by Damien Broderick

* * * *

Damien Broderick’s latest critical book is Unleashing the Strange: Twenty-First Century Science Fiction Literature, from Borgo Press. His next one, Chained to the Alien, will be an anthology of essays from Australian Science Fiction Review (Second Series). Other recent publications include two collaborative SF novels: The Book of Revelation, written with Rory Barnes, and Post Mortal Syndrome, written with his wife Barbara Lamar. The author’s recent tales for Asimov’s have taken some inspiration from classic SF writers like A.E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, and Roger Zelazny. Damien now appears in our pages with a decidedly Dickian meditation on...

Jive Bolen exited his cramped office inside the two hundred story zeugma complex in the heart of nouveau Manhattan. Summer’s noon sun was a blurry disk high overhead, easily visible even through the crowding skyscrapers. The size of a ten dollar coin at arm’s length. Or so he’d read in the pape during morning coffee break, hoping to ferret out some lively snippet to throw into his next abortive conversation with Jolene, the building’s peripatetic Vogelsangerin, with whom he had been desperately smitten for at least the last four thwarted months. Jive fished a coin from his pouch pocket and held it up. Not quite; the frayed edges of the immense nanotech-spun soletta, stationed out at Earth-Sun L1, extended like a reddish ghost corona beyond the rim of the plastic currency unit. The literal meaning of his ghost analogy stung Jive somewhere in his cerebellum a moment too late to repress it. Shuddering, he folded the coin back into his pouch.

Something rushed directly above him. The sort of uncanny buffeting rush of air, it seemed to him in a vivid recollection from childhood, that a falling ten-ton safe creates in a toon as it tumbles from a high window to flatten a furious two-dimensional and villainous puddycat. In disbelief, Jive glanced up past the rim of his Brooks Brothers tropical pith helmet. By the living lord Harry, it was a safe plunging toward him, or a plausible simulation. No, light winked from the front of the thing. Leaping back, terrified, Jive tripped on the curb, fell full length. With a splintering detonation, the thing flew apart into shards of broken glass, trailing wires, microcircuitry from the previous century, plywood, and tasteless veneer. Another damned TV set, hurled from an upper window by a cit driven to despair.

Jive scrambled to his feet, retreated, lifted his eyes again. A moment later something long and large with flapping limbs flailed down to slam atop the fractured television receiver. The soggy crump of flesh striking concrete, the spatter of blood, twisted Jive Bolen’s mouth in disgust. He felt a sort of remote sympathy. Another day, another ‘ratische Augen, as the Kraut socialists dubbed them. Square eyes. Mort victims of the visible dead, supposedly. Kind of ironic.

A siren was already sounding as a mortuary truckee, alerted by gossipgrrl watch, raced to claim the corpse. Jive shrugged, settled his hat about his ears. Mortuarian was a job, distasteful or not. It was a living—and there was another soupcon of irony. A more socially useful job, he reproved himself, than his own dead-end post with Industrie Globalisierung, AG. Day after oppressive day, representing the shareholders on the board of management oversight, his nominal post with the Aktiengesellschaft, seemed ever more meaningless. A political contrivance. Even if it paid the bills for himself and Aunt Tilly, god bless her, and his damned wife and the kids off on the far side of the continent in Orange County. Camouflage is what it is, though, he thought, for the great owners whose blocks of stock overwhelmed the protest votes of all the small stakeholders. In effect, he was a mere stalking horse for corporate greed.

Stepping around the corner, with some difficulty putting the corpse from his mind, he bought a liverwurst brat snacker from a sidewalk multimat. Jive consoled himself with the reflection that without such immense and unthinkable concentrations of wealth and power, the sun-blocker could never have been emplaced in orbit between Earth and Sun, mitigating the greenhouse threat that would have wiped 92 percent of all surface life from the globe within a mere thousand years. According to petacomp spreadsheet calculations, at any rate. Even though they had been known, historically, to be wrong.

