sleeping with you."

Jules said nothing, and didn't turn around.

"Jules, I'm perfecdy willing to do whatever will make you most comfortable. There doesn't have to be any sex. Or I'd be happy to do what I used to do when I was in late pregnancy. You wouldn't have to do anything at all."

"No sex," he said.

"Fine, fine. Jules, I'm getting awfully tired. Are you ready to sleep?"

There was a long pause, then he turned and nodded.

They lay quietly, side by side, not touching. The lights were out; Leo could barely see the outline of Jules's body.

After a long time, Jules turned on his side.

"Cleo, are you in there? Do you still love me?"

"I'm here," she said. "I love you. I always will."

Jules jumped when Leo touched him, but made no objection. He began to cry, and Leo held him close. They fell asleep in each other's arms.

The Oophyte was as full and noisy as ever. It gave Leo a headache.

He did not like the place any more than Cleo had, but it was the only place he knew to find sex partners quickly and easily, with no emotional entanglements and no long process of seduction. Everyone there was available; all one needed to do was ask. They used each other for sexual calisthenics just one step removed from masturbation, cheerfully admitted the fact, and took the position that if you didn't approve, what were you doing there? There were plenty of other places for romance and relationships.

Leo didn't normally approve of it—not for himself, though he cared not at all what other people did for amusement. He preferred to know someone he bedded.

But he was here tonight to learn. He felt he needed the practice. He did not buy the argument that he would know just what to do because he had been a woman and knew what they liked. He needed to know how people reacted to him as a male.

Things went well. He approached three women and was accepted each time. The first was a mess—so thafs what they meant by too soon!—and she was rather indignant about it until he explained his situation. After that she was helpful and supportive.

He was about to leave when he was propositioned by a woman who said her name was Lynx. He was tired, but decided to go with her.

Ten frustrating minutes later she sat up and moved away from him. "What are you here for, if that's all the interest you can muster? And don't tell me it's my fault."

"I'm sorry," he said. "I forgot. T thought I could . . . well, I didn't realize I had to be really interested before I could perform."

"Perform? That's a funny wav to out it."

"I'm sorry." He told her what the problem was, how many times he had made love in the last two hours. She sat on the edge of the bed and ran her hands through her hair, frustrated and irritable.

"Well, it's not the end of the world. There's plenty more out there. But you could ewe a girl a warning. You didn't have to say yes back there."

"I know. It's my fault. I'll have to learn to nidge my capacity, I guess. It's just that I'm used to being able to, even if I'm not particularly—"

Lynx laughed. "What am I savin it? Listen to me. Honey, I used to have the same problem myself. Weeks of not getting it up. And I know it hurts."

"Well," Leo said. "I know what you're feeling like, too. It's no fun."

Lynx shrugged. "In other circumstances, yeah. But like I said, the woods are full of 'em tonight. I won't have any problem." She put her hand on his cheek and pouted at him. "Hey, I didn't hurt your poor male ego, did I?"

Leo thought about it, probed around for bruises, and found none.

"No."

She laughed. "I didn't think so. Because you don't have one. Enjoy it, Leo. A male ego is something that has to be grown carefully, when you're young. People have to keep pointing out what you have to do to be a man, so you can recognize failure when you can't 'perform.' How come you used that word?"

"I don't know. I guess I was just thinking of it that way."

"Trying to be a quote man unquote. Leo, you don't have enough emotional investment in it. And you're lucky. It took me over a year to shake mine. Don't be a man. Be a male human, instead. The switchover's a lot easier that way."

"I'm not sure what you mean."

She patted his knee. "Trust me. Do you see me getting all upset because I wasn't sexy enough to turn you on, or some such garbage? No. I wasn't brought up to worry that way. But reverse it. If I'd done to you what you just did to me, wouldn't something like that have occurred to you?"

"I think it would Though I've always been pretty secure in that area."

"The most secure of us are whimpering children beneath it, at least some of the time. You understand that I got upset because you said yes when you weren't ready? And that's all I was upset about? It was impolite, Leo. A male human shouldn't do that to a female human. With a man and a woman, it's different. The poor fellow's got a lot of junk in his head, and so does the woman, so they shouldn't be held responsible for the tricks their egos play on them."

Leo laughed. "I don't know if you're making sense at all. But I like the sound of it. 'Male human.' Maybe I'll see the difference one day."

Some of the expected problems never developed.

Paul barely noticed the change. Leo had prepared himself for a traumatic struggle with his son, and it never came. If it changed Paul's life at all, it was in the fact that he could now refer to his maternal parent as Leo instead of mother.

Strangely enough, it was Lilli who had the most trouble at first. Leo was hurt by it, tried not to show it, and did everything he could to let her adjust gradually. Finally she came to him one day about a week after the change. She said she had been silly, and wanted to know if she could get a change, too, since one of her best friends was getting one. Leo talked her into remaining female until after the onset of puberty. He told her he thought she might enjoy it.

Leo and Jules circled each other like two tigers in a cage, unsure if a fight was necessary but ready to start clawing out eyes if it came to it. Leo didn't like the analogy; if he had still been a female tiger, he would have felt sure of the outcome. But he had no wish to engage in a dominance struggle with Jules.

