Winter 2007

In this Issue:

The following features are in this issue:

•  Column: Bears Examine #2 by Elizabeth Bear

•  Column: Bears Examine #3 by Elizabeth Bear

•  Column: HARVESTING THE DARKNESS #2: FULLY STOKE(re)D by Norman Partridge

•  Column: Me and Lucifer by Mike Resnick

•  Fiction: A Plain Tale from Our Hills by Bruce Sterling

•  Fiction: A Season of Broken Dolls by Caitlin R Kiernan

•  Fiction: Deadman’s Road by Joe R. Lansdale

•  Fiction: Eating Crow by Neal Barrett, Jr.

•  Fiction: Jude Confronts Global Warming by Joe Hill

•  Fiction: Missile Gap by Charles Stross

•  Fiction: Pluto Tells All by John Scalzi

•  Fiction: The Leopard's Paw by Jay Lake

•  Fiction The Lost Continent of Moo: A Lucifer Jones Story by Mike Resnick

•  Review: Jack Knife and Map of Dreams

•  Review: Nebula Awards Showcase 2007 edited by Mike Resnick

•  Review: On the Road with Harlan Ellison volume 3

•  Review: Softspoken by Lucius Shepard

•  Review: The Last Mimzy by Henry Kuttner

•  Review: The Yiddish Policeman's Union By Michael Chabon

•  Review: White Night by Jim Butcher & Wizards edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois

•  Review:The Best of the Best Volume 2 20 Years of The Best Short Science Fiction Novels

•               Review: Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor Volume 2

Column: Bears Examine #2 by Elizabeth Bear

I hate the word ought, and I hate blanket imperatives. For that reason, I am not about to say that every aspiring writer really ought to spend a year reading slush.

But I will say that aspiring writers can learn by reading slush. For one thing, it will show you what everybody else is doing, and maybe why it’s not such a great idea for you to do exactly the same thing.

But moreover, you will learn something more important to your development as a writer.

You learn why editors reject stories.

And editors reject stories for very simple reasons. Essentially, it boils down to one thing (sort of like the old joke that Cause of Death is really always the same: “lack of oxygen to the brain”) if a story is rejected, it’s because the story failed to enthrall the editor.

I still read slush, for the online ‘zine Ideomancer. I don’t get paid to do it. I’m not the person who makes the final editorial decisions. I am just the Cerberus at the gate, the person you have to get past to get to the people who will actually decide if we are going to publish you.

And they reject most of what I send up, because I don’t actually have to love everything I pass along. I just have to get to the end and not roll my eyes.

I’m going to be candid. The eyeroll is when I reject. It’s my red line of death. (Damon Knight used to draw a line on critique manuscripts to indicate the point at which he rejected them.)

The moment I send a story back whence it came is the moment when I take a breath and think, “Why am I reading this?”

The main thing an editor cares about is if the story keeps her reading.

And that’s it. That’s all you have to do. You’re not being graded on a curve. You’re not being graded pass/fail. You are not, in fact, being graded.

In other words, you don’t have to be “good enough.” There is no such thing as good enough. It doesn’t matter what your writing group is doing, either: this is not about peer promotion; it’s about entertainment.

If you can entertain, you get the job.

If you can’t… the job goes to somebody who can. Because the slush reader’s job is to anticipate the entertainment reader. The end consumer. The guy who buys the book.

That reader is an entirely selfish beast, you see, and he doesn’t owe the writer anything. An inconvenient fact, and one I find a tremendous frustration, but there you go. He’s the one with the money in his pocket; he is completely in control of the relationship.

This doesn’t mean that you should let him run your life, though. Because this is where artistic integrity comes in.

As a writer, you have to be able to set limits on what you are or are not willing to do. I personally would recommend not writing anything you’re not sufficiently passionate about to really want to write.

And readers, in addition to being fickle, are psychic.

They can tell if you don’t care. Not-caring is boring. And if the slush reader is bored, the regular reader is going to be bored too.

The bad news is, not-caring is not the only form of being boring. My slush is full of stories about which the writer obviously cares deeply. Those may be unpublishable for a variety of other reasons.

As a slush reader, I have a list of other things that I have come to find boring. Preachiness is boring. Predictability is boring. Twist endings are boring.

Most of the things aspiring writers do to punch up the beginning of a story are boring. (Explosions, sex, shocking revelations, the inevitable heat death of the universe.) All that stuff is boring.

So what’s a writer to do?

Here’s the counterintuitive thing. A story can be incredibly engaging from word one, even if it starts with a great big wodge of exposition.

Because what pulls us into the story is the narrative urgency, the drive, and the disconnect. The little mystery, the incongruity… and the writer’s voice. That’s the dirty secret: what keeps you reading, as an editor, is whether or not the writer can rub words together.

The good news is, this is a learnable skill for most people. Just like juggling. And just like juggling, it’s not easy. And requires years of practice.

A lucky few come in gifted in terms of voice, but they generally have other problems–and their problems may be harder to address, because it’s my completely unscientific experience that those writers start selling sooner, and so may have less motivation to push themselves and keep pushing.

Voice, in other words, is the thing that emerges when one has written one’s million words for the trunk. (Mine was considerably more than a million. Just so you know.) The horrible thing about the million words is that you can’t write them expressly for the trunk. You never learn that way, just writing bad words. You have to push for the best words, bleed for them, train yourself to exceed your current limits.

It’s hard.

And as far as I know, there is no shortcut.

But there is that other thing I mentioned. The disconnect. The incongruity. It’s not the lake of blood or the masturbating vampire on page one that will keep a reader engaged in the story. (Actually, come to think of it, a masturbating vampire might just do the trick. I don’t see those every day. [Every slush reader in the business is cursing my name right now, FYI.])

What I mean is, what pulls a slush reader into a story is a certain vividness, of prose and image, of character and action. And that little thing that niggles, that you have to keep reading, to find out about.

Column: Bears Examine #3 by Elizabeth Bear

I come not to satirize Truesdale, but to bury him.

When Bill Schafer asked me to write these columns, he also mentioned that he’d like it if I could be as outrageous and topical and argumentative and controversial as possible. I’m honestly a pretty phlegmatic soul about most things, and I cautioned him that I wasn’t sure how much of that I could manage, really.

Well, you know. I could talk about the Hugo Ballot, and whose fault it is that there aren’t many women on it (1). And the Philip K. Dick Award, and why there aren’t many men on it. (2)

I could talk about how the Hugos are decided by a small group of dedicated fans of a certain age, who have well-established favorites, and who have a lock on the award for as long as they continue voting, because they are the ones voting. I could talk about the apparent trend that books nominated for the Hugos are those released in hardcover, and the perception that women writers are more likely to be released in paperback. I could speculate on whether this is due to their readerships, the coincidence of editorial tastes, the sort of topics that women writers trend to, the business models of the publishing houses that feature a preponderance of women writers, or the intersection of all of the above.

I could talk about why Chris Moriarty isn’t in hardcover, say.

I could talk about my inexpressible relief that Dave Truesdale can’t be arsed to read my books, especially when he considers calling some of the top women writers in SFF a bunch of pussies to be somehow satirical. I could talk about Adrienne Martini’s apparently bottomless ignorance of the Hugo nominating process. I could talk about whether or not a major genre magazine is undermining its credibility by featuring a columnist who by his own declaration isn’t a “writer.”

I could suggest that, as a genre, or a critical discussion, or whatever, what we really need is some satirists who are actually, you know, funny.

I could.

You know, I could, really. I could go on for hours. With minimal provocation.

But who the hell cares? I’d be bored before I got to the bottom of the page, and so would you (3). Talk about beating your dead horses.

So, in the spirit of flagellating corpses, I’d rather talk about zombies.

Now, zombies (4) are cool. They rot. And drop bits all over the place. And they shuffle, so you can run faster than they can(5), but they’re pretty much inexorable and implacable. What with being already dead.

And they want to eat your braiiiiinnnnssssss.

In some ways, I think of zombies as being like the creepy old man at the end of the block, when you were a kid. Remember him? The one in the paint-splattered medium-gray trousers cut off at the knee and the mustard-stained v-neck T-shirt, with his hair combed over his glossy age-spotted pate? Probably with a large carbuncle on the side of his head?

The one who would come lurching out his front door, around the patio wall, in his black socks and carpet slippers, shouting “You kids get off of my laaaaaaaaaawnnnn?”

Pretty much just like a zombie. Which is to say, carrying out a reflexive action (bellowing, and possibly waving a rake) without really any consideration of the whyfor or howfor of it. You step on his lawn. He bellows. You run, laughing like a fool.

He never seems to catch on that all the fun in tromping across his lawn is to get him to come out and bellow.

Zombies are the same way. They don’t have a lot of higher processing functions (after all, their brains are mostly mush. Or maggots. Which is why they want to eat yours.) They don’t move very fast. So you can outrun them. They’re only really worrisome in groups, because then they can surround or overwhelm you.

Well, admittedly, some zombies will ambush.

But under most circumstances, if you’ve got just one zombie, or a small group, your best bet is either to keep your distance, or maybe whack them with a cricket bat. That’s kind of violent, though, and you have to get close to them to do it. And if you don’t behead them with the first blow, then you’re stuck in close combat.

You can’t reason with a zombie. As I mentioned above, they react reflexively. They just shuffle around looking for brains to suck, and you’re not going to get much sense out of one.

Besides, in going in there with that cricket bat, you run the risk of zombie bite. Which, untreated, can turn you into a zombie too, mindlessly flailing about and bellowing BRAINS and YOU KIDS STAY THE HELL OUT OF MY ROOOOSEEEEBUUUSHES! And that’s where the real trouble starts.

Too much of that, and then you have zombie packs.

And besides, the damn things are already dead. They can’t adapt. They can’t process new ideas. (6) They’re hopelessly stuck at the moment of their demise. Brain-death.

So, okay, not great conversationalists. And they are, of course, dead. And rotting. (7)

And a bit stinky.

But they’re still cool.

They’re cool because they serve as a metaphor for the destructive influence of conventional society, among other things. For the perniciousness of programmed behavior and ossified thought patterns.

They provoke the protagonist into motion, and provide the impetus for him (or her) to get it together. To change his (or her) life. To win the boy (or girl) of his (or her) dreams.

To take action. To stand up.

To become a hero.

To take that swing. To become a leader. To get involved.

Also, bonking them on the head can be a pretty fantastic workout. Cricket bats aren’t light.

***

(1) Eleven women in seventy-six slots, of which two are nominated for fiction, and some of whom share their nomination with a man, but in the spirit of putting my thumb on the scale as ridiculously as possible, I counted each of those as a whole nomination. It comes to 14.5%. If you count the JWC not-a-Hugo-Award.

(2) Two out of seven, or 28.6%.

(3) Bet you a shiny penny.

(4) Unlike internet slapfights

(5) Unless of course they are the superspeed zombies from 28 Days Later, which are all zippy and can run you down! They’re highly evolved zombies! They’re way cool, but they are not germane to the satire.

(6) Except for George Romero zombies. Which are also way cool, and also not germane to the satire.

(7) Some of them, such as Michael Jackson, can dance. However, bits may still fall off occasionally.

Column: HARVESTING THE DARKNESS #2: FULLY STOKE(re)D by Norman Partridge

Last weekend I picked up my third Bram Stoker award. Well, not really. Joe Lansdale picked it up for me. The truth is that I’ve never been present to accept any of the Stokers I’ve won. The first two times, Lucy Taylor picked them up. That was okay, because I’m sure most folks in the audience were damn near ecstatic to find themselves staring at Lucy instead of me. Joe’s another story, though. Sure, Lansdale’s a handsome enough guy… but, hell, I’ve still got all my hair.

Still, I was pleased to see my short novel Dark Harvest get the award for Long Fiction this year. If you read my first column here at Subterranean Online, you know it’s a book that’s close to my heart in a few different ways. That makes receiving Haunted House #3 pretty sweet. Toss in the fact that it comes from my peers… well, that’s sweeter. Fact is I wish I’d been in Toronto to belly up to the bar and raise a tall glass of semper fi with all of you.

Of course, said sweetness had about as much staying power as the Costo-sized heavyweights who pass for contenders these days. That was my own fault, because I checked the buzz on a few message boards after I heard the news. It wasn’t long before the bitching and moaning started up, re: The Stoker Process, and everyone gathered ’round for a good catfight.

Ever notice how that happens? And how those threads endure? Man, some of them remind me of Marvin Hagler in his prime. They go the full fifteen rounds. Threads in which the merits of books and writers are intelligently debated–those die a quick death. But give folks a chance to rail against the powers that be, or work up a head of steam about how much better things in this disordered mess of a world would work if only they could don a metal suit and reign unchallenged à la Victor Von Doom… well, do that and you’re good for ten pages and a couple thousand views, for sure and for certain.

And right about here I’m tempted to haul a 60 Minutes crew straight down the rabbit hole to Message Board Land, where the Internet warriors dwell, and go a few rounds myself. But Bill Schafer only allows me 1,000 words for this gig, so we’ll have to raincheck that action. Let’s get back to those threads chewing over the Stokers and the awards process itself, since that’s what this column’s about. See, in the midst of the weekend hubbub, some interesting questions managed to rear their heads, and I’d like to take a crack at them.

Since we’re talking Stokers, an award decided by popular vote, much of the discussion focused on the responsibility of the voters. Tote up the final ballot this year, you’ve got just over three dozen works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. That’s a lot of ground to cover, and a lot of money to spend if the membership’s ponying up dollars for books. The question is: how many voters actually make that trip, and–realistically–should they be expected to?

To find an answer, let’s slap together three quick scenarios:

1. It’s a perfect world. Everybody reads everything and votes accordingly.
2. Nothing’s perfect… but, hey, everyone tries. Members read what they can, and–since they’re professionals and know the field–they cast some votes based on factors other than the particular work in question. Say, a writer’s entire body of work, or career.
3. Are you kidding, idiot? The world sucks. The most popular kids win every goddamn time. Welcome to Horror High School.

Of course, the truth lies somewhere in the gray areas between those scenarios. And the truth isn’t consistent, either. It varies from year to year. So what can be done to make things better, and move us toward that ideal in Scenario #1?

Someone suggested that nominated works be made available to the HWA membership, perhaps as PDF files. And, hey, that might work in some categories–say a short story. But I don’t see it happening with longer pieces. These collections, novels, and novellas represent the sweat of each creator’s brow. The nominees worked hard on them. Personally, I can’t see an author giving up what might be the best work of his or her career in pursuit of an award. That doesn’t sit right with me… and I didn’t do that with Dark Harvest. My reasoning was simple. Mostly, it just didn’t seem fair to the readers who were supporting my work by popping forty bucks for the hardcover over at Cemetery Dance.

And even if I had gone the PDF route, and every other nominee had, too… remember, we’re talking more than three dozen works showing up in members’ email boxes in the relatively short time between final ballot and vote casting. Me, I work a joe job and write–there are some years where I don’t finish that many books. In other words: Sorry, Charlie, there’s too much tortoise in the equation, not near enough hare.

So sweep that idea under the door, and what alternatives are left? Well, there are always juried awards like World Fantasy and the IHG. To tell the truth, the longer I’m in the business, the more I appreciate awards of this sort, where a small group of professionals accept the reading chores for a year, narrow the field, make the calls for winners and losers. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who signs up for that kind of a deal is really going above and beyond the call of duty, and I certainly respect those who give it a go.

Of course, the downside to juries is that they can pretty easily fall victim to the predilections (if not the downright prejudices) of their memberships. Remember, these are small groups, and four or five individuals can easily find themselves leaning in a direction that may not be representative of an entire organization. Conversely, a small group can split wide and hard, too. Hey, if you’ve hung around long enough, you’ve probably heard about that happening between the fantasy- and horror-based judges for the World Fantasy Award a time or two.

But no method is perfect. And maybe that’s the only answer I can scratch up for you right now. I will tell you this: when it comes to this year’s Long Fiction category, I was pleased to find myself in fine company. The other Stoker nominees included Kim Newman, whose particular blend of horror and pop culture I’ve admired for years. Laird Barron, a hot new talent whose work I’ve been following in F&SF. Chris Golden and Jim Moore, two of the hardest working professionals I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. And Fran Friel… well, I don’t know Fran’s work. Not yet. But her inclusion in this category is enough to make me order a copy of her book, and I look forward to reading it.

And for me, that’s ultimately what awards should be about.

The tale, not he who tells it.

For a writer, that’s the place the work gets done. You fight your battle on the page. That’s where you need to ask yourself if you measure up–to the best that you can do, or to the best that can be done–because that’s the only place you can make a difference.

Right there. On paper.

It’s the same place you’ll find your real reward.

Column: Me and Lucifer by Mike Resnick

Lucifer Jones was born one evening back in the late 1970s. I was trading videotapes with a number of other people—stores hadn’t started renting them yet, and this was the only way to increase your collection at anything above a snail’s pace—and one of my correspondents asked for a copy of She, with Ursula Andress, which happened to be playing on Cincinnati television.

I looked in my Maltin Guide and found that She ran 117 minutes. Now, this was back in the dear dead days when everyone knew that Beta was the better format, and it just so happened that the longest Beta tape in existence at the time was two hours. So I realized that I couldn’t just put the tape on and record the movie, commercials and all, because the tape wasn’t long enough. Therefore, like a good correspondent/trader, I sat down, controls in hand, to dub the movie (which I had never seen before) and edit out the commercials as they showed up.

About fifteen minutes into the film Carol entered the video room, absolutely certain from my peals of wild laughter that I was watching a Marx Brothers festival that I had neglected to tell her about. Wrong. I was simply watching one of the more inept films ever made.

And after it was over, I got to thinking: if they could be that funny by accident, what if somebody took those same tried-and-true pulp themes and tried to be funny on purpose?

So I went to my typewriter—this was back in the pre-computer days—and wrote down the most oft-abused African stories that one was likely to find in old pulp magazines and B movies: the elephants’ graveyard, Tarzan, lost races, mummies, white goddesses, slave-trading, what-have-you. When I got up to twelve, I figured I had enough for a book…but I needed a unifying factor.

Enter Lucifer Jones.

Africa today isn’t so much a dark and mysterious continent as it is an impoverished and hungry one, so I decided to set the book back in the 1920s, when things were wilder and most of the romantic legends of the pulps and B movies hadn’t been thoroughly disproved.

Who was the most likely kind of character to roam to all points of Africa’s compass? A missionary.

What was funny about a missionary? Nothing. So Lucifer became a con man who presented himself as a missionary. (As he is fond of explaining it, his religion is “a little something me and God whipped up betwixt ourselves of a Sunday afternoon”.)

Now, the stories themselves were easy enough to plot: just take a traditional pulp tale and stand it on its ear. But anyone could do that: I decided to add a little texture by having Lucifer narrate the book in the first person, and to make his language a cross between the almost-poetry of Trader Horn and the fractured English of Pogo Possum, and in truth I think there is more humor embedded in the language than in the plots.

Who but Lucifer, upon seeing Lord Carnavon’s caravan bringing the contents of King Tut’s 3,000-year-old-tomb to Cairo, could ask, “Just settling the estate now, are they?”

Who but Lucifer could lose a sporting wager in quite this manner: “My money held out just fine until I got to Durban, which had a mule track, horses being too expensive for that part of the country. I picked out a likely-looking one named Saint Andrew, placed my money down, and watched him go into the final turn leading by two lengths when a pride of lions raced out of the bush and attacked the field. The jockeys, most of whom were faster than their mounts anyway, jumped off and raced to safety, but none of the mules made it as far as the homestretch. The track, claiming that this was an act of God, refused to refund the bets, even though I, representing God, pointed out that what it mostly was was an act of lions.”

Who but Lucifer could describe the African wilderness thus: “Well, we walked and we walked and then we walked some more. I kept assuming that Cairo or Marrakech would pop into view any second, but she assured me that we were still in South Africa, and that we weren’t heading no farther than Nyasaland, which I hadn’t never heard of before, and which I now began picturing as a great huge field of grass with a bunch of baby nyasas hopping around on it.”

Because this was a labor of love, I also started putting in a bunch of references that would be clear only to a tiny segment of the audience. For example, in Adventures Tarzan is Lord Bloomstoke, the name Edgar Rice Burroughs originally chose for him before changing it to Lord Greystoke; every character in Casablanca is named after a car, in honor of Claude Rains (Lt. Renault) and Sydney Greenstreet (Signore Ferrari), and so on. A number of the details were historically accurate: Bousbir really was the biggest whorehouse in the world in 1925, there really was a nude painting of Nellie Willoughby hanging over the Long Bar in the New Stanley Hotel in the 1920s, the Mangbetu really were cannibals.

Then, since I had leaned rather heavily on the pulps for my plotlines, I started borrowing characters from the B movies: The Rodent is Peter Lorre, Major Dobbins is Sydney Greenstreet, the

Dutchman is Walter Slezak, and so on; every one of my favorite scoundrels made it intact from the screen to the page.

Finally, I needed a con man who was even better at his job than Lucifer, lest the book end too soon, and so I came up with Erich von Horst, who makes very few appearances—everyone else in a Lucifer Jones book keeps showing up time and again in the oddest places—but lays a number of economic time bombs across the continent that Lucifer keeps encountering at the least opportune moments.

The most fun I ever had in my life was the two months that I sat at the typewriter working on Adventures. I’ve done books of more lasting import, and I’ve created characters of far more depth and complexity, but during that period I fell, hopelessly and eternally, in love with Lucifer Jones.

I sold the book to Signet, which was publishing all my science fiction novels at the time. They didn’t quite know what to do with it, so they sat on it for a couple of years and finally released it in 1985, labeling it Science Fiction, which it most decidedly is not, and implying on the cover that Doctor Lucifer Jones (they left out the Honorable Right Reverend that comes before the Doctor) was just another adventurous version of Doctor Indiana Jones, which he most certainly is not.

The book came out, never found its audience, and died a silent death. Oh, a few mainstream newspapers found it—one New York reviewer called it the greatest parody of the adventure novel ever written—but for the most part it sank without a trace.

I had plotted out four more Lucifer Jones books, one on each continent (each, like Adventures, would end with the various national governments acting in concert to kick him off the continent). Exploits would take place in Asia from 1926 to 1931, and would include an Insidious Oriental Dentist, a Chinese detective with too many sons, a hidden kingdom where no one grows old, an abominable snowman, a poker game for the ownership of the Great Wall, and the like; Encounters would take place in Europe from 1931 to 1934, and would boast vampires, werewolves, the theft of the Crown Jewels, the discovery of Atlantis, the Clubfoot of Notre Dame, and similar incidents; Hazards would take place in South America from 1934 to 1938, amid all its lost cities, tropical jungles, and strange religious rites; and Intrigues would take place in the South Pacific and Australia just before—and possibly a few months after—Pearl Harbor (for which I imagine Lucifer was probably inadvertently responsible). If I needed still more, Lucifer’s grandfather, Nicodemus Jones, could have willed him a manuscript, describing his adventures in our own Wild West; and after 15 years of roaming the world, Lucifer could be forgiven for taking a second shot at making his fortune in Africa.

Oh, I had it all planned out, all right—except that Signet didn’t want anything but true-blue science fiction, and at the time I had no other publishers. Over the next few years I moved over to Tor and Ace, and while I still longed to get back to Lucifer Jones, I was turning out serious, prestigious, award-winning stuff at all lengths, and it never occurred to me to ask if anyone was interested in him. In point of fact, I thought I was the only person who even remembered Lucifer Jones.

Until 1991, when Brian Thomsen of Warners asked me to write a book for him. I explained that I would love to—Brian and I had been friends for years, and I’d always wanted to work with him—but I was under contract to both Tor and Ace, and between them they held options for all my science fiction.

Then I paused. “Well, I’m free to sell Lucifer Jones,” I added, half expecting him to ask who the hell Lucifer Jones was.

“I loved Adventures!” exclaimed Brian, and we were in business.

Sort of.

First, Warners decreed that for the price they were paying me, they needed more than a dozen of Lucifer’s adventures. So I suggested to Brian that I give them a super-thick book: I would

(minimally) revise and polish the original Adventures, add Exploits and Encounters, hand in 225,000 words, and call it The Chronicles of Lucifer Jones. He cleared it with his higher-ups and the response was positive.

Then I contacted Signet, which had reverted all twelve of my serious science fiction novels to me, and asked them to revert Adventures. They refused, declaring that they planned to reprint it.

So I told Brian, okay, we’ll just go with 140,000 words of all-new stuff. He went back to the contract department, explained the new scheme, and got me a contract a week later.

And on the day he delivered the contract, Signet decided to revert Adventures after all.

Okay, I said, let’s go back to our original concept.

I can’t, said Brian. I just spent a week telling them why going with all-new material was better than going with the original idea; I can’t walk right back in and tell them I’ve changed my mind.

And by the way, he added, we need a dragon.

A dragon, I asked.

You and I may know that Lucifer is in the spirit of the old Pulps and B-movies, explained Brian, but the publisher wants something fantastic on the cover. The deal only goes down if we can run an illo of a dragon.

I had my doubts, but I took a shot at it, and gave my Oriental dentist a block-long fire-breathing dragon named Cuddles. And you know what? It didn’t make a bit of difference to the book; Lucifer is such a liar anyway that one more lie just adds flavor to the story. And if you want to believe in the dragon, more power to you.

So now I had Exploits and Encounters coming out in one volume from Warners, which would be entitled Lucifer Jones. But when we still thought that the book would include Adventures, I had sold Brian a few other reverted titles, and now he was bought up for the year, and it looked like my spruced-up, revised Adventures would never see print—or at least, not anytime soon.

John Betancourt and Dean Wesley Smith to the rescue.

John, one of Lucifer’s most fervent admirers, said his Wildside Press would love to publish Adventures in hardcover, and before the dust had cleared he had agreed to publish matching signed, numbered, luxury hardcover editions of Exploits and Encounters as well. The revised Adventures came out in June of 1992, Exploits in February of 1993, and Encounters in October of 1994.

As for Dean, he had asked to serialize The Oracle Trilogy when he began Pulphouse Weekly…but as time dragged on and it became Pulphouse Monthly, he missed one deadline after another for beating the book versions out. Finally he asked if I had anything I could substitute for them. I suggested that every one of Lucifer’s chapters would make a stand-alone short story, found that Dean was another die-hard Lucifer fan, and we were in business: he agreed to run a Lucifer Jones story every month until all three books’ worth of them—33 stories in all—were used up. When all of them have been published, I’ll be writing a new Lucifer Jones tale for each issue, Dean will print them, and John will put them out in a limited edition that matches the first three before they go to mass market.

So there you have it: thanks to some editorial friends I never knew he had, Lucifer lives again. And this time he’s going to stick around awhile.

###

The above was written about 13 years ago, for Pulphouse. And it didn’t quite come to pass. Pulphouse did manage to print most of the stories from Adventures before going belly-up. At the time I was contracted six or seven books ahead, and I stayed contracted years ahead, and though he was far and away my favorite of my creations, Lucifer went onto the back burner and stayed there for ten long years.

Then in 2004, Lou Anders began editing the reborn Argosy and agreed to run a Lucifer story every other issue. So though it took him a decade to cross the Atlantic, Lucifer Jones finally set foot on the South American continent. Then, like Pulphouse before it, Argosy folded.

But another Lucifer fan, Chris Roberson, offered to run the second story I had sold to Argosy, “The Island of Annoyed Souls”, in his anthology Adventure. Finally Bill Schafer got in touch with me and offered to start running Lucifer regularly in Subterranean. He published “Chartreuse Mansions” a couple of issues back, and now Lucifer’s appearing in the same venue twice in a row for the first time in 13 years.

With a little luck, he’ll stick around long enough to get thrown off still another continent.

Fiction: A Plain Tale from Our Hills by Bruce Sterling

Little Flora ate straw as other children eat bread.

No matter how poor our harvests, we never lacked for straw. So Flora feasted every day, and outgrew every boy and girl her age. In summer, when the dust-storms off the plains scourge our hills, the children sicken. Flora thrived. Always munching, the tot was as round as a barrel and scarcely seemed to sweat.

It was Captain Kusak and his young wife Baratiya who had volunteered to breed her. Baratiya was as proud of her little prodigy as if she had given birth to the moon. Bold strokes of this kind are frequently discussed in Government, yet rarely crowned with success. No one should have resented Baratiya’s excellent luck in the venture. Still, certain women in our Hill Station took her attitude badly.

Kusak should have done something useful and tactful about the matter, because he had also hoped and planned for a new kind of child, one fit to live more lightly on our stricken Earth. Captain Kusak tried to speak some common-sense to his wife, I think; but he was clumsy, so this made her stubborn. Baratiya lost friends and her social prospects darkened. She obsessed so single-mindedly about the child that even her husband grew estranged from her.

Baratiya is more sensible now that other such children have been born to us. At the time, though, this woman was the talk of our Station.

You see, though motherhood is the golden key to humanity’s future, it can be a leaden burden in the present day. And as for the past–well! Many of us scarcely understand that a mere half-century ago, this world was crowded.

Certain grand people existed in those greater, louder, richer days. These moguls knew that a general ruin was coming to the Earth–for they were clever people. They feared our planet’s great calamity, and they schemed to avert it, or at least to adapt to the changes. They failed at both efforts, of course. The heat rose so suddenly that the rains dwindled and the mass of mankind starved in a space of years.

Rich or poor, the ancients perished quickly, but some few of that elite had a fierce appetite for living. Among them was a certain grand lady, a pioneer founder of our own Hill Station. Privately, we call this persistent woman “Stormcrow.”

I myself have nothing to say against her ladyship–if not for her, I would have no post within Government. However: if a little girl who eats straw differs from the rest of womankind, then a woman who never seems to age is even more remarkable.

Our Stormcrow is black-eyed, black-haired, slender, brown, clever, learned and elegant, and, taken all in all, a dazzling creature. Stormcrow sleeps a great deal. She pecks at her food like a bird. She lives with her servants in a large and silent compound with shuttered blinds. Yet Stormcrow takes a knowing hand in all we do here.

That old woman has no more morality than a rabbit. You had only to mention her name over the tea-and-oatmeal for every younger woman in the room to pull a sari over her head straightaway. Yet Stormcrow was witty and bright, and astoundingly well-informed–for Stormcrow, despite the world’s many vicissitudes, owned a computer. She invoked her frail machine only once a day, using sunlight and a sheet of black glass.

That machine was and is our Station’s greatest marvel. Its archives are vast. Even if her own past glories had vanished, Stormcrow still possessed the virtual shadow of that lost world.

They knew a great many fine things, back then. They never did our world much good through the sophistical things that they knew, but they learned astonishing skills: especially just toward the end. So: given her strange means and assets, Stormcrow was a pillar of our community. I once saw Stormcrow take a teenage girl, just a ragged, starving, wild-eyed, savage girl from off the plains, and turn her into something like a demi-goddess–but that story is not this one.

We therefore return to Captain Kusak, a brusque man with a simple need of some undivided female attention. Kusak’s gifted baby had overwhelmed his wife. So Kusak’s male eye wandered: and Stormcrow took note of this, and annexed Kusak. Captain Kusak was one of our best soldiers, an earnest and capable man who had won the respect of his peers. When Stormcrow appeared publicly on Kusak’s sturdy arm, it was as if she were annexing, not just him, but our whole society.

Being the creature she was, Stormcrow was quite incapable of concealing this affair. Quite the opposite: she publicly doted on Kusak. She walked with him openly, called him pet names, tempted him with special delicacies, dressed him in past ways.… Stormcrow was clawing herself from her world of screen-phantoms into the simpler, honest light of our present day.

Decent people were of course appalled by this. Appalled and titillated. It does not reflect entirely well on us that we spoke so much about the scandal. But we did.

Baratiya seemed at first indifferent to developments. The absence of her tactless husband allowed her to surrender completely to her child-obsession. Baratiya favored everyone she knew with every scrap of news about the child’s digestion and growth rates. However, even if the child of a woman’s loins is a technical masterpiece, that is not the end of the world. Not even raw apocalypse can end this world, which is something we hill folk understand that our forebears did not.

Blinded with motherly pride, Baratiya overlooked her husband’s infatuation, but some eight lady friends took pains to fully explain the situation to her. Proud Baratiya was not entirely lost to sense and reason. She saw the truth plainly: she was in a war. A war between heritage and possibility.

When Kusak returned home to Baratiya, an event increasingly rare, he was much too kind and considerate to her, and he spoke far too much about incomprehensible things. He had seen visions in Stormcrow’s ancient screens: ideas and concepts which were once of the utmost consequence, but which no longer constitute the world. Baratiya could never compete with Stormcrow in such arcane matters. Still, Baratiya understood her husband much better than Kusak understood her. In fact, Baratiya knew Captain Kusak better than Kusak knew anything.

So she nerved herself for the fight.

Certain consequential and outstanding people run our Government. If they send a captain’s wife a nicely printed invitation to eat, drink, dance, sing, and to “mingle with society,” then it behooves her to attend.

The singing and the dancing are veneers for the issue of real consequence: the “mingling with society,” in other words, reproduction. Our gentleman soldiers are frequently absent, guarding the caravans. Our ladies are often widowed through illness and misfortune. Government regards our grimly modest population, and Government does its duty.

So, if the Palace sets-to in a public celebration, there will reliably be pleasant music for a dance, special food, many people–and many private rooms.

“I can’t attend this fine ball at the capital,” said Baratiya to her husband, “the dust and heat are still too much for little Florrie. But that shouldn’t stop you from venturing.”

Captain Kusak said that he would go for the sake of civic duty. He then saw to the fancy clothes he had begun to affect. Baratiya knew then that he was feigning dislike and eager to go the ball. Kusak planned to go to the capital to revel in the eerie charms of Stormcrow–shamefully wasting his vigor on a relic who could not bear children.

If one of our Hill women dresses in her finest garments, that generally means a patchwork dress. Certain fabrics of the past are brightly dyed and nearly indestructible. They were also loomed and stitched by machines instead of human hands, so they have qualities we cannot match. Whenever a salvage caravan comes from a dead city during the cooler months, there is general excitement. Robbing the dead is always a great thrill, though never a healthy one.

In daily life, our hill women mostly favor saris, a simple unstitched length of cloth. Saris are practical garments, fit for our own time. Still, our women do boast one kind of fine dress which the ancients never had: women’s hard-weather gear.

Stiffened and hooded and polished, tucked and rucked, our hard-weather gear will shed rain, dust, high wind, mud, mosquitoes–it would shed snow, if we ever had snow. Baratiya was young, but she was not a soldier’s wife for nothing: she knew how to dress.

When Baratiya was through stitching her new ball-gown, it was more than simply strong and practical: it was a true creation. Its stern and hardy look was exactly the opposite of the frail, outdated finery that Stormcrow always wore.

The road to the capital is likely our safest road. Just past the famous ravine bridge–a place of legendary floods and ambushes–the capital road becomes an iron railway. So if the new monsoons are not too heavy, a lone woman in a sturdy ox cart can reach the railhead and travel on in nigh-perfect security.

Baratiya took this bold course of action, and arrived at the Palace ball. She wore her awesome new riding habit. She arrived in high time to find her husband drinking fortified wine, with Stormcrow languishing on his arm and pecking at a plate of rice. This sight made Baratiya flush, so that she looked even more gorgeous.

Baratiya deposited her invitation, opened an appointment card and loudly demanded meat.

The Palace is a place of strict etiquette. If a man and a woman at a Palace ball fill their appointment card and retire to a private niche, they are expected to do their duty to the future of mankind. In order to mate with a proper gusto, the volunteers are given our richest foodstuffs: pork, beef.

Much more often than you think, after gorging on that flesh, a man and woman will simply talk together in their private room. It is hard work to breed with a stranger. The fact that this conduct is Government-approved does not make it more appealing. Mankind is indeed a crooked timber, and no Government has ever built us quite straight.

Stormcrow instantly caught the challenging eye of Baratiya, and Stormcrow knew that Baratiya’s shouted demand for a feast was a purposeful gesture–aimed not so much at the men, who crowded toward the loud new arrival–but a gesture aimed at herself. Stormcrow was caught at disadvantage, not only by the suddenness of the wife’s appearance, but by the stark fact that Captain Kusak seemed to lack much appetite for her.

The old woman’s overstated eagerness to enter a private Palace room with Kusak had dented his confidence. Kusak too had been drinking too much–for he was shy, and troubled by what he was about to do. He was a decent man at heart, and he somehow sensed the inadequacy of his paramour.

More to the point, Kusak had never seen his young wife so attractive. Those fact that other men were so visibly eager for her company made Kusak stare, and, staring, he found himself fascinated. He could scarcely believe that this startling orgiast, shouting for meat and wine in her thunderous gown, was his threadbare little homebody.