He hurried along Eighth Avenue, munching his sliver, and had disposed of the degradable wrapping before he recalled that he was meant to be meeting Delphine for luncheon at the Quick Brown Pig, given five full stars by Eric in the Times Eats Guide. These days, since the divorce, his wife worked for the Consumer Advocacy and spent a day each month at the New York offices of Rand Nader. Probably she gets to eat free at the Pig, he thought morosely, but Del will insist on my paying for us both anyway, as if I’m not already squandering danegelt on alimony and school fees. His homeowatch peeped from his wrist, reminding him belatedly and uselessly of the lunch date. Fool of a thing, its programming bollixed by the same virus that had munged all the music records in the world except for those CDs carefully wrapped and hoarded by a few thrifty collectors like himself. Could that, he thought, abruptly wildly excited, be the doorway to Jolene’s singing heart? Did he dare risk humiliation, and the possible emetic degradation of his slender CD hoard?

A lovely young Chinese woman in clinging neck to heel sharkskin cheongsam bowed as he entered the dim luncheon palace. He checked his pith helmet, took a slip. With a hush of tiny slippered steps, she led him directly to an alcove where Delphine sat forward pertly, sipping an alcohol-free Manhattan and reading her own homeowatch. It projected a display directly onto her retinas, which danced like running lights in the lowered illumination of the booth. Jive slid in on the other side of the classic sparkly Formica eating bench, hearing the genuine red leather creak under his buttocks.

“Sorry I’m late.”

“Oh, hi. That’s all right, Jive. I had some research to catch up on before the plenary this afternoon.” Del switched off her data feed and looked at him, perfectly relaxed. She wore a pillbox hat spun from Martian crabgrass, which flourished only under the light of the twin hurtling moons of the red planet. He had given her that hat as a Kwanzaa gift two years ago, as their marriage took its final dive into the dumpster. Was this her notion of conciliation, or a final turn of the knife in his spine? “And how’s dear Auntie Tilly?”

“Matilda’s about as well as can be expected,” he said. “Morbid, actually. She’s got her nose stuck in that damned old TV set my Poppa gave her for her twenty-first birthday, the one he found on the curb and fixed up with valves he scrounged heaven knows where.”

“They’re the best for picking up the thays, those old ones, I hear,” Delphine said absently. “I have to say, the children are still obsessed by it as well, although I notice you don’t ask after them. I have to—”

“The children!” Jive said, voice roughening. “What the hell’s wrong with those kids? They won’t answer emails, their IM messages are totally incomprehensible, they refuse to pick up when I phone them.”

“For heaven’s sake, don’t exaggerate. At their age—”

“Exaggerate! Watch and learn!” He keyed the virtual board of his homeowatch, fastclicking his children’s phones. The holographic privacy display showed an instant red, with the words: NOT AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE LEAVE A MESSAGE, OR TRY AGAIN LATER. He turned his wrist so his former wife could witness his humiliation.

“Jevon, you’re losing your bearings. It’s three hours earlier on the left coast. The kids are both at morning class. You know full well they’re not allowed to use the access during scholastic hours.”

Deflated, Jive shook his head and reached for the menu. He wasn’t hungry; the brat sat in his guts like lead. I will be conciliatory, he decided. Isn’t that alleged to be one of my prime work-related skills? Isn’t conciliation the doctrine of Sister Grace of Magdalene, pastor of his house of worship, the Wee Baptist Kirk i’ the Glen (Scottish Rite)? To the lovely waitron, he said, “Get me a real Manhattan. And whatever my wife ... the lady is drinking, get her another. What would you like to eat, Delphine?”

“I ordered en route. You really should eat something if you’re going to drink—”

“Why do you let them watch that crap?” he asked vituperatively. “They should have their heads down to their books.”

“Jive, Angelina is eight and Barack is only five, let them enjoy a bit of childhood before you start cramming—”

He slammed his fist on the table, making the cut-glass soy dispenser jump. “Watching alleged dead people is enjoying childhood? Christ, you’re an intelligent, educated woman, Delphine, you must know it’s just a barrage of vicious propaganda beamed down on the cit sats from those goddamned Chinese—”

Showing her perfect white teeth, Delphine hissed, “Lower your damned voice, you oaf. In case you hadn’t noticed—”

Faces had turned their way, hiding shock behind bland contempt. The waitron stood with their drinks.