They shared an apartment, a family, and a bed. They were elaborately polite, but touched each other only rarely, and Leo always felt he should apologize when they did. Jules would not meet his eyes; their gazes would touch, then rebound like two cork balls with identical static charges.

But eventually Jules accepted Leo. He was "that guy who's always around" in Jules's mind. Leo didn't care for that, but saw it as progress. In a few more days Jules began to discover that he liked Leo. They began to share things, to talk more. The subject of their previous relationshp was taboo for a while. It was as if Jules wanted to know Leo from scratch, not acknowledging there had ever been a Cleo who had once been his wife.

It was that simple; Leo would not let it be. Jules sometimes sounded like he was mourning the passing of a loved one when he hesitantly began talking about the hurt inside him. He was able to talk freely to Leo, and it was in a slightly different manner from the way he had talked to Cleo. He poured out his soul. It was astonishing to Leo that there were so many bruises on it, so many defenses and insecurities. There was buried hostility which Jules had never felt free to tell a woman.

Leo let him go on, but when Jules started a sentence with, "I could never tell this to Cleo," or, "Now that she's gone," Leo would go to him, take his hand, and force him to look.

"I'm Cleo," he would say. "I'm right here, and I love you."

They started doing things together. Jules took him to places Cleo had never been. They went out drinking together and had a wonderful time getting sloshed. Before, it had always been dinner with a few drinks or dopesticks, then a show or concert. Now they might come home at 0200 harmonizing loud enough to get thrown in jail. Jules admitted he hadn't had so much fun since his college days.

Socializing was a problem. Few of their old friends were changers, and neither of them wanted to face the complications of going to a party as a couple. They couldn't make friends among changers, because Jules correctly saw he would be seen as an outsider.

So they saw a lot of men. Leo had thought he knew all of Jules's close friends, but found he had been wrong. He saw a side of Jules he had never seen before: more relaxed in ways, some of his guardedness gone, but with other defenses in place. Leo sometimes felt like a spy, looking in on a stratum of society he had always known" was there, but he had never been able to penetrate. If Cleo had walked into the group its structure would have changed subtly; she would have created a new milieu by her presence, like light destroying the atom it was meant to observe.

After his initial outing to the Oophyte, Leo remained celibate for a long time. He did not want to have sex casually; he wanted to love Jules. As far as he knew, Jules was abstaining, too.

But they found an acceptable alternative in double-dating. They shopped around together for a while, taking out different women and having a lot of fun without getting into sex, until each settled on a woman he could have a relationship with. Jules was with Diane, a woman he had known at work for many years. Leo went out with Harriet.

The four of them had great times together. Leo loved being a pal to Jules, but would not let it remain simply that. He took to reminding Jules that he could do this with Cleo, too. What Leo wanted to emphasize was that he could be a companion, a buddy, a confidant no matter which sex he was. He wanted to combine the best of being a woman and being a man, be both things for Jules, fulfill all his needs. But it hurt to think that Jules would not do the same for him.

"Well, hello, Leo. I didn't expect to see you today."

"Can I come in, Harriet?"

She held the door open for him.

"Can I get you anything? Oh, yeah, before you go any further, that 'Harriet' business is finished. I changed my name today. It's Joule from now on. That's spelled j-o-u-l-e."

"Okay, Joule. Nothing for me, thanks." He sat on her couch.

Leo was not surprised at the new name. Changers had a tendency to get away from "name" names. Some did as Cleo had done by choosing a gender equivalent or a similar sound. Others ignored gender connotations and used the one they had always used. But most eventually chose a neutral word, according to personal preference.

"Jules, Julia," he muttered.

"What was that?" Joule's brow wrinkled slightly. "Did you come here for mothering? Things going badly?"

Leo slumped down and contemplated his folded hands.

"I don't know. I guess I'm depressed. How long has it been now? Five months? I've learned a lot, but I'm not sure just what it is. I feel like I've grown. I see the world . . . well, I see things differently, yes. But Fm still basically the same person."

"In the sense that you're the same person at thirty-three as you were at ten?"

Leo squirmed. "Okay. Yeah, I've changed. But it's not any kind of reversal. Nothing turned topsy-turvy. It's an expansion. It's not a new viewpoint. It's like filling something up, moving out into unused spaces. Becoming . . ." His hands groped in the air, then fell back into his lap. "It's like a completion."

Joule smiled. "And you're disappointed? What more could you ask?"

Leo didn't want to get into that just yet. "Listen to this, and see if you agree. I always saw male and female— whatever that is, and I don't know if the two really exist other than physically and don't think it's important anyway. ... I saw those qualities as separate. Later, I thought of them like Siamese twins in everybody's head. But the twins were visually fighting, trying to cut each other off. One would beat the other down, maim it, throw it in a cell, and never feed it, but they were always connected and the beaten-down one would make the winner pay for the victory.

"So I wanted to try and patch things up between them. I thought I'd just introduce them to each other and try to referee, but they got along a lot better than I expected. In fact, they turned into one whole person, and found they could be very happy together. I can't tell them apart any more. Does that make any sense?"