Stormcrow smiled in the face of her misfortune and redoubled her efforts to charm. But Stormcrow had overplayed her position. She could not hold Kusak’s eye, much less his hand.

Kusak shouldered his way through the throng around his wife.

“I fear that you come too late, Captain Kusak,” said Baratiya, swilling from her wine-cup. Kusak, his voice trembling, asked her to grant him a private meeting. In response, she showed him her engagement card, already signed with the names of four sturdy male volunteers.

Kusak begged her to reconsider these appointments.

Then she replied: “Then show me your own program, dear!”

Kusak handed his engagement card to her, with his mustached face impassive but his shoulders slumping like a thief’s. Baratiya said nothing, but she smiled cruelly, dipped a feather pen in the public inkwell and overwrote Stormcrow’s famous name. She defaced it coolly and deliberately, leaving only her ladyship’s time-tattered initials.… which are “R” and “K.”

Man and wife then linked arms and advanced to a private verandah. They emerged from it only to eat. They publicly demanded and ate the most forbidden meat of all, the awesome fare the pioneers ate when they first founded our Hill Station. It is not pork, neither is it beef. But a man and woman will eat that meat when there is no other choice but death: when their future survival together means more to them than any inhibition from their past. In the plain, honest life of our Hills, it is our ultimate pledge.

A man and woman with a child are of one flesh. When they take a step so grave and public as eating human meat, even Government sees fit to respect that. So wife and husband ate from their own special platter, with their faces burning and their hands trembling with rekindled passion. They ate together with a single mind, like two people stirring the same flame.

Then Stormcrow, who will never again gorge herself in such a way, turned toward me in the lamplight. She confessed to me that she knew herself well and truly beaten.

Then she looked me in the eye and confided: “In the very first days of Creation, a woman could just hand a man an apple and make him perfectly happy. Now this is a twice-fallen world. We women have truly been kicked out of Paradise–and as for the men, they’ve learned nothing.”

I thought otherwise, as is common with me, but I had nothing to say to console her. So I simply stroked the pretty henna patterns on her hands.

Fiction: A Season of Broken Dolls by Caitlin R Kiernan

Part I

August 14, 2027

Sabit’s the one with a hard-on for stitchwork, not me. It is not exactly (or at all) my particular realm of expertise, not my cuppa, not my scene–as the beatniks used to say, back there in those happy Neolithic times. I mean the plethora of Lower Manhattan flesh-art dives like Guro/Guro or Twist or that pretentious little shitstain way down on Pearl–Corpus Ex Machina–the one that gets almost as much space in the police blotters as in the glossy snip-art rags.

Me, I’m still laboring alone or nearly so in the Dark Ages, and she never lets me forget it. My unfashionable and unprofitable preoccupation with mere canvas and paint, steel and plaster, all that which has been deemed demodé, passé, Post-Relevant, all that which is fit only to fill up musty old museum vaults and public galleries, gathering more dust even than my career.

You still write on a goddamn keyboard, for chris’sakes, she laughs. You’re the only woman I ever fucked made being a living fossil a goddamn point of pride. And then Sabit checks for my pulse–two fingers pressed gently to a wrist or the side of my throat–bcause, hey, maybe I’m not a living fossil at all. Maybe I’m that other kind, like Pollack and Mondrian, Henry Moore and poor old Man Ray. No, no, no, the blood’s still flowing sluggishly along, she smiles and lights a cigarette. Too bad. Maybe there’s hope for you yet, my love.

Sabit likes to talk almost as much as she likes to watch. It’s not as though the bitch has a mark on her hide anywhere, not as though she’s anything but a tourist with a hard-on, a fetishist who can not ever get enough of her kink. Prick her for a crimson bead and the results would come back same as mine, 98% the same as any chimpanzee. She knows how much contempt is reserved in those quarters for tourists and trippers, but I think that only makes her more zealous. She exhales, and smoke lingers like a unearned halo about her face. I should have dumped her months ago, but I’m not as young as I used to be, and I’m just as addicted to sex as she is to nicotine and pills and stitchwork. She calls herself a poet, but she has never let me read a word she’s written, if she’s ever written a word.

I found her a year ago, almost a year ago, found her in a run-down titty bar getting fucked-up on vodka and laudanum and speed and the too-firm silicone breasts of women who might have been the real thing–even if their perfect boobs were not–or might only have been cheap japandroids. She followed me home, fifteen years my junior, and the more things change, the more things stay the way they were day before day before yesterday, day before I met Sabit and her slumberous Arabian eyes. My sloe-eyed stitch-fiend of a girlfriend, and I have her, and she has me, and we’re as happy as happy can be, and I pretend it means something more than orgasms and not being alone, something more than me annoying her and her taunting and insulting me.

Now she’s telling me there’s a new line-up down @ Corpus Ex Machina (hereafter known simply as CeM), and we have to be there tomorrow night. We have to be there, she says. The Trenton Group is showing, and last time the Trenton Group showed, there was almost a riot, so we have to be there. I have deadlines that have nothing whatsoever to do with that constantly revolving meat-market spectacle, and in a moment I’ll finish this entry & then I’ll tell her that, and she’ll tell me we have to be there, we have to be there, & there will be time to finish my articles later. There always is, & I’m never late. Never late enough to matter. I’ll go with her, bcause I do not trust her to go alone–not go alone and come back here again–she’ll tell me that, and she’ll be right as fucking rain. Her smug triumph, well that’s a given. Just as my obligatory refusal followed by inevitable, reluctant acquiescence is also a given. We play by the same rules every time. Now she’s on about some scandal @ Guro/Guro–chicanery and artifice, prosthetics, and she says, They’re all a bunch of gidding poseurs, the shitheels run that sorry dump. Someone ought to burn it to the ground for this. You know how to light a match I reply, & she rolls her dark eyes @ me.

No rain today. No rain since…June. The sky at noon is the color of rust, and I wish it were winter. Enough for now. Maybe she’ll shut up for 10 or 15 if I fuck her.

August 16, 2027

“You’re into that whole scene, right?” Which only shows to go once again that my editor still has her head rammed so far up her ass that her farts smell like toothpaste. But I said yeah, sure, bcause she wanted someone with cred on the Guro/Guro story, the stitch chicanery, allegations of fraud among the freaks, & what else was I supposed to say? I can’t remember the last time I had the nerve to turn down a paying assignment. Must have been years before I met Sabit, at least. So, yeah, I tagged along last night, just like she wanted–both of them wanted–she & she, but @ least I can say it’s work, and Berlin picked up the tab.

Sabit’s out, so I don’t have her yammering in my goddamn ear, an hour to myself, perhaps, half an hour, however long it takes her to get back with dinner. I wanted to put something down, something that isn’t in the notes and photos I’ve already filed with the pre-edit gleets. Fuck. I’ve been popping caps from Sabit’s pharmacopoeia all goddamn day long, I don’t even know what, the baby-blue ones she gets $300/two dozen from Peru, the ones she says calm her down but they’re not calming me down. They haven’t even dulled the edge, so far as I can tell.

But, anyway, there we were @ CeM, in the crowded Pearl St. warehouse passing itself off as a slaughterhouse or a zoo or an exhibition or what the fuck ever, and there’s this bird from Tokyo, and I never got her name, but she had eyes all the colors of peacock feathers, iridescent eyes, and she recognized me. Some monied bird with pretty peacock eyes. She’d read the series I wrote in ‘21 when the city finally gave up and let the sea have the subway. I read a lot, she said. I might have been a journalist myself, she said. That sort of shit. Thought she was going to ask me to sign a goddamn cocktail napkin. And I’m smiling & nodding yes, bcause that’s agency policy, be nice to the readers, don’t feed the pigeons, whatever. But I can’t take my eyes off the walls. The walls are new. They were just walls last time Sabit dragged me down to one of her snip affairs. Now they’re alive, every square inch, mottled shades of pink and gray and whatever you call that shade between pink and gray. Touch them (Sabit must have touched them a hundred times) and they twitch or sprout goosebumps. They sweat, those walls.

And the peacock girl was in one ear, and Sabit was in the other, the music so loud I was already getting a headache before my fourth drink, and I was trying to stop looking at those walls. Pig, Sabit told me later in the evening. It’s all just pig, and she sounded disappointed. Most of this is in the notes, though I didn’t say how unsettling I found those walls of skin. I save the revulsion for my own dime. Sabit says they’re working on adding functional genitalia and….fuck. I hear her at the door. Later, then. She has to shut up and go to sleep eventually.

August 16, 2027 (later, 11:47 p.m.)

Sabit came back with a bag full of Indian takeaway, when she’d gone out for sushi. I really couldn’t care less, one way or the other, these days food is only fucking food–curry or wasabi, but when I asked why she’d changed her mind, she just stared at me, eyes blank as a goddamn dead codfish, & shrugged. Then she was quiet all night long, & the last thing I need just now is Sabit Abbasi going all silent and creepy on me. She’s asleep, snoring bcause her sinuses are bad bcause she smokes too much. & I’m losing the momentum I needed to say anything more about what happened @ CeM on Sat. night. It’s all fading, like a dream.

I’ve been reading one of Sabit’s books, The Breathing Composition (Welleran Smith, 2025), something from those long-ago days when the avant-garde abomination of stitch & snip was still hardly more than nervous rumor & theory & the wishful thinking of a handful of East Coast art pervs. I don’t know what I was looking for, if it was just research for the article, don’t know what I thought I might find–or what any of this has to do with Sat. nite. Am I afraid to write it down? That’s what Sabit would say. But I won’t ask Sabit. What do you dream, Sabit, my dear sadistic plaything? Do you dream in installations, muscles and tendons, gallery walls of sweating pig flesh, living bone exposed for all to see, vivisection as not-quite still life, portrait of the artist as a young atrocity? Are your sweet dreams the same things keeping me awake, making me afraid to sleep?

There was so goddamn much @ CeM to turn my fucking stomach, but just this one thing has me jigged and sleepless and popping your blue Peruvian bon bons. Just this one thing. I’m not the squeamish sort, and everyone knows it. That’s one reason the agency tossed the Guro/Guro story at me. Gore & sex and mutilation? Give it to Schuler. She’s seen the worst and keeps coming back for more. Wasn’t she one of the first into Brooklyn after the bomb? & she did that crazy whick out on the Stuyvesant rat attacks. How many murders and suicides and serial killers does that make for Schuler now? 9? Fourteen? 38? That kid in the Bronx, the Puerto Rican bastard who sliced up his little sister & then fed her through a food processor, that was one of Schuler’s, yeah? Ad infinitum, ad nauseum, hail Mary, full of beans. Cause they know I won’t be on my knees puking up lunch when I should be making notes & getting the vid or asking questions.

But now, now Sabit, I’m dancing round this one thing. This one little thing. So, here there’s a big ol’ chink in these renowned nerves of steel. Maybe I’ve got a weak spot after fucking all. Rings of flesh, towers of iron–oh yeah, sure–fucking corpses heaped in dumpters and rats eating fucking babies alive & winos & don’t forget the kid with the Cuisinart–sure, fine–but that one labeled #17, oh, now that’s another goddamn story. She saw something there, & ol’ Brass-Balls Schuler was never quite the same again, isn’t that the way it goes?

Are you laughing in your dreams, Sabit? Is that why you’re smiling next to me in your goddamn sleep? I’ve dog-eared a page in your book, Sabit, a page with a poem written in a New Jersey loony bin by a woman, & Welleran Smith just calls her Jane Doe so I do not know her name. But Welleran Smith & that mangy bunch of stitch prophets called her a visionary, & I’m writing it down here, while I try to find the nerve to say whatever it is I’d wanted to say about #17:

spines and bellies knitted & proud and all open

all watching spines and bellies and the three;

triptych & buckled, ragdoll fusion

3 of you so conjoined, my eyes from yours,

arterial hallways knitted red proud flesh

Healing and straining for cartilage & epidermis

Not taking, we cannot imagine

So many wet lips, your sky Raggedy alchemy

And all expecting Jerusalem

And Welleran Smith, he proclaims Jane Doe a “hyperlucid transcendent schizo-oracle,” a “visionary calling into the maelstrom.” & turns out, here in the footnotes, they put the bitch away bcause she’d drugged her lover–she was a lesbian; of course, she had to be a lesbian–she drugged her lover and used surgical thread to sew the woman’s lips & nostrils closed, after performing a crude tracheotomy so she wouldn’t suffocate. Jane Doe sewed her own vagina shut, and she removed her own nipples & then tried grafting them onto her gf’s belly. She kept the woman (not named, sorry, lost to anonymity) cuffed to a bed for almost 6 weeks before someone finally came poking around & jesus fucking christ, Sabit, this is the sort of sick bullshit set it all in motion. Jane Doe’s still locked away in her padded cell, I’m guessing–hyperlucid & worshipped by the snips–& maybe the woman she mutilated is alive somewhere, trying to forget. Maybe the doctors even patched her up (ha ha fucking ha) made her good as new again, but I doubt it.

I need to sleep. I need to lie down & close my eyes & not see #17 and sweating walls and Sabit ready to fucking cum bcause she can never, ever get enough. It’s half an hour after midnight, & they expect copy from me tomorrow night, eight sharp, when I haven’t written a goddamn word about the phony stitchwork @ Guro/Guro. Fuck you, Sabit, and fuck Jane Doe & that jackoff Welleran Smith and the girl with peacock eyes that I should have screwed just to piss you off. I should have brought her back here and fucked her in our bed, & maybe you’d have found some other snip tourist & even now I could be basking in the sanguine cherry glow of happily ever fucking after.

August 18, 2027

I’m off the Guro/Guro story. Missed the extended DL tonight, no copy, never even made it down to the gallery. Just my notes and photos from CeM for someone else to pick up where I left off. Lucky the agency didn’t let me go. Lucky or unlucky. But they can’t can me, not for missing a deadline or two. I have rep, I have creds, I have awards & experience & loyal goddamn readers. Hell, I still get a byline on this thing; it’s in my contract. Fuck it. Fuck it all.

August 19, 2027

Welleran Smith’s “Jane Doe” died about six months ago, back in March. I asked some questions, said it was work for the magazine, tagged some people who know people who could get to the files. It was a suicide–oh, and never you mind that she’d been on suicide watch for years. This one was a certified trooper, a bona-fide martyr in the service of her own undoing. She chewed her tongue in half & choked herself on it. She had a name, too. Don’t know if Smith knew it & simply withheld it, or if he never looked that far. Maybe he only prigged the bits he needed to put the snips in orbit & disregarded the rest.

“Jane Doe” was Judith Louise Darger, born 1992, Ph. D. in Anthropology from Yale, specialized in urban neomythology, syncretism, etc. & did a book with HarperC back in ‘21–Bloody Mary, La Llorona, and the Blue Lady: Feminine Icons in a Child’s Apocalypse. Sold for shit, out of print by 2023. But found a battered copy cheap uptown. Darger’s gf and victim, she’s dead, too. Another suicide, not long after they put Darger away. Turns out, she had a history of neurosis and self-mutilation going back to high school, & there was all sorts of shit there I’m not going to get into, but she told the courts that what Darger did to her, and to herself, they’d planned the whole thing for months. So, why the fuck did good old Welleran Smith leave that part out? It was in the goddamn press, no secret. I have a photograph of Judith Darger, right here on the dj of her book. She could not look less remarkable.

Sabit says there’s another Trenton Group show this weekend & don’t I wanna to go? She’s hardly said three words to me the last couple of days, but she told me this. Get another look at #17, she said, & I almost fucking hit her. No more pills, Schuler. No more pills.

August 20, 2027

No sleep last night. Today, I filed for my next assignment, but so far the green bin’s still empty. Maybe I’m being punished for blowing the DL on Weds. night, some sort of pass-ag bullshit bcause that’s the best those weasels in senior edit can ever seem to manage. Or maybe it’s only a sloooowwww week. I am having a hard time caring, either way.

No sleep last night. No, I said that already. Time on my hands and that’s never a good thing. Insomnia and coffee and gin, takeaway and Pop-Tarts and a faint throb that wants to be a headache (how long since one of those?), me locked in my office last night reading a few chapters of Darger’s grand flop, but there’s nothing in there–fascinating and I don’t know why it wasn’t better received, but still leading me nowhere, nowhere at all (where did I think it would lead?). This bit re: La Llorona (“Bloody Mary”) from Ch. 3–“Some girls with no home feel claws scratching under the skin on their arms. Their hand [sic] looks like red fire.” And this one, from a Miami New Times article: “When a child says he got the story from the spirit world, as homeless children do, you’ve hit the ultimate non sequitur.” Homeless kids and demons and angels, street gangs, drugs, the socioeconomic calamities of thirty goddamn years ago. News articles from 1997. None of this is gonna answer any of my questions, if I truly have questions to be answered. But this is “Jane Doe’s” magnum opus, and there is some grim fascination I can’t shake–How did she get from there to there, from diy street myths to sewing her gf’s mouth shut?

Maybe it wasn’t such a short goddamn walk. Maybe, one night, she stood before a dark mirror in a darkened room, the mirror coated with dried saltwater–going native or just too fucking curious, whatever–and maybe she stood there chanting Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, over and over and over and La Llorona scratched her way out through the looking glass, scarring the anthropolgist’s soul with her rosary beads. Maybe that’s where this began, the snips and stitches, #17. Maybe it all goes back to those homeless kids in Miami, back before the flood, before the W. Antarctic ice sheet melted and Dade County FL sank like a stone, and all along it was the late Dr. J. L. Darger let this djinn out of its bottle in ways people like Sabit have not yet begun to suspect and never will. I’m babbling, and if that’s the best I can do, I’m going to stop keeping a damned journal.

I’ve agreed to be @ CeM tomorrow night with Sabit. I’m a big girl. I can sip my shitty Merlot and nibble greasy orange cheese and stale crackers with the best of them. I can bear the soulless conversation and the sweating porcine walls. I can look at #17 and see nothing there but bad art, fucked-up artless crap, pretentious carnage and willful suffering. Maybe then I can put all this shit behind me. Who knows, maybe I can even put Sabit behind me, too.

August 20, 2027 (later, p.m.)

Sabit says the surgeon on #17 will be at the show t’morrow night. I think maybe it’s someone Sabit was screwing before she started screwing me. Oh, & this, from The Breathing Composition, which I’ve started reading again & frankly wish I had not. Seems Welleran Smith somehow got his paws on Darger’s diary, or one of her diaries, & he quotes it at length (& no doubt there are contextual issues; don’t know the fate of the original text):

“We are all alone on a darkling plain, precisely as Matt. Arnold said. We are so very alone here, and we yearn each day for the reunification promised by priests and gurus and by some ancient animal instinct. We are evolution’s grand degenerates, locked away forever in the consummate prison cells of our conscious minds, each divided always from the other. I met a man from Spain, and he gave me a note card with the number seventeen written on it seventeen times. He thought that surely I would understand right away, and he was heartbroken when I did not. When I asked, he would not explain. I’ve kept the card in my files, and sometimes I take it out and stare at it, hoping that I will at last discern its message. But it remains perfectly opaque, bcause my eyes are the eyes of the damned.”

& I’m looking thru the program for the Trenton Show on the 15th, last Sun., & only one piece is numbered, only 1 piece w/a # for a title–#17. Yes, I know. I’m going in circles here. Chasing my own ass. Toys in the attic. Nutters as the goddamn snips if I don’t watch myself. If I don’t get some sleep. I haven’t seen Sabit all evening, just a call this afternoon.

August 21, 2027 (Saturday, 10:12 a.m.)

Four whole hours sleep last night. & the hangover is not so bad that old-fash blck coffee and aspirin isn’t helping. My head feels clearer than it has in days. Sabit came home sometime after I nodded off & I woke with her snoring next to me. When I asked if maybe she wanted breakfast, she smiled, so I made eggs & cut a grapefruit in half. Perhaps I can persuade her to stay home tonight, that we should both stay home tonight. There is nothing down there I need to see again.

Part II

August 21, 2027 (2:18 p.m.)

No, she says. We are expected, she says, & what the fuck is that supposed to mean, anyway? So there was a fight, bcause there always has to be a fight with Sabit, a real screamer this time, & I have no idea where she’s run off to but she swore she’d be back by five & I better be sober, she said, & I better be dressed & ready for the show. So, yeah, fuck it. I’ll go to the damn show with her. I’ll rub shoulders with the stitch freaks this one last time. Maybe I’ll even have a good long look at #17 (tho’ now, I should add, now Sabit says the surgeon won’t be there after all). Maybe I’ll stand & stare until it’s only flesh & wires & hooks & fancy lighting.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette wrote somewhere, “Look for a long time at what pleases you, and for a longer time at what pains you.” Maybe I’ll shame them all with my staring. They only feel as much pain as they want to feel–isn’t that what Sabit is always telling me? The stitchworks, they get all the best painkillers, ever since the Feds decided this sick shit consitutes Art–so long as certain lines are not crossed. They bask in glassy-eyed morphine hazes, shocked cold orange on neuroblocks & Fibrodene & Elyzzium, exotic transdermals & maybe all that shit’s legal & maybe it ain’t, but 2380 no one’s asking too many questions as the City of NY has enough on its great collective plate these days w/out stitch-friendly lawyers raising a holy funk about censorship and freedom of expression and 1st Amendment violations. The cops hate the fuckers, but none of the arrests have had jack to do with drugs, just disorderly conduct, riots after shows, shit like that. But yeah, t’morrow night I’ll go back to CeM with Sabit, my heart’s damned desire, my cunt’s lazy love, & I will look until they want to fucking charge me extra.

August 21, 2027

So Sabit shows up an hour or so after dark…she’s gone now, gone again bcause I suppose I have chased her away, again. That’s what she would say, I am sure. I have chased her away again. But, as I was saying, she shows up, & I can tell she’s been drinking bcause she has that smirk and that swagger she gets when she’s been drinking, & I can tell she’s still pissed. I’m waiting for the other shoe. I’m waiting, bcause I fucking know whatever’s coming next is for my benefit. & I’m thinking, screw it, get it over with, don’t let her have the satisfaction of getting in the first blow. I’m thinking, this is where it ends. Tonight. No more of her bullshit. It’s been a grandiose act of reciprocal masochism, Sabit, & it’s been raw & all, but enough’s enough. @ least the sex was good, so let’s remember that & move on.

& that’s when I notice the gauze patch taped to her back, centered between her shoulder blades just so, placed just so there between her scapulae, centered on the smooth brown plain of her trapezius (let me write this the way a goddamn snip would write it, cluttered with an anatomist’s Latin). & when I ask her what the fuck, she just shrugs, & that swatch of gauze goes up & then down again. But I know. I know whatever it is she’s done, whatever comes next, this is it. This is her preemptive volley, so I can just forget all about landing the first punch this time, baby. Sabit knows revenge like a drunk knows an empty bottle, & I should have given up while I was ahead.

I’ve been wanting some new ink, she says. You helped me to finally make up my mind, that’s all. & before she can say anything else, I rip away the bandage. She does not even fucking flinch, even though the tattoo can’t be more than a couple hrs old, still seeping & puffy and red, & all I can hear is her laughing. Bcause there on her back is the Roman numeral XVII, & when she asks for the bandage back, I slap her.

I slapped her.

This use of present tense, what’s that but keeping the wound open & fresh, keeping the scabs at bay just like some goddamn pathetic stitchwork would do. I slapped her. The sound of my hand against her cheek was so loud, crack like a goddamn firecracker, & in the silence afterwards (just as fucking loud) she just smiled & smiled & smiled for me. & then I started yelling–I don’t know exactly what–accusations that couldn’t possibly have made sense, slurs and insinuation, and truthfully I knew even then none of it was anything but bitterness & disappointment that she’d not only managed to draw first blood (hahaha) this round, she’d finally pushed me far enough to hit her. I’d never hit her before. I had never hit anyone before, not since some bullshit high-school fights, &, at last, she did not even need to raise her voice. & then she just smiled @ me, & I think I must have finally told her to say something, bcause I was puking sick to death of that smug smile.

I’m glad you approve, she said. Or maybe she said, I’m glad you understand. In this instance, the meanings would be the same somehow. Somehow interchangeable. But I did not apologize. That’s the sort of prick I am. I sat down on the kitchen floor & stared @ linoleum patterns & when I looked up again she was gone. I don’t know if she’s gone gone, or if Sabit has merely retreated until she decides it’s time for another blitz. Rethinking her maneuvers, the ins & outs of this campaign, logistics and field tactics & what the fuck ever. Cards must be played properly. I know Sabit, & she will never settle for Pyrrhic victory, no wars of attrition, no winner’s curse. I sat on the floor until I heard the door shut & so knew I was alone again. I would say at least this gets me out of CeM on Sun. night, but I may go alone. Even though I know she’ll be there. Clearly, I can hurt some more. Tonight I will get drunk, & that is all.

August 22, 2027 (2:56 a.m.)

Always have I been a sober drunk. I’ve finished the gin & started on an old bottle of rye whisky–gift from some former lover I won’t name here–bcause I didn’t feel like walking through the muggy, dusty evening, risking life and limb & lung for another pretty blue bottle of Bombay. A sober & lazy drunk, adverse to taking unnecessary risks. Sabit has not yet reappeared, likely she will not. I suspect she believes she has won not only the battle, but the war, as well. Good for her. May she go haunt some other sad fuck’s life. Of course, the apt. is still awash in her junk, her clothes, her stitch lit, the hc zines and discs & her txtbooks filled with diagrams, schematics of skeletons & musculature, neuroanatomy, surgical technique, organic chem and pharmacology, immunology, all that crap. Snip porn. I should dump it all. I should call someone 2830 to cart it all away so I don’t have to fucking look at it anymore. The clothes, her lucite ashtrays, the smoky, musky, spicy smell of her, bottles of perfume, cosmetics, music, jewelry, deodorant, jasmine soap, & jesus all the CRAP she’s left behind to keep me company. I don’t know if I’ll sleep tonight. I don’t want to. I don’t want to be awake anymore ever again. Why did she want to rub my nose in #17? Just that she’s finally found a flaw, a goddamn weakness, & she has to make the most of it?

A talkative, sober drunk. But wait–there is something. There is something else I found in Welleran Smith, & I’m gonna write it down. Something more from the diary/ies of Dr. Judith Darger, unless it’s only something Smith concocted to suit his own ends. More & more I consider that likelihood, that Darger is only some lunatic just happened to be where these people needed her to be, but isn’t that how it always is with saints and martyrs? Questions of victimhood arise. Who’s exploiting who? Whose exploiting whom? Christ I get lost in all these words. I don’t need words. I’m strangling on words. I need to see Sabit & end this mess & be done with her. According to Welleran Smith, Darger writes (none of the “entries” are dated):

“I would not tell a child that it isn’t going to hurt. I wouldn’t lie. It is going to hurt, and it is going to hurt forever or as long as human consciousness may endure. It is going to hurt until it doesn’t hurt anymore. That is what I would tell a child. That is what I tell myself, and what am I but my own child? So, I will not lie to any of you. Yes, there will be pain, and at times the pain will seem unbearable. But the pain will open doorways. The pain is a doorway, as is the scalpel and as are the sutures and each and every incision. Pain is to be thrown open wide that all may gaze at the wonders which lie beyond. Why is it assumed this flesh must not be cut? Why is it assumed this is my final corporeal form? What is it we cannot yet see for all our fear of pain and ugliness and disfiguration? I would not tell a child that it isn’t going to hurt. I would teach a child to live in pain.”

Is that what I am learning from you, Sabit? Is that the lesson of #17 and the glassy stare of those six eyes? Would you, all of you, teach me to live with pain?

August 23, 2027

It’s almost dawn, that first false dawn & just a bit of hesitant purple where the sky isn’t quite night anymore. As much as I have ever seen false dawn in the city, where we try so hard to keep the night away forever. If I had a son, or a daughter, I would tell them a story, how people are @ war with night, & the city–like all cities–is only a fortress built to hold back the night, even though all the world is just a bit of grit floating in a sea of night that might go on almost forever. I’m on the roof. I’ve never been up here before. Sabit & I never came up here. Maybe another three hours left before it’s too hot & bright to sit up here, only 95F now if my watch is telling me the truth. My face & hair are slick with sweat, sweating out the booze & pills, sweating out the sour memory of Sabit. It feels good to sweat.

I went to Pearl St. & the Trenton reveal @ Corpus ex Machina, but apparently she did not. Maybe she had something better to do & someone better to be doing it with. I flashed my press tag @ the door, so at least I didn’t have to pay the $47 cover. I was not the only pundit in attendance. I saw Kline, who’s over @ the Voice these days (that venerable old whore) & I saw Garrison, too. Buzzards w/their beaks sharp, stomach’s empty, mouth’s watering. No, I do not know if birds salivate, but reporters fucking do. None of them spoke to me, & I exchanged the favor.

The place was replete, as the dollymops are wont to say, chock-full, standing room only. I sipped dirty martinis and licorice shides & looked no one in the eye, no one who was not on exhibit. #17 was near the back, not as well lit as some of the others, & I stood there & stared, bcause that is what I’d come for. Sometimes it gazed back me, or they gazed @ me–I am uncertain of the proper idiom or parlance or phrase. Is it One or are they 3? I stared & stared & stared, like any good voyeur would do, any dedicated peeper, bcause no clips are allowed, so you stand & drink it all in there the same way the Neanderthals did it or pony up the fat spool of cash for one of the Trenton chips or mnemonic lozenges (“all proceeds for R&D, promo, & ongoing medical expenses,” of course). I looked until all I saw was all I was meant to see–the sculpted body(ies), living & breathing & conscious–the perpetually hurting realization of all Darger’s nightmares. If I saw beauty there, it was no different from the beauty I saw in Brooklyn after the New Konsojaya Trading Co. popped their mini-nuke over on Tillary St. No different from a hundred lingering deaths I’ve witnessed.

Welleran Smith said this was to be “the soul’s terrorism against the tyranny of genes & phenotype.” I stood there & I saw everything there was to see. Maybe Sabit would have been proud. Maybe she would have been disappointed @ my resolve. It hardly matters, either way. A drop of sweat dissolving on my tongue & I wonder if that’s the way the ocean used to taste, when it wasn’t suicide to taste the ocean?

When I had seen all I had come to see, my communion w/#17, I found an empty stool @ the bar. I thought you might still put in an appearance, Sabit, so I got drunker & waited for a glimpse of you in the crowd. & there was a man sitting next to me, Harvey somebody or another from Chicago, gray-haired with a mustache, & he talked & I listened, as best I could hear him over the music. I think the music was suffocating me. He said, That’s my granddaughter over there, what’s left of her, & he pointed thru the crush of bodies toward a stitchwork hanging from the warehouse ceiling, a dim chandelier of circuitry & bone & muscles flayed & rearranged. I’d looked at the piece on the way in–The Lighthouse of Francis Bacon, it was called. The old man told me he’d been following the show for months, but now he was almost broke & would have to head back to Chicago soon. He was only drinking ginger ale. I bought him a ginger ale & listened, leaning close so he didn’t have to shout to be heard. The chandelier had once been a student @ the Pritzker School of Medicine, but then, he said, “something happened.” I did not ask what. I decided if he wanted me to know, he would tell me. He didn’t. Didn’t tell me, I mean. He tried to buy me a drink, but I wouldn’t let him.

The grandfather of the Lighthouse of Francis Bacon tried to buy me a drink, & I realized I was thinking like a journalist again, thinking you dumb fucks–here’s your goddamn story–not some bullshit hearsay about chicanery among the snips, no, this old man’s your goddamn story, this poor guy probably born way the fuck back before man even walked on the goddamn moon & now he’s sitting here at the end of the world, this anonymous old man rubbing his bony shoulders with the tourists and art critics & stitch fiends and freaks because his granddaughter decided she’d rather be a fucking chandelier than a gynecologist. Oh god, Sabit. If you could have shown him your brand-new tattoo.

I left the place before midnight, paid the hack extra to go farther south, to get me as near the ruins as he dared. I needed to see them, that’s all. Rings of flesh & towers of iron, right, rust-stained granite and the empty eye sockets where once were windows. The skyscraper stubs of Old Downtown, Wall St. and Battery Park City, all of it inundated by the rising waters there @ the confluence of the Hudson & the E. River. And then I came home, & now I am sitting here on the roof, getting less & less drunk, sweating & listening to traffic & the city waking up around me–the living fossil with her antique keyboard. If you do come back here, Sabit, if that’s whatever happens next, you will not find me intimidated by your XVII or by #17, either, but I don’t think you ever will. You’ve moved on. & if you send someone to pack up your shit, I’ll probably already be in Bratislava by then. After CeM, there were 2 good assigns waiting for me in the green bin, & I’m taking the one that gets me far, far away from here for 3 weeks in Slovakia. But right now I’m just gonna sit here on the roof & watch the sun come up all swollen & lobster red over this rotten, drowning city, over this rotten fucking world. I think the pigeons are waking up.

Fiction: Deadman’s Road by Joe R. Lansdale

Part One

The evening sun had rolled down and blown out in a bloody wad, and the white, full moon had rolled up like an enormous ball of tightly wrapped twine. As he rode, the Reverend Jebidiah Rains watched it glow above the tall pines. All about it stars were sprinkled white-hot in the dead-black heavens.

The trail he rode on was a thin one, and the trees on either side of it crept toward the path as if they might block the way, and close up behind him. The weary horse on which he was riding moved forward with its head down, and Jebidiah, too weak to fight it, let his mount droop and take its lead. Jebidiah was too tired to know much at that moment, but he knew one thing. He was a man of the Lord and he hated God, hated the sonofabitch with all his heart.

And he knew God knew and didn’t care, because he knew Jebidiah was his messenger. Not one of the New Testament, but one of the Old Testament, harsh and mean and certain, vengeful and without compromise; a man who would have shot a leg out from under Moses and spat in the face of the Holy Ghost and scalped him, tossing his celestial hair to the wild four winds.

It was not a legacy Jebidiah would have preferred, being the bad man messenger of God, but it was his, and he had earned it through sin, and no matter how hard he tried to lay it down and leave it be, he could not. He knew that to give in and abandon his God-given curse, was to burn in hell forever, and to continue was to do as the Lord prescribed, no matter what his feelings toward his mean master might be. His Lord was not a forgiving Lord, nor was he one who cared for your love. All he cared for was obedience, servitude and humiliation. It was why God had invented the human race. Amusement.

As he thought on these matters, the trail turned and widened, and off to one side, amongst tree stumps, was a fairly large clearing, and in its center was a small log house, and out to the side a somewhat larger log barn. In the curtained window of the cabin was a light that burned orange behind the flour-sack curtains. Jebidiah, feeling tired and hungry and thirsty and weary of soul, made for it.

Stopping a short distance from the cabin, Jebidiah leaned forward on his horse and called out, “Hello, the cabin.”

He waited for a time, called again, and was halfway through calling when the door opened, and a man about five-foot two with a large droopy hat, holding a rifle, stuck himself part of the way out of the cabin, said, “Who is it calling? You got a voice like a bullfrog.”

“Reverend Jebidiah Rains.”

“You ain’t come to preach none, have you?”

“No, sir. I find it does no good. I’m here to beg for a place in your barn, a night under its roof. Something for my horse, something for myself if it’s available. Most anything, as long as water is involved.”

“Well,” said the man, “this seems to be the gathering place tonight. Done got two others, and we just sat asses down to eat. I got enough you want it, some hot beans and some old bread.”

“I would be most obliged, sir,” Jebidiah said.

“Oblige all you want. In the meantime, climb down from that nag, put it in the barn and come in and chow. They call me Old Timer, but I ain’t that old. It’s cause most of my teeth are gone and I’m crippled in a foot a horse stepped on. There’s a lantern just inside the barn door. Light that up, and put it out when you finish, come on back to the house.”

***

When Jebidiah finished grooming and feeding his horse with grain in the barn, watering him, he came into the cabin, made a show of pushing his long black coat back so that it revealed his ivory-handled .44 cartridge-converted revolvers. They were set so that they leaned forward in their holsters, strapped close to the hips, not draped low like punks wore them. Jebidiah liked to wear them close to the natural swing of his hands. When he pulled them it was a movement quick as the flick of a hummingbird’s wings, the hammers clicking from the cock of his thumb, the guns barking, spewing lead with amazing accuracy. He had practiced enough to drive a cork into a bottle at about a hundred paces, and he could do it in bad light. He chose to reveal his guns that way to show he was ready for any attempted ambush. He reached up and pushed his wide-brimmed black hat back on his head, showing black hair gone gray-tipped. He thought having his hat tipped made him look casual. It did not. His eyes always seemed aflame in an angry face.