“I didn’t mean ... Oh, please, just put them down.” He gestured to the great acrylic patriotic flag above them, pinned to the four corners of the room, fifty white stars on deep skyblue, three more blue stars clinging at the inner edge of the top white stripes: New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan. “I know these Chinese are our loyal allies, our fellow citizens, but it’s obvious to anyone with his damned ear to the ground that these ... these fake dead people are a plot to undermine the confidence of our nation. I’m insulted, Delphine. It’s our people they are targeting especially, you know that, the Chinese think we’re still a damned superstitious bunch of primitive jungle—”

“Shut up, you fool.” His wife was on her feet, seething yet containing her fury. Holding her handbag against her breast, she said, “You can get the check. I should have known better. And give the kids a call at a time when it suits them, not you.”

His head had started throbbing. He threw back the Manhattan, coughed. To the impassive waitron, he said, “Get me another. And a soluble ginseng antacid.”

* * * *

His head echoed like a jug kicked by a steel-tipped boot. Ensconced again in the refitted storage room that was his office, Jive Bolen groaned. He was drinking too much. Two Manhattans on a stomach with nothing in it but a brat sliver, it was self-destructive. His tongue rolled again and again against his lips, trying to dispel the over-sweet taste of cherry and burned orange peel. He noticed what he was doing, and recoiled in disgust. This was the tic that had disfigured poor Gran Bolen as she subsided inch by inch toward the grave. Tardive dyskinesia, the medically induced disorder of the nervous system inflicted by early-generation antipsychotic drugs, those barbarously crude neuroleptics such as metoclopramide. Induced supersensitivity to dopamine in the nigrostrial pathway, damaging the D2 dopamine receptor. Or so he’d been told by the apologetic physician who finally had changed the old lady’s regimen, but too late, far too late. She had thought to see the dead, Jive recalled, with a shudder. Her erratic thought disorders, that late turn to Buddhism, to the belief in the Bardo Thodol and afterlife demons. As if the word of the Lord Savior were not enough.

He fumbled off a cap of cuffee, heard the hiss as it self-heated, drank it down with a trembling hand. What’s wrong with me? he wondered. It’s this damned cramped work space, he thought, staring peevishly at the wall to his right, the racks of classic Barbie dolls still in their virginal packaging.

Without knocking, his Uzbek secretary, Hammerlock Ganji, poked his head around the door jamb. “Christ, you look terrible, Chief. You’re drinking too much.”

“Shut up,” Jive said. He took another swig, but the cap was empty. The foul taste of the synthetic lingered on his lips, and he felt his tongue once again begin its bovine rotation. “It’s these quarters, Ganj. Undignified for a man of my station.”

Neither said anything further; it was simply a fact of life that in these straitened times the great multinational corps had to impose the most severe restrictions on their senior factors, and to be seen to do so. Ganji entered the office, squeezed past Jive’s desk, stood examining, as he often did, with a perfervid fascination, the fantastically expensive collectible Barbara Millicent Roberts manikins in their plastic and cardboard cages. There was not a single Ken mounted on the wall.

“You need cheering up,” Hammerlock said at length. His eyes traveling back again to the dolls in their pristine boxes. If one of them ever went missing, which was unlikely given the covert security features in situ, Jive would know where to turn.

“I hear Jolene is in the building. I’ll have her drop by. A professional call,” he said hastily. “It’s part of the building code, as you know, Chief.”

“If you wish,” Jive said, foraging ostentatiously in a pile of hard-copy documents. “Go away now, I’m busy.”

It could only have been ten minutes later when he heard her cheerful birdsong soprano carol his name at the open door.

“I told my secretary I’m too busy for therapeutic melody today,” he said gruffly.

“Never too hectic for a heart-filling tune, I hope,” she said, and perched herself on the edge of his desk. “What’s it to be? Cole Porter? Wit and a jaunty air. Something from the Beatles collection? I love ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ although people have gone off it, and I suppose we mustn’t blame them.”

“‘Come again,’“ said Jive, decisively. Jolene had the power and sweetness of a young Linda Ronstadt—it was possible that she could meet the demands of Dowland. If she knew his work.

“Come again?” she said, grinning.