Joule moved over to sit beside him.

"It's a good analogy, in its way. I feel something like that, but I don't think about it any more. So what's the problem? You just told me you feel whole now."

Leo's face contorted. "Yes. I do. And if I am, what does that make Jules?" He began to cry, and Joule let him get it out, just holding his hand. She thought he'd better face it alone, this time. When he had calmed down, she began to speak quietly.

"Leo, Jules is happy as he is. I think he could be much happier, but there's no way for us to show him that without having him do something that he fears so much. It's possible that he will do it someday, after more time to get used to it. And it's possible that he'll hate it and run screaming back to his manhood. Sometimes the maimed twin can't be rehabilitated."

She sighed heavily, and got up to pace the room.

"There's going to be a lot of this in the coming years," she said. "A lot of broken hearts. We're not really very much like them, you know. We get along better. We're not angels, but we may be the most civilized, considerate group the race has yet produced. There are fools and bastards among us, just like the one-sexers, but I think we tend to be a little less foolish, and a little less cruel. I think changing is here to stay.

"And what you've got to realize is that you're lucky. And so is Jules. It could have been much worse. I know of several broken homes just among my own friends. There's going to be many more before society has assimilated this. But your love for Jules and his for you has held you together. He's made a tremendous adjustment, maybe as big as the one you made. He likes you. In either sex. Okay, so you don't make love to him as Leo. You may never reach that point."

"We did. Last night." Leo shifted on the couch. "I. . . I got mad. I told him if he wanted to see Cleo, he had to learn to relate to me, because I'm me, dammit."

"I think that might have been a mistake."

Leo looked away from her. "I'm starting to think so, too."

"But I think the two of you can patch it up, if there's any damage. You've come through a lot together."

"I didn't mean to force anything on him, I just got mad."

"And maybe you should have. It might have been just the thing. You'll have to wait and see."

Leo wiped his eyes and stood up.

"Thanks, Harr . . . sorry. Joule. You've helped me. I ... uh, I may not be seeing you as often for a while."

"I understand. Let's stay friends, okay?" She kissed him, and he hurried away.

She was sitting on a pillow facing the door when he came home from work, her legs crossed, elbows resting on her knee with a dopestick in her hand. She smiled at him.

"Well, you're home early. What happened?"

"I stayed home from work." She nearly choked, trying not to laugh. He threw his coat to the closet and hurried into the kitchen. She heard something being stirred, then -the sound of glass shattering. He burst through the doorway.

"Cleo!"

"Darling, you look so handsome with your mouth hanging open."

He shut it, but still seemed unable to move. She went to him, feeling tingling excitement in her loins like the return of an old friend. She put her arms around him, and he nearly crushed her. She loved it.

He drew back slightly and couldn't seem to get enough of her face, his eyes roaming every detail.

"How long will you stay this way?" he asked. "Do you have any idea?"

"I don't know. Why?"

He smiled, a little sheepishly. "I hope you won't take this wrong. I'm so happy to see you. Maybe I shouldn't say it . . . but no, I think I'd better. I like Leo. I think I'll miss him, a little."

She nodded. "I'm not hurt. How could I be?" She drew away and led him to a pillow. "Sit down, Jules. We have to have a talk." His knees gave way under him and he sat, looking up expectandy.

"Leo isn't gone, and don't you ever think that for a minute. He's right here." She thumped her chest and looked at him defiantly. "He'll always be here. He'll never go away."

"I'm sorry, Cleo, I—"

"No, don't talk yet. It was my own fault, but I didn't know any better. I never should have called myself Leo. It gave you an easy out. You didn't have to face Cleo being a male. I'm changing all that. My name is Nile. N-i-l-e. I won't answer to anything else." "All right. It's a nice name."

"I thought of calling myself Lion. For Leo the lion. But I decided to be who I always was, the queen of the Nile, Cleopatra. For Old time's sake."

He said nothing, but his eyes showed his appreciation.

"What you have to understand is that they're both gone, in a sense. You'll never be with Cleo again. I look like her now. I resemble her inside, too, like an adult resembles the child. I have a tremendous amount in common with what she was. But I'm not her."

He nodded. She sat beside him and took his hand.

"Jules, this isn't going to be easy. There are things I want to do, people I want to meet. We're not going to be able to share the same friends. We could drift apart because of it. I'm going to have to fight resentment because you'll be holding me back. You won't let me explore your female side like I want to. You're going to resent me because 111 be trying to force you into something you think is wrong for you. But I want to try and make it work."

He let out his breath. "God, CI . . . Nile. I've never been so scared in my life. I thought you were leading up to leaving me."

She squeezed his hand. "Not if I can help it. I want each of us to try and accept the other as they are. For me, that includes being male whenever I feel like it. It's all the same to me, but I know it's going to be hard for you."

They embraced, and Jules wiped his tears on her shoulder, then faced her again.

"I'll do anything and everything in my power, up to—" She put her finger to her lips. "I know. I accept you that way. But 111 keep trying to convince you."