Inside, the cabin was bright with kerosene lamp light, and the kerosene smelled, and there were curls of black smoke twisting about, mixing with gray smoke from the pipe of Old Timer, and the cigarette of a young man with a badge pinned to his shirt. Beside him, sitting on a chopping log by the fireplace, which was too hot for the time of year, but was being used to heat up a pot of beans, was a middle-aged man with a slight paunch and a face that looked like it attracted thrown objects. He had his hat pushed up a bit, and a shock of wheat-colored, sweaty hair hung on his forehead. There was a cigarette in is mouth, half of it ash. He twisted on the chopping log, and Jebidiah saw that his hands were manacled together.

“I heard you say you was a preacher,” said the manacled man, as he tossed the last of his smoke into the fireplace. “This here sure ain’t God’s country.”

“Worse thing is,” said Jebidiah, “it’s exactly God’s country.”

The manacled man gave out with a snort, and grinned.

“Preacher,” said the younger man, “my name is Jim Taylor. I’m a deputy for Sheriff Spradley, out of Nacogdoches. I’m taking this man there for a trial, and most likely a hanging. He killed a fella for a rifle and a horse. I see you tote guns, old style guns, but good ones. Way you tote them, I’m suspecting you know how to use them.”

“I’ve been known to hit what I aim at,” Jebidiah said, and sat in a rickety chair at an equally rickety table. Old Timer put some tin plates on the table, scratched his ass with a long wooden spoon, then grabbed a rag and used it as a pot holder, lifted the hot bean pot to the table. He popped the lid of the pot, used the ass-scratching spoon to scoop a heap of beans onto plates. He brought over some wooden cups and poured them full from a pitcher of water.

“Thing is,” the deputy said, “I could use some help. I don’t know I can get back safe with this fella, havin’ not slept good in a day or two. Was wondering, you and Old Timer here could watch my back till morning? Wouldn’t even mind if you rode along with me tomorrow, as sort of a backup. I could use a gun hand. Sheriff might even give you a dollar for it.”

Old Timer, as if this conversation had not been going on, brought over a bowl with some moldy biscuits in it, placed them on the table. “Made them a week ago. They’ve gotten a bit ripe, but you can scratch around the mold. I’ll warn you though, they’re tough enough you could toss one hard and kill a chicken on the run. So mind your teeth.”

“That how you lost yours, Old Timer?” the manacled man said.

“Probably part of them,” Old Timer said.

“What you say, preacher?” the deputy said. “You let me get some sleep?”

“My problem lies in the fact that I need sleep,” Jebidiah said. “I’ve been busy, and I’m what could be referred to as tuckered.”

“Guess I’m the only one that feels spry,” said the manacled man.

“No,” said, Old Timer. “I feel right fresh myself.”

“Then it’s you and me, Old Timer,” the manacled man said, and grinned, as if this meant something.

“You give me cause, fella, I’ll blow a hole in you and tell God you got in a nest of termites.”

The manacled man gave his snort of a laugh again. He seemed to be having a good old time.

“Me and Old Timer can work shifts,” Jebidiah said. “That okay with you, Old Timer?”

“Peachy,” Old Timer said, and took another plate from the table and filled it with beans. He gave this one to the manacled man, who said, lifting his bound hands to take it, “What do I eat it with?”

“Your mouth. Ain’t got no extra spoons. And I ain’t giving you a knife.”

The manacled man thought on this for a moment, grinned, lifted the plate and put his face close to the edge of it, sort of poured the beans toward his mouth. He lowered the plate and chewed. “Reckon they taste scorched with or without a spoon.”

Jebidiah reached inside his coat, took out and opened up a pocket knife, used it to spear one of the biscuits, and to scrape the beans toward him.

“You come to the table, young fella,” Old Timer said to the deputy. “I’ll get my shotgun, he makes a move that ain’t eatin’, I’ll blast him and the beans inside him into that fireplace there.”

***

Old Timer sat with a double barrel shotgun resting on his leg, pointed in the general direction of the manacled man. The deputy told all that his prisoner had done while he ate. Murdered women and children, shot a dog and a horse, and just for the hell of it, shot a cat off a fence, and set fire to an outhouse with a woman in it. He had also raped women, stuck a stick up a sheriff’s ass, and killed him, and most likely shot other animals that might have been some good to somebody. Overall, he was tough on human beings, and equally as tough on livestock.

“I never did like animals,” the manacled man said. “Carry fleas. And that woman in the outhouse stunk to high heaven. She ought to eat better. She needed burning.”

“Shut up,” the deputy said. “This fella,” and he nodded toward the prisoner, “his name is Bill Barrett, and he’s the worst of the worst. Thing is, well, I’m not just tired, I’m a little wounded. He and I had a tussle. I hadn’t surprised him, wouldn’t be here today. I got a bullet graze in my hip. We had quite a dust up. I finally got him down by putting a gun barrel to his noggin’ half a dozen times or so. I’m not hurt so bad, but I lost blood for a couple days. Weakened me. You’d ride along with me Reverend, I’d appreciate it.”

“I’ll consider it,” Jebidiah said. “But I’m about my business.”

“Who you gonna preach to along here, ‘sides us?” the deputy said.

“Don’t even think about it,” Old Timer said. “Just thinking about that Jesus foolishness makes my ass tired. Preaching makes me want to kill the preacher and cut my own throat. Being at a preachin’ is like being tied down in a nest red bitin’ ants.”

“At this point in my life,” Jebidiah said. “I agree.”

There was a moment of silence in response to Jebidiah, then the deputy turned his attention to Old Timer. “What’s the fastest route to Nacogdoches?”

“Well now,” Old Timer said, “you can keep going like you been going, following the road out front. And in time you’ll run into a road, say thirty miles from here, and it goes left. That should take you right near Nacogdoches, which is another ten miles, though you’ll have to make a turn somewhere up in there near the end of the trip. Ain’t exactly sure where unless I’m looking at it. Whole trip, traveling at an even pace ought to take you two day.”

“You could go with us,” the deputy said. “Make sure I find that road.”

“Could,” said Old Timer, “but I won’t. I don’t ride so good anymore. My balls ache I ride a horse for too long. Last time I rode a pretty good piece, I had to squat over a pan of warm water and salt, soak my taters for an hour or so just so they’d fit back in my pants. “

“My balls ache just listening to you,” the prisoner said. “Thing is, though, them swollen up like that, was probably the first time in your life you had man-sized balls, you old fart. You should have left them swollen.”

Old Timer cocked back the hammers on the double barrel. “This here could go off.”

Bill just grinned, leaned his back against the fire-place, then jumped forward. For a moment, it looked as if Old Timer might cut him in half, but he realized what had happened.

“Oh yeah,” Old Timer said. “That there’s hot, stupid. Why they call it a fire place.”

Bill readjusted himself, so that his back wasn’t against the stones. He said, “I ‘m gonna cut this deputy’s pecker off, come back here, make you fry it up and eat it.”

“You’re gonna shit and fall back in it,” Old Timer said. “That’s all you’re gonna do.”

When things had calmed down again, the deputy said to Old Timer, “There’s no faster route?”

Old timer thought for a moment. “None you’d want to take.”

“What’s that mean?” the deputy said.

Old Timer slowly lowered the hammers on the shotgun, smiling at Bill all the while. When he had them lowered, he turned his head, looked at the deputy. “Well, there’s Deadman’s Road.”

“What’s wrong with that?” the deputy asked.

“All manner of things. Used to be called Cemetery Road. Couple years back that changed.”

Jebidiah’s interest was aroused. “Tell us about it, Old Timer.”

“Now I ain’t one to believe in hogwash, but there’s a story about the road, and I got it from someone you might say was the horse’s mouth.”

“A ghost story, that’s choice,” said Bill.

“How much time would the road cut off going to Nacogdoches?” the deputy asked.

“Near a day,” Old Timer said.

“Damn. Then that’s the way I got to go,” the deputy said.

“Turn off for it ain’t far from here, but I wouldn’t recommend it,” Old Timer said. “I ain’t much for Jesus, but I believe in haints, things like that. Living out here in this thicket, you see some strange things. There’s gods ain’t got nothing to do with Jesus or Moses, or any of that bunch. There’s older gods than that. Indians talk about them.”

“I’m not afraid of any Indian gods,” the deputy said.

“Maybe not,” Old Timer said, “but these gods, even the Indians ain’t fond of them. They ain’t their gods. These gods are older than the Indian folk their ownselfs. Indians try not to stir them up. They worship their own.”

“And why would this road be different than any other?” Jebidiah asked. “What does it have to do with ancient gods?”

Old Timer grinned. “You’re just wanting to challenge it, ain’t you, Reverend? Prove how strong your god is. You weren’t no preacher, you’d be a gunfighter, I reckon. Or, maybe you are just that. A gunfighter preacher.”

“I’m not that fond of my god,” Jebidiah said, “but I have been given a duty. Drive out evil. Evil as my god sees it. If these gods are evil, and they’re in my path, then I have to confront them.”

“They’re evil, all right,” Old Timer said.

“Tell us about them,” Jebidiah said.

***

Part Two

“Gil Gimet was a bee keeper,” Old timer said. “He raised honey, and lived off of Deadman’s Road. Known then as Cemetery Road. That’s ‘cause there was a graveyard down there. It had some old Spanish graves in it, some said Conquistadores who tromped through here but didn’t tromp out. I know there was some Indians buried there, early Christian Indians, I reckon. Certainly there were stones and crosses up and Indian names on the crosses. Maybe mixed breeds. Lots of intermarrying around here. Anyway, there were all manner people buried up there. The dead ground don’t care what color you are when you go in, cause in the end, we’re all gonna be the color of dirt.”

“Hell, “ Bill said. “You’re already the color of dirt. And you smell like some pretty old dirt at that.”

“You gonna keep on, mister,” Old Timer said, “and you’re gonna wind up having the undertaker wipe your ass.” Old Timer cocked back the hammers on the shotgun again. “This here gun could go off accidently. Could happen, and who here is gonna argue it didn’t?”

“Not me,” the deputy said. “It would be eaiser on me you were dead, Bill.”

Bill looked at the Reverend. “Yeah, but that wouldn’t set right with the Reverend, would it Reverend?”

“Actually, I wouldn’t care one way or another. I’m not a man of peace, and I’m not a forgiver, even if what you did wasn’t done to me. I think we’re all rich and deep in sin. Maybe none of us are worthy of forgiveness.”

Bill sunk a little at his seat. No one was even remotely on his side. Old Timer continued with his story.

“This here bee keeper, Gimet, he wasn’t known as much of a man. Mean-hearted is how he was thunk of. I knowed him, and I didn’t like him. I seen him snatch up a little dog once and cut the tail off of it with his knife, just cause he thought it was funny. Boy who owned the dog tried to fight back, and Gimet, he cut the boy on the arm. No one did nothin’ about it. Ain’t no real law in these parts, you see, and wasn’t nobody brave enough to do nothin’. Me included. And he did lots of other mean things, even killed a couple of men, and claimed self-defense. Might have been, but Gimet was always into something, and whatever he was into always turned out with someone dead, or hurt, or humiliated.”

“Bill here sounds like he could be Gimet’s brother,” the deputy said.

“Oh, no,” Old Timer said, shaking his head. “This here scum-licker ain’t a bump on the mean old ass of Gimet. Gimet lived in a little shack off Cemetery Road. He raised bees, and brought in honey to sell at the community up the road. Guess you could even call it a town. Schow is the way the place is known, on account of a fella used to live up there was named Schow. He died and got ate up by pigs. Right there in his own pen, just keeled over slopping the hogs, and then they slopped him, all over that place. A store got built on top of where Schow got et up, and that’s how the place come by the name. Gimet took his honey in there to the store and sold it, and even though he was a turd, he had some of the best honey you ever smacked your mouth around. Wish I had me some now. It was dark and rich, and sweeter than any sugar. Think that’s one reason he got away with things. People don’t like killing and such, but they damn sure like their honey.”

“This story got a point?” Bill said.

“You don’t like way I’m telling it,” Old Timer said, “why don’t you think about how that rope’s gonna fit around your neck. That ought to keep your thoughts occupied, right smart.”

Bill made a grunting noise, turned on his block of wood, as if to show he wasn’t interested.

“Well, now, honey or not, sweet tooth, or not, everything has an end to it. And thing was he took to a little gal, Mary Lynn Twoshoe. She was a part Indian gal, a real looker, hair black as the bottom of a well, eyes the same color, and she was just as fine in the features as them pictures you see of them stage actresses. She wasn’t five feet tall, and that hair of hers went all the way down her back. Her daddy was dead. The pox got him. And her mama wasn’t too well off, being sickly, and all. She made brooms out of straw and branches she trimmed down. Sold a few of them, raised a little garden and a hog. When all this happened, Mary Lynn was probably thirteen, maybe fourteen. Wasn’t no older than that.”

“If you’re gonna tell a tale,” Bill said, “least don’t wander all over the place.”

“So, you’re interested?” Old Timer said.

“What else I got to do?” Bill said.

“Go on,” Jebidiah said. “Tell us about Mary Lynn.”

Old Timer nodded. “Gimet took to her. Seen her around, bringing the brooms her mama made into the store. He waited on her, grabbed her, and just throwed her across his saddle kickin’ and screamin’, like he’d bought a sack of flour and was ridin’ it to the house. Mack Collins, store owner came out and tried to stop him. Well, he said something to him. About how he shouldn’t do it, least that’s the way I heard it. He didn’t push much, and I can’t blame him. Didn’t do good to cross Gimet. Anyway, Gimet just said back to Mack, ‘Give her mama a big jar of honey. Tell her that’s for her daughter. I’ll even make her another jar or two, if the meat here’s as sweet as I’m expecting.’

“With that, he slapped Mary Lynn on the ass and rode off with her.”

“Sounds like my kind of guy,” Bill said.

“I have become irritated with you now,” Jebidiah said. “Might I suggest you shut your mouth before I pistol whip you.”

Bill glared at Jebidiah, but the Reverend’s gaze was as dead and menacing as the barrels of Old Timer’s shotgun.

“Rest of the story is kind of grim,” Old Timer said. “Gimet took her off to his house, and had his way with her. So many times he damn near killed her, and then he turned her lose, or got so drunk she was able to get loose. Time she walked down Cemetery Road, made it back to town, well, she was bleeding so bad from having been used so rough, she collapsed. She lived a day and died from loss of blood. Her mother, out of her sick bed, rode a mule out there to the cemetery on Cemetery Road. I told you she was Indian, and she knew some Indian ways, and she knew about them old gods that wasn’t none of the gods of her people, but she still knew about them.

“She knew some signs to draw in cemetery dirt. I don’t know the whole of it, but she did some things, and she did it on some old grave out there, and the last thing she did was she cut her own throat, died right there, her blood running on top of that grave and them pictures she drawed in the dirt.”

“Don’t see how that done her no good,” the deputy said.

“Maybe it didn’t, but folks think it did,” Old Timer said. “Community that had been pushed around by Gimet, finally had enough, went out there in mass to hang his ass, shoot him, whatever it took. Got to his cabin they found Gimet dead outside his shack. His eyes had been torn out, or blown out is how they looked. Skin was peeled off his head, just leaving the skull and a few hairs. His chest was ripped open, and his insides was gone, exceptin’ the bones in there. And them bees of his had nested in the hole in his chest, had done gone about making honey. Was buzzing out of that hole, his mouth, empty eyes, nose, or where his nose used to be. I figure they’d rolled him over, tore off his pants, they’d have been coming out of his asshole.”

“How come you weren’t out there with them?” Bill said. “How come this is all stuff you heard?”

“Because I was a coward when it come to Gimet,” Old Timer said. “That’s why. Told myself wouldn’t never be a coward again, no matter what. I should have been with them. Didn’t matter no how. He was done good and dead, them bees all in him. What was done then is the crowd got kind of loco, tore off his clothes, hooked his feet up to a horse and dragged him through a blackberry patch, them bees just burstin’ out and hummin’ all around him. All that ain’t right, but I think I’d been with them, knowing who he was and all the things he’d done, I might have been loco too. They dumped him out on the cemetery to let him rot, took that girl’s mother home to be buried some place better. Wasn’t no more than a few nights later that folks started seeing Gimet. They said he walked at night, when the moon was at least half, or full, like it is now. Number of folks seen him, said he loped alongside the road, following their horses, grabbing hold of the tail if he could, trying to pull horse and rider down, or pull himself up on the back of their mounts. Said them bees was still in him. Bees black as flies, and angry whirling all about him, and coming from inside him. Worse, there was a larger number of folks took that road that wasn’t never seen again. It was figured Gimet got them.”

“Horse shit,” the deputy said. “No disrespect, Old Timer. You’ve treated me all right, that’s for sure. But a ghost chasing folks down. I don’t buy that.”

“Don’t have to buy it,” Old Timer said. “I ain’t trying to sell it to you none. Don’t have to believe it. And I don’t think it’s no ghost anyway. I think that girl’s mother, she done something to let them old gods out for awhile, sicked them on that bastard, used her own life as a sacrifice, that’s what I think. And them gods, them things from somewhere else, they ripped him up like that. Them bees is part of that too. They ain’t no regular honey bee. They’re some other kind of bees. Some kind of fitting death for a bee raiser, is my guess.”

“That’s silly,” the deputy said.

“I don’t know,” Jebidiah said. “The Indian woman may only have succeeded in killing him in this life. She may not have understood all that she did. Didn’t know she was giving him an opportunity to live again…Or maybe that is the curse. Though there are plenty others have to suffer for it.”

“Like the folks didn’t do nothing when Gimet was alive,” Old Time said. “ Folks like me that let what went on go on.”

Jebidiah nodded. “Maybe.”

The deputy looked at Jebidiah. “Not you too, Reverend. You should know better than that. There ain’t but one true god, and ain’t none of that hoodoo business got a drop of truth to it.”

“If there’s one god,” Jebidiah said, “there can be many. They are at war with one another, that’s how it works, or so I think. I’ve seen some things that have shook my faith in the one true god, the one I’m servant to. And what is our god but hoodoo? It’s all hoodoo, my friend.”

“Okay. What things have you seen, Reverend?” the deputy asked.

“No use describing it to you, young man,” Jebidiah said. “You wouldn’t believe me. But I’ve recently come from Mud Creek. It had an infestation of a sort. That town burned down, and I had a hand in it.”

“Mud Creek,” Old Timer said. “I been there.”

“Only thing there now,” Jebidiah said, “is some charred wood.”

“Ain’t the first time it’s burned down,” Old Timer said. “Some fool always rebuilds it, and with it always comes some kind of ugliness. I’ll tell you straight. I don’t doubt your word at all, Reverend.”

“Thing is,” the deputy said, “I don’t believe in no haints. That’s the shortest road, and it’s the road I’m gonna take.”

“I wouldn’t,” Old Timer said.

“Thanks for the advice. But no one goes with me or does, that’s the road I’m taking, provided it cuts a day off my trip.”

“I’m going with you,” Jebidiah said. “My job is striking at evil. Not to walk around it.”

“I’d go during the day,” Old Timer said. “Ain’t no one seen Gimet in the day, or when the moon is thin or not at all. But way it is now, it’s full, and will be again tomorrow night. I’d ride hard tomorrow, you’re determined to go. Get there as soon as you can, before dark.”

“I’m for getting there,” the deputy said. “I’m for getting back to Nacogdoches, and getting this bastard in a cell.”

“I’ll go with you,” Jebidiah said. “But I want to be there at night. I want to take Deadman’s Road at that time. I want to see if Gimet is there. And if he is, send him to his final death. Defy those dark gods the girl’s mother called up. Defy them and loose my god on him. What I’d suggest is you get some rest, deputy. Old Timer here can watch a bit, then I’ll take over. That way we all get some rest. We can chain this fellow to a tree outside, we have to. We should both get slept up to the gills, then leave here mid-day, after a good dinner, head out for Deadman’s Road. Long as we’re there by nightfall.”

“That ought to bring you right on it,” Old Timer said. “You take Deadman’s Road. When you get to the fork, where the road ends, you go right. Ain’t no one ever seen Gimet beyond that spot, or in front of where the road begins. He’s tied to that stretch, way I heard it.”

“Good enough,” the deputy said. “I find this all foolish, but if I can get some rest, and have you ride along with me, Reverend, then I’m game. And I’ll be fine with getting there at night.”

***

Next morning they slept late, and had an early lunch. Beans and hard biscuits again, a bit of stewed squirrel. Old Timer had shot the rodent that morning while Jebidiah watched Bill sit on his ass, his hands chained around a tree in the front yard. Inside the cabin, the deputy had continued to sleep.

But now they all sat outside eating, except for Bill.

“What about me?” Bill asked, tugging at his chained hands.

“When we finish,” Old Timer said. “Don’t know if any of the squirrel will be left, but we got them biscuits for you. I can promise you some of them. I might even let you rub one of them around in my plate, sop up some squirrel gravy.”

“Those biscuits are awful,” Bill said.

“Ain’t they,” Old Timer said.

Bill turned his attention to Jebidiah. “Preacher, you ought to just go on and leave me and the boy here alone. Ain’t smart for you to ride along, cause I get loose, ain’t just the deputy that’s gonna pay. I’ll put you on the list.”

“After what I’ve seen in this life,” Jebidiah said, “you are nothing to me. An insect…So, add me to your list.”

“Let’s feed him,” the deputy said, nodding at Bill, “and get to moving. I’m feeling rested and want to get this ball started.”

***

The moon had begun to rise when they rode in sight of Deadman’s Road. The white cross road sign was sticking up beside the road. Trees and brush had grown up around it, and between the limbs and the shadows, the crudely painted words on the sign were halfway readable in the waning light. The wind had picked up and was grabbing at leaves, plucking them from the ground, tumbling them about, tearing them from trees and tossing them across the narrow, clay road with a sound like mice scuttling in straw.

“Fall always depresses me,” the deputy said, halting his horse, taking a swig from his canteen.

“Life is a cycle,” Jebidiah said. “You’re born, you suffer, then you’re punished.”

The deputy turned in his saddle to look at Jebidiah. “You ain’t much on that resurrection and reward, are you?”

“No, I’m not.”

“I don’t know about you,” the deputy said, “but I wish we hadn’t gotten here so late. I’d rather have gone through in the day.”

“Thought you weren’t a believer in spooks?” Bill said, and made with his now familiar snort. “You said it didn’t matter to you.”

The deputy didn’t look at Bill when he spoke. “I wasn’t here then. Place has a look I don’t like. And I don’t enjoy temptin’ things. Even if I don’t believe in them.”

“That’s the silliest thing I ever heard,” Bill said.

“Wanted me with you,” Jebidiah said. “You had to wait.”

“You mean to see something, don’t you, preacher?” Bill said.

“If there is something to see,” Jebidiah said.

“You believe Old Timer’s story?” the deputy said. “I mean, really?”

“Perhaps.”

Jebidiah clucked to his horse and took the lead.

***

When they turned onto Deadman’s Road, Jebidiah paused and removed a small, fat bible from his saddlebag.

The deputy paused too, forcing Bill to pause as well. “You ain’t as ornery as I thought,” the deputy said. “You want the peace of the bible just like anyone else.”

“There is no peace in this book,” Jebidiah said. “That’s a real confusion. Bible isn’t anything but a book of terror, and that’s how God is: Terrible. But the book has power. And we might need it.”

“I don’t know what to think about you, Reverend,” the deputy said.

“Ain’t nothin’ you can think about a man that’s gone loco,” Bill said. “I don’t want to stay with no man that’s loco.”

“You get an idea to run, Bill, I can shoot you off your horse,” the deputy said. “Close range with my revolver, far range with my rifle. You don’t want to try it.”

“It’s still a long way to Nacogdoches,” Bill said.

***

The road was narrow and of red clay. It stretched far ahead like a band of blood, turned sharply to the right around a wooded curve where it was a dark as the bottom of Jonah’s whale. The blowing leaves seemed especially intense on the road, scrapping dryly about, winding in the air like giant hornets. The trees, which grew thick, bent in the wind, from right to left. This naturally led the trio to take to the left side of the road.

The farther they went down the road, the darker it became. By the time they got to the curve, the woods were so thick, and the thunderous skies had grown so dark, the moon was barely visible; its light was as weak as a sick baby’s grip.

When they had traveled for some time, the deputy said, obviously feeling good about it, “There ain’t nothing out here ‘sides what you would expect. A possum maybe. The wind.”

“Good for you, then,” Jebidiah said. “Good for us all.”

“You sound disappointed to me,” the deputy said.

“My line of work isn’t far from yours, Deputy. I look for bad guys of a sort, and try and send them to hell…Or in some cases, back to hell.”

And then, almost simultaneous with a flash of lightning, something crossed the road not far in front of them.

“What the hell was that?” Bill said, coming out of what had been a near stupor.

“It looked like a man,” the deputy said.

“Could have been,” Jebidiah said. “Could have been.”

“What do you think it was?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I do.”

“Gimet,” Jebidiah said.

***

The sky let the moon loose for a moment, and its light spread through the trees and across the road. In the light there were insects, a large wad of them, buzzing about in the air.

“Bees,” Bill said. “Damn if them ain’t bees. And at night. That ain’t right.”

“You an expert on bees?” the deputy asked.

“He’s right,” Jebidiah said. “And look, they’re gone now.”

“Flew off,” the deputy said.

“No….no they didn’t,” Bill said. “I was watching, and they didn’t fly nowhere. They’re just gone. One moment they were there, then they was gone, and that’s all there is to it. They’re like ghosts.”

“You done gone crazy,” the deputy said.

“They are not insects of this earth,” Jebidiah said. “They are familiars.”

“What,” Bill said.

“They assist evil, or evil beings,” Jebidiah said. “In this case, Gimet. They’re like a witches black cat familiar. Familiars take on animal shapes, insects, that sort of thing.”

“That’s ridiculous,” the deputy said. “That don’t make no kind of sense at all.”

“Whatever you say,” Jebidiah said, “but I would keep my eyes alert, and my senses raw. Wouldn’t hurt to keep your revolvers loose in their holsters. You could well need them. Though, come to think of it, your revolvers won’t be much use.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Bill said.

Jebidiah didn’t answer. He continued to urge his horse on, something that was becoming a bit more difficult as they went. All of the horses snorted and turned their heads left and right, tugged at their bits; their ears went back and their eyes went wide.

“Holy hell,” Bill said, “what’s that?”

Jebidiah and the deputy turned to look at him. Bill was turned in the saddle, looking back. They looked too, just in time to see something that looked pale blue in the moonlight, dive into the brush on the other side of the road. Black dots followed, swarmed in the moonlight, then darted into the bushes behind the pale, blue thing like a load of buckshot.

“What was that?” the deputy said. His voice sounded as if it had been pistol whipped.

“Already told you,” Jebidiah said.

“That couldn’t have been nothing human,” the deputy said.

“Don’t you get it,” Bill said, “that’s what the preacher is trying to tell you. It’s Gimet, and he ain’t nowhere alive. His skin was blue. And he’s all messed up. I seen more than you did. I got a good look. And them bees. We ought to break out and ride hard.”

“Do as you choose,” the Reverend said. “I don’t intend to.”

“And why not?” Bill said.

“That isn’t my job.”

“Well, I ain’t got no job. Deputy, ain’t you supposed to make sure I get to Nacogdoches to get hung? Ain’t that your job?”

“It is.”

“Then we ought to ride on, not bother with this fool. He wants to fight some grave crawler, then let him. Ain’t nothing we ought to get into.”

“We made a pact to ride together,” the deputy said. “So we will.”

“I didn’t make no pact,” Bill said.

“Your word, your needs, they’re nothing to me,” the deputy said.

At that moment, something began to move through the woods on their left. Something moving quick and heavy, not bothering with stealth. Jebidiah looked in the direction of the sounds, saw someone, or something, moving through the underbrush, snapping limbs aside like they were rotten sticks. He could hear the buzz of the bees, loud and angry. Without really meaning to, he urged the horse to a trot. The deputy and Bill joined in with their own mounts, keeping pace with the Reverend’s horse.

They came to a place off the side of the road where the brush thinned, and out in the distance they could see what looked like bursting white waves, frozen against the dark. But they soon realized it was tombstones. And there were crosses. A graveyard. The graveyard Old Timer had told them about. The sky had cleared now, the wind had ceased to blow hard. They had a fine view of the cemetery, and as they watched, the thing that had been in the brush moved out of it and went up the little rise where the graves were, climbed up on one of the stones and sat. A black cloud formed around its head, and the sound of buzzing could be heard all the way out to the road. The thing sat there like a king on a throne. Even from that distance it was easy to see it was nude, and male, and his skin was gray—blue in the moonlight—and the head looked misshapen. Moon glow slipped through cracks in the back of the horror’s head and poked out of fresh cracks at the front of its skull and speared out of the empty eye sockets. The bee’s nest, visible through the wound in its chest, was nestled between the ribs. It pulsed with a yellow-honey glow. From time to time, little black dots moved around the glow and flew up and were temporarily pinned in the moonlight above the creature’s head.

“Jesus,” said the deputy.

“Jesus won’t help a bit,” Jebidiah said.

“It’s Gimet, ain’t it? He…it…really is dead,” the deputy said.

“Undead,” Jebidiah said. “I believe he’s toying with us. Waiting for when he plans to strike.”

“Strike?” Bill said. “Why?”

“Because that is his purpose,” Jebidiah said, “as it is mine to strike back. Gird you loins men, you will soon be fighting for your life.”

“How about we just ride like hell?” Bill said.

In that moment, Jebidiah’s words became prophetic. The thing was gone from the grave stone. Shadows had gathered at the edge of the woods, balled up, become solid, and when the shadows leaped from the even darker shadows of the trees, it was the shape of the thing they had seen on the stone, cool blue in the moonlight, a disaster of a face, and the teeth…They were long and sharp. Gimet leaped in such a way that his back foot hit the rear of Jebidiah’s animal, allowing him to spring over the deputy’s horse, to land hard and heavy on Bill. Bill let out a howl and was knocked off his mount. When he hit the road, his hat flying, Gimet grabbed him by his bushy head of straw-colored hair and dragged him off as easily as if he were a kitten. Gimet went into the trees, tugging Bill after him. Gimet blended with the darkness there. The last of Bill was a scream, the raising of his cuffed hands, the cuffs catching the moonlight for a quick blink of silver, then there was a rustle of leaves and a slapping of branches, and Bill was gone.

“My God,” the deputy said. “My God. Did you see that thing?”

Jebidiah dismounted, moved to the edge of the road, leading his horse, his gun drawn. The deputy did not dismount. He pulled his pistol and held it, his hands trembling. “Did you see that?” he said again, and again.

“My eyes are as good as your own,” Jebidiah said. “I saw it. We’ll have to go in and get him.”

“Get him?” the deputy said. “Why in the name of everything that’s holy would we do that? Why would we want to be near that thing? He’s probably done what he’s done already…Damn, Reverend. Bill, he’s a killer. This is just as good as I might want. I say while the old boy is doing whatever he’s doing to that bastard, we ride like the goddamn wind, get on out on the far end of this road where it forks. Gimet is supposed to be only able to go on this stretch, ain’t he?”

“That’s what Old Timer said. You do as you want. I’m going in after him.”

“Why? You don’t even know him.”

“It’s not about him,” Jebidiah said.

“Ah, hell. I ain’t gonna be shamed.” The deputy swung down from his horse, pointed at the place where Gimet had disappeared with Bill. “Can we get the horses through there?”

“Think we will have to go around a bit. I discern a path over there.”

“Discern?”

“Recognize. Come on, time is wasting.”

Part Three

They went back up the road a pace, found a trail that led through the trees. The moon was strong now as all the clouds that had covered it had rolled away like wind blown pollen. The air smelled fresh, but as they moved forward, that changed. There was a stench in the air, a putrid smell both sweet and sour, and it floated up and spoiled the freshness.

“Something dead,” the deputy said.

“Something long dead,” Jebidiah said.

Finally the brush grew so thick they had to tie the horses, leave them. They pushed their way through briars and limbs.

“There ain’t no path,” the deputy said. “You don’t know he come through this way.”

Jebidiah reached out and plucked a piece of cloth from a limb, held it up so that the moon dropped rays on it. “This is part of Bill’s shirt. Am I right?”

The deputy nodded. “But how could Gimet get through here? How could he get Bill through here?”

“What we pursue has little interest in the things that bother man. Limbs, briars. It’s nothing to the living dead.”

They went on for a while. Vines got in their way. The vines were wet. They were long thick vines, and sticky, and finally they realized they were not vines at all, but guts, strewn about and draped like decorations.

“Fresh,” the deputy said. “Bill, I reckon.”

“You reckon right,” Jebidiah said.

They pushed on a little farther, and the trail widened, making the going easier. They found more pieces of Bill as they went along. The stomach. Fingers. Pants with one leg in them. A heart, which looked as if it has been bitten into and sucked on. Jebidiah was curious enough to pick it up and examine it. Finished, he tossed it in the dirt, wiped his hands on Bill’s pants, the one with the leg still in it, said, “Gimet just saved you a lot of bother and the State of Texas the trouble of a hanging.”

“Heavens,” the deputy said, watching Jebidiah wipe blood on the leg filled pants.

Jebidiah looked up at the deputy. “He won’t mind I get blood on his pants,” Jebidiah said. “He’s got more important things to worry about, like dancing in the fires of hell. And by the way, yonder sports his head.”

Jebidiah pointed. The deputy looked. Bill’s head had been pushed onto a broken limb of a tree, the sharp end of the limb being forced through the rear of the skull and out the left eye. The spinal cord dangled from the back of the head like a bell rope.

The deputy puked in the bushes. “Oh, God. I don’t want no more of this.”

“Go back. I won’t think the less of you, cause I don’t think that much of you to begin with. Take his head for evidence and ride on, just leave me my horse.”

The deputy adjusted his hat. “Don’t need the head…And if it comes to it, you’ll be glad I’m here. I ain’t no weak sister.”

“Don’t talk me to death on the matter. Show me what you got, boy.”

The trail was slick with Bill’s blood. They went along it and up a rise, guns drawn. At the top of the hill they saw a field, grown up, and not far away, a sagging shack with a fallen down chimney.

They went that direction, came to the shack’s door. Jebidiah kicked it with the toe of his boot and it sagged open. Once inside, Jebidiah struck a match and waved it about. Nothing but cobwebs and dust.

“Must have been Gimet’s place,” Jebidiah said. Jebidiah moved the match before him until he found a lantern full of coal oil. He lit it and placed the lantern on the table.

“Should we do that?” the deputy asked. “Have a light. Won’t he find us?”

“In case you have forgotten, that’s the idea.”

Out the back window, which had long lost its grease paper covering, they could see tombstones and wooden crosses in the distance. “Another view of the graveyard,” Jebidiah said. “That would be where the girl’s mother killed herself.”

No sooner had Jebidiah said that, then he saw a shadowy shape move on the hill, flitting between stones and crosses. The shape moved quickly and awkwardly.

“Move to the center of the room,” Jebidiah said.

The deputy did as he was told, and Jebidiah moved the lamp there as well. He sat it in the center of the floor, found a bench and dragged it next to the lantern. Then he reached in his coat pocket and took out the bible. He dropped to one knee and held the bible close to the lantern light and tore out certain pages. He wadded them up, and began placing them all around the bench on the floor, placing the crumpled pages about six feet out from the bench and in a circle with each wad two feet apart.

The deputy said nothing. He sat on the bench and watched Jebidiah’s curious work. Jebidiah sat on the bench beside the deputy, rested one of his pistols on his knee. “You got a .44, don’t you?”

“Yeah. I got a converted cartridge pistol, just like you.”

“Give me your revolver.”

The deputy complied.

Jebidiah opened the cylinders and let the bullets fall out on the floor.

“What in hell are you doing?”

Jebidiah didn’t answer. He dug into his gun belt and came up with six silver tipped bullets, loaded the weapon and gave it back to the deputy.

“Silver,” Jebidiah said. “Sometimes it wards off evil.”

“Sometimes?”

“Be quiet now. And wait.”

“I feel like a staked goat,” the deputy said.

After a while, Jebidiah rose from the bench and looked out the window. Then he sat down promptly and blew out the lantern.

***

Somewhere in the distance a night bird called. Crickets sawed and a large frog bleated. They sat there on the bench, near each other, facing in opposite directions, their silver loaded pistols on their knees. Neither spoke.

Suddenly the bird ceased to call and the crickets went silent, and no more was heard from the frog. Jebidiah whispered to the deputy.

“He comes.”

The deputy shivered slightly, took a deep breath. Jebidiah realized he too was breathing deeply.

“Be silent, and be alert,” Jebidiah said.