“It needs a lutenist to accompany the lyrics,” Jive told her. “John Dowland? Turn of the seventeenth century?”

“Sorry.”

“It’s the most perfect music I’ve ever heard.” He cleared his throat and sang, well enough to convey the tune, if not much more, reverberant in the small office, “Thy graces that refrain, To do me due delight.” He took a deeper breath, knowing how it should be done, even if it was beyond his capacity to build the energy across the octave, note by note, phrase by phrase, to a gently controlled climax and release conveying the doomed sense of one long, last breath, one sigh: “To see, to hear, To touch, to kiss, To die...” His baritone broke, and shamefacedly he finished, in a growl, “With thee again, In sweetest sympathy.”

The young woman was thunderstruck.

“Oh, Mr. Bolen, that’s just ... that’s—beautiful. Is there a recording...?”

Jive gazed at her, refreshed, his headache eased. “As a matter of fact, I have probably the last uncorrupted CD pressing of Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli singing the duet. One of the last Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft releases before the emetic plague erased—Do you think you’d care to visit my apt and hear it on my classic eMachines CD player?”

Instead of answering, she sang the fragment back to him, with luscious honeyed fragrance, effortlessly soaring. He felt his eyes dampen.

“It’s about the thays, that song,” she told him guilelessly. “To die again. I wonder how that composer knew, so long ago? In sweetest sympathy. Although they don’t look terribly happy.”

Jive frowned.

“You’re not, I hope, speaking of—”

“Did you see Leno & Letterman last night? It was hilarious. They had the top ten thays, you know, live feeds from viewers’ homes.”

“Don’t call them that. It’s all a vicious—”

“Oh, but they are disconnected thetans, it’s been scientifically proved.” Sweet Jesus, Jive realized, she’s a ‘tologist. Probably second or third generation. But no more eccentric, he decided, than a Mormon or a Moonie. She leaned forward, and light gleamed below her throat, at the open neck of her bright daffodil-yellow blouse. In that moment, he felt entirely prepared to overlook her ‘tology belief structure, even forgive the golden—or gold-plated—icon nestled in Jolene’s small ripe cleavage. The icon, he noticed suddenly, hung from a fine gold chain linked to a pair of bolts in the saint’s neck. Like those terrible old Frankenstein movies. Out burst a guffaw. After a moment of uncertainty, the friendly smile was gone from her face.

“What.”

Oh Christ. Risk everything on one wild throw of the die? What the heck. The thick Germanic neck of the iconic Church bust (speaking of busts) was turned outward, its coarse features nuzzling at her. “I couldn’t help notice where your Divine Founder has his face buried,” he said jovially. “If a man was ambitious, he might hope...” He trailed off.

The sangerin stared at him, speechless. Then a hesitant smile. A shudder of relief jolted through him. Where innocent ribaldry entered freely, soon more joyful bawdry might follow.

“Hey!” she said, then, suddenly frowning. “Are you mocking my faith?”

Jive shook his head piously. “I wouldn’t dream of it, darling.”

* * * *

Inside the cozy plastic-shelled condo apartment high above what had once been the Hudson River and was now a stack of mighty water-pumping carbonoid pipes buried below the condo struts, he found Aunt Tilly eating a boiled Raptosaurus egg from both ends. The edible DNA-recovered commercial product rolled unsteadily on her blue-etched dining plate, spilling white albumen and deep orange yolk on the tablecloth. The dignified old lady, dressed formally for dinner in mothball-reeking black and white, kept her eyes fixed on his near-wallsized HDTV display. At her hand, the remote shined its merry red activation light. On the screen, a morose peasant face of Asian mien gazed out hopelessly at them both. Others wandered in the ill-defined monotone background, as if peering in at the living-dining quadrant, shaking their heads, moving on. Damn it, he thought, my half-senile charge has changed the channel again in my absence. He had warned her repeatedly. Maybe he needed to invoke a Parental Warning lock-down code. But, to his chagrin, he realized that he did not know how to do that.