“All right,” said the deputy, and he locked his eyes on the open window at the back of the shack. Jebidiah faced the door, which stood halfway open and sagging on its rusty hinges.

For a long time there was nothing. Not a sound. Then Jebidiah saw a shadow move at the doorway and heard the door creak slightly as it moved. He could see a hand on what appeared to be an impossibly long arm, reaching out to grab at the edge of the door. The hand clutched there for a long time, not moving. Then, it was gone, taking its shadow with it.

Time crawled by.

“It’s at the window,” the deputy said, and his voice was so soft it took Jebidiah a moment to decipher the words. Jebidiah turned carefully for a look.

It sat on the window sill, crouched there like a bird of prey, a halo of bees circling around its head. The hive pulsed and glowed in its chest, and in that glow they could see more bees, so thick they appeared to be a sort of humming smoke. Gimet’s head sprouted a few springs of hair, like withering grass fighting its way through stone. A slight turn of its head allowed the moon to flow through the back of its cracked skull and out of its empty eyes. Then the head turned and the face was full of shadows again. The room was silent except for the sound of buzzing bees.

“Courage,” Jebidiah said, his mouth close to the deputy’s ear. “Keep your place.”

The thing climbed into the room quickly, like a spider dropping from a limb, and when it hit the floor, it stayed low, allowing the darkness to lay over it like a cloak.

Jebidiah had turned completely on the bench now, facing the window. He heard a scratching sound against the floor. He narrowed his eyes, saw what looked like a shadow, but was in fact the thing coming out from under the table.

Jebidiah felt the deputy move, perhaps to bolt. He grabbed his arm and held him.

“Courage,” he said.

The thing kept crawling. It came within three feet of the circle made by the crumpled bible pages.

The way the moonlight spilled through the window and onto the floor near the circle Jebidiah had made, it gave Gimet a kind of eerie glow, his satellite bees circling his head. In that moment, every aspect of the thing locked itself in Jebidiah’s mind. The empty eyes, the sharp, wet teeth, the long, cracked nails, blackened from grime, clacking against the wooden floor. As it moved to cross between two wads of scripture, the pages burst into flames and a line of crackling blue fulmination moved between the wadded pages and made the circle light up fully, all the way around, like Ezekiel’s wheel.

Gimet gave out with a hoarse cry, scuttled back, clacking nails and knees against the floor. When he moved, he moved so quickly there seemed to be missing spaces between one moment and the next. The buzzing of Gimet’s bees was ferocious.

Jebidiah grabbed the lantern, struck a match and lit it. Gimet was scuttling along the wall like a cockroach, racing to the edge of the window.

Jebidiah leaped forward, tossed the lit lantern, hit the beast full in the back as it fled through the window. The lantern burst into flames and soaked Gimlet’s back, causing a wave of fire to climb from the thing’s waist to the top of its head, scorching a horde of bees, dropping them from the sky like exhausted meteors.

Jebidiah drew his revolver, snapped off a shot. There was a howl of agony, and then the thing was gone.

Jebidiah raced out of the protective circle and the deputy followed. They stood at the open window, watched as Gimet, flame-wrapped, streaked through the night in the direction of the graveyard.

“I panicked a little,” Jebidiah said. “I should have been more resolute. Now he’s escaped.”

“I never even got off a shot,” the deputy said. “God, but you’re fast. What a draw.”

“Look, you stay here if you like. I’m going after him. But I tell you now, the circle of power has played out.”

The deputy glanced back at it. The pages had burned out and there was nothing now but a black ring on the floor.

“What in hell caused them to catch fire in the first place?”

“Evil,” Jebidiah said. “When he got close, the pages broke into flames. Gave us the protection of God. Unfortunately, as with most of God’s blessings, it doesn’t last long.”

“I stay here, you’d have to put down more pages.”

“I’ll be taking the bible with me. I might need it.”

“Then I guess I’ll be sticking.”

***

They climbed out the window and moved up the hill. They could smell the odor of fire and rotted flesh in the air. The night was as cool and silent as the graves on the hill.

Moments later they moved amongst the stones and wooden crosses, until they came to a long wide hole in the earth. Jebidiah could see that there was a burrow at one end of the grave that dipped down deeper into the ground.

Jebidiah paused there. “He’s made this old grave his den. Dug it out and dug deeper.”

“How do you know?” the deputy asked.

“Experience…And it smells of smoke and burned skin. He crawled down there to hide. I think we surprised him a little.”

Jebidiah looked up at the sky. There was the faintest streak of pink on the horizon. “He’s running out of daylight, and soon he’ll be out of moon. For a while.”

“He damn sure surprised me. Why don’t we let him hide? You could come back when the moon isn’t full, or even half full. Back in the daylight, get him then.”

“I’m here now. And it’s my job.”

“That’s one hell of a job you got, mister.”

“I’m going to climb down for a better look.”

“Help yourself.”

Jebidiah struck a match and dropped himself into the grave, moved the match around at the mouth of the burrow, got down on his knees and stuck the match and his head into the opening.

“Very large,” he said, pulling his head out. “I can smell him. I’m going to have to go in.”

“What about me?”

“You keep guard at the lip of the grave,” Jebidiah said, standing. “He may have another hole somewhere, he could come out behind you for all I know. He could come out of that hole even as we speak.”

“That’s wonderful.”

Jebidiah dropped the now dead match on the ground. “I will tell you this. I can’t guarantee success. I lose, he’ll come for you, you can bet on that, and you better shoot those silvers as straight as William Tell’s arrows.”

“I’m not really that good a shot.”

“I’m sorry,” Jebidiah said, and struck another match along the length of his pants seam, then with his free hand, drew one of his revolvers. He got down on his hands and knees again, stuck the match in the hole and looked around. When the match was near done, he blew it out.

“Ain’t you gonna need some light?” the deputy said. “A match ain’t nothin’.”

“I’ll have it.” Jebidiah removed the remains of the bible from his pocket, tore it in half along the spine, pushed one half in his coat, pushed the other half before him, into the darkness of the burrow. The moment it entered the hole, it flamed.

“Ain’t your pocket gonna catch inside that hole?” the deputy asked.

“As long as I hold it or it’s on my person, it won’t harm me. But the minute I let go of it, and the aura of evil touches it, it’ll blaze. I got to hurry, boy.”

With that, Jebidiah wiggled inside the burrow.

***

In the burrow, Jebidiah used the tip of his pistol to push the bible pages forward. They glowed brightly, but Jebidiah knew the light would be brief. It would burn longer than writing paper, but still, it would not last long.

After a goodly distance, Jebidiah discovered the burrow dropped off. He found himself inside a fairly large cavern. He could hear the sound of bats, and smell bat guano, which in fact, greased his path as he slid along on his elbows until he could stand inside the higher cavern and look about. The last flames of the bible burned itself out with a puff of blue light and a sound like an old man breathing his last.

Jebidiah listened in the dark for a long moment. He could hear the bats squeaking, moving about. The fact that they had given up the night sky, let Jebidiah know daylight was not far off.

Jebidiah’s ears caught a sound, rocks shifting against the cave floor. Something was moving in the darkness, and he didn’t think it was the bats. It scuttled, and Jebidiah felt certain it was close to the floor, and by the sound of it, moving his way at a creeping pace. The hair on the back of Jebidiah’s neck bristled like porcupine quills. He felt his flesh bump up and crawl. The air became stiffer with the stench of burnt and rotting flesh. Jebidiah’s knees trembled. He reached cautiously inside his coat pocket, produced a match, struck it on his pants leg, held it up.

At that very moment, the thing stood up and was brightly lit in the glow of the match, the bees circling its skin-stripped skull. It snarled and darted forward. Jebidiah felt its rotten claws on his shirt front as he fired the revolver. The blaze from the bullet gave a brief, bright flare and was gone. At the same time, the match was knocked out of his hand and Jebidiah was knocked backwards, onto his back, the thing’s claws at his throat. The monster’s bees stung him. The stings felt like red-hot pokers entering his flesh. He stuck the revolver into the creature’s body and fired. Once. Twice. Three times. A fourth.

Then the hammer clicked empty. He realized he had already fired two other shots. Six dead silver soldiers were in his cylinders, and the thing still had hold of him.

He tried to draw his other gun, but before he could, the thing released him, and Jebidiah could hear it crawling away in the dark. The bats fluttered and screeched.

Confused, Jebidiah drew the pistol, managed to get to his feet. He waited, listening, his fresh revolver pointing into the darkness.

Jebidiah found another match, struck it.

The thing lay with its back draped over a rise of rock. Jebidiah eased toward it. The silver loads had torn into the hive. It oozed a dark, odiferous trail of death and decaying honey. Bees began to drop to the cavern floor. The hive in Gimet’s chest sizzled and pulsed like a large, black knot. Gimet opened his mouth, snarled, but otherwise didn’t move.

Couldn’t move.

Jebidiah, guided by the last wisps of his match, raised the pistol, stuck it against the black knot, and pulled the trigger. The knot exploded. Gimet let out with a shriek so sharp and loud it startled the bats to flight, drove them out of the cave, through the burrow, out into the remains of the night.

Gimet’s claw-like hands dug hard at the stones around him, then he was still and Jebidiah’s match went out.

***

Jebidiah found the remains of the bible in his pocket, and as he removed it, tossed it on the ground, it burst into flames. Using the two pistol barrels like large tweezers, he lifted the burning pages and dropped them into Gimet’s open chest. The body caught on fire immediately, crackled and popped dryly, and was soon nothing more than a blaze. It lit the cavern up bright as day.

Jebidiah watched the corpse being consumed by the biblical fire for a moment, then headed toward the burrow, bent down, squirmed through it, came up in the grave.

He looked for the deputy and didn’t see him. He climbed out of the grave and looked around. Jebidiah smiled. If the deputy had lasted until the bats charged out, that was most likely the last straw, and he had bolted.

Jebidiah looked back at the open grave. Smoke wisped out of the hole and out of the grave and climbed up to the sky. The moon was fading and the pink on the horizon was widening.

Gimet was truly dead now. The road was safe. His job was done.

At least for one brief moment.

Jebidiah walked down the hill, found his horse tied in the brush near the road where he had left it. The deputy’s horse was gone, of course, the deputy most likely having already finished out Deadman’s road at a high gallop, on his way to Nacogdoches, perhaps to have a long drink of whisky and turn in his badge.

Fiction: Eating Crow by Neal Barrett, Jr.

“They’re dogs.”

“Dogs?”

“Look at them on the TV, sir. They’re dogs.”

“That’s impossible. They can’t be dogs. Beings from the stars are not dogs.”

“No offense, Mr. President. They’re fricking dogs.”

“I’ll ask you to watch your language, Jim.”

“Bob.”

“What?”

“Bob, sir. I’m Bob. Your Secretary of State.”

“Of course you are. Now what in blazes is going on here, Bob? And what are you doing about it? We simply can’t have dogs, hovering over the White House. Have you talked to them? Can’t they hover somewhere else?”

“I’ve talked to one, sir.”

“One.”

“The one out there, sir. On the lawn.”

“Jesus, Bob. That’s a dog.”

“Yes, sir.”

“He hasn’t done anything, has he? On the lawn, I mean. If people see that… Jim, what do they want? Women? That’s what they want on SCI-FI Channel. Scantily clad women.”

“Bob, sir. No, sir, the one I talked to, he wants to eat a crow.”

“That’s disgusting. Even for a dog. Okay, he wants a crow, give him a crow.”

“I gave him a crow, He doesn’t want a crow, he wants a Crow. A Native American, sir.”

“Good Lord! Well, he can’t have one. You know what Bill O’Reilly would do with that?”

“I told him, Mr. President. He says we better do it. He says we maybe noticed that’s a pretty big ship. He says he’ll toast a couple of states, see if you change your mind.”

“What kind of states?”

“New York, Connecticut. Eastern Seaboard, Maine to Florida, down through the Keys.”

“One Crow, Bob. That’s it. And no women.”

“Right, sir. That’s a good decision, sir.”

“I’m the decisioner, Bob. That what’s I do.”

***

“Holy Eagle crap, what are you supposed to be?”

“You are Retching Bison, Jr., a person of the Injun persuasion? I am J’haan of the Tzūn folk. On your planet I am known as Dog.”

“You’re kidding. That’s a dog suit, right? A hell of a good suit but a fricking suit. Man, how do you get your legs to bend like that? That is terrific. Really. So what are you selling, dude? Whatever it is, we don’t want any. And we don’t say Injun, pal. We say Absaroka. Crow, to you. Suppose you take your shaggy ass right off the reservation, before you get a traditional arrow up the kazoo.”

“Sorry, I cannot go now, Absaroka guy. Bob, who is secretary of the states, is to pick me up when I am done. We are staying at the hotel place in Billings of Montana. He will return in two of your Earthly hours. I should be done by then.”

“Be done what?”

“I fear that is of a confidential nature. Tell me, please. I must be correctly in this. How do I know you are a Crow? How do I know you are a Native of America or not? What if that is a merely a native suit? Where is your feather? Where are your mocs and the beach cloth to cover your ding?”

“Dong. And we don’t do feathers. Not with a three-piece and a tie. J’haan, is it? I had a dog named Duke, and another named Spot. Duke’s likely dead. Spot ran off. Look, you going to hang around here, sit, stay. I can’t stand to see you bouncing around on two legs. I think I’m at the fricking circus.”

“A circus is an event of peanuts and merry-making. I know that. We have learned much from your motioning picture and television shows. There is little to do in the spaces-in-between but peek into planetary fun on the orbs we pass by. I have watched the antics of the Lucy and the See-Es-Eyes. Peepee Herman and his band. The battle of the Leons and the Giants.

“Passing your world is where I came upon the topic that brings me here now. Much has puzzled my head. I will not deign to mention my anger at learning what ‘pet’ means. The Tzūn folk will not be forgetting this. Now, however, answer these things if you will: What is ‘Dog Gone?’ A dog is not here, a dog is gone? Gone where? Are dog days different than person days? How does that work? Is there a time differential among my kinsmen here? Why is there such great interest in dog-eared, dogface, dog fight? dog house, dog leg, dogging it, dogie, dog’s life, put on the dog? Put what on the dog, and why? Why is there a dog in the manger? I know about mangers, and what is the dog doing there in the first place? I do not understand why it is best to let sleeping dogs lie. Lying is pointless when one is not in the conscious state. And besides, how do you know if one is doing a fibbing in his sleep? You have no powers of the sensory kind, we are certain of that.

“These and other things are of great concern to me. But what has brought me here, Retching Bison, Jr., is this business about Dogs and Crows. I can see you are of the humans. Not of the shade, say, of Bob, secretary of the states, but human nevertheless. Why, then, does history and stuff remind us that the Crow is the white man’s dog? White men, such as the Bob, can surely tell you are not of a dogly nature at all. Why, then, do we of the Tzūn come across this statement in countless bad motion-movie shows? Why do the jonwaines say this over and over again? It is, of course, an honor to be a dog, but not so much, I think, in such a case as this.”

“I cannot answer all of your questions, which would bore me to tears, but I will, indeed, tell you the meaning of that one. Many years ago, when Axxaashe, the sun, and Bilitaachiia, the moon, looked down upon my people with love instead of great disdain, the Absaroka fought the nations of the Nez Perce, the Arapaho, and the devil Sioux. We were proud, and blessed by Father Trout and Mother Pigeon. Man, Baacheé, and Woman, Bia, made love by the sweet waters, the Bilé, of the Yellowstone River. We fought our enemies with passion and honor.

“Then, we made a big mistake: We fought beside the white man. We chased the great Seated Bull north when he led his people to Canada after the great battle of Greasy Grass. From then on, we were scorned by other nations. Hated in all the camps by the rivers, on the plains and in the mountains. And thus, we became known as the white man’s dogs. I assure you, there was no honor in this, nothing but shame and sorrow…”

“I thank you, Retching Bison, Jr. That is a great deal more than I really wanted to know, but I clearly see your point. Now, though we have become companions, though certainly not friends, a disgusting thought if I ever there was one, I feel I must tell you why I have come. One of the phrases I frequently run across on our in-between voyages is eating crow. I have never thought about the meaning of these words, and don’t give a rhatt’s rear, if you really want to know. I only know that since the Crow and the Tzūn folk appear to have much in common through myth and TV, I find I wish to satisfy my hunger by eating Crow. I would be grateful if you would concede to my needs, and not make a big thing about this, which would greatly embarrass us both.”

“I wish I could be of a more giving nature, but I fear this cannot be. Surely you must know the act of being eaten is both a painful and final thing, J’haan. That is, unless you believe the Pawnee god Suki-Pastaka’coli, who tells us we pass from the tract of digestion directly to the Big Whorehouse in the Sky. I am not a Pawnee person, though there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“What I believe, Retching Bison, Jr., is that you are stalling, hoping to catch me off guard as I prepare to render you senseless with a Car-oddie chop I learned from the great Chowlin master himself.”

“I feel I can save you some humuliation, J’haan, by informing you I am a skilled student of the ancient Burmese art of bando boxing, a deadly form of combat based upon the motion of creatures from the animal world. Rendered senseless, as you say, is a most pleasant feeling, compared to a single blow from a bando dude.”

“We are getting nowhere with this banter, Retching Bison, Jr. Let us take a fighting stance, and see who comes out as London Broil or some other fancy cut, and who does not.”

“In all fairness, J’haan, there is one thing I feel I must tell you. In all your learned discourse about this strange link between your folk and mine, you have somehow failed to note that history and the moving picture point out that while eating crow is a familiar term—one that seems to strike your fancy as a gourmand treat—it is no more common than the fact that the Crow eat dog, and have, for centuries past. No offense, but it is quite a tasty dish, properly boiled to reduce the somewhat doggy odor that is common to your kind, cooked or not.”

“This is true? You are certain of this? You are not simply making this up to throw me off my feed?”

“No, J’haan, it is fact. Please know that your hunger has started my juices flowing as well. But, as you have been reasonably honest with me I feel I can do no less with you.”

“Then, Retching Bison, Jr., we have reached a near impossible dilemma. It is much like that insidious horror, algebra: One factor cancels out the other, and we are left with nothing. It would be unnatural for either of us to partake of the other. Yet, my stomach is as dark and empty as the spaces-in-between the stars. My being cries out for sustenance, vittles, fast food, slow food, food of any sort. Grub, chow, groceries, grits. This untimely revelation of yours has left us without any lunch.”

“Oh con-trair, mon dog. I am thinking it has not…

***

“If you’re finished with that leg, you might pass it over here, J’haan. I am stuffed, but that looks mighty good.”

“A bit stringy, friend of the Tzūn, but a little ketchup helps. I’ll have another bite of that heart, if you will, then I think a little nap.”

“Excellent idea, friend of the Absaroka. And I must say, I find it somewhat amazing that your folk and mine have non foolish prejudices where food is concerned.”

“Indeed. Innards or outards, it’s all the same to me. But do answer me this, old fellow. Though I know little of Earthly customs, I find it amazing your hotels do not appear to mind a fire in their rooms.”

“Actually, they do.”

“Ah, I see.”

“If you’d like, I will share this last bit of lung with you. It’s quite good.”

“As they say among my people, organs are where it’s at.”

“I can see that this is so. From now on, you will be known far and wide in the Crow Nation as Liver Eatin’ Jahaan-Tzūn!”

“Indeed, Junior, I would be proud to bear this title.”

—For Terry Bison

Fiction: Jude Confronts Global Warming by Joe Hill

Georgia was in the music library, knitting little silver skulls on a shawl, and listening to the radio, when Jude wandered into the room.

“…3,000 scientists signed the strongest statement yet on the subject of global warming,” said the newsman. “The letter paints a dark picture of the earth’s future, warning that melting ice caps, super hurricanes, and coastal flooding are inevitable if the global community doesn’t act decisively to address climate change. Concerned consumers are advised to consider lowering their energy consumption, and to look at alternative energy cars…”

Jude flipped the radio over to FUM. They were playing Soundgarden, Black Hole Sun. Jude turned it up.

“What the fuck you do that for?” Georgia said, and chucked a sewing needle at the back of his head. It bounced off his shoulders. Jude ignored it. “I was listening to that, asshole.”

“Now you’re listening to this,” Jude said.

“You’re such a dick.”

“Oh hell,” he said, turning back toward her. “They were wetting themselves over global cooling, twenty years ago. Remember that? No, probably not. Big Bird didn’t talk much environmental science.”

She threw the other sewing needle at him. He ducked, stuck an arm up to protect his face. The needle glanced off his wrist. By the time he looked up over his arm, she had huffed out.

Jude followed her into the kitchen. She bent into the fridge, to paw out a bottle of that cranberry red stuff she drank now, one of her wine coolers. To Jude, it tasted like Kool-Aid, as prepared by the Rev. Jim Jones.

“It’s a crock,” Jude said. “Nobody knows.”

“Everybody knows,” she said. “There’s data that shows the earth’s temperature has been rising every year for the last fifty years. No one argues that.”

He had to clamp down on a laugh. It was always funny to him, when Georgia used words like data. He was maybe not entirely successful at disguising his amusement, because she threw the cap of her wine cooler at him.

“Will you stop throwing shit at me?” he said.

She turned away on her heel, glared back into the open fridge for something to munch on. Her lips were moving, as she whispered angrily to herself. He caught just a word here and there: fuck; Jude; ignoramus.

He eased around the chopping block, slipped up behind her, and put his arms around her waist, clasping her body to his. At the same time he peered over her shoulder into the refrigerator. Nothing to drink except those fucking wine coolers.

“C’mon. I hate when we fight about stupid shit,” he said, and slid his hands up to give her melons a squeeze.

“It isn’t stupid shit,” she said, elbowing him off her, and wheeling around, her eyes giving him the old death ray. “Take a look at your cars. Why you got to drive everywhere in those shitty gas guzzling old cars of yours? Just because they make you feel like a badass? First it was the Mustang, then it was the Charger. They both get about three miles to the gallon, and when people are stuck behind us in traffic, you can see ‘em turning black in the face from breathing your exhaust. You ever thought about taking yourself out and buying a nice responsible hybrid—one of those superlow emissions vehicles that get such great mileage?”

“I was thinking about taking myself out to get some beer,” he said, and burped in her face. “Oops, sorry—runaway emissions.”

She punched him in the chest, gave him the finger, and told him to eat shit, roughly all at the same time. He turned away, laughing, grabbed his black duster off the back of a chair.

“The people who drive hybrids look like weenies,” he said. “I wouldn’t be caught dead.”

He left her in the kitchen, and cut through Danny’s old office, headed for the driveway. Jude opened the side door, shaking his head, and stepped out into the Atlantic Ocean.

He hadn’t expected it to be there—the ocean hadn’t been waiting outside the front door yesterday—and he sank straight down, his motorcycle boots filling with icy seawater.

“Blub,” he said. A jellyfish moved past him in pulses. He turned to go back inside, but the currents already had him, and he was rolled away through dark water. The hubcap of his Dodge Charger sailed by. Shit, he thought, the Charger. It had to be underwater too. The engine, the leather upholstery, the custom radio system…the whole thing was probably fucked.

Then Jude drowned.

Fiction: Missile Gap by Charles Stross

It’s 1976 again. Abba are on the charts, the Cold War is in full swing — and the Earth is flat. It’s been flat ever since the eve of the Cuban war of 1962; and the constellations overhead are all wrong. Beyond the Boreal ocean, strange new continents loom above tropical seas, offering a new start to colonists like newly-weds Maddy and Bob, and the hope of further glory to explorers like ex-cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: but nobody knows why they exist, and outside the circle of exploration the universe is inexplicably warped.

Gregor, in Washington DC, knows but isn’t talking. Colonel-General Gagarin, on a years-long mission to go where New Soviet Man has not gone before, is going to find out. And on the edge of an ancient desert, beneath the aged stars of another galaxy, Maddy is about to come face-to-face with humanity’s worst fear…

You can order a copy of Missle Gap by Charles Stross here at the SubPress site, or here at Amazon.com.

From Booklist:
“With the dazzling success of his last two novels, including the Hugo-nominated Accelerando (2005), Stross is rapidly establishing himself as one of the preeminent masters of hard sf. Here he takes a breather from weightier fare with a bizarre, nevertheless brilliant alternate-history novella featuring a protracted U.S.-Soviet cold war…Once again, Stross sets the bar high for his colleagues, should they be feeling competitive, in this mind-bending, intriguing yarn.”

From Publishers Weekly:
“The result is a blend of 1900s H.G. Wells and 1970s propaganda, updated for the 21st century in the clear, chilly and fashionably cynical style that lets Stross get away with premises that would be absurdly cheesy in anyone else’s hands.”

From Green Man Review:
”There are some pretty creepy moments here including one that remminded me of the Cthulhu mythos. Or possibly the Pod People. Really. Truly. And the ending was a proper surprise, as I wasn’t sure how Stross would wrap it up. Indeed that’s the gold standard for good storytelling for me — interesting characters in a plausibe setting (no how farfetched it seems at first glance) with an ending that I wasn’t expecting. Bravo Stross!”

Chapter One: Bomb scare

Gregor is feeding pigeons down in the park when the sirens go off.

A stoop-shouldered forty-something male in a dark suit, pale-skinned and thin, he pays no attention at first: the birds hold his attention. He stands at the side of a tarmac path, surrounded by damp grass that appears to have been sprayed with concrete dust, and digs into the outer pocket of his raincoat for a final handful of stale bread-crumbs. Filthy, soot-blackened city pigeons with malformed feet jostle with plump white-collared wood pigeons, pecking and lunging for morsels. Gregor doesn’t smile. What to him is a handful of stale bread, is a deadly business for the birds: a matter of survival. The avian struggle for survival runs parallel to the human condition, he ponders. It’s all a matter of limited resources and critical positioning. Of intervention by agencies beyond their bird-brained understanding, dropping treats for them to fight over. Then the air raid sirens start up.

The pigeons scatter for the treetops with a clatter of wings. Gregor straightens and looks round. It’s not just one siren, and not just a test: a policeman is pedaling his bicycle along the path towards him, waving one-handed. “You there! Take cover!”

Gregor turns and presents his identity card. “Where is the nearest shelter?”

The constable points towards a public convenience thirty yards away. “The basement there. If you can’t make it inside, you’ll have to take cover behind the east wall–if you’re caught in the open, just duck and cover in the nearest low spot. Now go!” The cop hops back on his black boneshaker and is off down the footpath before Gregor can frame a reply. Shaking his head, he walks towards the public toilet and goes inside.

It’s early spring, a weekday morning, and the toilet attendant seems to be taking the emergency as a personal comment on the cleanliness of his porcelain. He jumps up and down agitatedly as he shoves Gregor down the spiral staircase into the shelter, like a short troll in a blue uniform stocking his larder. “Three minutes!” shouts the troll. “Hold fast in three minutes!” So many people in London are wearing uniforms these days, Gregor reflects; it’s almost as if they believe that if they play their wartime role properly the ineffable will constrain itself to their expectations of a humanly comprehensible enemy.

A double-bang splits the air above the park and echoes down the stairwell. It’ll be RAF or USAF interceptors outbound from the big fighter base near Hanworth. Gregor glances round: A couple of oafish gardeners sit on the wooden benches inside the concrete tunnel of the shelter, and a louche City type in a suit leans against the wall, irritably fiddling with an unlit cigarette and glaring at the NO SMOKING signs. “Bloody nuisance, eh?” he snarls in Gregor’s direction.

Gregor composes his face in a thin smile. “I couldn’t possibly comment,” he says, his Hungarian accent betraying his status as a refugee. (Another sonic boom rattles the urinals, signaling the passage of yet more fighters.) The louche businessman will be his contact, Goldsmith. He glances at the shelter’s counter. Its dial is twirling slowly, signaling the marked absence of radon and fallout. Time to make small-talk, verbal primate grooming: “Does it happen often?”

The corporate tough relaxes. He chuckles to himself. He’ll have pegged Gregor as a visitor from stranger shores, the new NATO dominions overseas where they settled the latest wave of refugees ejected by the communists. Taking in the copy of The Telegraph and the pattern of stripes on Gregor’s tie he’ll have realized what else Gregor is to him. “You should know, you took your time getting down here. Do you come here often to visit the front line, eh?”

“I am here in this bunker with you,” Gregor shrugs. “There is no front line on a circular surface.” He sits down on the bench opposite the businessman gingerly. “Cigarette?”

“Don’t mind if I do.” The businessman borrows Gregor’s cigarette case with a flourish: the symbolic peace-offering accepted, they sit in silence for a couple of minutes, waiting to find out if it’s the curtain call for world war four, or just a trailer.

A different note drifts down the staircase, the warbling tone that indicates the all-clear these days. The Soviet bombers have turned for home, the ragged lion’s stumpy tail tickled yet again. The toilet troll dashes down the staircase and windmills his arms at them: “No smoking in the nuclear bunker!” he screams. “Get out! Out, I say!”

Gregor walks back into Regent’s Park, to finish disposing of his stale bread-crumbs and ferry the contents of his cigarette case back to the office. The businessman doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to be arrested, and his English nationalist/neutralist cabal interned: meanwhile, Gregor is being recalled to Washington DC. This is his last visit, at least on this particular assignment. There are thin times ahead for the wood pigeons.

Chapter Two: Voyage

It’s a moonless night and the huge reddened whirlpool of the Milky Way lies below the horizon. With only the reddish-white pinprick glare of Lucifer for illumination, it’s too dark to read a newspaper.

Maddy is old enough to remember a time when night was something else: when darkness stalked the heavens, the Milky Way a faded tatter spun across half the sky. A time when ominous Soviet spheres bleeped and hummed their way across a horizon that curved, when geometry was dominated by pi, astronomy made sense, and serious men with horn-rimmed glasses and German accents were going to the moon. October 2, 1962: that’s when it all changed. That’s when life stopped making sense. (Of course it first stopped making sense a few days earlier, with the U-2 flights over the concrete emplacements in Cuba, but there was a difference between the lunacy of brinksmanship–Khrushchev’s shoe banging on the table at the UN as he shouted “we will bury you!”–and the flat earth daydream that followed, shattering history and plunging them all into this nightmare of revisionist geography.)

But back to the here-and-now: she’s sitting on the deck of an elderly ocean liner on her way from somewhere to nowhere, and she’s annoyed because Bob is getting drunk with the F-deck boys again and eating into their precious grubstake. It’s too dark to read the ship’s daily news sheet (mimeographed blurry headlines from a world already fading into the ship’s wake), it’ll be at least two weeks before their next landfall (a refueling depot somewhere in what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration surveyors–in a fit of uncharacteristic wit–named the Nether Ocean), and she’s half out of her skull with boredom.

When they signed up for the Emigration Board tickets Bob had joked: “A six month cruise? After a vacation like that we’ll be happy to get back to work!”–but somehow the sheer immensity of it all didn’t sink in until the fourth week out of sight of land. In those four weeks they’d crawled an expanse of ocean wider than the Pacific, pausing to refuel twice from huge rust-colored barges: and still they were only a sixth of the way to Continent F-204, New Iowa, immersed like the ultimate non-sequitur in the ocean that replaced the world’s horizons on October 2, 1962. Two weeks later they passed The Radiators. The Radiators thrust from the oceanic depths to the stratosphere, Everest-high black fins finger-combing the watery currents. Beyond them the tropical heat of the Pacific gave way to the sub-arctic chill of the Nether Ocean. Sailing between them, the ship was reduced to the proportions of a cockroach crawling along a canyon between skyscrapers. Maddy had taken one look at these guardians of the interplanetary ocean, shuddered, and retreated into their cramped room for the two days it took to sail out from between the slabs.

Bob kept going on about how materials scientists from NOAA and the National Institutes were still trying to understand what they were made of, until Maddy snapped at him. He didn’t seem to understand that they were the bars on a prison cell. He seemed to see a waterway as wide as the English Channel, and a gateway to the future: but Maddy saw them as a sign that her old life was over.

If only Bob and her father hadn’t argued; or if Mum hadn’t tried to pick a fight with her over Bob–Maddy leans on the railing and sighs, and a moment later nearly jumps out of her skin as a strange man clears his throat behind her.

“Excuse me, I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“That’s alright,” Maddy replies, irritated and trying to conceal it. “I was just going in.”

“A shame: it’s a beautiful night,” says the stranger. He turns and puts down a large briefcase next to the railing, fiddling with the latches. “Not a cloud in sight, just right for stargazing.” She focuses on him, seeing short hair, small paunch, and a worried thirty-something face. He doesn’t look back, being preoccupied with something that resembles a photographer’s tripod.

“Is that a telescope?” she asks, eyeing the stubby cylindrical gadget in his case.

“Yes.” An awkward pause. “Name’s John Martin. Yourself?”

“Maddy Holbright.” Something about his diffident manner puts her at ease. “Are you settling? I haven’t seen you around.”

He straightens up and tightens joints on the tripod’s legs, screwing them into place. “I’m not a settler, I’m a researcher. Five years, all expenses paid, to go and explore a new continent.” He carefully lifts the telescope body up and lowers it onto the platform, then begins tightening screws. “And I’m supposed to point this thing at the sky and make regular observations. I’m actually an entomologist, but there are so many things to do that they want me to be a jack of all trades, I guess.”

“So they’ve got you to carry a telescope, huh? I don’t think I’ve ever met an entomologist before.”

“A bug-hunter with a telescope,” he agrees: “kind of unexpected.”

Intrigued, Maddy watches as he screws the viewfinder into place then pulls out a notebook and jots something down. “What are you looking at?”

He shrugs. “There’s a good view of S-Doradus from here,” he says. “You know, Satan? And his two little angels.”

Maddy glances up at the violent pinprick of light, then looks away before it can burn her eyes. It’s a star, but bright enough to cast shadows from half a light year’s distance. “The disks?”

“Them.” There’s a camera body in his bag, a chunky old Bronica from back before the Soviets swallowed Switzerland and Germany whole. He carefully screws it onto the telescope’s viewfinder. “The Institute wants me to take a series of photographs of them–nothing fancy, just the best this eight-inch reflector can do–over six months. Plot the ship’s position on a map. There’s a bigger telescope in the hold, for when I arrive, and they’re talking about sending a real astronomer one of these days, but in the meantime they want photographs from sixty thousand miles out across the disk. For parallax, so they can work out how fast the disks are moving.”

“Disks.” They seem like distant abstractions to her, but John’s enthusiasm is hard to ignore. “Do you suppose they’re like, uh, here?” She doesn’t say like Earth–everybody knows this isn’t Earth any more. Not the way it used to be.

“Maybe.” He busies himself for a minute with a chunky film cartridge. “They’ve got oxygen in their atmospheres, we know that. And they’re big enough. But they’re most of a light year away–far closer than the stars, but still too far for telescopes.”

“Or moon rockets,” she says, slightly wistfully. “Or sputniks.”

“If those things worked any more.” The film is in: he leans over the scope and brings it round to bear on the first of the disks, a couple of degrees off from Satan. (The disks are invisible to the naked eye; it takes a telescope to see their reflected light.) He glances up at her. “Do you remember the moon?”

Maddy shrugs. “I was just a kid when it happened. But I saw the moon, some nights. During the day, too.”

He nods. “Not like some of the kids these days. Tell them we used to live on a big spinning sphere and they look at you like you’re mad.”

“What do they think the speed of the disks will tell them?” She asks.

“Whether they’re all as massive as this one. What they could be made of. What that tells us about who it was that made them.” He shrugs. “Don’t ask me, I’m just a bug-hunter. This stuff is big, bigger than bugs.” He chuckles. “It’s a new world out here.”

She nods very seriously, then actually sees him for the first time: “I guess it is.”

Chapter Three: Boldly Go

“So tell me, comrade colonel, how did it really feel?”

The comrade colonel laughs uneasily. He’s forty-three and still slim and boyish-looking, but carries a quiet melancholy around with him like his own personal storm cloud. “I was very busy all the time,” he says with a self-deprecating little shrug. “I didn’t have time to pay attention to myself. One orbit, it only lasted ninety minutes, what did you expect? If you really want to know, Gherman’s the man to ask. He had more time.”

“Time.” His interrogator sighs and leans his chair back on two legs. It’s a horribly old, rather precious Queen Anne original, a gift to some Tsar or other many years before the October revolution. “What a joke. Ninety minutes, two days, that’s all we got before they changed the rules on us.”

“’They,’ comrade chairman?” The colonel looked puzzled.

“Whoever.” The chairman’s vague wave takes in half the horizon of the richly paneled Kremlin office. “What a joke. Whoever they were, at least they saved us from a pasting in Cuba because of that louse Nikita.” He pauses for a moment, then toys with the wine glass that sits, half-empty, before him. The colonel has a glass too, but his is full of grape juice, out of consideration for his past difficulties. “The ‘whoever’ I speak of are of course the brother socialists from the stars who brought us here.” He grins humorlessly, face creasing like the muzzle of a shark that smells blood in the water.