He picked up the remote, fiddled with it impotently. He changed the channel to a repeat of Baywatch, but, to his fury, the fully electronic selector switched it back. The Chinese civ-sat radiations, he thought indignantly; they’ve hijacked my HDTV digital set. Swearing under his breath, he switched it off. Tilly moaned, looked reproachfully at him. She had yolk smeared over the bright red clown’s mouth of her lip gloss. In his hand, without his intervention, the red pilot light flashed on again. The screen filled with its voiceless parade of woe.

He threw the useless piece of junk down on the table, and went to the small kitchen sink to find a washcloth. The newscasts were correct, then. Not just the old pre-digital sets were vulnerable, though they provided the best registration of the images, apparently. Any set with a remote control was now susceptible to manipulation by these spurious dead, or more properly their Potemkin-style manipulators, who channeljacked it instantly to their interface feed.

Creating the impression, at least in the gullible, of departed souls searching endlessly for the living they had left behind.

It was more than he could take. Jive threw the dampened cloth down into the sink, left Tilly dully viewing the propaganda, and went into his bedroom. Behind a matched, leather-bound set of the Left Behind novels Tilly had given him four or five birthdays ago, before her deterioration had proceeded to its current sorry state, he found a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He uncapped it, entered the half bath alcove, poured a healthy slug into his tooth glass.

I have to stop drinking, he told himself, feeling the burn. After a time, though, his depression faded away. An image of that lovely little birdsongstress filled his heart with growing elation. He’d have to dispose of Tilly for the evening. Maybe the two middle-aged ladies on the floor above, a long-term lesbian couple if he recognized the signs, would look after the senile old thing for the night. He couldn’t imagine that they’d take any liberties. Not, at any rate, the kind he planned for Jolene. He wondered idly if the girl had a surname. Must have, stood to reason. Social Security stamp, the whole ID apparatus. Christ, really it didn’t matter. He poured another shot.

* * * *

“Sweet love doth now invite,

“Thy graces that refrain

“To do me due delight,” sang Ms. Brightman’s simulated voice, admittedly not representative of her peak but glorious still. Jolene sat decorously on the edge of his large formerly marital bed—he’d cunningly moved the CD apparatus out of the living room and into more congenial surrounds—and listened intently. Her eyes, he was happy to see, shone. As the next verse began, she read ahead from the printout he’d prepared, and sang in perfect counterpoint to Bocelli: “Come again,

“That I may cease to mourn

“Through thy unkind disdain

“For now left and forlorn.”

He might as well have not been in the room. Song was her passion, that and her oddball faith. But now, after that heartbreaking pause, she turned her eyes on him and sang with the two reconstructed voices, male and female:

“I sit, I sigh,

“I weep, I faint,

“I die, in deadly pain

“And endless misery...”

Her eyes were bright with pain.

Perhaps, Jive thought, too late, this was not the best choice of song for a seduction. But the ravishing beauty of her voice, so much richer in this room, singing these old words, was so much more enthralling than in the light ditties she cast upon the conditioned air of the zeugma structure where they worked. He waited, spellbound but sorrowing, as she sang the rest of the verses.

“Deadly pain and endless misery,” she said, finally. “That’s what the thays are showing us.” She clutched hopelessly at her pendant icon, and burst into tears.

He packed away his precious, irreplaceable recording while she visited the bathroom, and then, trying to hide his irritation and painful sexual arousal, escorted her home.

* * * *

Jive was half in the bag as he slipped a farecard across the turnstile and joined what seemed a substantial proportion of steaming, sweating New York on the 50th Street subway platform. Why didn’t I get a cab? he asked himself. Is this my pathetic way of punishing myself ? Is my thalamic function overriding my essentially sane frontal brain, driving me into some sort of deliberate confrontation with the world of the Arbeitnehmer, the common workers I’m meant to be representing? He squeezed his eyes shut against the buffeting of the train as it pulled in to the station, grit and oil-scented air flying up like some Biblical plague of insects. He was jostled getting aboard, and held his tropical helmet with one hand as his homey popped on and reminded him in its high-pitched child’s voice that he had an appointment at two, with the engineers at the new Thane of Cawdor thanatorium labs. He snapped the homeowatch off with a grunt. Fool thing, where the heck did it think he was headed on this damned crowded train? And what did the idiots at Industrie Globalisierung, AG, think they were doing, sending him to oversee the so-called findings of this bunch of palpable crackpots?