“Brother socialists.” The colonel smiles hesitantly, wondering if it’s a joke, and if so, whether he’s allowed to share it. He’s still unsure why he’s being interviewed by the premier–in his private office, at that. “Do we know anything of them, sir? That is, am I supposed to–”

“Never mind.” Aleksey sniffs, dismissing the colonel’s worries. “Yes, you’re cleared to know everything on this topic. The trouble is there is nothing to know, and this troubles me, Yuri Alexeyevich. We infer purpose, the engine of a greater history at work–but the dialectic is silent on this matter. I have consulted the experts, asked them to read the chicken entrails, but none of them can do anything other than parrot pre-event dogma: ‘any species advanced enough to do to us what happened that day must of course have evolved true Communism, comrade premier! Look what they did for us! (That was Shchlovskii, by the way.) And yes, I look and I see six cities that nobody can live in, spaceships that refuse to stick to the sky, and a landscape that Sakharov and that bunch of double-domes are at a loss to explain. There are fucking miracles and wonders and portents in the sky, like a galaxy we were supposed to be part of that is now a million years too old and shows extensive signs of construction. There’s no room for miracles and wonders in our rational world, and it’s giving the comrade general secretary, Yuri, the comrade general secretary, stomach ulcers; did you know that?”

The colonel sits up straight, anticipating the punch line: it’s a well-known fact throughout the USSR that when Brezhnev says ‘frog,’ the premier croaks. And here he is in the premier’s office, watching that very man, Aleksey Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers, third most powerful man in the Soviet Union, taking a deep breath.

“Yuri Alexeyevich, I have brought you here today because I want you to help set Leonid Illich’s stomach at rest. You’re an aviator and a hero of the Soviet Union, and more importantly you’re smart enough to do the job and young enough to see it through, not like the old farts cluttering up Stavka. (It’s going to take most of a lifetime to sort out, you mark my words.) You’re also, you will pardon the bluntness, about as much use as a fifth wheel in your current posting right now: we have to face facts, and the sad reality is that none of Korolev’s birds will ever fly again, not even with the atomic bomb pusher-thing they’ve been working on.” Kosygin sighs and shuffles upright in his chair. “There is simply no point in maintaining the Cosmonaut Training Centre. A decree has been drafted and will be approved next week: the manned rocket program is going to be wound up and the cosmonaut corps reassigned to other duties.”

The colonel flinches. “Is that absolutely necessary, comrade chairman?”

Kosygin drains his wine glass, decides to ignore the implied criticism. “We don’t have the resources to waste. But, Yuri Alexeyevich, all that training is not lost.” He grins wolfishly. “I have new worlds for you to explore, and a new ship for you to do it in.”

“A new ship.” The colonel nods then does a double take, punch-drunk. “A ship?”

“Well, it isn’t a fucking horse,” says Kosygin. He slides a big glossy photograph across his blotter towards the colonel. “Times have moved on.” The colonel blinks in confusion as he tries to make sense of the thing at the centre of the photograph. The premier watches his face, secretly amused: confusion is everybody’s first reaction to the thing in the photograph.

“I’m not sure I understand, sir–”

“It’s quite simple: you trained to explore new worlds. You can’t, not using the rockets. The rockets won’t ever make orbit. I’ve had astronomers having nervous breakdowns trying to explain why, but the all agree on the key point: rockets won’t do it for us here. Something wrong with the gravity, they say it even crushes falling starlight.” The chairman taps a fat finger on the photograph. “But you can do it using this. We invented it and the bloody Americans didn’t. It’s called an ekranoplan, and you rocket boys are going to stop being grounded cosmonauts and learn how to fly it. What do you think, colonel Gagarin?”

The colonel whistles tunelessly through his teeth: he’s finally worked out the scale. It looks like a flying boat with clipped wings, jet engines clustered by the sides of its cockpit–but no flying boat ever carried a runway with a brace of MiG-21s on its back. “It’s bigger than a cruiser! Is it nuclear powered?”

“Of course.” The chairman’s grin slips. “It cost as much as those moon rockets of Sergei’s, colonel-general. Try not to drop it.”

Gagarin glances up, surprise and awe visible on his face. “Sir, I’m honored, but–”

“Don’t be.” The chairman cuts him off. “The promotion was coming your way anyway. The posting that comes with it will earn you as much honor as that first orbit. A second chance at space, if you like. But you can’t fail: the cost is unthinkable. It’s not your skin that will pay the toll, it’s our entire rationalist civilization.” Kosygin leans forward intently.

“Somewhere out there are beings so advanced that they skinned the earth like a grape and plated it onto this disk–or worse, copied us all right down to the atomic level and duplicated us like one of those American Xerox machines. It’s not just us, though. You are aware of the other continents in the oceans. We think some of them may be inhabited, too–nothing else makes sense. Your task is to take the Sergei Korolev, the first ship of its class, on an historic five-year cruise. You will boldly go where no Soviet man has gone before, explore new worlds and look for new peoples, and to establish fraternal socialist relations with them. But your primary objective is to discover who built this giant mousetrap of a world, and why they brought us to it, and to report back to us–before the Americans find out.

Chapter Four: Committee Process

The cherry trees are in bloom in Washington DC, and Gregor perspires in the summer heat. He has grown used to the relative cool of London and this unaccustomed change of climate has disoriented him. Jet lag is a thing of the past–a small mercy–but there are still adjustments to make. Because the disk is flat, the daylight source–polar flares from an accretion disk inside the axial hole, the scientists call it, which signifies nothing to most people–grows and shrinks the same wherever you stand.

There’s a concrete sixties-vintage office block with a conference suite furnished in burnt umber and orange, chromed chairs and Kandinsky prints on the walls: all very seventies. Gregor waits outside the suite until the buzzer sounds and the receptionist looks up from behind her IBM typewriter and says, “You can go in now, they’re expecting you.”

Gregor goes in. It’s an occupational hazard, but by no means the worst, in his line of work.

“Have a seat.” It’s Seth Brundle, Gregor’s divisional head–a grey-looking functionary, more adept at office back-stabbing than field-expedient assassinations. His cover, like Gregor’s, is an innocuous-sounding post in the Office of Technology Assessment. In fact, both he and Gregor work for a different government agency, although the notional task is the same: identify technological threats and stamp on them before they emerge.

Brundle is not alone in the room. He proceeds with the introductions: “Greg Samsa is our London station chief and specialist in scientific intelligence. Greg, this is Marcus.” The bald, thin-faced German in the smart suit bobs his head and smiles behind his horn-rimmed glasses. “Civilian consultant.” Gregor mistrusts him on sight. Marcus is a defector–a former Stasi spook, from back before the Brezhnev purges of the mid-sixties. Which puts an interesting complexion on this meeting.

“Murray Fox, from Langley.”

“Hi,” says Gregor, wondering just what kind of insane political critical mass Stone is trying to assemble: Langley and Brundle’s parent outfit aren’t even on speaking terms, to say the least.

“And another civilian specialist, Dr. Sagan.” Greg nods at the doctor, a thin guy with sparkling brown eyes and hippyish long hair. “Greg’s got something to tell us in person,” says Brundle. “Something very interesting he picked up in London. No sources please, Greg.”

“No sources,” Gregor echoes. He pulls out a chair and sits down. Now he’s here he supposes he’ll just have to play the role Brundle assigned to him in the confidential briefing he read on the long flight home. “We have word from an unimpeachable HUMINT resource that the Russians have–” he coughs into his fist. “Excuse me.” He glances at Brundle. “Okay to talk about COLLECTION RUBY?”

“They’re all cleared,” Brundle says dryly. “That’s why it says ‘joint committee’ on the letterhead.”

“I see. My invitation was somewhat terse.” Gregor stifles a sigh that seems to say, all I get is a most urgent recall; how am I meant to know what’s going on and who knows what? “So why are we here?”

“Think of it as another collective analysis board,” says Fox, the man from the CIA. He doesn’t look enthused.

“We’re here to find out what’s going on, with the benefit of some intelligence resources from the other side of the curtain.”

Doctor Sagan, who has been listening silently with his head cocked to one side like a very intelligent blackbird, raises an eyebrow.

“Yes?” asks Brundle.

“I, uh, would you mind explaining that to me? I haven’t been on one of these committees before.”

No indeed, thinks Gregor. It’s a miracle Sagan ever passed his political vetting: he’s too friendly by far with some of those Russian astronomer guys who are clearly under the thumb of the KGB’s First Department. And he’s expressed doubts–muted, of course–about the thrust of current foreign policy, which is a serious no-no under the McNamara administration.

“A CAB is a joint committee feeding into the Central Office of Information’s external bureaux on behalf of a blue-ribbon panel of experts assembled from the intelligence community,” Gregor recites in a bored tone of voice. “Stripped of the bullshit, we’re a board of wise men who’re meant to rise above narrow bureaucratic lines of engagement and prepare a report for the Office of Technology Assessment to pass on to the Director of Central Intelligence. It’s not meant to reflect the agenda of any one department, but to be a Delphi board synergizing our lateralities. Set up after the Cuban fiasco to make sure that we never again get backed into that kind of corner by accidental group-think. One of the rules of the CAB process is that it has to include at least one dissident: unlike the commies we know we’re not perfect.” Gregor glances pointedly at Fox, who has the good sense to stay silent.

“Oh, I see,” Sagan says hesitantly. With more force: “so that’s why I’m here? Is that the only reason you’ve dragged me away from Cornell?”

“Of course not, Doctor,” oozes Brundle, casting Gregor a dirty look. The East German defector, Wolff, maintains a smug silence: I are above all this. “We’re here to come up with policy recommendations for dealing with the bigger picture. The much bigger picture.”

“The Builders,” says Fox. “We’re here to determine what our options look like if and when they show up, and to make recommendations about the appropriate course of action. Your background in, uh, SETI recommended you.”

Sagan looks at him in disbelief. “I’d have thought that was obvious,” he says.

“Eh?”

“We won’t have any choice,” the young professor explains with a wry smile. “Does a termite mound negotiate with a nuclear superpower?”

Brundle leans forward. “That’s rather a radical position, isn’t it? Surely there’ll be some room for maneuver? We know this is an artificial construct, but presumably the builders are still living people. Even if they’ve got green skin and six eyes.”

“Oh. My. God.” Sagan leans forward, his face in his hands. After a moment Gregor realizes that he’s laughing.

“Excuse me.” Gregor glances round. It’s the German defector, Wolff, or whatever he’s called. “Herr Professor, would you care to explain what you find so funny?”

After a moment Sagan leans back, looks at the ceiling, and sighs. “Imagine a single, a forty-five RPM record with a centre hole punched out. The inner hole is half an astronomical unit–forty-six million miles–in radius. The outer edge is of unknown radius, but probably about two and a half AUs–two hundred and forty five million miles. The disk’s thickness is unknown–seismic waves are reflected off a mirror-like rigid layer eight hundred miles down–but we can estimate it at eight thousand miles, if its density averages out at the same as Earth’s. Surface gravity is the same as our original planet, and since we’ve been transplanted here and survived we have learned that it’s a remarkably hospitable environment for our kind of life; only on the large scale does it seem different.”

The astronomer sits up. “Do any of you gentlemen have any idea just how preposterously powerful whoever built this structure is?”

“How do you mean, preposterously powerful?” asks Brundle, looking more interested than annoyed.

“A colleague of mine, Dan Alderson, did the first analysis. I think you might have done better to pull him in, frankly. Anyway, let me itemise: item number one is escape velocity.” Sagan holds up a bony finger. “Gravity on a disk does not diminish in accordance with the inverse square law, the way it does on a spherical object like the planet we came from. We have roughly earthlike gravity, but to escape, or to reach orbit, takes tremendously more speed. Roughly two hundred times more, in fact. Rockets that from Earth could reach the moon just fall out of the sky after running out of fuel. Next item:” another finger. “The area and mass of the disk. If it’s double-sided it has a surface area equal to billions and billions of Earths. We’re stuck in the middle of an ocean full of alien continents, but we have no guarantee that this hospitable environment is anything other than a tiny oasis in a world of strangeness.”

The astronomer pauses to pour himself a glass of water, then glances round the table. “To put it in perspective, gentlemen, this world is so big that, if one in every hundred stars had an earth-like planet, this single structure could support the population of our entire home galaxy. As for the mass–this structure is as massive as fifty thousand suns. It is, quite bluntly, impossible: as-yet unknown physical forces must be at work to keep it from rapidly collapsing in on itself and creating a black hole. The repulsive force, whatever it is, is strong enough to hold the weight of fifty thousand suns: think about that for a moment, gentlemen.”

At that point Sagan looks around and notices the blank stares. He chuckles ruefully.

“What I mean to say is, this structure is not permitted by the laws of physics as we understand them. Because it clearly does exist, we can draw some conclusions, starting with the fact that our understanding of physics is incomplete. Well, that isn’t news: we know we don’t have a unified theory of everything. Einstein spent thirty years looking for one, and didn’t come up with it.

But, secondly.” He looks tired for a moment, aged beyond his years. “We used to think that any extraterrestrial beings we might communicate with would be fundamentally comprehensible: folks like us, albeit with better technology. I think that’s the frame of mind you’re still working in. Back in sixty-one we had a brainstorming session at a conference, trying to work out just how big an engineering project a spacefaring civilization might come up with. Freeman Dyson, from Princeton, came up with about the biggest thing any of us could imagine: something that required us to imagine dismantling Jupiter and turning it into habitable real estate.

“This disk is about a hundred million times bigger than Dyson’s sphere. And that’s before we take into account the time factor.”

“Time?” Echoes Fox from Langley, sounding confused.

“Time.” Sagan smiles in a vaguely disconnected way. “We’re nowhere near our original galactic neighborhood and whoever moved us here, they didn’t bend the laws of physics far enough to violate the speed limit. It takes light about 160,000 years to cross the distance between where we used to live, and our new stellar neighborhood, the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Which we have fixed, incidentally, by measuring the distance to known Cepheid variables, once we were able to take into account the measurable red shift of infalling light and the fact that some of them were changing frequency slowly and seem to have changed rather a lot. Our best estimate is eight hundred thousand years, plus or minus two hundred thousand. That’s about four times as long as our species has existed, gentlemen. We’re fossils, an archaeology experiment or something. Our relevance to our abductors is not as equals, but as subjects in some kind of vast experiment. And what the purpose of the experiment is, I can’t tell you. I’ve got some guesses, but…”

Sagan shrugs, then lapses into silence. Gregor catches Brundle’s eye and Brundle shakes his head, very slightly. Don’t spill the beans. Gregor nods. Sagan may realize he’s in a room with a CIA spook and an East German defector, but he doesn’t need to know about the Alienation Service yet.

“Well that’s as may be,” says Fox, dropping words like stones into the hollow silence at the table. “But it begs the question, what are we going to tell the DCI?”

“I suggest,” says Gregor, “that we start by reviewing COLLECTION RUBY.” He nods at Sagan. “Then, maybe when we’re all up to speed on that, we’ll have a better idea of whether there’s anything useful we can tell the DCI.

Chapter Five: Cannon-Fodder

Madeleine and Robert Holbright are among the last of the immigrants to disembark on the new world. As she glances back at the brilliant white side of the liner, the horizon seems to roll around her head, settling into a strange new stasis that feels unnatural after almost six months at sea.

New Iowa isn’t flat and it isn’t new: rampart cliffs loom to either side of the unnaturally deep harbor (gouged out of bedrock courtesy of General Atomics). A cog-driven funicular railway hauls Maddy and Robert and their four shipping trunks up the thousand-foot climb to the plateau and the port city of Fort Eisenhower–and then to the arrival and orientation camp.

Maddy is quiet and withdrawn, but Bob, oblivious, natters constantly about opportunities and jobs and grabbing a plot of land to build a house on. “It’s the new world,” he says at one point: “why aren’t you excited?”

“The new world,” Maddy echoes, biting back the urge to say something cutting. She looks out the window as the train climbs the cliff-face and brings them into sight of the city. City is the wrong word: it implies solidity, permanence. Fort Eisenhower is less than five years old, a leukaemic gash inflicted on the landscape by the Corps of Engineers. The tallest building is the governor’s mansion, at three stories. Architecturally the town is all Wild West meets the Radar Age, raw pine houses contrasting with big grey concrete boxes full of seaward-pointing Patriot missiles to deter the inevitable encroachment of the communist hordes. “It’s so flat.”

“The nearest hills are two hundred miles away, past the coastal plain–didn’t you read the map?”

She ignores his little dig as the train squeals and clanks up the side of the cliff. It wheezes asthmatically to a stop besides a wooden platform, and expires in a belch of saturated steam. An hour later they’re weary and sweated-up in the lobby of an unprepossessing barrack-hall made of plywood. There’s a large hall and a row of tables and a bunch of bored-looking colonial service types, and people are walking from one position to another with bundles of papers, answering questions in low voices and receiving official stamps. The would-be colonists mill around like disturbed livestock among the piles of luggage at the back of the room. Maddy and Robert queue uneasy in the damp afternoon heat, overhearing snippets of conversation. “Country of origin? Educational qualifications? Yes, but what was your last job?” Religion and race–almost a quarter of the people in the hall are refugees from India or Pakistan or somewhere lost to the mysterious east forever–seem to obsess the officials. “Robert?” she whispers.

“It’ll be alright,” he says with false certainty. Taking after his dad already, trying to pretend he’s the solid family man. Her sidelong glance at him steals any residual confidence. Then it’s their turn.

“Names, passports, country of origin?” The guy with the moustache is brusque and bored, irritated by the heat.

Robert smiles at him. “Robert and Madeleine Holbright, from Canada?” He offers their passports.

“Uh-huh.” The official gives the documents a very American going-over. “What schooling have you done? What was your last job?”

“I’ve, uh, I was working part-time in a garage. On my way through college–I was final year at Toronto, studying structural engineering, but I haven’t sat the finals. Maddy–Maddy’s a qualified paramedic.”

The officer fixes her with a stare. “Worked at it?”

“What? Uh, no–I’m freshly qualified.” His abrupt questioning flusters her.

“Huh.” He makes a cryptic notation against their names on a long list, a list that spills over the edge of his desk and trails towards the rough floor. “Next.” He hands the passports back, and a couple of cards, and points them along to the row of desks.

Someone is already stepping up behind them when Maddy manages to read the tickets. Hers says TRAINEE NURSE. Robert is staring at his and saying “no, this is wrong.”

“What is it, Bob?” She looks over his shoulder as someone jostles him sideways. His card reads LABORER (unskilled); but she doesn’t have time to read the rest.

Chapter Six: Captain’s Log

Yuri Gagarin kicks his shoes off, loosens his tie, and leans back in his chair. “It’s hotter than fucking Cuba!” he complains.

“You visited Cuba, didn’t you, boss?” His companion, still standing, pours a glass of iced tea and passes it to the young colonel-general before drawing one for himself.

“Yeah, thanks Misha.” The former first cosmonaut smiles tiredly. “Back before the invasion. Have a seat.”

Misha Gorodin is the only man on the ship who doesn’t have to give a shit whether the captain offers him a seat, but he’s grateful all the same: a little respect goes a long way, and Gagarin’s sunny disposition and friendly attitude is a far cry from some of the fuckheads Misha’s been stuck with in the past. There’s a class of officer who thinks that because you’re a zampolit you’re somehow below them, but Yuri doesn’t do that: in some ways he’s the ideal New Soviet Man, progress personified. Which makes life a lot easier, because Yuri is one of the very few naval commanders who doesn’t have to give a shit what his political officer thinks, and life would be an awful lot stickier without that grease of respect to make the wheels go round. Mind you, Yuri is also commander of the only naval warship operated by the Cosmonaut Corps, which is a branch of the Strategic Rocket Forces, another howling exception to the usual military protocol. Somehow this posting seems to be breaking all the rules…

“What was it like, boss?”

“Hot as hell. Humid, like this. Beautiful women but lots of dark-skinned comrades who didn’t bathe often enough–all very jolly, but you couldn’t help looking out to sea, over your shoulder. You know there was an American base there, even then? Guantanamo. They don’t have the base now, but they’ve got all the rubble.” For a moment Gagarin looks morose. “Bastards.”

“The Americans.”

“Yes. Shitting on a small defenseless island like that, just because they couldn’t get to us any more. You remember when they had to hand out iodine tablets to all the kids? That wasn’t Leningrad or Gorky, the fallout plume: it was Havana. I don’t think they wanted to admit just how bad it was.”

Misha sips his tea. “We had a lucky escape.” Morale be damned, it’s acceptable to admit at least that much in front of the CO, in private. Misha’s seen some of the KGB reports on the US nuclear capabilities back then, and his blood runs cold; while Nikita had been wildly bluffing about the Rodina’s nuclear defenses, the Americans had been hiding the true scale of their own arsenal. From themselves as much as the rest of the world.

“Yes. Things were going to the devil back then, no question: if we hadn’t woken up over here, who knows what would have happened? They out-gunned us back then. I don’t think they realized.” Gagarin’s dark expression lifts: he glances out of the open porthole–the only one in a private cabin that opens–and smiles. “This isn’t Cuba, though.” The headland rising above the bay tells him that much: no tropical island on earth supported such weird vegetation. Or such ruins.

“Indeed not. But, what about the ruins?” asks Misha, putting his tea glass down on the map table.

“Yes.” Gagarin leans forward: “I was meaning to talk to you about that. Exploration is certainly in line with our orders, but we are a trifle short of trained archaeologists, aren’t we? Let’s see: we’re four hundred and seventy thousand kilometers from home, six major climactic zones, five continents–it’ll be a long time before we get any settlers out here, won’t it?” He pauses delicately. “Even if the rumors about reform of the penal system are true.”

“It is certainly a dilemma,” Misha agrees amiably, deliberately ignoring the skipper’s last comment. “But we can take some time over it. There’s nobody out here, at least not within range of yesterday’s reconnaissance flight. I’ll vouch for lieutenant Chekhov’s soundness: he has a solid attitude, that one.”

“I don’t see how we can leave without examining the ruins, but we’ve got limited resources and in any case I don’t want to do anything that might get the Academy to slap our wrists. No digging for treasure until the egg-heads get here.” Gagarin hums tunelessly for a moment, then slaps his hand on his thigh: “I think we’ll shoot some film for the comrade general secretary’s birthday party. First we’ll secure a perimeter around the beach, give those damned spetsnaz a chance to earn all the vodka they’ve been drinking. Then you and I, we can take Primary Science Party Two into the nearest ruins with lights and cameras. Make a visual record, leave the double-domes back in Moscow to figure out what we’re looking at and whether it’s worth coming back later with a bunch of archaeologists. What do you say, Misha?”

“I say that’s entirely logical, comrade general,” says the political officer, nodding to himself.

“That’s so ordered, then. We’ll play it safe, though. Just because we haven’t seen any active settlement patterns, doesn’t mean there’re no aborigines lurking in the forest.”

“Like that last bunch of lizards.” Misha frowns. “Little purple bastards!”

“We’ll make good communists out of them eventually,” Yuri insists. “A toast! To making good communists out of little purple lizard-bastards with blowpipes who shoot political officers in the arse!”

Gagarin grins wickedly and Gorodin knows when he’s being wound up on purpose and summons a twinkle to his eye as he raises his glass: “And to poisons that don’t work on human beings.”

Chapter Seven: Discography

Warning:

The following briefing film is classified COLLECTION RUBY. If you do not possess both COLLECTION and RUBY clearances, leave the auditorium and report to the screening security officer immediately. Disclosure to unauthorized personnel is a federal offense punishable by a fine of up to ten thousand dollars and/or imprisonment for up to twenty years. You have thirty seconds to clear the auditorium and report to the screening security officer.

Voice-over:

Ocean–the final frontier. For twelve years, since the momentous day when we discovered that we had been removed to this planar world, we have been confronted by the immensity of an ocean that goes on as far as we can see. Confronted also by the prospect of the spread of Communism to uncharted new continents, we have committed ourselves to a strategy of exploration and containment.

Film clip:

An Atlas rocket on the launch pad rises slowly, flames jetting from its tail: it surges past the gantry and disappears into the sky.

Cut to:

A camera mounted in the nose, pointing back along the flank of the rocket. The ground falls behind, blurring into blue distance. Slowly, the sky behind the rocket is turning black: but the land still occupies much of the fisheye view. The first stage engine ring tumbles away, leaving the core engine burning with a pale blue flame: now the outline of the California coastline is recognizable. North America shrinks visibly: eventually another, strange outline swims into view, like a cipher in an alien script. The booster burns out and falls behind, and the tumbling camera catches sunlight glinting off the upper-stage Centaur rocket as its engine ignites, thrusting it higher and faster.

Voice-over:

We cannot escape.

Cut to:

A meteor streaking across the empty blue bowl of the sky; slowing, deploying parachutes.

Voice-over:

In 1962, this rocket would have blasted a two-ton payload all the way into outer space. That was when we lived on a planet that was an oblate sphere. Life on a dinner-plate seems to be different: while the gravitational attraction anywhere on the surface is a constant, we can’t get away from it. In fact, anything we fire straight up will come back down again. Not even a nuclear rocket can escape: according to JPL scientist Dan Alderson, escape from a Magellanic disk would require a speed of over one thousand six hundred miles per second. That is because this disk masses many times more than a star–in fact, it has a mass fifty thousand times greater than our own sun.

What stops it collapsing into a sphere? Nobody knows. Physicists speculate that a fifth force that drove the early expansion of the universe–they call it ‘quintessence’–has been harnessed by the makers of the disk. But the blunt truth is, nobody knows for sure. Nor do we understand how we came here–how, in the blink of an eye, something beyond our comprehension peeled the earth’s continents and oceans like a grape and plated them across this alien disk.

Cut to:

A map. The continents of earth are laid out–Americas at one side, Europe and Asia and Africa to their east. Beyond the Indonesian island chain Australia and New Zealand hang lonely on the edge of an abyss of ocean.

The map pans right: strange new continents swim into view, ragged-edged and huge. A few of them are larger than Asia and Africa combined; most of them are smaller.

Voice-over:

Geopolitics was changed forever by the Move. While the surface topography of our continents was largely preserved, wedges of foreign material were introduced below the Mohorovicik discontinuity–below the crust–and in the deep ocean floor, to act as spacers. The distances between points separated by deep ocean were, of necessity, changed, and not in our geopolitical favor. While the tactical balance of power after the Move was much as it had been before, the great circle flight paths our strategic missiles were designed for–over the polar ice cap and down into the Communist empire–were distorted and stretched, placing the enemy targets outside their range. Meanwhile, although our manned bombers could still reach Moscow with in-flight refueling, the changed map would have forced them to traverse thousands of miles of hostile airspace en route. The Move rendered most of our strategic preparations useless. If the British had been willing to stand firm, we might have prevailed–but in retrospect, what went for us also went for the Soviets, and it is hard to condemn the British for being unwilling to take the full force of the inevitable Soviet bombardment alone.

In retrospect the only reason this was not a complete disaster for us is that the Soviets were caught in the same disarray as ourselves. But the specter of Communism now dominates western Europe: the supposedly independent nations of the European Union are as much in thrall to Moscow as the client states of the Warsaw Pact. Only the on-going British State of Emergency offers us any residual geopolitical traction on the red continent, and in the long term we must anticipate that the British, too, will be driven to reach an accommodation with the Soviet Union.

Cut to:

A silvery delta-winged aircraft in flight. Stub wings, pointed nose, and a shortage of windows proclaim it to be an unmanned drone: a single large engine in its tail thrusts it along, exhaust nozzle glowing cherry-red. Trackless wastes unwind below it as the viewpoint–a chase plane–carefully climbs over the drone to capture a clear view of the upper fuselage.

Voice-over:

The disk is vast–so huge that it defies sanity. Some estimates give it the surface area of more than a billion earths. Exploration by conventional means is futile: hence the deployment of the NP-101 Persephone drone, here seen making a proving flight over land mass F-42. The NP-101 is a reconnaissance derivative of the nuclear-powered D-SLAM Pluto missile that forms the backbone of our post-Move deterrent force. It is slower than a strategic D-SLAM, but much more reliable: while D-SLAM is designed for a quick, fiery dash into Soviet territory, the NP-101 is designed to fly long duration missions that map entire continents. On a typical deployment the NP-101 flies outward at thrice the speed of sound for nearly a month: traveling fifty thousand miles a day, it penetrates a million miles into the unknown before it turns and flies homeward. Its huge mapping cameras record two images every thousand seconds, and its sophisticated digital computer records a variety of data from its sensor suite, allowing us to build up a picture of parts of the disk that our ships would take years or decades to reach. With resolution down to the level of a single nautical mile, the NP-101 program has been a resounding success, allowing us to map whole new worlds that it would take us years to visit in person.

At the end of its mission, the NP-101 drops its final film capsule and flies out into the middle of an uninhabited ocean, to ditch its spent nuclear reactor safely far from home.

Cut to:

A bull’s-eye diagram. The centre is a black circle with a star at its heart; around it is a circular platter, of roughly the same proportions as a 45 rpm single.

Voice over:

A rough map of the disk. Here is the area we have explored to date, using the NP-101 program.

(A dot little larger than a sand grain lights up on the face of the single.)

That dot of light is a million kilometers in radius–five times the distance that used to separate our old Earth from its moon. (To cross the radius of the disk, an NP-101 would have to fly at Mach Three for almost ten years.) We aren’t even sure exactly where the centre of that dot lies on the disk: our highest sounding rocket, the Nova-Orion block two, can barely rise two degrees above the plane of the disk before crashing back again. Here is the scope of our knowledge of our surroundings, derived from the continental-scale mapping cameras carried by Project Orion:

(A salmon pink area almost half an inch in diameter lights up around the red sand grain on the face of the single.)

Of course, cameras at an altitude of a hundred thousand miles can’t look down on new continents and discern signs of Communist infiltration; at best they can listen for radio transmissions and perform spectroscopic analyses of the atmospheric gasses above distant lands, looking for gasses characteristic of industrial development such as chlorofluorocarbons and nitrogen oxides.

This leaves us vulnerable to unpleasant surprises. Our long term strategic analyses imply that we are almost certainly not alone on the disk. In addition to the Communists, we must consider the possibility that whoever build this monstrous structure–clearly one of the wonders of the universe–might also live here. We must contemplate their motives for bringing us to this place. And then there are the aboriginal cultures discovered on continents F-29 and F-364, both now placed under quarantine. If some land masses bear aboriginal inhabitants, we may speculate that they, too, have been transported to the disk in the same manner as ourselves, for some as-yet unknown purpose. It is possible that they are genuine stone-age dwellers–or that they are the survivors of advanced civilizations that did not survive the transition to this environment. What is the possibility that there exists on the disk one or more advanced alien civilizations that are larger and more powerful than our own? And would we recognize them as such if we saw them? How can we go about estimating the risk of our encountering hostile Little Green Men–now that other worlds are in range of even a well-equipped sailboat, much less the Savannah-class nuclear powered exploration ships? Astronomers Carl Sagan and Daniel Drake estimate the probability as high–so high, in fact, that they believe there are several such civilizations out there.

We are not alone. We can only speculate about why we might have been brought here by the abductors, but we can be certain that it is only a matter of time before we encounter an advanced alien civilization that may well be hostile to us. This briefing film will now continue with an overview of our strategic preparations for first contact, and the scenarios within which we envisage this contingency arising, with specific reference to the Soviet Union as an example of an unfriendly ideological superpower…

Chapter Eight: Tenure Track

After two weeks, Maddy is sure she’s going mad.

She and Bob have been assigned a small prefabricated house (not much more than a shack, although it has electricity and running water) on the edge of town. He’s been drafted into residential works, put to work erecting more buildings: and this is the nearest thing to a success they’ve had, because after a carefully-controlled protest his status has been corrected, from just another set of unskilled hands to trainee surveyor. A promotion of which he is terribly proud, evidently taking it as confirmation that they’ve made the right move by coming here.

Maddy, meanwhile, has a harder time finding work. The district hospital is fully staffed. They don’t need her, won’t need her until the next shipload of settlers arrive, unless she wants to pack up her bags and go tramping around isolated ranch settlements in the outback. In a year’s time the governor has decreed they’ll establish another town-scale settlement, inland near the mining encampments on the edge of the Hoover Desert. Then they’ll need medics to staff the new hospital: but for now, she’s a spare wheel. Because Maddy is a city girl by upbringing and disposition, and not inclined to take a job tramping around the outback if she can avoid it.

She spends the first week and then much of the second mooching around town, trying to find out what she can do. She’s not the only young woman in this predicament. While there’s officially no unemployment, and the colony’s dirigiste administration finds plenty of hard work for idle hands, there’s also a lack of openings for ambulance crew, or indeed much of anything else she can do. Career-wise it’s like a trip into the 1950’s. Young, female, and ambitious? Lots of occupations simply don’t exist out here on the fringe, and many others are closed or inaccessible. Everywhere she looks she sees mothers shepherding implausibly large flocks of toddlers their guardians pinch-faced from worry and exhaustion. Bob wants kids, although Maddy’s not ready for that yet. But the alternatives on offer are limited.

Eventually Maddy takes to going through the “help wanted” ads on the bulletin board outside city hall. Some of them are legit: and at least a few are downright peculiar. One catches her eye: field assistant wanted for biological research. I wonder? she thinks, and goes in search of a door to bang on.

When she finds the door–raw wood, just beginning to bleach in the strong colonial sunlight–and bangs on it, John Martin opens it and blinks quizzically into the light. “Hello?” he asks.

“You were advertising for a field assistant?” She stares at him. He’s the entomologist, right? She remembers his hands on the telescope on the deck of the ship. The voyage itself is already taking on the false patina of romance in her memories, compared to the dusty present it has delivered her to.

“I was? Oh–yes, yes. Do come in.” He backs into the house–another of these identikit shacks, colonial, family, for the use of–and offers her a seat in what used to be the living room. It’s almost completely filled by a work table and a desk and a tall wooden chest of sample drawers. There’s an odd, musty smell, like old cobwebs and leaky demijohns of formalin. John shuffles around his den, vaguely disordered by the unexpected shock of company. There’s something touchingly cute about him, like the subjects of his studies, Maddy thinks. “Sorry about the mess, I don’t get many visitors. So, um, do you have any relevant experience?”

She doesn’t hesitate: “None whatsoever, but I’d like to learn.” She leans forward. “I qualified as a paramedic before we left. At college I was studying biology, but I had to drop out midway through my second year: I was thinking about going to medical school later, but I guess that’s not going to happen here. Anyway, the hospital here has no vacancies, so I need to find something else to do. What exactly does a field assistant get up to?”

“Get sore feet.” He grins lopsidedly. “Did you do any lab time? Field work?” Maddy nods hesitantly so he drags her meager college experiences out of her before he continues. “I’ve got a whole continent to explore and only one set of hands: we’re spread thin out here. Luckily NSF budgeted to hire me an assistant. The assistant’s job is to be my Man Friday; to help me cart equipment about, take samples, help with basic lab work–very basic–and so on. Oh, and if they’re interested in entomology, botany, or anything else remotely relevant that’s a plus. There aren’t many unemployed life sciences people around here, funnily enough: have you had any chemistry?”

“Some,” Maddy says cautiously; “I’m no biochemist.” She glances round the crowded office curiously. “What are you meant to be doing?”

He sighs. “A primary survey of an entire continent. Nobody, but nobody, even bothered looking into the local insect ecology here. There’re virtually no vertebrates, birds, lizards, what have you–but back home there are more species of beetle than everything else put together, and this place is no different. Did you know nobody has even sampled the outback fifty miles inland of here? We’re doing nothing but throw up shacks along the coastline and open-cast quarries a few miles inland. There could be anything in the interior, absolutely anything.” When he gets excited he starts gesticulating, Maddy notices, waving his hands around enthusiastically. She nods and smiles, trying to encourage him.

“A lot of what I’m doing is the sort of thing they were doing in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Take samples, draw them, log their habitat and dietary habits, see if I can figure out their life cycle, try and work out who’s kissing-cousins with what. Build a family tree. Oh, I also need to do the same with the vegetation, you know? And they want me to keep close watch on the other disks around Lucifer. ‘Keep an eye out for signs of sapience,’ whatever that means: I figure there’s a bunch of leftovers in the astronomical community who feel downright insulted that whoever built this disk and brought us here didn’t land on the White House lawn and introduce themselves. I’d better tell you right now, there’s enough work here to occupy an army of zoologists and botanists for a century; you can get started on a PhD right here and now if you want. I’m only here for five years, but my successor should be okay about taking on an experienced RA … the hard bit is going to be maintaining focus. Uh, I can sort you out a subsistence grant from the governor-general’s discretionary fund and get NSF to reimburse him, but it won’t be huge. Would twenty Truman dollars a week be enough?”