They sped under old Manhattan. The air-conditioning was on the fritz, hardly unusual. Imagine how life would be without the soletta, he thought. If this was actually the true greenhouse effect everyone was suffering, rather than an attenuated, sunlight-blocked ghost of—he caught his own thought again, snarled at himself. Those things, those mechanical interruptions on the screen, they were not ghosts, not the dead. It was a filthy political stunt, a sort of techno-brainwashing. No matter what foolish Tilly maintained, glued hour after hour in her darkened room, anxiously watching the dead, as she supposed them to be, marching behind her cathode ray tube, peering out, gesturing, their mouths moving silently.

Jesus, wasn’t it obvious? Whatever that dear little professional virgin Vogelsangerin believed. Most of them must be Chinese actors, you could tell at a glance. In those tasteless Mao suits, or old fashioned wrapping of one kind or another. Or Indians, not Native American, dark featured and gaunt from the Indian subcontinent, or Pakistan, or Bali, or whatever. A fashion show of faux-starved mummies from hell. He shuddered, rocking as the train thudded over tracks loosely fixed to sleepers unrepaired for years. Every spare cent was required for the big boosters shoving up the materiel to spin the soletta into being, there at the Lagrange libration point nine hundred thousand miles from Earth. That, or the planet would be roasted. Not immediately, true—but in another millennium. Was that why the dead were suddenly hanging about, shoving their damned stupid faces into people’s primetime viewing—

Jive caught himself with an audible obscenity.

“No call for that language, sir,” a young blonde mother said, rebuking him with a scowl as she turned her child away.

Apologize? Damn it, no. He was furious with himself, with the way he’d allowed the absurd obsessions of gullible people to draw his unconscious into betraying what he knew for a fact. The train was pulling into Brooklyn; he pushed his way to the door. One consolation: if he’d taken a cab he’d have been cooler, yes, and the ride smoother, but he’d still be trapped somewhere in traffic-lock, probably. With the meter ticking.

The so-called thanatorium was within walking distance of High Street station. His headache was easing, and his dyspepsia.

A long-jawed, raw-boned specimen in a stained lab coat introduced him, the head of engineering, Dr. Samuels. Bart Samuels asked him to say a few preparatory words on behalf of the oversight entity of their funding body.

“Very well, gentlemen. And lady,” Jive told the assembled nerds and geeks in the traditional garb of their professions or trades. “Let me make one thing clear. I don’t want to hear any claptrap—and I believe I speak for the Aktiengesellschaft in saying this—about discarnate souls, or cross-overs, or unnucleated thetans.” The nerds lounged as if they were taking an authorized anti-stress break, sucking their Prozac spansules, and stared at him without interest, dully. The one woman scientist or engineer actually rolled her eyes. Then, to his disbelief, she poked out her tongue, not at him but for her own entertainment, rolled it as well, and stared cross-eyed at its purplish tip. This was impudence beyond his capacity to cope. He took his seat abruptly, turning his back on most of them. Samuels signalled a bored audiovisual geek to activate the bank of some twenty antique television receivers arrayed like something out of the Apollo project command room three-quarters of a century earlier.

The screens took an agonizingly long moment to come alive, as tubes warmed and electrons skittered about inside magnetic fields. One by one, then, the grey screens lit up with images: two repeats of I Love Lucy and one of Gunsmoke, broadcast on the free-to-view channels, and a maddening diorama of meaningless, unscripted, silently parading men, women, and children. The Family of Man, Jive told himself, half-hysterically, recalling a book his grandma had loved and made him leaf through every time he and his sisters visited her in the nursing home. Gone these two score years, God bless her. And here were the same faces of every nation, peering out into the drab humming, shuffling, and rustling of the ad hoc, modified media lab.

One of the nerds came forward to a podium. “We’ve had trained law enforcement lip readers examine the images, Mr. Bolen,” he said in a bored, impudent tone. “Most of them are speaking Mandarin, Cantonese, and dialectal variants. There’s an admixture of other major languages, of course, including German, Arabic, English, French, Spanish—”

“Chinese, you say!” Jive cried.