Maddy thinks for a moment. Truman dollars–the local scrip–aren’t worth a whole lot, but there’s not much to spend them on. And Rob’s earning for both of them anyway. And a PhD …that could be my ticket back to civilization, couldn’t it? “I guess so,” she says, feeling a sense of vast relief: so there’s something she’s useful for besides raising the next generation, after all. She tries to set aside the visions of herself, distinguished and not too much older, gratefully accepting a professor’s chair at an ivy league university. “When do I start?”

Chapter Nine: On the Beach

Misha’s first impressions of the disturbingly familiar alien continent are of an oppressively humid heat, and the stench of decaying jellyfish.

The Sergei Korolev floats at anchor in the river estuary, a huge streamlined visitor from another world. Stubby fins stick out near the waterline, like a seaplane with clipped wings: gigantic Kuznetsov atomic turbines in pods ride on booms to either side of its high-ridged back, either side of the launch/recovery catapults for its parasite MiG fighter-bombers, aft of the broad curve of the ekranoplan’s bridge. Near the waterline, a boat bay is open: a naval spetsnaz team is busy loading their kit into the landing craft that will ferry them to the small camp on the beach. Misha, who stands just above the waterline, turns away from the giant ground effect ship and watches his commander, who is staring inland with a faint expression of worry. “Those trees–awfully close, aren’t they?” Gagarin says, with the carefully studied stupidity that saw him through the first dangerous years after his patron Khrushchev’s fall.

“That is indeed what captain Kirov is taking care of,” replies Gorodin, playing his role of foil to the colonel-general’s sardonic humor. And indeed shadowy figures in olive-green battle dress are stalking in and out of the trees, carefully laying tripwires and screamers in an arc around the beachhead. He glances to the left, where a couple of sailors with assault rifles stand guard, eyes scanning the jungle. “I wouldn’t worry unduly sir.”

“I’ll still be happier when the outer perimeter is secure. And when I’ve got a sane explanation of this for the comrade General Secretary.” Gagarin’s humor evaporates: he turns and walks along the beach, towards the large tent that’s already gone up to provide shelter from the heat of noon. The bar of solid sunlight–what passes for sunlight here–is already at maximum length, glaring like a rod of white-hot steel that impales the disk. (Some of the more superstitious call it the axle of heaven. Part of Gorodin’s job is to discourage such non-materialist backsliding.)

The tent awning is pegged back: inside it, Gagarin and Misha find Major Suvurov and Academician Borisovitch leaning over a map. Already the scientific film crew–a bunch of dubious civilians from the TASS agency–are busy in a corner, preparing cans for shooting. “Ah, Oleg, Mikhail.” Gagarin summons up a professionally photogenic smile. “Getting anywhere?”

Borisovitch, a slight, stoop-shouldered type who looks more like a janitor than a world-famous scientist, shrugs. “We were just talking about going along to the archaeological site, General. Perhaps you’d like to come, too?”

Misha looks over his shoulder at the map: it’s drawn in pencil, and there’s an awful lot of white space on it, but what they’ve surveyed so far is disturbingly familiar in outline–familiar enough to have given them all a number of sleepless nights even before they came ashore. Someone has scribbled a dragon coiling in a particularly empty corner of the void.

“How large is the site?” asks Yuri.

“Don’t know, sir.” Major Suvurov grumps audibly, as if the lack of concrete intelligence on the alien ruins is a personal affront. “We haven’t found the end of it yet. But it matches what we know already.”

“The aerial survey–” Mikhail coughs, delicately. “If you’d let me have another flight I could tell you more, General. I believe it may be possible to define the city limits narrowly, but the trees make it hard to tell.”

“I’d give you the flight if only I had the aviation fuel,” Gagarin explains patiently. “A chopper can burn its own weight in fuel in a day of surveying, and we have to haul everything out here from Archangel. In fact, when we go home we’re leaving most of our flight-ready aircraft behind, just so that on the next trip out we can carry more fuel.”

“I understand.” Mikhail doesn’t look happy. “As Oleg Ivanovitch says, we don’t know how far it reaches. But I think when you see the ruins you’ll understand why we need to come back here. Nobody’s found anything like this before.”

“Old Capitalist Man.” Misha smiles thinly. “I suppose.”

“Presumably.” Borisovitch shrugs. “Whatever, we need to bring archaeologists. And a mass spectroscope for carbon dating. And other stuff.” His face wrinkles unhappily. “They were here back when we would still have been living in caves!”

“Except we weren’t,” Gagarin says under his breath. Misha pretends not to notice.

By the time they leave the tent, the marines have got the Korolev’s two BRDMs ashore. The big balloon-tired armored cars sit on the beach like monstrous amphibians freshly emerged from some primeval sea. Gagarin and Gorodin sit in the back of the second vehicle with the academician and the film crew: the lead BRDM carries their spetsnaz escort team. They maintain a dignified silence as the convoy rumbles and squeaks across the beach, up the gently sloping hillside, and then down towards the valley with the ruins.

The armored cars stop and doors open. Everyone is relieved by the faint breeze that cracks the oven-heat of the interior. Gagarin walks over to the nearest ruin–remnants of a wall, waist-high–and stands, hands on hips, looking across the wasteland.

“Concrete,” says Borisovitch, holding up a lump of crumbled not-stone from the foot of the wall for Yuri to see.

“Indeed.” Gagarin nods. “Any idea what this was?”

“Not yet.” The camera crew is already filming, heading down a broad boulevard between rows of crumbling foundations. “Only the concrete has survived, and it’s mostly turned to limestone. This is old.”

“Hmm.” The First Cosmonaut walks round the stump of wall and steps down to the foundation layer behind it, looking around with interest. “Interior column here, four walls–they’re worn down, aren’t they? This stuff that looks like a red stain. Rebar? Found any intact ones?”

“Again, not yet sir,” says Borisovitch. “We haven’t looked everywhere yet, but …”

“Indeed.” Gagarin scratches his chin idly. “Am I imagining it or are the walls all lower on that side?” He points north, deeper into the sprawling maze of overgrown rubble.

“You’re right sir. No theory for it, though.”

“You don’t say.” Gagarin walks north from the five-sided building’s ruin, looks around. “This was a road?”

“Once, sir. It was nine meters wide–there seems to have been derelict ground between the houses, if that’s what they were, and the road itself. “

“Nine meters, you say.” Gorodin and the academician hurry to follow him as he strikes off, up the road. “Interesting stonework here, don’t you think, Misha?”

“Yessir. Interesting stonework.”

Gagarin stops abruptly and kneels. “Why is it cracked like this? Hey, there’s sand down there. And, um. Glass? Looks like it’s melted. Ah, trinitite.”

“Sir?”

Borisovitch leans forward. “That’s odd.”

“What is?” asks Misha, but before he gets a reply both Gagarin and the researcher are up again and off towards another building.

“Look. The north wall.” Gagarin’s found another chunk of wall, this one a worn stump that’s more than a meter high: he looks unhappy.

“Sir? Are you alright?” Misha stares at him. Then he notices the academician is also silent, and looking deeply perturbed. “What’s wrong?”

Gagarin extends a finger, points at the wall. “You can just see him if you look close enough. How long would it take to fade, Mikhail? How many years have we missed them by?”

The academician licks his lips: “At least two thousand years, sir. Concrete cures over time, but it takes a very long time indeed to turn all the way to limestone. and then there’s the weathering process to take account of. But the surface erosion…yes, that could fix the image from the flash. Perhaps. I’d need to ask a few colleagues back home.”

“What’s wrong?” the political officer repeats, puzzled.

The first cosmonaut grins humorlessly. “Better get your Geiger counter, Misha, and see if the ruins are still hot. Looks like we’re not the only people on the disk with a geopolitical problem…”

Chapter Ten: Been Here Before

Brundle has finally taken the time to pull Gregor aside and explain what’s going on; Gregor is not amused.

“Sorry you walked into it cold,” says Brundle. “But I figured it would be best for you to see for yourself.” He speaks with a Midwestern twang, and a flatness of affect that his colleagues sometimes mistake for signs of an underlying psychopathology.

“See what, in particular?” Gregor asks sharply. “What, in particular?” Gregor tends to repeat himself, changing only the intonation, when he’s disturbed. He’s human enough to recognize it as a bad habit but still finds it difficult to suppress the reflex.

Brundle pauses on the footpath, looks around to make sure there’s nobody within earshot. The Mall is nearly empty today, and only a humid breeze stirs the waters on the pool. “Tell me what you think.”

Gregor thinks for a moment, then summons up his full command of the local language: it’s good practice. “The boys in the big house are asking for a CAB. It means someone’s pulled his head out of his ass for long enough to realize they’ve got worse things to worry about than being shafted by the Soviets. Something’s happened to make them realize they need a policy for dealing with the abductors. This is against doctrine, we need to do something about it fast before they start asking the right questions. Something’s shaken them up, something secret, some HUMINT source from the wrong side of the curtain, perhaps. Could it be that man Gordievsky? But they haven’t quite figured out what being here means. Sagan–does his presence mean what I think it does?”

“Yes,” Brundle says tersely.

“Oh dear.” A reflex trips and Gregor takes off his spectacles and polishes them nervously on his tie before replacing them. “Is it just him, or does it go further?” He leaves the rest of the sentence unspoken by convention–is it just him you think we’ll have to silence?

“Further.” Brundle tends to talk out of the side of his mouth when he’s agitated, and from his current expression Gregor figures he’s really upset. “Sagan and his friends at Cornell have been using the Arecibo dish to listen to the neighbors. This wasn’t anticipated. Now they’re asking for permission to beam a signal at the nearest of the other disks. Straight up, more or less; ‘talk to us.’ Unfortunately Sagan is well-known, which is why he caught the attention of our nominal superiors. Meanwhile, the Soviets have found something that scared them. CIA didn’t hear about it through the usual assets–they contacted the State Department via the embassy, they’re that scared.” Brundle pauses a moment. “Sagan and his buddies don’t know about that, of course.”

“Why has nobody shot them already?” Gregor asks coldly.

Brundle shrugs. “We pulled the plug on their funding just in time. If we shot them as well someone might notice. Everything could go nonlinear while we were trying to cover it up. You know the problem; this is a semi-open society, inadequately controlled. A bunch of astronomers get together on their own initiative–academic conference, whatever–and decide to spend a couple of thousand bucks of research grant money from NIST to establish communications with the nearest disk. How are we supposed to police that kind of thing?”

“Shut down all their radio telescopes. At gunpoint, if necessary, but I figure a power cut or a congressional committee would be just as effective as leverage.”

“Perhaps, but we don’t have the Soviets’ resources to work with. Anyway, that’s why I dragged Sagan in for the CAB. It’s a Potemkin village, you understand, to convince everybody he contacted that something is being done, but we’re going to have to figure out how to shut him up.”

“Sagan is the leader of the ‘talk-to-us, alien gods’ crowd, I take it.”

“Yes.”

“Well.” Gregor considers his next words carefully. “Assuming he’s still clean and uncontaminated, we can turn him or we can ice him. If we’re going to turn him we need to do it convincingly–full Tellerization–and we’ll need to come up with a convincing rationale. Use him to evangelize the astronomical community into shutting up or haring off in the wrong direction. Like Heisenberg and the Nazi nuclear weapons program.” He snaps his fingers. “Why don’t we tell him the truth? At least, something close enough to it to confuse the issue completely?”

“Because he’s a member of the Federation of American Scientists and he won’t believe anything we tell him without independent confirmation,” Brundle mutters through one side of his mouth. “That’s the trouble with using a government agency as our cover story.”

They walk in silence for a minute. “I think it would be very dangerous to underestimate him,” says Gregor. “He could be a real asset to us, but uncontrolled he’s very dangerous. If we can’t silence him we may have to resort to physical violence. And with the number of colonies they’ve already seeded, we can’t be sure of getting them all.”

“Itemize the state of their understanding,” Brundle says abruptly. “I want a reality check. I’ll tell you what’s new after you run down the checklist.”

“Okay.” Gregor thinks for a minute. “Let us see. What everyone knows is that between zero three fifteen and twelve seconds and thirteen seconds Zulu time, on October second, sixty two, all the clocks stopped, the satellites went away, the star map changed, nineteen airliners and forty six ships in transit ended up in terminal trouble, and they found themselves transferred from a globe in the Milky Way galaxy to a disk which we figure is somewhere in the lesser Magellanic cloud. Meanwhile the Milky Way galaxy–we assume that’s what it is–has changed visibly. Lots of metal-depleted stars, signs of macroscopic cosmic engineering, that sort of thing. The public explanation is that the visitors froze time, skinned the earth, and plated it over the disk. Luckily they’re still bickering over whether the explanation is Minsky’s copying, uh, hypothesis, or that guy Moravec with his digital simulation theory.”

“Indeed.” Brundle kicks at a paving stone idly. “Now. What is your forward analysis?”

“Well, sooner or later they’re going to turn dangerous. They have the historic predisposition towards teleological errors, to belief in a giant omnipotent creator and a purpose to their existence. If they start speculating about the intentions of a transcendent intelligence, it’s likely they’ll eventually ask whether their presence here is symptomatic of God’s desire to probe the circumstances of its own birth. After all, we have evidence of how many technological species on the disk, ten million, twelve? Replicated many times, in some cases. They might put it together with their concept of manifest destiny and conclude that they are, in fact, doomed to give birth to God. Which is an entirely undesirable conclusion for them to reach from our point of view. Teleologists being bad neighbors, so to speak.”

“Yes indeed,” Brundle says thoughtfully, then titters quietly to himself for a moment.

“This isn’t the first time they’ve avoided throwing around H-bombs in bulk. That’s unusual for primate civilizations. If they keep doing it, they could be dangerous.”

“Dangerous is relative,” says Brundle. He titters again. Things move inside his mouth.

“Don’t do that!” Gregor snaps. He glances round instinctively, but nothing happens.

“You’re jumpy.” Brundle frowns. “Stop worrying so much. We don’t have much longer here.”

“Are we being ordered to move? Or to prepare a sterilization strike?”

“Not yet.” Brundle shrugs. “We have further research to continue with before a decision is reached. The Soviets have made a discovery. Their crewed exploration program. The Korolev lucked out.”

“They–” Gregor tenses. “What did they find?” He knows about the big nuclear-powered Ekranoplan, the dragon of the Caspian, searching the seven oceans for new worlds to conquer. He even knows about the small fleet they’re trying to build at Archangelsk, the ruinous expense of it. But this is new. “What did they find?”

Brundle grins humorlessly. “They found ruins. Then they spent another eight weeks mapping the coastline. They’ve confirmed what they found, they sent the State Department photographs, survey details–the lot.” Brundle gestures at the Cuban War monument, the huge granite column dominating the Mall, its shadow pointing towards the Capitol. “They found Washington DC, in ruins. One hundred and forty thousand miles that way.” He points due north. “They’re not total idiots, and it’s the first time they’ve found one of their own species-transfer cognates. They might be well on their way to understanding the truth, but luckily our comrades in Moscow have that side of the affair under control. But they communicated their discovery to the CIA before it could be suppressed, which raises certain headaches.

“We must make sure that nobody here asks why. So I want you to start by dealing with Sagan.”

Chapter Eleven: Collecting Jar

It’s noon, and the rippling heat haze turns the horizon to fog in the distance. Maddy tries not to move too much: the cycads cast imperfect shadows, and she can feel the Venetian blinds of light burning into her pale skin. She sighs slightly as she hefts the heavy canvas sample bag out of the back of the Land Rover: John will be needing it soon, once he’s finished photographing the mock-termite nests. It’s their third field trip together, their furthest dash into the outback, and she’s already getting used to working with John. He’s surprisingly easy to get on with, because he’s so absorbed in his work that he’s refreshingly free of social expectations. If she didn’t know better she could almost let her guard down and start thinking of him as a friend, not an employer.

The heat makes her mind drift: she tries to remember what sparked her most recent quarrel with Bob, but it seems so distant and irrelevant now–like home, like Bob arguing with her father, like their hurried registry-office wedding and furtive emigration board hearing. All that makes sense now is the stifling heat, the glare of not-sunlight, John working with his camera out in the noonday sun where only mad dogs and Englishmen dare go. Ah, it was the washing. Who was going to do the washing while Maddy was away on the two-day field trip? Bob seemed to think he was doing her a favor, cooking for himself and taking his clothes to the single over-used public laundry. (Some year real soon now they’d get washing machines, but not yet…) Bob seemed to think he was being big-hearted, not publicly getting jealous all over her having a job that took her away from home with a male superior who was notoriously single. Bob seemed to think he was some kind of progressive liberated man, for putting up with a wife who had read Betty Freidan and didn’t shave her armpits. Fuck you, Bob, she thinks tiredly, and tugs the heavy strap of the sample case over her shoulder and turns to head in John’s direction. There’ll be time to sort things out with Bob later. For now, she’s got a job to do.

John is leaning over the battered camera, peering through its viewfinder in search of…something. “What’s up?” she asks.

“Mock termites are up,” he says, very seriously. “See the entrances?” The mock termites are what they’ve come to take a look at–nobody’s reported on them from close up, but they’re very visible as soon as you venture into the dusty plain. She peers at the foot of the termite mound, a baked clay hump in the soil that seems to writhe with life. There are little pipe-like holes, tunnels almost, emerging from the base of the mound, and little black mock-termites dancing in and out of the holes in never-ending streams. Little is relative–they’re almost as large as mice. “Don’t touch them,” he warns.

“Are they poisonous?” asks Maddy.

“Don’t know, don’t want to find out this far from the hospital. The fact that there are no vertebrates here–” he shrugs. “We know they’re poisonous to other insectoida.”

Maddy puts the sample case down. “But nobody’s been bitten, or died, or anything.”

“Not that we know of.” He folds back the lid of the case and she shivers, abruptly cold, imagining bleached bones lying unburied in the long grass of the inland plain, where no humans will live for centuries to come. “It’s essential to take care out here. We could be missing for days before anyone noticed, and a search party wouldn’t necessarily find us, even with the journey plan we filed.”

“Okay.” She watches as he takes out an empty sample jar and a label and carefully notes down time and date, distance and direction from the milestone at the heart of Fort Eisenhower. Thirty six miles. They might as well be on another planet. “You’re taking samples?”

He glances round: “of course.” Then he reaches into the side pocket of the bag and removes a pair of heavy gloves, which he proceeds to put on, and a trowel. “If you could put the case down over there?”

Maddy glances inside the case as he kneels down by the mock termite mound. It’s full of jars with blank labels, neatly segregated, impassable quarantine zones for improbable species. She looks round. John is busy with the mock-termite mound. He’s neatly lopped the top off it: inside, the earth is a squirming mass of–things. Black things, white things like bits of string, and a pulp of half-decayed vegetable matter that smells damply of humus. He probes the mound delicately with the trowel, seeking something. “Look,” he calls over his shoulder. “It’s a queen!”

Maddy hurries over. “Really?” she asks. Following his gloved finger, she sees something the size of her left forearm, white and glistening. It twitches, expelling something round, and she feels her gorge rise. “Ugh!”

“It’s just a happy mother,” John says calmly. He lowers the trowel, works it in under the queen and lifts her–and a collection of hangers-on, courtiers and bodyguards alike–over the jar. He tips, he shakes, and he twists the lid into place. Maddy stares at the chaos within. What is it like to be a mock termite, suddenly snatched up and transplanted to a mockery of home? What’s it like to see the sun in an electric light bulb, to go about your business, blindly pumping out eggs and eating and foraging for leaves, under the eyes of inscrutable collectors? She wonders if Bob would understand if she tried to tell him. John stands up and lowers the glass jar into the sample case, then freezes. “Ouch,” he says, and pulls his left glove off.

“Ouch.” He says it again, more slowly. “I missed a small one. Maddy, medical kit, please. Atropine and neostigmine.”

She sees his eyes, pinprick pupils in the noonday glare, and dashes to the Land Rover. The medical kit, olive green with a red cross on a white circle, seems to mock her: she rushes it over to John, who is now sitting calmly on the ground next to the sample case. “What do you need?” she asks.

John tries to point, but his gloved hand is shaking wildly. He tries to pull it off, but the swollen muscles resist attempts to loosen the glove. “Atropine–” A white cylinder, with a red arrow on one side: she quickly reads the label, then pushes it hard against his thigh, feels something spring-loaded explode inside it. John stiffens, then tries to stand up, the automatic syringe still hanging from his leg. He staggers stiff-legged towards the Land Rover and slumps into the passenger seat.

“Wait!” she demands. Tries to feel his wrist: “how many of them bit you?”

His eyes roll. “Just one. Silly of me. No vertebrates.” Then he leans back. “I’m going to try and hold on. Your first aid training.”

Maddy gets the glove off, exposing fingers like angry red sausages: but she can’t find the wound on his left hand, can’t find anything to suck the poison out of. John’s breathing is labored and he twitches: he needs the hospital but it’s at least a four hour drive away and she can’t look after him while she drives. So she puts another syringe load of atropine into his leg and waits with him for five minutes while he struggles for breath hoarsely, then follows up with adrenalin and anything else she can think of that’s good for handling anaphylactic shock. “Get us back,” he manages to wheeze at her between emphysemic gasps. “Samples too.”

After she gets him into the load bed of the truck, she dashes over to the mock termite mound with the spare petrol can. She splashes the best part of a gallon of fuel over the heap, coughing with the stink: she caps the jerry can, drags it away from the mound, then strikes a match and throws it flickering at the disordered insect kingdom. There’s a soft whump as the igniting gas sets the mound aflame: small shapes writhe and crisp beneath an empty blue sky pierced by the glaring pinprick of S Doradus. Maddy doesn’t stay to watch. She hauls the heavy sample case back to the Land Rover, loads it into the trunk alongside John, and scurries back towards town as fast as she can.

She’s almost ten miles away before she remembers the camera, left staring in cyclopean isolation at the scorched remains of the dead colony

Chapter Twelve: Homeward Bound

The big ground effect ship rumbles softly as it cruises across the endless expanse of the Dzerzhinsky Ocean at nearly three hundred knots, homeward bound at last. Misha sits in his cubby-hole–as shipboard political officer he rates an office of his own–and sweats over his report with the aid of a glass of Polish pear schnapps. Radio can’t punch through more than a few thousand miles of air directly, however powerful the transmitters; on earth they used to bounce signals off the ionosphere or the moon, but that doesn’t work here–the other disks are too far away to use as relays. There’s a chain of transceiver buoys marching out across the ocean at two thousand kilometer intervals, but the equipment is a pig to maintain, very expensive to build, and nobody is even joking about stringing undersea cables across a million kilometers of sea floor. Misha’s problem is that the expedition, himself included, is effectively stranded back in the eighteenth century, without even the telegraph to tie civilization together–which is a pretty pickle to find yourself in when you’re the bearer of news that will make the Politburo shit a brick. He desperately wants to be able to boost this up the ladder a bit, but instead it’s going to be his name and his alone on the masthead.

“Bastards. Why couldn’t they give us a signal rocket or two?” He gulps back what’s left of the schnapps and winds a fresh sandwich of paper and carbon into his top-secret-eyes-only typewriter.

“Because it would weigh too much, Misha,” the captain says right behind his left shoulder, causing him to jump and bang his head on the overhead locker.

When Misha stops swearing and Gagarin stops chuckling, the Party man carefully turns his stack of typescript face down on the desk then politely gestures the captain into his office. “What can I do for you, boss? And what do you mean, they’re too heavy?”

Gagarin shrugs. “We looked into it. Sure, we could put a tape recorder and a transmitter into an ICBM and shoot it up to twenty thousand kilometers. Trouble is, it’d fall down again in an hour or so. The fastest we could squirt the message, it would cost about ten rubles a character–more to the point, even a lightweight rocket would weigh as much as our entire payload. Maybe in ten years.” He sits down. “How are you doing with that report?”

Misha sighs. “How am I going to explain to Brezhnev that the Americans aren’t the only mad bastards with hydrogen bombs out here? That we’ve found the new world and the new world is just like the old world, except it glows in the dark? And the only communists we’ve found so far are termites with guns?” For a moment he looks haggard. “It’s been nice knowing you, Yuri.”

“Come on! It can’t be that bad–” Gagarin’s normally sunny disposition is clouded.

“You try and figure out how to break the news to them.” After identifying the first set of ruins, they’d sent one of their MiGs out, loaded with camera pods and fuel: a thousand kilometers inland it had seen the same ominous story of nuclear annihilation visited on an alien civilization: ruins of airports, railroads, cities, factories. A familiar topography in unfamiliar form.

This was New York–once, thousands of years before a giant stamped the bottom of Manhattan island into the sea bed–and that was once Washington DC. Sure there’d been extra skyscrapers, but they’d hardly needed the subsequent coastal cruise to be sure that what they were looking at was the same continent as the old capitalist enemy, thousands of years and millions of kilometers beyond a nuclear war. “We’re running away like a dog that’s seen the devil ride out, hoping that he doesn’t see us and follow us home for a new winter hat.”

Gagarin frowns. “Excuse me?” He points to the bottle of pear schnapps.

“You are my guest.” Misha pours the First Cosmonaut a glass then tops up his own. “It opens certain ideological conflicts, Yuri. And nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news.”

“Ideological–such as?”

“Ah.” Misha takes a mouthful. “Well, we have so far avoided nuclear annihilation and invasion by the forces of reactionary terror during the Great Patriotic War, but only by the skin of our teeth. Now, doctrine has it that any alien species advanced enough to travel in space is almost certain to have discovered socialism, if not true communism, no? And that the enemies of socialism wish to destroy socialism, and take its resources for themselves. But what we’ve seen here is evidence of a different sort. This was America. It follows that somewhere nearby there is a continent that was home to another Soviet Union–two thousand years ago. But this America has been wiped out, and our elder Soviet brethren are not in evidence and they have not colonized this other-America–what can this mean?”

Gagarin’s brow wrinkled. “They’re dead too? I mean, that the alternate-Americans wiped them out in an act of colonialist imperialist aggression but did not survive their treachery,” he adds hastily.

Misha’s lips quirk in something approaching a grin: “Better work on getting your terminology right first time before you see Brezhnev, comrade,” he says. “Yes, you are correct on the facts, but there are matters of interpretation to consider. No colonial exploitation has occurred. So either the perpetrators were also wiped out, or perhaps…well, it opens up several very dangerous avenues of thought. Because if New Soviet Man isn’t home hereabouts, it implies that something happened to them, doesn’t it? Where are all the true Communists? If it turns out that they ran into hostile aliens, then…well, theory says that aliens should be good brother socialists. Theory and ten rubles will buy you a bottle of vodka on this one. Something is badly wrong with our understanding of the direction of history.”

“I suppose there’s no question that there’s something we don’t know about,” Gagarin adds in the ensuing silence, almost as an afterthought.

“Yes. And that’s a fig-leaf of uncertainty we can hide behind, I hope.” Misha puts his glass down and stretches his arms behind his head, fingers interlaced until his knuckles crackle. “Before we left, our agents reported signals picked up in America from–damn, I should not be telling you this without authorization. Pretend I said nothing.” His frown returns.

“You sound as if you’re having dismal thoughts,” Gagarin prods.

“I am having dismal thoughts, comrade colonel-general, very dismal thoughts indeed. We have been behaving as if this world we occupy is merely a new geopolitical game board, have we not? Secure in the knowledge that brother socialists from beyond the stars brought us here to save us from the folly of the imperialist aggressors, or that anyone else we meet will be either barbarians or good communists, we have fallen into the pattern of an earlier age–expanding in all directions, recognizing no limits, assuming our manifest destiny. But what if there are limits? Not a barbed wire fence or a line in the sand, but something more subtle. Why does history demand success of us? What we know is the right way for humans on a human world, with an industrial society, to live. But this is not a human world. And what if it’s a world we’re not destined to succeed? Or what if the very circumstances which gave rise to Marxism are themselves transient, in the broader scale? What if there is a–you’ll pardon me–a materialist God? We know this is our own far future we are living in. Why would any power vast enough to build this disk bring us here?”

Gagarin shakes his head. “There are no limits, my friend,” he says, a trifle condescendingly: “If there were, do you think we would have gotten this far?”

Misha thumps his desk angrily. “Why do you think they put us somewhere where your precious rockets don’t work?” he demands. “Get up on high, one push of rocket exhaust and you could be halfway to anywhere! But down here we have to slog through the atmosphere. We can’t get away! Does that sound like a gift from one friend to another?”

“The way you are thinking sounds paranoid to me,” Gagarin insists. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, mind you: only–could you be overwrought? Finding those bombed cities affected us all, I think.”

Misha glances out of his airliner-sized porthole: “I fear there’s more to it than that. We’re not unique, comrade; we’ve been here before. And we all died. We’re a fucking duplicate, Yuri Alexeyevich, there’s a larger context to all this. And I’m scared by what the politburo will decide to do when they see the evidence. Or what the Americans will do…”

Chapter Thirteen: Last Supper

Returning to Manhattan is a comfort of sorts for Gregor, after the exposed plazas and paranoid open vistas of the capital. Unfortunately he won’t be here for long–he is, after all, on an assignment from Brundle–but he’ll take what comfort he can from the deep stone canyons, the teeming millions scurrying purposefully about at ground level. The Big Apple is a hive of activity, as always, teeming purposeful trails of information leading the busy workers about their tasks. Gregor’s nostrils flare as he stands on the sidewalk on Lexington and East 100th. There’s an Italian restaurant Brundle recommended when he gave Gregor his briefing papers. “Their spaghetti al’ polpette is to die for,” Brundle told him. That’s probably true, but what’s inarguable is that it’s only a couple of blocks away from the offices of the Exobiology Annex to Cornell’s New York Campus, where Sagan is head of department.

Gregor opens the door and glances around. A waiter makes eye contact. “Table for one?”

“Two. I’m meeting–ah.” Gregor sees Sagan sitting in a booth at the back of the restaurant and waves hesitantly. “He’s already here.”

Gregor nods and smiles at Sagan as he sits down opposite the professor. The waiter drifts over and hands him a menu. “Have you ordered?”

“I just got here.” Sagan smiles guardedly. “I’m not sure why you wanted this meeting, Mr., uh, Samsa, isn’t it?” Clearly he thinks he gets the joke–a typical mistake for a brilliant man to make.

Gregor allows his lower lip to twitch. “Believe me, I’d rather it wasn’t necessary,” he says, entirely truthfully. “But the climate in DC isn’t really conducive to clear thought or long-range planning–I mean, we operate under constraints established by the political process. We’re given questions to answer, we’re not encouraged to come up with new questions. So what I’d like to do is just have an open-ended informal chat about anything that you think is worth considering. About our situation, I mean. In case you can open up any avenues we ought to be investigating that aren’t on the map right now.”

Sagan leans forward. “That’s all very well,” he says agreeably, “but I’m a bit puzzled by the policy process itself. We haven’t yet made contact with any nonhuman sapients. I thought your committee was supposed to be assessing our policy options for when contact finally occurs. It sounds to me as if you’re telling me that we already have a policy, and you’re looking to find out if it’s actually a viable one. Is that right?”

Gregor stares at him. “I can neither confirm nor deny that,” he says evenly. Which is the truth. “But if you want to take some guesses I can either discuss things or clam up when you get too close,” he adds, the muscles around his eyes crinkling conspiratorially.

“Aha.” Sagan grins back at him boyishly. “I get it.” His smile vanishes abruptly. “Let me guess. The policy is predicated on MAD, isn’t it?”

Gregor shrugs then glances sideways, warningly: the waiter is approaching. “I’ll have a glass of the house red,” he says, sending the fellow away as fast as possible. “Deterrence presupposes communication, don’t you think?” Gregor asks.

“True.” Sagan picks up his bread knife and absent-mindedly twirls it between finger and thumb. “But it’s how the idiots–excuse me, our elected leaders–treat threats, and I can’t see them responding to tool-using non-humans as anything else.” He stares at Gregor. “Let me see if I’ve got this right. Your committee pulled me in because there has, in fact, been a contact between humans and non-human intelligences–or at least some sign that there are NHIs out there. The existing policy for dealing with it was drafted some time in the sixties under the influence of the hangover left by the Cuban war, and it basically makes the conservative assumption that any aliens are green-skinned Soviets and the only language they talk is nuclear annihilation. This policy is now seen to be every bit as bankrupt as it sounds but nobody knows what to replace it with because there’s no data on the NHIs. Am I right?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny that,” says Gregor.

Sagan sighs. “Okay, play it your way.” He closes his menu. “Ready to order?”

“I believe so.” Gregor looks at him. “The spaghetti al’ polpette is really good here,” he adds.

“Really?” Sagan smiles. “Then I’ll try it.”

They order, and Gregor waits for the waiter to depart before he continues. “Suppose there’s an alien race out there. More than one. You know about the multiple copies of Earth. The uninhabited ones. We’ve been here before. Now let’s see…suppose the aliens aren’t like us. Some of them are recognizable, tribal primates who use tools made out of metal, sea-dwelling ensemble entities who communicate by ultrasound. But others–most of them–are social insects who use amazingly advanced biological engineering to grow what they need. There’s some evidence that they’ve colonized some of the empty Earths. They’re aggressive and territorial and they’re so different that…well, for one thing we think they don’t actually have conscious minds except when they need them. They control their own genetic code and build living organisms tailored to whatever tasks they want carrying out. There’s no evidence that they want to talk to us, and some evidence that they may have emptied some of those empty Earths of their human population. And because of their, um, decentralized ecosystem and biological engineering, conventional policy solutions won’t work. The military ones, I mean.”

Gregor watches Sagan’s face intently as he describes the scenario. There is a slight cooling of the exobiologist’s cheeks as his peripheral arteries contract with shock: his pupils dilate and his respiration rate increases. Sour pheromones begin to diffuse from his sweat ducts and organs in Gregor’s nasal sinuses respond to them.

“You’re kidding?” Sagan half-asks. He sounds disappointed about something.

“I wish I was.” Gregor generates a faint smile and exhales breath laden with oxytocin and other peptide messengers fine-tuned to human metabolism. In the kitchen, the temporary chef who is standing in for the regular one–off sick, due to a bout of food poisoning–will be preparing Sagan’s dish. Humans are creatures of habit: once his meal arrives the astronomer will eat it, taking solace in good food. (Such a shame about the chef.) “They’re not like us. SETI assumes that NHIs are conscious and welcome communication with humans and, in fact, that humans aren’t atypical. But let’s suppose that humans are atypical. The human species has only been around for about a third of a million years, and has only been making metal tools and building settlements for ten thousand. What if the default for sapient species is measured in the millions of years? And they develop strong defense mechanisms to prevent other species moving into their territory?”

“That’s incredibly depressing,” Sagan admits after a minute’s contemplation. “I’m not sure I believe it without seeing some more evidence. That’s why we wanted to use the Arecibo dish to send a message, you know. The other disks are far enough away that we’re safe, whatever they send back: they can’t possibly throw missiles at us, not with a surface escape velocity of twenty thousand miles per second, and if they send unpleasant messages we can stick our fingers in our ears.”

The waiter arrives, and slides his entree in front of Sagan.

“Why do you say that?” asks Gregor.

“Well, for one thing, it doesn’t explain the disk. We couldn’t make anything like it–I suppose I was hoping we’d have some idea of who did? But from what you’re telling me, insect hives with advanced biotechnology…that doesn’t sound plausible.”

“We have some information on that.” Gregor smiles reassuringly. “For the time being, the important thing to recognize is that the species who are on the disk are roughly equivalent to ourselves in technological and scientific understanding. Give or take a couple of hundred years.”

“Oh.” Sagan perks up a bit.

“Yes,” Gregor continues. “We have some information–I can’t describe our sources–but anyway. You’ve seen the changes to the structure of the galaxy we remember. How would you characterize that?”

“Hmm.” Sagan is busy with a mouthful of delicious tetrodotoxin-laced meatballs. “It’s clearly a Kardashev type-III civilization, harnessing the energy of an entire galaxy. What else?”

Gregor smiles. “Ah, those Russians, obsessed with coal and steel production! This is the information age, Dr. Sagan. What would the informational resources of a galaxy look like, if they were put to use? And to what use would an unimaginably advanced civilization put them?”

Sagan looks blank for a moment, his fork pausing halfway to his mouth, laden with a deadly promise. “I don’t see–ah!” He smiles, finishes his forkful, and nods. “Do I take it that we’re living in a nature reserve? Or perhaps an archaeology experiment?”

Gregor shrugs. “Humans are time-binding animals,” he explains. “So are all the other tool-using sentient species we have been able to characterize; it appears to be the one common factor, they like to understand their past as a guide to their future. We have sources that have…think of a game of Chinese whispers? The belief that is most widely held is that the disk was made by the agencies we see at work restructuring the galaxy, to house their, ah, experiments in ontology. To view their own deep past, before they became whatever they are, and to decide whether the path through which they emerged was inevitable or a low probability outcome. The reverse face of the Drake equation, if you like.”

Sagan shivers. “Are you telling me we’re just … memories? Echoes from the past, reconstituted and replayed some unimaginable time in the future? That this entire monstrous joke of a cosmological experiment is just a sideshow?”

“Yes, Dr. Sagan,” Gregor says soothingly. “After all, the disk is not so large compared to an entire galaxy, don’t you think? And I would not say the sideshow is unimportant. Do you ever think about your own childhood? And wonder whether the you that sits here in front of me today was the inevitable product of your upbringing? Or could you have become someone completely different–an airline pilot, for example, or a banker? Alternatively, could someone else have become you? What set of circumstances combine to produce an astronomer and exobiologist? Why should a God not harbour the same curiosity?”

“So you’re saying it’s introspection, with a purpose. The galactic civilization wants to see its own birth.”

“The galactic hive mind,” Gregor soothes, amused at how easy it is to deal with Sagan. “Remember, information is key. Why should human-level intelligences be the highest level?” All the while he continues to breathe oxytocin and other peptide neurotransmitters across the table towards Sagan. “Don’t let such speculations ruin your meal,” he adds, phrasing it as an observation rather than an implicit command.

Sagan nods and returns to using his utensils. “That’s very thought-provoking,” he says, as he gratefully raises the first mouthful to his lips. “If this is based on hard intelligence it…well, I’m worried. Even if it’s inference, I have to do some thinking about this. I hadn’t really been thinking along these lines.”

“I’m sure if there’s an alien menace we’ll defeat it,” Gregor assures him as he masticates and swallows the neurotoxin-laced meatball in tomato sauce. And just for the moment, he is content to relax in the luxury of truth: “Just leave everything to me and I’ll see that your concerns are communicated to the right people. Then we’ll do something about your dish and everything will work out for the best.”

Chapter Fourteen: Poor prognosis

Maddy visits John regularly in hospital. At first it’s a combination of natural compassion and edgy guilt; John is pretty much alone on this continent of lies, being both socially and occupationally isolated, and Maddy can convince herself that she’s helping him feel in touch, motivating him to recover. Later on it’s a necessity of work–she’s keeping the lab going, even feeding the squirming white horror in the earth-filled glass jar, in John’s absence–and partly boredom. It’s not as if Bob’s at home much. His work assignments frequently take him to new construction sites up and down the coast. When he is home they frequently argue into the small hours, picking at the scabs on their relationship with the sullen pinch-faced resentment of a couple fifty years gone in despair at the wrongness of their shared direction. So she escapes by visiting John and tells herself that she’s doing it to keep his spirits up as he learns to use his prostheses.

“You shouldn’t blame yourself,” he tells her one afternoon when he notices her staring. “If you hadn’t been around I’d be dead. Neither of us was to know.”

“Well.” Maddy winces as he sits up, then raises the tongs to his face to nudge the grippers apart before reaching for the water-glass. “That won’t–” She changes direction in mid sentence–“make it easier to cope.”

“We’re all going to have to cope,” he says gnomically, before relaxing back against the stack of pillows. He’s a lot better now than he was when he first arrived, delirious with his hand swollen and blackening, but the after-effects of the mock termite venom have weakened him in other ways. “I want to know why those things don’t live closer to the coast. I mean, if they did we’d never have bothered with the place. After the first landing, that is.” He frowns. “If you can ask at the crown surveyor’s office if there are any relevant records, that would help.”

“The crown surveyor’s not very helpful.” That’s an understatement. The crown surveyor is some kind of throwback; last time she went in to his office to ask about maps of the northeast plateau he’d asked her whether her husband approved of her running around like this. “Maybe when you’re out of here.” She moves her chair closer to the side of the bed.

“Doctor Smythe says next week, possibly Monday or Tuesday.” John sounds frustrated. “The pins and needles are still there.” It’s not just his right hand, lopped off below the elbow and replaced with a crude affair of padding and spring steel; the venom spread and some of his toes had to be amputated. He was fitting when Maddy reached the hospital, four hours after he was bitten. She knows she saved his life, that if he’d gone out alone he’d almost certainly have been killed, so why does she feel so bad about it?

“You’re getting better,” Maddy insists, covering his left hand with her own. “You’ll see.” She smiles encouragingly.

“I wish–” For a moment John looks at her; then he shakes his head minutely and sighs. He grips her hand with his fingers. They feel weak, and she can feel them trembling with the effort. “Leave Johnson–” the surveyor–“to me. I need to prepare an urgent report on the mock termites before anyone else goes poking them.”

“How much of a problem do you think they’re going to be?”

“Deadly.” He closes his eyes for a few seconds, then opens them again. “We’ve got to map their population distribution. And tell the governor-general’s office. I counted twelve of them in roughly an acre, but that was a rough sample and you can’t extrapolate from it. We also need to learn whether they’ve got any unusual swarming behaviors–like army ants, for example, or bees. Then we can start investigating whether any of our insecticides work on them. If the governor wants to start spinning out satellite towns next year, he’s going to need to know what to expect. Otherwise people are going to get hurt.” Or killed, Maddy adds silently.

John is very lucky to be alive: Doctor Smythe compared his condition to a patient he’d once seen who’d been bitten by a rattler, and that was the result of a single bite by a small one. If the continental interior is full of the things, what are we going to do? Maddy wonders.

“Have you seen any sign of her majesty feeding?” John asks, breaking into her train of thought.

Maddy shivers. “Turtle tree leaves go down well,” she says quietly. “And she’s given birth to two workers since we’ve had her. They chew the leaves to mulch then regurgitate it for her.”

“Oh, really? Do they deliver straight into her mandibles?”

Maddy squeezes her eyes tight. This is the bit she was really hoping John wouldn’t ask her about. “No,” she says faintly.

“Really?” He sounds curious.

“I think you’d better see for yourself.” Because there’s no way in hell that Maddy is going to tell him about the crude wooden spoons the mock termite workers have been crafting from the turtle tree branches, or the feeding ritual, and what they did to the bumbler fly that got into the mock termite pen through the chicken wire screen.

He’ll just have to see for himself.

Chapter Fifteen: Rushmore

The Korolev is huge for a flying machine but pretty small in nautical terms. Yuri is mostly happy about this. He’s a fighter jock at heart and he can’t stand Navy bullshit. Still, it’s a far cry from the MiG-17s he qualified in. It doesn’t have a cockpit, or even a flight deck–it has a bridge, like a ship, with the pilots, flight engineers, navigators, and observers sitting in a horseshoe around the captain’s chair. When it’s thumping across the sea barely ten meters above the wave-tops at nearly five hundred kilometers per hour, it rattles and shakes until the crew’s vision blurs. The big reactor-powered turbines in the tail pods roar and the neutron detectors on the turquoise radiation bulkhead behind them tick like demented death-watch beetles: the rest of the crew are huddled down below in the nose, with as much shielding between them and the engine rooms as possible. It’s a white-knuckle ride, and Yuri has difficulty resisting the urge to curl his hands into fists because whenever he loses concentration his gut instincts are telling him to grab the stick and pull up. The ocean is no aviator’s friend, and skimming across this infinite gray expanse between planet-sized land-masses forces Gagarin to confront the fact that he is not, by instinct, a sailor.

They’re two days outbound from the new-old North America, forty thousand kilometers closer to home and still weeks away even though they’re cutting the corner on their parabolic exploration track. The fatigue is getting to him as he takes his seat next to Misha–who is visibly wilting from his twelve hour shift at the con–and straps himself in. “Anything to report?” He asks.

“I don’t like the look of the ocean ahead,” says Misha. He nods at the navigation station to Gagarin’s left: Shaw, the Irish ensign, sees him and salutes.

“Permission to report, sir?” Gagarin nods. “We’re coming up on a thermocline boundary suggestive of another radiator wall, this time surrounding uncharted seas. Dead reckoning says we’re on course for home but we haven’t charted this route and the surface waters are getting much cooler. Any time now we should be spotting the radiators, and then we’re going to have to start keeping a weather eye out.”

Gagarin sighs: exploring new uncharted oceans seemed almost romantic at first, but now it’s a dangerous but routine task. “You have kept the towed array at altitude?” he asks.

“Yes sir,” Misha responds. The towed array is basically a kite-born radar, tugged along behind the Korolev on the end of a kilometer of steel cable to give them some warning of obstacles ahead. “Nothing showing–”

Right on cue, one of the radar operators raises a hand and waves three fingers.

“–Correction, radiators ahoy, range three hundred, bearing …okay, let’s see it.”

“Maintain course,” Gagarin announces. “Let’s throttle back to two hundred once we clear the radiators, until we know what we’re running into.” He leans over to his left, watching over Shaw’s shoulder.

The next hour is unpleasantly interesting. As they near the radiator fins, the water and the air above it cool down. The denser air helps the Korolev generate lift, which is good, but they need it, which is bad. The sky turns gray and murky and rain falls in continuous sheets that hammer across the armored bridge windows like machine gun fire. The ride becomes gusty as well as bumpy, until Gagarin orders two of the nose turbines started just in case they hit a down-draft. The big jet engines guzzle fuel and are usually shut down in cruise flight, used only for take-off runs and extraordinary situations. But punching through a cold front and a winter storm isn’t flying as usual as far as Gagarin’s concerned, and the one nightmare all Ekranoplan drivers face is running into a monster ocean wave nose-first at cruise speed.

Presently the navigators identify a path between two radiator fins, and Gagarin authorizes it. He’s beginning to relax as the huge monoliths loom out of the gray clouds ahead when one of the sharp-eyed pilots shouts: “Icebergs!”

“Fucking hell.” Gagarin sits bolt upright. “Start all boost engines! Bring up full power on both reactors! Lower flaps to nine degrees and get us the hell out of this!” He turns to Shaw, his face gray. “Bring the towed array aboard, now.”

“Shit.” Misha starts flipping switches on his console, which doubles as damage control central. “Icebergs?”

The huge ground-effect ship lurches and roars as the third pilot starts bleeding hot exhaust gasses from the running turbines to start the other twelve engines. They’ve probably got less than six hours’ fuel left, and it takes fifteen minutes on all engines to get off the water, but Gagarin’s not going to risk meeting an iceberg head-on in ground-effect. The Ekranoplan can function as a huge, lumbering, ungainly sea-plane if it has to; but it doesn’t have the engine power to do so on reactors alone, or to leap-frog floating mountains of ice. And hitting an iceberg isn’t on Gagarin’s to-do list.

The rain sluices across the roof of the bridge and now the sky is louring and dark, the huge walls of the radiator slabs bulking in twilight to either side. The rain is freezing, supercooled droplets that smear the Korolev’s wings with a lethal sheen of ice. “Where are the leading edge heaters?” Gagarin asks. “Come on!”

“Working, sir,” calls the number four pilot. Moments later the treacherous rain turns to hail stones, rattling and booming but fundamentally unlikely to stick to the flight surfaces and build up weight until it flips the ship over. “I think we’re going to–”

A white and ghostly wall comes into view in the distance, hammering towards the bridge windows like a runaway freight train. Gagarin’s stomach lurches. “Pull up, pull up!” The first and second pilots are struggling with the hydraulically boosted controls as the Korolev’s nose pitches up almost ten degrees, right out of ground effect. “Come on!”

They make it.

The iceberg slams out of the darkness of the storm and the sea like the edge of the world; fifty meters high and as massive as mountains, it has lodged against the aperture between the radiator fins. Billions of tons of pack-ice has stopped dead in the water, creaking and groaning with the strain as it butts up against the infinite. The Korolev skids over the leading edge of the iceberg, her keel barely clearing it by ten meters, and continues to climb laboriously into the darkening sky. The blazing eyes of her reactors burn slick scars into the ice below. Then they’re into the open water beyond the radiator fins, and although the sea below them is an expanse of whiteness they are also clear of icy mountains.

“Shut down engines three through fourteen,” Gagarin orders once he regains enough control to keep the shakes out of his voice. “Take us back down to thirty meters, lieutenant. Meteorology, what’s our situation like?”

“Arctic or worse, comrade general.” The meteorologist, a hatchet-faced woman from Minsk, shakes her head. “Air temperature outside is thirty below, pressure is high.” The rain and hail has vanished along with the radiators and the clear seas–and the light, for it is now fading towards nightfall.

“Hah. Misha, what do you think?”

“I think we’ve found our way into the freezer, sir. Permission to put the towed array back up?”

Gagarin squints into the darkness. “Lieutenant, keep us at two hundred steady. Misha, yes, get the towed array back out again. We need to see where we’re going.”

The next three hours are simultaneously boring and fraught. It’s darker and colder than a Moscow apartment in winter during a power cut; the sea below is ice from horizon to horizon, cracking and groaning and splintering in a vast expanding V-shape behind the Korolev’s pressure wake. The spectral ruins of the Milky Way galaxy stretch overhead, reddened and stirred by alien influences. Misha supervises the relaunch of the towed array, then hands over to Major Suvurov before stiffly standing and going below to the unquiet bunk room. Gagarin sticks to a quarter-hourly routine of reports, making sure that he knows what everyone is doing. Bridge crew come and go for their regular station changes. It is routine, and deadly with it. Then:

“Sir, I have a return. Permission to report?”

“Go ahead.” Gagarin nods to the navigator. “Where?”

“Bearing zero–it’s horizon to horizon–there’s a crest rising up to ten meters above the surface. Looks like landfall, range one sixty and closing. Uh, there’s a gap and a more distant landfall at thirty-five degrees, peak rising to two hundred meters.”

“That’s some cliff.” Gagarin frowns. He feels drained, his brain hazy with the effort of making continual decisions after six hours in the hot seat and more than two days of this thumping roaring progression. He glances round. “Major? Please summon Colonel Gorodin. Helm, come about to zero thirty five. We’ll take a look at the gap and see if it’s a natural inlet. If this is a continental mass we might as well take a look before we press on for home.”

For the next hour they drive onwards into the night, bleeding off speed and painting in the gaps in the radar map of the coastline. It’s a bleak frontier, inhumanly cold, with a high interior plateau. There are indeed two headlands, promontories jutting into the coast from either side of a broad, deep bay. Hills rise from one of the promontories and across the bay. Something about it strikes Gagarin as strangely familiar, if only he could place it. Another echo of Earth? But it’s too cold by far, a deep Antarctic chill. And he’s not familiar with the coastline of Zemlya, the myriad inlets off the northeast passage, where the submarines cruise on eternal vigilant patrols to defend the frontier of the Rodina.

A thin predawn light stains the icy hilltops gray as the Korolev cruises slowly between the headlands–several kilometers apart–and into the wide open bay beyond. Gagarin raises his binoculars and scans the distant coastline. There are structures, straight lines! “Another ruined civilization?” He asks quietly.

“Maybe, sir. Think anyone could survive in this weather?” The temperature has dropped another ten degrees in the predawn chill, although the Ekranoplan is kept warm by the outflow of its two Kuznetsov aviation reactors.

“Hah.”

Gagarin begins to sweep the northern coast when Major Suvurov stands up. “Sir! Over there!”

“Where?” Gagarin glances at him. Suvurov is quivering with anger, or shock, or something else. He, too, has his binoculars out.

“Over there! On the southern hillside.”

“Where–” He brings his binoculars to bear as the dawn light spills across the shattered stump of an immense skyscraper.

There is a hillside behind it, a jagged rift where the land has risen up a hundred meters. It reeks of antiquity, emphasized by the carvings in the headland. Here is what the expedition has been looking for all along, the evidence that they are not alone.

“My God.” Misha swears, shocked into politically incorrect language.

“Marx,” says Gagarin, studying the craggy features of the nearest head. “I’ve seen this before, this sort of thing. The Americans have a memorial like it. Mount Rushmore, they call it.”

“Don’t you mean Easter Island?” asks Misha. “Sculptures left by a vanished people…”

“Nonsense! Look there, isn’t that Lenin? And Stalin, of course.” Even though the famous moustache is cracked and half of it has fallen away from the cliff. “But who’s that next to them?”

Gagarin brings his binoculars to focus on the fourth head. Somehow it looks far less weathered than the others, as if added as an afterthought, perhaps some kind of insane statement about the mental health of its vanished builders. Both antennae have long since broken off, and one of the mandibles is damaged, but the eyeless face is still recognizably unhuman. The insectile head stares eyelessly out across the frozen ocean, an enigma on the edge of a devastated island continent. “I think we’ve found the brother socialists,” he mutters to Misha, his voice pitched low so that it won’t carry over the background noise on the flight deck. “And you know what? Something tells me we didn’t want to.”

Chapter Sixteen: Anthropic Error

As the summer dry season grinds on, Maddy finds herself spending more time at John’s home-cum-laboratory, doing the cleaning and cooking for herself in addition to maintaining the lab books and feeding the live specimens. During her afternoons visiting in the hospital she helps him write up his reports. Losing his right hand has hit John hard: he’s teaching himself to write again but his handwriting is slow and childish.

She finds putting in extra hours at the lab preferable to the empty and uncomfortable silences back in the two bedroom prefab she shares with Bob. Bob is away on field trips to outlying ranches and quarries half the time and working late the other half. At least, he says he’s working late. Maddy has her suspicions. He gets angry if she isn’t around to cook, and she gets angry right back at him when he expects her to clean, and they’ve stopped having sex. Their relationship is in fact going downhill rapidly, drying up and withering away in the arid continental heat, until going to work in John’s living room among the cages and glass vivaria and books feels like taking refuge. She took to spending more time there, working late for real, and when Bob is away she sleeps on the wicker settee in the dining room.

One day, more than a month later than expected, Doctor Smythe finally decides that John is well enough to go home. Embarrassingly, she’s not there on the afternoon when he’s finally discharged. Instead, she’s in the living room, typing up a report on a sub-species of the turtle tree and its known parasites, when the screen door bangs and the front door opens. “Maddy?”

She squeaks before she can stop herself. “John?” She’s out of the chair to help him with the battered suitcase the cabbie half-helpfully left on the front stoop.

“Maddy.” He smiles tiredly. “I’ve missed being home.”

“Come on in.” She closes the screen door and carries the suitcase over to the stairs. He’s painfully thin now, a far cry from the slightly too plump entomologist she’d met on the colony liner. “I’ve got lots of stuff for you to read–but not until you’re stronger. I don’t want you overworking and putting yourself back in hospital!”

“You’re an angel.” He stands uncertainly in his own living room, looking around as if he hadn’t quite expected to see it again. “I’m looking forward to seeing the termites.”

She shivers abruptly. “I’m not. Come on.” She climbs the stairs with the suitcase, not looking back. She pushes through the door into the one bedroom that’s habitable–he’s been using the other one to store samples–and dumps the case on the rough dressing table. She’s been up here before, first to collect his clothing while he was in hospital and later to clean and make sure there are no poisonous spiders lurking in the corners. It smells of camphor and dusty memories. She turns to face him. “Welcome home.” She smiles experimentally.

He looks around. “You’ve been cleaning.”

“Not much.” She feels her face heat.

He shakes his head. “Thank you.”

She can’t decide what to say. “No, no, it’s not like that. If I wasn’t here I’d be…”

John shuffles. She blinks at him, feeling stupid and foolish. “Do you have room for a lodger?” She asks.

He looks at her and she can’t maintain eye contact. It’s all going wrong, not what she wanted.

“Things going badly?” he asks, cocking his head on one side and staring at her. “Forgive me, I don’t mean to pry–”

“No, no, it’s quite alright.” She sniffs. Takes a breath. “This continent breaks things. Bob hasn’t been the same since we arrived, or I, I haven’t. I need to put some space between us, for a bit.”

“Oh.”

“Oh.” She’s silent for a while. “I can pay rent–”

This is an excuse, a transparent rationalization, and not en-
tirely true, but she’s saved from digging herself deeper into a lie because John manages to stumble and reaches out to steady himself with his right arm, which is still not entirely healed, and Maddy finds herself with his weight on her shoulder as he hisses in pain. “Ow! Ow!”

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

“It wasn’t you–” They make it to the bed and she sits him down beside her. “I nearly blacked out then. I feel useless. I’m not half the man I was.”

“I don’t know about that,” she says absently, not quite registering his meaning. She strokes his cheek, feeling it slick with sweat. The pulse in his neck is strong. “You’re still recovering. I think they sent you home too early. Let’s get you into bed and rest up for a couple of hours, then see about something to eat. What do you say to that?”

“I shouldn’t need nursing,” he protests faintly as she bends down and unties his shoe-laces. “I don’t need…nursing.” He runs his fingers through her hair.

“This isn’t about nursing.”

Two hours later, the patient is drifting on the edge of sleep, clearly tired out by his physical therapy and the strain of homecoming. Maddy lies curled up against his shoulder, staring at the ceiling. She feels calm and at peace for the first time since she arrived here. It’s not about Bob any more, is it? She asks herself. It’s not about what anybody expects of me. It’s about what I want, about finding my place in the universe. She feels her face relaxing into a smile. Truly, for a moment, it feels as if the entire universe is revolving around her in stately synchrony.

John snuffles slightly then startles and tenses. She can tell he’s come to wakefulness. “Funny,” he says quietly, then clears his throat.

“What is?” Please don’t spoil this, she prays.

“I wasn’t expecting this.” He moves beside her. “Wasn’t expecting much of anything.”

“Was it good?” She tenses.

“Do you still want to stay?” he asks hesitantly. “Damn, I didn’t mean to sound as if–”

“No, I don’t mind–” She rolls towards him, then is brought up short by a quiet, insistent tapping that travels up through the inner wall of the house. “Damn,” she says quietly.

“What’s that?” He begins to sit up.

“It’s the termites.”

John listens intently. The tapping continues erratically, on-again, off-again, bursts of clattering noise. “What is she doing?”

“They do it about twice a day,” Maddy confesses. “I put her in the number two aquarium with a load of soil and leaves and a mesh lid on top. When they start making a racket I feed them.”

He looks surprised. “This I’ve got to see.”

The walls are coming back up again. Maddy stifles a sigh: it’s not about her any more, it’s about the goddamn mock termites. Anyone would think they were the center of the universe and she was just here to feed them. “Let’s go look, then.” John is already standing up, trying to pick up his discarded shirt with his prosthesis. “Don’t bother,” she tells him. “Who’s going to notice, the insects?”

“I thought–” he glances at her, taken aback–“sorry, forget it.”

She pads downstairs, pausing momentarily to make sure he’s following her safely. The tapping continues, startlingly loud. She opens the door to the utility room in the back and turns on the light. “Look,” she says.

The big glass-walled aquarium sits on the worktop. It’s lined with rough-tamped earth and on top, there are piles of denuded branches and wood shavings. It’s near dusk, and by the light filtering through the windows she can see mock-termites moving across the surface of the muddy dome that bulges above the queen’s chamber. A group of them have gathered around a curiously straight branch: as she watches, they throw it against the glass like a battering ram against a castle wall. A pause, then they pick it up and pull back, and throw it again. They’re huge for insects, almost two inches long: much bigger than the ones thronging the mounds in the outback. “That’s odd.” Maddy peers at them. “They’ve grown since yesterday.”

“They? Hang on, did you take workers, or…?”

“No, just the queen. None of these bugs are more than a month old.”

The termites have stopped banging on the glass. They form two rows on either side of the stick, pointing their heads up at the huge, monadic mammals beyond the alien barrier. Looking at them closely Maddy notices other signs of morphological change: the increasing complexity of their digits, the bulges at the back of their heads. Is the queen’s changing, too? She asks herself, briefly troubled by visions of a malignant intelligence rapidly swelling beneath the surface of the vivarium, plotting its escape by moonlight.

John stands behind Maddy and folds his arms around her. She shivers. “I feel as if they’re watching us.”

“But to them it’s not about us, is it?” He whispers in her ear. “Come on. All that’s happening is you’ve trained them to ring a bell so the experimenters give them a snack. They think the universe was made for their convenience. Dumb insects, just a bundle of reflexes really. Let’s feed them and go back to bed.”

The two humans leave and climb the stairs together, arm in arm, leaving the angry aboriginal hive to plot its escape unnoticed.

Chapter Seventeen: It’s always October the First

Gregor sits on a bench on the Esplanade, looking out across the river towards the Statue of Liberty. He’s got a bag of stale bread crumbs and he’s ministering to the flock of pigeons that scuttle and peck around his feet. The time is six minutes to three on the afternoon of October the First, and the year is irrelevant. In fact, it’s too late. This is how it always ends, although the onshore breeze and the sunlight are unexpected bonus payments.

The pigeons jostle and chase one another as he drops another piece of crust on the pavement. For once he hasn’t bothered to soak them overnight in 5% warfarin solution. There is such a thing as a free lunch, if you’re a pigeon in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’s going to be dead soon, and if any of the pigeons survive they’re welcome to the wreckage.

There aren’t many people about, so when the puffing middle aged guy in the suit comes into view, jogging along as if he’s chasing his stolen wallet, Gregor spots him instantly. It’s Brundle, looking slightly pathetic when removed from his man-hive. Gregor waves hesitantly, and Brundle alters course.

“Running late,” he pants, kicking at the pigeons until they flap away to make space for him at the other end of the bench.

“Really?”

Brundle nods. “They should be coming over the horizon in another five minutes.”

“How did you engineer it?” Gregor isn’t particularly interested but technical chit-chat serves to pass the remaining seconds.

“Man-in-the-middle, ramified by all their intelligence assessments.” Brundle looks self-satisfied. “Understanding their caste specialization makes it easier. Two weeks ago we told the GRU that MacNamara was using the NP-101 program as cover for a pre-emptive D-SLAM strike. At the same time we got the NOAA to increase their mapping launch frequency, and pointed the increased level of Soviet activity out to our sources in SAC. It doesn’t take much to get the human hives buzzing with positive feedback.”

Of course, Brundle and Gregor aren’t using words for this incriminating exchange. Their phenotypically human bodies conceal some useful modifications, knobby encapsulated tumors of neuroectoderm that shield the delicate tissues of their designers, neural circuits that have capabilities human geneticists haven’t even imagined. A visitor from a more advanced human society might start excitedly chattering about wet-phase nanomachines and neural-directed broadband packet radio, but nobody in New York on a sunny day in 1979 plus one million is thinking in those terms. They still think the universe belongs to their own kind, skull-locked social–but not eusocial–primates. Brundle and Gregor know better. They’re workers of a higher order, carefully tailored to the task in hand, and although they look human there’s less to their humanity than meets the eye. Even Gagarin can probably guess better, an individualist trapped in the machinery of a utopian political hive. The termites of New Iowa and a host of other Galapagos continents on the disk are not the future, but they’re a superior approximation to anything humans have achieved, even those planetary instantiations that have doctored their own genome in order to successfully implement true eusocial societies. Group minds aren’t prone to anthropic errors.

“So it’s over, is it?” Gregor asks aloud, in the stilted serial speech to which humans are constrained.

“Yep. Any minute now–”

The air raid sirens begin to wail. Pigeons spook, exploding outward in a cloud of white panic.

“Oh, look.”

The entity behind Gregor’s eyes stares out across the river, marking time while his cancers call home. He’s always vague about these last hours before the end of a mission–a destructive time, in which information is lost–but at least he remembers the rest. As do the hyphae of the huge rhizome network spreading deep beneath the park, thinking slow vegetable thoughts and relaying his sparky monadic flashes back to his mother by way of the engineered fungal strands that thread the deep ocean floors. The next version of him will be created knowing almost everything: the struggle to contain the annoying, hard-to-domesticate primates with their insistent paranoid individualism, the dismay of having to carefully sterilize the few enlightened ones like Sagan…

Humans are not useful. The future belongs to ensemble intelligences, hive minds. Even the mock-termite aboriginals have more to contribute. And Gregor, with his teratomas and his shortage of limbs, has more to contribute than most. The culture that sent him, and a million other anthropomorphic infiltrators, understands this well: he will be rewarded and propagated, his genome and memeome preserved by the collective even as it systematically eliminates yet another outbreak of humanity. The collective is well on its way towards occupying a tenth of the disk, or at least of sweeping it clean of competing life forms. Eventually it will open negotiations with its neighbors on the other disks, joining the process of forming a distributed consciousness that is a primitive echo of the vast ramified intelligence wheeling across the sky so far away. And this time round, knowing why it is being birthed, the new God will have a level of self-understanding denied to its parent.

Gregor anticipates being one of the overmind’s memories: it is a fate none of these humans will know save at second-hand, filtered through his eusocial sensibilities. To the extent that he bothers to consider the subject, he thinks it is a disappointment. He may be here to help exterminate them, but it’s not a personal grudge: it’s more like pouring gasoline on a troublesome ant heap that’s settled in the wrong back yard. The necessity irritates him, and he grumbles aloud in Brundle’s direction: “If they realized how thoroughly they’d been infiltrated, or how badly their own individuality lets them down–”

Flashes far out over the ocean, ruby glare reflected from the thin tatters of stratospheric cloud.

“–They might learn to cooperate some day. Like us.”

More flashes, moving closer now as the nuclear battlefront evolves.

Brundle nods. “But then, they wouldn’t be human any more. And in any case, they’re much too late. A million years too late.”

A flicker too bright to see, propagating faster than the signaling speed of nerves, punctuates their conversation. Seconds later, the mach wave flushes their cinders from the bleached concrete of the bench. Far out across the disk, the game of ape and ant continues; but in this place and for the present time, the question has been answered. And there are no human winners.

***

Fiction: Pluto Tells All by John Scalzi

Pluto Tells All

By Pluto, ex-planet, 4,500,000,000 years old

As told to John Scalzi

•  I don’t want to sound like I was surprised, but yeah, I was surprised. Because just before, they were talking about adding planets, right? Me and Eris and possibly Ceres, and it looked like that proposal was getting good play. So it looked good, and Charon and I thought it’d be okay to take a break and get a little alone time. So there we are relaxing and then suddenly my agent Danny’s on the phone, telling me about the demotion. And I say to him, I thought you had this taken care of. That’s what you told me. And he said, well, they took another vote. And then he started trying to spin the demotion like it was a positive. Look at Phil Collins, he said. He was an ex-member of Genesis but then he had this huge solo career. And I said, first, Phil Collins sucks, and second, I’m not exactly the lead singer of the solar system, am I? This isn’t the Phil Collins scenario, it’s the Pete Best scenario. I’m the Pete Best of the goddamn solar system. So I fired Danny. Now I’m with CAA.

•  No, really. Phil Collins does suck. I’m sorry, but there it is. Good drummer, but a lot of his sound is from his producer, Hugh Padgham. You want to sound like Phil Collins? Have your producer drop in a noise gate. Done. And his singing. Oy. Funny thing is, in the 80s, Phil was in talks to play me in a science fiction comedy. He dropped out of it and made Buster instead. The movie deal fell apart after that. I lost some money on that. I have some issues with Phil Collins.

•  The funny thing about the demotion is that I never actually wanted to be a planet, you know? I was out here minding my own business and then suddenly Clyde Tombaugh is staring at me. And the next thing I know, people start calling me and telling me I’m the newest planet. And I remember saying, I don’t know if I want that responsibility. And they said, well, you can’t not be a planet now, Walt Disney’s already named a character after you. That’s really what made me a planet. Not the astronomers, but that cartoon dog. People loved that dog.

•  Ironically, I’m a cat person.

•  I’m not going to sue. Who am I going to sue? You think the International Astronomical Union has any money to speak of? There’s a reason the most popular event at an astronomer’s conference is the free buffet.

•  I try to look at it philosophically. Seventy-six years a fine run. And now I’m sort of the spokesperson for an entirely new class of objects: The dwarf planets. I understand it’s meant to be something of a consolation prize, but you know what, there are more of us dwarf planets out here than anything else. If we’re talking “one dwarf planet, one vote,” you’re going to find we’re setting the agenda on a lot of things.

•  I might make a comeback. There are some groups rebelling against the new definition right now. And there are a lot of people telling me they want to work with me. It’s not just NASA anymore. Let’s just say CAA is earning its fee.

•  Yes, I’m excited about the New Horizons mission. But I wish you guys could have found a way to get one of the Voyagers my way. I wanted to listen that record.

•  I think most people know I had no direct involvement in The Adventures of Pluto Nash. That movie took place on your moon, folks.

•  “Dwarf planet” is a misnomer. If I sit in your lap, you’re gonna feel me.

•  “Plutoed”? Has anyone ever actually used that word? Even I don’t use it, and it happened to me. I think it’s some sort of urban myth.

•  The worst thing about it all is that Eris feels like it’s her fault, like if she’d never been discovered then they wouldn’t have had an excuse to kick me out. She’s a sweet kid. She shouldn’t have to feel like it has anything to do with her.

•  Yes, it’s cold this far out from the sun. But look, I’m mostly made of ice. I get any closer, I’d get melty, and then suddenly I’m the size of Vesta. Then I really will be a dwarf planet.

•  No, no. Some of my best friends are asteroids.

•  I’ll tell you when I think the problem started. A few years ago the director of the Rose Center for Earth and Space asked for a favor. A big fat unethical favor. I said to him that I was too big to fit in a jail cell but he was just the right size, and I didn’t want that for him. He got snippy, I got snippy back, but I thought that was that–it’s business. A little while later they do that panorama of the solar system of theirs, and I’ve been dropped from it, and the Rose Center spokesman is saying I’m the “King of the Trans-Neptunian Objects” in that patronizing way of his. I should have done the director his favor and let him rot when he got caught.

•  It’s not what you think. Just because I’m named for the god of the underworld, it doesn’t mean I have connections.

•  I have problems with the new definition, yeah. What is this “sweep your lane” shit? Let me toss Eris at your planet and see what sort of job Earth does sweeping the lane. I don’t think you’d like the result. Look, when people want you gone, they’ll use any excuse. Simple as that.

•  Also, highly elliptical orbits are fun. You don’t know what you’re missing, people.

•  One thing about something like this is you find out who your friends are. Jupiter couldn’t have been nicer during the whole thing. Saturn’s been a real sweetheart, too. And Neptune–well, we go way back. We’re simpatico, always have been. But some others, eh. Not so nice.

•  No, I don’t want to name names. They know who they are.

•  Oh, fine. Mercury. I got into the club, and Mercury was suddenly my best buddy. And I thought, well, okay–we’re close to the same size, both of us have eccentric orbits, we’ve both got a 3:2 resonance thing going on. Similarities, you know? So we hang out, get to know each other, fine, whatever. Then the IAU vote comes down and I haven’t heard from him since. Like the demotion might be catching or something. He may be right; he’s not exactly a brilliant lane-sweeper himself.

•  Evidence? Well, you know. It’s not that he has an unusually thick iron core; it’s that he’s got an unusually thin silicate skin. Where did the rest of it go? So much for lane-sweeping. See, now you know why he’s so damn twitchy. A perfect example of small planet syndrome.

•  No, I don’t have small planet syndrome. I have dwarf planet syndrome. Didn’t you get the memo?

•  You know who else have been nice? Moons. If anyone had reason to be bitter about me being made a planet, it was them. Hell, you can’t tell me Titan doesn’t deserve to be a planet: He’s got an atmosphere, for God’s sake. Not one of them ever said anything against me. The day I got demoted, Titan calls up, says “you wuz robbed” and then tells me dirty jokes until I nearly throw up laughing. We should swap him for Mercury.

•  I have nothing bad to say about Earth. Good planet. Friendly. Too bad you people are making her all itchy recently. If I were her I would be considering a topical application of a meteor right about now. You’re lucky she’s tolerant.

•  One of the good things about the whole fracas was once it was settled, Eris finally got a permanent name. Being called “Xena” really ticked her off. She said that when Uranus was discovered, his temporary name was “Georgium Sidus,” after King George III of England. He got a national leader, she got a butch tv character. I told her I didn’t really think she wanted to be named “Dubya,” and she said I had a point. Then I said her moon would have been named “Cheney,” and then she hit me.

•  It hurts when you’re hit by a dwarf planet. She’s bigger than me, you know.

•  I would have preferred the term “ice planet” myself. Some of the “dwarf” planets out here are going to mess with that definition once you discover them.

•  No, I won’t tell you where they are. Find them yourself. You guys are good at that.

•  Life on other planets? You know, I’m paid really well not to comment about that.