“They seem to be lost and looking for their families. The popular rumor that they are so-called ‘thays’ or thetans is not borne out by synoptic analysis of the recorded utterances to date. The more articulate among their number are asking for our aid, the assistance of living scientists. Hence this briefing. We are not authorized to—”

“Aid? Aid? Crap! A scheme to divert our remaining resources to ideological lunatics who wish to see the planet’s climate disrupted, to their own sectional advantage.” Although what benefit could accrue to anyone other than the Inuits he couldn’t imagine. Least of all those closer to the tropics.

“Sir, we do have a few ideas about what’s causing this manifestation,” said Bart Samuels. “It seems likely that the soletta structure is intercepting or even enhancing insolation in the cerebral theta range. Despite racist rumors of a geopolitical flavor—”

Jive cut him off. “Listen, don’t give me any moralizing hocus-pocus and run-around,” he said angrily, remaining seated but raising his voice so nobody in the room would miss his import. “Three weeks ago, I saw a man throw himself from a tenth story window, driven to desperation by these preposterous ... things.” He flung one hand at the screens. “First he’d torn his TV set off the wall, and thrown it into the street, where the goddamned thing nearly killed me. Then he jumped after it, and did kill himself. This is not a new furtive viral advertising campaign. It is not a political ploy by some misguided faction of the American Unterschicht or sotto classe.”

He rose, faced the useless pointy-headed drones, then looked back up in rage at the drifting images of despair. If what the screen displayed was truly hell, or some other version of the afterlife, as Tilly and Jolene claimed, it undercut everything a man could believe, could work toward in his career. How could you bring children into a world if this abomination was their destiny? “No,” he roared, with the deep-throated power of a Baptist choir baritone. “A fraud! These are computer-generated engrams projected into our living rooms on stolen citizen satellite channels by the Chinese national zaibatsus. Or, if not them, revanchists in the Saudi peninsula. They can’t be...” His voice drained away, suddenly, as an image caught his eye. Bile rose in his throat. “Oh my dear god. Granny Bolen? Can that be you?”

An old woman’s face peered down at him from the closest orthicon tube display, and in a series of snapping jumps copied itself across all of the banked monitors. The muted mutter of Desi Arnaz and James Arness was wiped away. Jive Bolen stared up at his dead grandmother, who looked back in terror at him from twenty grey windows. Her wrinkled hands pressed the inner edges of the screens, and her mouth moved, again and again, in a sort of voiceless screaming supplication. Jive felt his own lips mimic the movements of her mute mouth. Help me, he mouthed back, mirroring her cry. Get me out of here, little Jevon. Aloud, Jive said, softly, “Help me.” Tears ran down his cheeks.

* * * *

Hammerlock Ganji reached Jive on his phone as he waited impatiently in the research thanatorium lobby for his cab back to the city.

“You’re better off waiting there until things calm down, chief,” the secretary told him, licking lips nervously.

“Tarry in Brooklyn? Don’t be absurd, Ganji.” A small red gypsy cab pulled up outside the plate glass lobby. God, is that what we’ve sunk to now, in our effort to attain a low fiscal profile? Through the dirty vehicle window he saw a villainous wild-haired import from Turkestan or points farther east apparently shouting into an old-fashioned mic with a helical cable. A moment later the cool receptionist crossed the carpet and murmured that his ride awaited. Jive gave her a reflex smile and nod, and went out into the soletta-muted sunlight. A disturbing tang hung in the air. Wood smoke? He coughed, suddenly. Something more toxic than that.

“Get in, mister, you want a ride,” the driver told him, pushing the passenger door open from the inside. “We gotta move fast, before anyone catches on we’re coming from this science place.”

“What?” Jive had no chance to buckle up before the cabbie took off with a screech. They tore through a small crowd of scowling citizens who loitered at the gates of the lab. What the hell? There was a thud, and another. “For the love of sweet Harry,” he cried, “those fools are throwing rocks at you.”

“Not me, professor—you.” He gunned the little car’s electric hybrid engine, flung it onto the feeder to the bridge. Jive ducked his tall head, wound down the filthy window. Streamers and pillars of smoke were slowly drifting upward from the Manhattan skyline, billowing into the damaged sunlight. “Blogs are saying kill all scientists.”

“I’m not a scientist, I’m a ... a high-status administrator.” For some reason, saying so made Jive Bolen feel profoundly ashamed. “It’s part of my duties to oversee the efforts of bona-fide researchers in the domain of—” He broke off. “Christ, why am I explaining myself to a gypsy hack? Just get me to the zeugma, and step on it.”

His homeowatch and phone were both peeping; he shifted his mind into high, concentrated gear. A thudding racket ahead pulled up his head. A laden moving van had ploughed into two or three cars illegally stopped at the edge of the feeder. The ‘stanner cursed or prayed vehemently, perhaps in the name of Allah, and jerked them to one side, skidding past the pile-up. God almighty, men stood by the side of the road with rifles and shotguns. The windshield starred, shattered, fell into fragments of safety glass. Ganji said, faintly, like a voice of conscience, “Bolen, the thays want all the scientists dead. The streets are clogged with crazies who agree with them. Just get the hell off the road and lay low for a—”

Impact jarred his teeth. The door beside him sprang open, and Jive tumbled bruisingly to the road surface. Pain tore up his right arm as his hand broke at the wrist. He lost consciousness. The pain was gone. He lay in the silent, empty street for minutes or hours, passing in and out of clarity. People were moving past him. Nobody stopped to help. The damn world’s gone mad, he told himself. It’s been a powder keg ready to go bang ever since the hothouse shock really struck home, when we realized we needed to spend every penny the world makes putting up that shield in space. And Christ knows what that’s done, in addition. He seemed for a moment to be back in the Wee Kirk i’ the Glen, hearing obese, powerful Sister Mary Magdalene belt out the verses of “God of Earth and Outer Space,” that sprightly Baptist hymnal entry by the Welshman Joseph Parry. He smiled in the grey twilight. A lot they knew about outer space back then, in the nineteenth century. Sister Mary powered away as he piped along in the choir, with his sisters singing lustily. Where are they, he asked himself. Where are my sisters? At length Jive stumbled to his feet, holding his brutalized right arm tenderly with his left hand against his breast. Now that he was home again, he could get it looked at by competent medical practitioners. After that terrible near-accident, escaping from it shakily, stumbling inside his apt, he found Aunt Tilly absent. Of course, she was staying for several days upstairs with those pleasant dykes. A nice couple, for all their gene-reproductive dysfunction. He walked through the house, and with increasing alarm found that his wife and children were also gone. Plaintively, he called their names. “Angelina, where are you, honeypie? Barack, you scamp? Come out, come out.” Silence, and the rustle of strangers inside his home. “Delphine, you bitch!” He found himself on the ground floor and wandered in the smoke-filled streets. Others were drifting along as if dazed, staring into windows, some in the middle of the streets. Why was the traffic stalled? Someone caught his sleeve, spoke urgently, but he couldn’t seem to hear the man’s voice. The man raised a crudely wrought sign, rendered in thick black marker pen ink on the back, evidently, of an advertising poster: SEND THE SEINTISTS OVER, THEY HAV 2 HELP US. A flicker of motion caught his eye, reflected in the side window of a motionless Hyundai sedan. Behind the curved window, half-seen, the driver sat, listening to his phone. Reflected in the glass, faces passed, jumbled and unfamiliar. Terrified, Jive shook his head in denial. He sat edgily in his favorite armchair, activated the HDTV to distract himself and settle his nerves. The machine wasn’t working right. A new emetic virus attack? His daughter’s monochrome face contorted in the wide frame of the image. He lumbered to his feet, went to the out-of-order plasma image. The child rushed away behind the screen and returned with his wife and son, who peered in apparent horror at the camera. When was this home movie shot? He couldn’t recall. Where is Tilly? In the monochrome, silent background, he watched Delphine turn her head, walk with her head clasped in her hands like a mime doing an impression of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Gentle love, he thought absurdly, recalling Dowland, Draw forth thy wounding dart. She opened the front door. Upheaval in the background, black and white gouts of flame and smoke. People were running, striking each other. Two cops stood, hats in hand, unhappy, bearing bad news Jive Bolen could not bear to hear.

—to Phil’s memory, of course