I will say that if there is life on other planets, that they’d wish you’d stop beaming “lite hits” music stations into space. I’m not the only one out here who has Phil Collins issues. Theoretically.

Fiction: The Leopard’s Paw by Jay Lake

Standing against a deafening roar, Jacob Ervin slammed his fists, hardened weapons as powerful as any product of the metalsmith’s art, into the head of the leaping cat. Fangs longer than his index finger brushed so close to his face that he could smell the rotten meat on the creature’s breath. But his shattering blow had done its work. The head was already stove in.

He moved quickly, unsheathing his ancient poniard. The weapon kept a marvelous edge that belied the brutish neglect of its late owner. Ervin worked the point in under the sabretooth leopard’s front right shoulder and gutted the beast in one great swoop. Long practice in the woods of Colorado stood him good stead under the alien sun as he skinned the cat.

The meat he abandoned for the carrion eaters already circling close. Let the hyenas and the vultures have it. Ervin had taken his trophy in single combat, a fair fight of muscle against muscle, backed by a superbly trained human intellect set against highly evolved predatory instinct. He could afford to be generous to those who would someday clean his own bones.

Carrying the bloody hide, he smiled into the glare of the setting sun. It would be a long run to his current camp, but the moon was rising and the smell of the cat upon him would ward off all but the most foolhardy animals.

###

He spent the next few days scraping and curing the hide. Ervin had picked this particular cave for his campsite because of the saline deposits nearby. He was not sure which of the local plants would be a good source of tannin, so he’d fallen back on the old frontier method of salt-curing. The thing stunk enough to bother even his prodigiously indifferent nose, but Ervin stayed the course.

This sabretooth leopard was key to his plan to enter the lost city of Redwater.

The Borgan tribal king had broken his word to Ervin. Betrayed by a savage! No American man could stand for such treatment, not if he wanted to look himself in the mirror again. Not that Ervin had seen a mirror since coming to this world, but the principle was the same.

The mountain-walls to the north were a boundary to everyone save those black buzzard-men who raided all the local tribes. He had yet to find a way across the rocky barrier, but he would. In the mean time, Ervin needed to settle his position among the savages once and for all. He had no ambition to be their king, but neither would he be subject to their whims and foolish taboos.

The leopard was coming along nicely. He’d boiled the skull, for the sake of being too hurried to bury it. Ervin had never chanced to study the taxidermist’s art, but he had some notion of what he was about. He’d already set aside a pair of opals stolen from the Borgans to use for the leopard’s eyes. Shame that he had no flashlight or other way of making them glow from within. Now that the skin was drying under its load of salt, Ervin worked on the wicker frame that would make it stand out from his body. This would transform him into a great cat padding through the night.

Redwater was where the last temple of the leopard priests had stood, before the savages had rebelled and thrown them down amid fire and but blood. The curses laid upon that benighted place were legendary. But curses meant nothing to a man as hard-driven and unforgiving of self as Ervin was.

###

A week to the day after he had hunted and killed the great predator, Jacob Ervin was ready to wear its pelt. The Borgans and their fellow tribes believed that the leopard priests had been skin changers, walking the night with claws and fangs to punish the disloyal and slay the unwary. Ervin knew the secret of skin changing right enough–it was here in his hand.

He slipped the wicker frame across the shoulder and lashed the legs to his upper arms. The skull fell down over his forehead, while he had left the skin of the neck open to provide additional concealment as it dangled. The leopard’s pelt was heavy, but he knew the aspect he presented to any man or beast watching was ferocious.

Ervin padded into the night, using a sort of crouched run he had practiced. It was as close as he could get to the bounding gait of the one of the great cats, but he reckoned that not many were going to stick around to criticize his errors.

Only a man could stand against the leopards of these hills, and not many men at that.

He made his practice run by night, to avoid betraying details out of place. Tall grass which Ervin the man could simply look over swatted Ervin the leopard in the face. A real cat would have stopped and sat up, or maybe taken a great leap, but neither was an option for him. He cursed the slashes the sharp plant blades opened in his skin, but kept running. He was not a man to shirk or set aside a task once committed to it.

Jacob Ervin was a near-perfect specimen of human development. His physique had been the envy of anatomists at the university in Boulder when he attended college, before all the trouble started. But the human body is not designed to run long distances bent double, especially not with forty pounds of wicker and hide pressing down upon it.

By the time he reached the little creek which marked the edge of what Ervin thought of as his front yard, his hips were like to kill him, and his hands were bloody from supporting his weight. He knew he’d need to take a few days to let the palms heal, and make some sort of hand-shoe. Running gloves.

He stopped to drink, careful to bend down and lap like a cat, his face to the water.

When he looked up from his refreshment, Ervin saw another sabretooth leopard watching him carefully from the other bank, not ten feet distant. An easy pounce for such a creature.

This was peril indeed! His poniard was back in his cave-camp. With the wicker bound to his upper arms, Ervin could not throw the bone-crushing punch he’d used to kill the cat from which he’d taken the skin. That had been a carefully-set ambush, too, baited with a wounded antelope check staked out and crying. He had been at his most prepared.

If the other cat leapt now, he was dead. By God, he’d show it a thing or two! Ervin tilted his head back and roared, the astonishing projective power of his massive lungs creating an unholy screech that woke the night-roosting birds amid the nearby reeds.

The other cat roared back at him, then turned to pad off into the moonlight.

Victory, even without force of arm, was still victory. Ervin’s steps were lighter on the way back to his fire, though he took more care with his hands, avoiding the tall grass as much as possible.

By damn, he was the leopard, wasn’t he? Sometimes a man had to allow himself a little pride, he thought.

#

Six days later, at the new moon, Ervin stood on a ridge and looked down upon his goal. Redwater’s cyclopean ruins were no more than bulking shadows by starlight. The river that threaded out of the shattered city was a darker line amid the black grass.

Ervin had brought his leopard skin here by travois, two day’s march. It had taken him the days between to heal his hands and make the hand-boots. Now he shrugged his way into the wicker frame with practiced ease, lacing the arm stays. He saved the hand-boots til last. He was rather proud of the leopard spoor he’d worked in the palms.

Now, he thought, to the city.

The Borgans had believed with a passion that no man walking upright could enter Redwater. It was surrounded by curses, and everyone knew the ghosts of the leopard priests had the cold jealousy of the dead. Ervin himself had seen three Borgan youths race toward the walls in broad daylight, passions aflame with dares and counter-dares, before dropping dead in the grass. Older warriors had crawled in upon all fours to drag them forth.

The boys had no marks upon their bodies.

He reasoned that while the idea of a curse was plain foolery, it was possible some strange weapon from the ancient days existed within the ruins. Perhaps it threw a line of force at the height of a running man’s beating heart. Perhaps it knew the shape of a man, through the workings of some dimly clever electromechanical eye. The Borgans and their brother tribes were charmingly primitive and downright obtuse, but it was clear enough to Ervin that an industrial civilization had once stood here.

Someone had the means to raise the great slabs which comprised the ruins of Redwater, after all. It would take more than crowds of slaves to do such work.

By going crouched within the skin of a leopard he would twice over fool whatever defenses lurked within. Further, if the Borgans were spying on him as they so often did when he descended from his solitary hills, they would see him go in as a leopard. To be known to those savages a skin changer could only stoke their fear of him. That in turn would build respect in their simple minds, and give Ervin the freedom of action he required for his longer-term plans.

He slunk through the grass, moving in his best approximation of a leopard’s loping bound. The hardest part of this rig was seeing right before him. He accomplished this by tossing his head and looking beneath the fearsome teeth which framed the opening in front of his face.

The walls were close before him. Ervin’s sense of direction had not betrayed him. The hand-boots were saving him great trouble and pain as well.

He loped onward, through the massive gates which had stood unbarred for three generations since the downfall of the city.

###

The streets were paved, which was strange for this world. Few went mounted and there were no carts or carriages here, let alone motorcars. Stranger still, the pavers were hexagonal. The effect was that of running across a vast stone honeycomb.

Ervin’s goal was to steal the leopard’s paw. It was the most sacred relic of the leopard priests. Legend said that the attack on the city had failed to breach the great temple, which was defended by skin changers. The Borgans and their temporary allies had burned out the city instead before retreating as the curse was laid down.

He reasoned that the paw would still be inside the temple. The priests were certainly dead, and their savage cult with them. There had been not so much as a balefire inside Redwater since the city was destroyed. With the widespread belief in the cure, no one would have come to steal it. With the leopard’s paw in his hands, Ervin could bring the tribes to his word. Not to mention extract satisfaction from the troublesome Borgans.

He found his way to the center of the city, stopping only for the briefest glimpses from beneath his mask. The streets were clear at the centers but the verges were a jumble of rubble and dirt. Redwater seemed to be built on a radial plan. This was just as he had expected from looking at the city from a distance. Not to mention being consistent with the psychology of a religious center.

Running on all fours, Ervin found that he was more adapted to the curious gait. He trusted his finely-honed body to meet any challenge required of it. This was near his limits, though. He was pleased how well he was settling in.

Let the Borgans fear the leopard!

Soon enough he was in the central plaza. The dim light of the moonless night meant the temple bulked large as if it were new-built. It was difficult to see the signs of ruin here.

He bounded up the wide, shallow steps toward gaping black maws which had once been doors. Inside he would shed the skin and move deftly on two feet, as man was meant to. Ervin paused at the top of the steps, turned to face the empty city, and on an impulse released a great roar which echoed over the stone rooftops.

Much to his surprise, there was an answer to his challenge from nearby.

His blood ran hot. His vision flashed red a moment, while the hair on his body stood up. Once more he was confronted with a true leopard while unprepared to fight like man or beast! He had not considered that the scene by the creek might repeat itself.

There was nothing for it but to roar out his challenge once more.

This time the animal trotted into the square. The creature was a lighter shadow in the inky pools of blackness. He could see it pause, settle onto its haunches and issue another mighty challenge. The cat was insolent, he would give it that.

Then it leapt forward, racing up the stairs. Ervin stood to meet it and found he could not. The wicker and the pelt bound him too tightly. He snarled and hurled himself down the stairs on all fours, tail lashing.

The two sabretooth leopards collided in a snarling ball of fur and claws and teeth. They rolled back down into the plaza, each seeking a grip on the other’s throat. Ervin slashed with his claws, laying open his attacker’s flank. Then he realized what was happening.

He had become the leopard.

Skin changer indeed.

Even in another body, his spirit was a finely-honed weapon, his intellect dedicated to fine and brutal arts of combat. His muscles seemed to know what was wanted of him in this new form. His human self within did not know how to lose. Someday, when death claimed him at sword point or bloody-toothed, Ervin would die winning.

She (for he was suddenly all too keenly aware that the other was a leopardess) caught her foreclaws in his chest. His great back legs came into play and he hooked her in the belly.

They rolled again to fetch up against the broken base of some fountain. He snapped at her neck, just missing, as she tried to wiggle out of his hold. Then she bit at him, catching the skin.

Their muzzles nearly touched in an eerie feline imitation of a human kiss. With that thought he found himself in his own form once more. The sensation of the change was elastic and electrifying, much like the touch of arcane scientific forces which had first projected him to this world.

Was skin changing nothing more than some ancient weapon? Perhaps the same which imposed the strictures of the curse.

In that same moment the leopardess writhed and changed to a woman. She was voluptuous, with bosoms each bigger than the span of his outstretched hand. Her female form was completely unclothed save for a bath of sweat and blood from the scratches he had laid upon her.

As distracting as her scent and proximate nudity might be, Ervin did not for a moment lose sight of the fact that they had just been fighting a battle to the death. He pinned her, his strength in human form far superior to her distaff physique.

“You have the advantage of me, ma’am,” he growled, some trace of the leopard’s roar still in his voice.

“You are the outlander,” she replied.

“Jacob Ervin, at your service.”

She thrust her groin against him. “Truly?”

“Later, perhaps.” He grinned. Ervin was not a man to be distracted by the rushing of blood to his nether parts. “Why did you seek to kill me?”

“It was you who gave challenge.”

“Truce?”

She nodded. “Truce.”

They both stood, stretching sore and wounded muscles. Ervin’s own carefully constructed wickerwork and hide was shredded. The woman seemed to have nothing but her skin. She also possessed the refreshing unselfconsciousness of the primitive. Her beauty was clothing enough.

“It is my plan to go within and retrieve the leopard’s paw,” he told her. “Are you set on stopping me?”

“I am afraid I cannot allow that,” she said.

“Why do you defend this place? It is nothing but dead stone and ashes.”

She shrugged. “Why do you attack it?”

“Because those who care about it are too craven. I would make them an example of my courage.”

“Then be brave,” she said. She touched the bottom of his chin. “Do not throw away your life, Jacob Ervin.”

He stepped back, admiring her sweat-slicked form gleaming in the starlight. Had there been a moon this night he might have seen every curve and fold of her glorious body, but this was enough. Ervin thought he understood who this woman was.

Turning away from her, he ignored his own turgidity. She would follow or not. He would deal with her or not. His hearing was as superb and finely honed as the rest of his physique, and so he listened as his foot touched the first step.

There was a sort of rustle. She was returning to form.

A second step, and he heard a rush of air as she sprung off her back feet.

A third step, and he knew she would drop to bite the back of his head, as these cats did.

Ervin spun around, swinging his mighty fist at the spot in the air where he knew her skull must pass. She snapped her great fangs, her breath hot and close enough to fill his nose, but the blow of his hammer hand broke her skull.

The leopardess collapsed into the steps in a steaming heap. She kicked twice, then melted, fading to old bones and tattered fur.

“No clothing, no fur,” he told the corpse as it receded through the generations of time back toward the sacking of the city. “A man needs scraps to become a leopard. But when a leopard becomes a man, well… You should have been less quick to fight.”

Such a waste, he thought. She had been beautiful in both her forms.

He turned his attention to the temple, stepping into the shadows within to search for the leopard’s paw.

###

Dawn found him walking from the ruins of Redwater upright as a man should. The leopard’s paw was heavy in his hand. It was a large nugget of gold, roughly in the shape of its namesake, with three white crystals where the claws might be.

His greater treasure, though, was the weathered skull he’d found on the bottom of the temple steps when he exited. She had aged her years in dying, and so this bone was three generations old. But when Ervin raised his standard and took the tribes north to make war against the buzzard men from beyond the wall, the leopardess would watch over him.

A shame, he thought. He should have sampled her kiss when he had the chance. Ervin was certain he’d never meet her like again.

He turned, looking at the city as it rose in dawn’s red glare, and gave one last, echoing roar. Thanks, apologies, tribute to a fallen foe. It was of no real account. Only the next battle mattered.

Fiction The Lost Continent of Moo: A Lucifer Jones Story by Mike Resnick

Part I

You know, there’s one thing I ain’t never figgered out, and man and boy it’s been bothering me most of my blameless life, and even now as a old man I haven’t come up with an answer, and I’ve had a lot of time to think about it since it was always happening to me, even back in 1935 which is when the tale I’m telling you took place, and though I’ve wandered the face of five continents (or maybe seven, if you count them two little ones down south) I still don’t know why it takes me such a short time to get lost and such a long time to get found again.

In fact, that was my very thought as I left Cornelius MacNamarra’s chartreuse mansions behind me and mosied alongside the Amazon, waiting for civilization to raise its head so I could get together with it and finally get around to the serious business of building the Tabernacle of Saint Luke. But the closest I came to civilization in the next week was a couple of little fellers who were wearing paint on their faces and not much else. They didn’t speak no known language, which is something they had in common with the French, and they kept staring at me as if they were wondering how my head would look in their trophy case, so I finally took my leave of them.

I wish I could have took my leave of everything else, because I kept getting et by mosquitos and hissed at by snakes and growled at by jaguars and giggled at by monkeys, and after I’d footslogged maybe another hundred miles and still hadn’t seen no shining cities filled to overflowing with sinners who were in desperate need of a man of the cloth like myself, I figgered maybe the cities had all migrated to the south when no one was looking, so I took a left turn and put the Amazon River behind me.

Now, I knew South America had a bunch of cities even back then, places like Rio and Buenos Aires and Caracas and Saigon, but it was like they’d seen me coming and had all tiptoed away before I could lay eyes on any of ‘em. I picked up a female companion named Petunia along the way. She was a real good listener, but she didn’t say nothing and she smelled just terrible, especially after a rainstorm (of which we had an awful lot), and after a few days I finally had to admit that I just didn’t have much in common with lady tapirs, and we parted ways.

I kept trudging along, keeping my spirits up by reading my well-worn copy of the Good Book, and finally, after another couple of weeks, the forest started retreating, the mosquitos found other things to do, the animals took umbrage when I kept reciting the Eighth and Fourteenth Commandments at ‘em, and even the rain decided it had urgent business elsewhere. The land flattened out, the sun came out of hiding, and suddenly I was in this pasture that must have been a couple of hundred miles long, give or take a few inches.

And as I looked over my surroundings, I began to realize that this wasn’t like no part of South America I had ever seen, and I’d seen an awful lot of it, starting with San Palmero and working my way through the Island of Annoyed Souls and this big wet area everyone called the Amazon Basin though I didn’t see nary a single wash basin, with or without no love-starved amazons, the whole time I was walking through it.

I kept looking around and thinking that maybe I’d fallen asleep and sleptwalked to some new country. I was still mulling on it when I realized I’d been walking forever and a day, and I decided to lay down right on the grass, and if there’d been a desk clerk I’d have told him not to wake me til maybe half past Tuesday, and then I was snoring to beat the band.

I woke up when something kind of cold and sort of wet and more than a little bit pushy rubbed against my face.

“I’m sleeping,” I said.

It nudged me kind of gently.

“Go away,” I said, scrunching up my eyes. “It’s a holiday somewhere in the world. I’ll get a job tomorrow.”

Then whatever it was pressed right up against my ear and said

“Moo!”

“What in tarnation was that?” I bellowed, jumping to my feet.

Suddenly I heard a dozen more moos, and I looked around, and damned if I wasn’t surrounded by some of the fattest cows I’d ever seen. There were hundreds of ‘em, maybe thousands, and they’d all snuck on me my while I was sleeping.

And then I thought, well, maybe they didn’t exactly sneak up. Maybe they live here.

“Moo!” said a few dozen of ‘em, staring at me with big brown cows’ eyes, as if they were begging me to come on over and choose a steak for dinner.

And then, being a educated man, I remembered my history books, or at least some stories I’d heard in Red Charlie’s Waterfront Bar in Macao, which comes to almost the same thing, and I realized that somehow or other I had stumbled onto a new land what no one else had ever seen before, and it didn’t take but forty or fifty more cows joining the chorus to for me to figger out that I was probably the first white man ever to set foot on the Lost Continent of Moo what had been writ up in fable, song and story.

I looked off into the distance, hoping to see a shining city filled with Moovians or whatever they called themselves, where I could build my tabernacle and set up shop, but there wasn’t nothing out there but cows. Now, I knew there had to be people somewhere, because in all my experience I ain’t never come across a cow that could sing songs or tell stories about lost continents.

And while we’re speaking of lost continents, them of you what’s read Encounters, the story of my attempt to bring the word of the Lord to the sinful nations of Europe, will know right off the bat that this here wasn’t the first lost continent I discovered. In fact, it seems that one of the things I’m really good at, other than helping poor sinners (and especially fallen women) see the light and the glory, is finding lost continents. It ain’t generally known–and if fact if you didn’t read my book it probably ain’t known at all–but not only did I find the lost continent of Atlantis, I actually bought it. Of course, it was buried under a few fathoms of water, but I’d be there still if the Greek government hadn’t objected to my placing a bunch of ads in the local paper offering to sell lots with a Mediterranean view. But that’s another story, and one what’s already been told with grace and elegance.

Anyway, after I’d wandered a couple of miles, stepping in all kinds of things that a gentleman would never discuss with you except to say they were vile and foul-smelling and mostly plentiful, I heard a shout off to my left. I turned and saw a guy riding up on a horse. He was kind of dressed like a cowboy, except for the chaps and the belt and the shirt and the hat, and he galloped up to me, and then just when I was sure he’d escaped from some hospital for the pixilated and thunk I was a polo ball or whatever it is that they hit with them sticks, he pulled his horse to a stop and said something to me in some alien tongue.

“I don’t understand a word you’re saying, Brother,” I replied, “but allow me to introduce myself. I’m the Right Reverend Doctor Lucifer Jones, and I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.”

He jabbered something else I couldn’t follow.

“Before we resort to sign language, Brother,” I said, “perhaps you could tell me if I’ve indeed stumbled onto the lost continent of ancient legend.”

As I said it, I indicated the land with a wave of my hand, and cocked an eyebrow so he’d know I was asking a question.

It worked, because he shot me a friendly smile and said, “Pampas”, which I figgered was how they said Moo in Mooish.

“Thanks, Brother,” I said. “And now I wonder if you can tell me where I can find the king of Moo?”

He just stared at me, puzzled, and then I realized I’d made a simple mistake.

“Strike that, Brother,” I said. “Where can I find the king of Pampas?”

He kind of frowned, and I began thinking that my initial appraisal was right, except maybe for the polo part.

“Well, thanks anyway,” I said, “but I can’t waste no more time here. I got to scout up the people and start bringing the Word to any godless sinners I find among ‘em, so I guess I’ll be going now.” I gave his horse’s neck a friendly pat, and noticed some weird kind of trinket he had with a ball attached to each end.

He saw me staring at it, and said “Bolas.”

“Thanks, Brother,” I said. Then, remembering my manners, I added “And bolas to you too.”

I headed off to my right, but he immediately urged his horse forward and blocked my way. Then he started jabbering at me and pointing to my left. I looked where he was pointing, and all I could see was maybe twenty thousand cows, give or take a couple.

“That’s mighty considerate of you, Brother, but I’m looking for sinners of the two-legged kind,” I told him. “Besides, mighty few cows contribute to the poor box, and that’s a serious consideration when you’re figuring out where to build your tabernacle.”

I walked around his horse and began heading off again, and again he blocked my way.

“Just what seems to be your problem, Brother?” I said, starting to get a bit riled.

He began talking a blue streak, but I didn’t hear no familiar words like “pampas” or “bolas”, and finally I held up my hand for silence.

“I appreciate your concern,” I said, “and as near as I can figger it, either you think I’m here to convert your cattle, or I look so hungry you want me to take a couple of hundred cows home with me, or–and now that I come to think of it, them first two don’t hold a candle to the next reason, which is that you got all your womenfolk stashed in the direction I’m going.” I gave him a reassuring smile. “You don’t have to worry none, Brother. The way I smell after walking through your pasture, I doubt that any woman of quality would let me get near her–and if she would, that just means she’s been stepping in all this stuff too, and I ain’t wildly interested in getting much closer than fifty feet to her, or maybe a hundred, depending on which way the wind’s blowing.”

I began walking yet again, and this time he just sighed and frowned and shook his head, and finally he dug his spurs into his horse and headed off toward all the cattle he’d been trying to introduce me to.

It took me a whole day and a night to get out of that cow pasture, but finally I came to what was either a large rocky hill or a small rocky mountain, and I followed a footpath up it, and pretty soon I became aware that I was being watched by unseen eyes, which in my broad experience are just about the worst kind of eyes to be watched by, and finally the footpath widened a bit, and suddenly I was facing a mighty impressive stone building which sure didn’t resemble no other building I’d ever seen. Of course, the 200 naked warriors, each of ‘em with a spear and an expression that would have meant their shorts were too tight if any of ‘em had been wearing shorts, might have had a little something to do with it.

Finally they stood aside, and a kind of short, pudgy white man mosied out of the building while they all bowed down as he passed by. He was wearing a loincloth, which meant he was dressed a lot better than any of his friends and neighbors, and he had a half-smoked cigar in his mouth. He was kind of bald, and a little bit cock-eyed, and he had such a thick unkempt beard that it instantly said to all and sundry that he wasn’t on speaking terms with his barber, and his bare feet were pretty caked with all the stuff I’d been doing my best to avoid, but outside all that I suppose he was as presentable as most people, and certainly more presentable than some I’d run into lately.

He walked up to me, stopped about four feet away, put his hands on his hips, jutted out his chin, and said “Who the hell are you?”

“You speak English,” I said, surprised.

“I speak English a hell of a lot better than you answer questions,” he said. “Now, who are you?”

“The Right Reverend Honorable Doctor Lucifer Jones at your service,” I said. “Weddings and baptisms done cheap, with a group rate for funerals. And who do I have the pleasure of addressing?”

“Rakovekin, Lord of the Outer Realm, Messenger of the Almighty, Spokesman for the Elder Deities, and Commander of the Legions of the Dead.”

“That’s quite a mouthful, Brother,” I noted.

“Yeah, it can get tedious,” he admitted. “Especially at parties when I have to meet a lot of new people. You can call me Henry.”

“Forgive me for pointing it out, but Henry don’t sound like no South American name.”

“And the other one I gave you did?” he asked.

“Now as I come to think on it, no, I suppose it didn’t neither,” I answered.

“Henry’s what they used to call me before I stumbled onto this place.”

“I could tell right off you weren’t no native,” I said.

“Only place I’m native to is Hackensack, New Jersey,” said Henry.

“What’s a Hackensack boy doing thousands of miles from home on this here lost continent?” I asked.

“Being a god,” he said.

“Pleasant work?” I asked.

“Most of the time,” he said.

“Maybe I’ll take a stab at it and join you, since I spend so much time consulting with the Lord anyway,” I offered. “What’s the job pay?”

“We only got room for one god around here, and I’m it,” he said. “Now, you’re welcome to stick around a day or two until you’re rested up, and you can even grab some grub to take with you on your long and arduous journey to anywhere else in the world, but you can’t stay here on no permanent basis.”

“How did you find this here lost continent, Brother Henry?” I asked him.

“Didn’t know it was no continent, and it sure as hell ain’t as lost as it used to be,” he grumbled. “You’re the fourth white man to wander in here in less than ten years.”

“What happened to the other three?”

“I sent two of ‘em packing.”

“And the third,” I said. “Is he still here?”

“Parts of him are.”

Which made me think that there were maybe worse ideas than sticking around just a day or two and then hitting the road.

“But to answer your question, Reverend Jones,” he continued, “I came down to this part of the world to hunt elephants.”

“I don’t want to put no damper on your enthusiasm, Brother Henry,” I said, “but there ain’t no elephants within a couple of thousand miles of here, except them what’s on display at zoos.”

“Well, if push had come to shove I’d have settled for ‘em,” said Henry. “They don’t run so fast nor so far when they’re in a cage, and they sure can’t find much natural cover there.”

I could see right off that he was a natural-born sportsman who was put off his feed at the thought of littering the landscape with escaped animals what had been gutshot or worse, and I figgered if I could befriend him over the next couple of days I could maybe send him off to a zoo in Argentina or Brazil and try my hand at the god business myself.

“Anyway,” said Henry, “I was wandering the landscape looking for elephants without no success when I stumbled onto this place. I couldn’t see no one around, so I just followed the path right up to the temple, and I was so danged tired that I walked into it to get out of the sun and kind of catch my wind, and that stone altar in the middle of the place looked so inviting that I doffed most of my duds and lay down on it to take a little nap.” He shook his head in wonderment. “Next thing I knew there were twenty naked men kneeling down in front of me. At first I thought they were shooting craps, which is what’s usually going on when a bunch of Hackensack men get down on their knees, but then they saw I was awake and they began bowing and chanting. After awhile I asked one of ‘em what it all meant, and he told me that I was clearly the god of prophecy that had been sent down to lead them to their former glory, and he started giving me my name and my titles. I know you thought I’d guv you a tongue twister when I introduced myself, but actually I got 38 more titles to go with the ones you heard. At first I thought reciting ‘em all would charm the ladies, but the truth of the matter is that most of ‘em fall asleep before I hit Number 20.”

“Speaking of the womenfolk, Brother Henry, just where are they all hiding?” I asked him.

“Oh, they’re off tilling fields and fetching water and toting firewood and other womanly duties like that,” he said. “All except for the priestesses, anyway.”

“And what about the men?”

“Mostly they’re worshipping me in private, and getting ready to go to war.”

“War?” I repeated. “You planning to attack two hundred thousand head of cattle?”

“No, we’re after the gauchos that herd the cattle,” he said. “Then I figure once we’ve won that little skirmish, we’ll drive the cattle all the way to Buenos Aires so we’ll have a little something to nibble on while we’re carrying out our war of conquest.”

“I like a man who thinks ahead,” I said. “I can tell we’re going to be great friends, Brother Henry.”

“Well, as long as you’re here, Reverend,” he said, his expression softening a bit, “I might as well show you around my earthly kingdom.” He lowered his voice confidentially. “Truth of the matter is that I ain’t yet figured out where they’re hiding my heavenly kingdom.”

He headed off to the interior of the building, leaving all the menfolk behind, and I fell into step behind him.

“This here’s the Great Temple of Rakovekin,” he said. “I keep trying to get ‘em to call it the Great Temple of Henry, but they’re a stubborn lot.”

I saw a bunch of half-naked women puttering around lighting candles and such, and I shot the closest of ‘em a great big smile. “Them’s my Heavenly Handmaidens,” said Henry. “Each and every one of ‘em a virgin.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Well, except for them what ain’t,” he replied with a shrug.

I kind of winked at another of ‘em, and she giggled and blushed, and I pretty much decided then and there that since food grew on trees and bushes and Heavenly Handmaidens only seemed to grow in Moo, I’d take a couple of ‘em with me when I left and trust to the Lord that I could find food along the way.

“Over here,” said Henry, pointing to a big stone slab, “is the altar I fell asleep on that first day.”

I looked closer. It had a lot of bloodstains on it.

“I see you don’t believe in sacrificing turnips,” I noted, and he threw back his head and laughed.

“Rev,” he said, “I had a feeling the second I saw you that we was going to become friends.” He patted the stains lovingly. “No, these come from men who thought they could lay hands on the High Priestess.”

“You got a High Priest, too?”

“We did,” he said. He pointed to one of the stains. “I believe that’s what’s left of him.”

“She’s inviolate, huh?” I said.

“No,” he answered. “Last time I saw her she was in gold, such minimal duds as she was wearing. Mostly a crown, a couple of armbands, and some sandals, as I recall.”

“Sounds like she was dressed for mighty warm weather,” I said, “which I must admit we got a lot of in this here neck of the woods.”

“Just between you and me, it’s more like an armpit of the woods,” said Henry confidentially, “which is why I plan to pillage and plunder my way to Bahia.”

“I thunk you were making war on Buenos Aires,” I said.

“As long as it begins with a B and it’s got electricity and running water, makes no difference to me,” answered Henry.

“Getting back to your High Priestess, has she got a name?”

“Of course she has a name,” he said. “Why?”

“Truth to tell, Brother Henry, I got an affinity for gorgeous half-naked High Priestesses,” I said. “Some people like Ford roadsters, some people like fine Waterford crystal, me, I like–”

“I get the point,” he said. “I may introduce you to her, but you have to understand up front that she belongs to me. If you touch her or make a play for her, it’ll bring all my heavenly wrath down on your head. That altar’s always got room for another bloodstain.”

“I don’t rightly hold with one human being owning another, Brother Henry,” I said severely. Personally, I figured taking out a short-term lease on the High Priestess was a different matter altogether, but I decided not to discuss the finer points of it with him at that particular moment.

“I fully agree, Reverend Jones,” he said.

“You do?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “No human being should ever own another.” Then he smiled and added, “Damned lucky for me that I’m a god and not a human being, ain’t it?”

I had to admit that I didn’t have no logical answer to that. In fact, I was just about to change the subject and maybe get him talking about the Brooklyn Dodgers or Equipoise or some other subject that was near and dear to folks what grew up near Hackensack, when my attention and my breath was both took by the most beautiful High Priestess anyone ever laid eyes on, and one look was enough to convince any red-blooded man or god that eyes were the very least of all the things he wanted to lay on her.

“Close your mouth, Reverend,” said Henry. “You never know what’ll fly into it in these here parts.”

She kept approaching me until she was just a couple of feet away, than stopped and smiled at me.

“Hello,” she said, extending a delicate hand. “My name is Valeria.”

“Miss Valeria, ma’am,” I said, “I just want to state for the record that in a lifetime of admiring half-naked High Priestesses and other delicate morsels of femininity, I ain’t never seen nothing to compare to your beauty, and if you’re ever in the need of a little nocturnal spiritual comfort, all you got to do is say the word and I’ll be there with bells on.”

She giggled. “Why would you wear bells?”

“You prefer feathers, just say the word,” I told her.

“That’s enough, Reverend,” said Henry. “Let’s not forget who’s the god and who’s the mortal here.”

“So you ain’t told her?” I said.

“Told her what?” he demanded.

“That any mortal what sleeps with a god will die of a hideously disfiguring disease,” I said as Valeria kind of gasped and took a couple of quick steps backward. “I thunk everyone knew that.”

“Valeria, honey, he’s just making that up!” said Henry.

I pulled my bible out of my pocket. “It’s all right here in the Book of Salome, Chapter 7, Verse 3.” (Actually, the Book of Salome ain’t got no Chapter 7 or Verse 3, but I had a soft spot for them because those were the numbers of the last Daily Double I hit at Saratoga just before I was gently requested to leave the country by a handful of gendarmes and politicians and other select authorities that didn’t have no sense of humor or proportion.)

“Let me see that!” said Henry, reaching for my bible.

I pulled it back, and shot Valeria a triumphant smile. “Think about it,” I said. “Would a real god have to look at the bible to remind himself of what it said?”

“But it didn’t say that at all!” shouted Henry.

“And now I suppose you’re gonna deny that you ever touched the last 200 women what died in these here parts,” I said.

“Valeria, baby, you ain’t going to listen to this intruder, are you?” said Henry, reaching out to her.

She jumped back out of reach. “Don’t touch me!” she cried.

“But Valeria, sweetie!” he said. Probably he was going to say more, but she turned and ran away before he could get the words out.

“You’re going to feel the brunt of my godly wrath for that, Lucifer Jones!” he vowed.

“Come on, Brother Henry,” I said. “I got you by two or three inches, maybe 20 pounds, and at least ten years. Let’s bury the hatchet, admit we both stumbled onto a happy situation here, and split the spoils. You can have everything to the left of the path that led up here, I’ll take everything to the right, you can have Valeria on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays (if you can convince her that she’ll survive being touched by you), I’ll take her to my side of the path on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and we’ll toss a coin for Sundays, provided you got any coins hidden in your loincloth.”

“I got a better idea,” he said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “What is it?”

“I think I’ll kill you and keep everything just the way it was.”

“You don’t scare me one bit,” I said. “You’re taking this god business a little too seriously, Brother Henry. You’re all alone in a strange land, wearing naught but a loincloth. Even Jesus had twelve disciples to do his bidding.”

“Conspicuous consumption,” he said. “I only need six disciples, and I got ‘em all right here.” He reached into his loincloth and pulled out a snub-nosed revolver.

“You know, Brother Henry,” I said, “now that I come to mull on it, Valeria ain’t close to the most beautiful woman I ever seen. Her nose is too big, and her eyes are kind of crossed, and when she smiles I can see she’s missing a molar or two, and–”

“Shut up!” he screamed. “You’re talking about the woman I love!”

“Well, upon reconsideration, missing that molar makes her an exotic creature of mystery, and anyone who can look in two directions at once has got to be a definite value when you’re out hunting or maybe running for your lives from a bunch of outraged infidels, and–”

“Enough!” he said. He aimed the gun at me. “You got any last words?”

“Like I was saying, from the neck down, she’s just about perfect.”

“Stop talking about her!” he snapped. “You got any other last words?”

“Well, now that I come to think of it, I do have a question,” I said.

“Just one.”

“You got any dangerous snakes in these here parts?”

“All right,” he said, shaking his head in disgust. “I done my best, but you’re just not taking this seriously. Prepare to meet the Lord.”

“Not to be argumentative,” I said as he cocked the pistol, “but weren’t you claiming that you was God?”

“He’s my brother,” said Henry. “He’s minding the store while I’m busy here.”

His finger tightened on the trigger.

Part II

I kind of scrunched my eyes up so I wouldn’t see the bullet coming. The strange thing was that I didn’t hear it nor feel it neither.

“Shit!” screamed Henry. “Get this thing off’n me!”

I opened my eyes and saw that Henry, who’d been wearing naught but a loincloth a few seconds earlier, was now wearing a wraparound anaconda what was maybe 25 feet long.

“Don’t just stare at me!” he yelled. “Help me!”

“I don’t mean no impertinence, Brother Henry,” I said, “but wasn’t you just preparing to shoot me before this here snake came to my rescue?”

“That was then!” he said kind of desperately. “This is now!”

“You’re still holding the gun,” I noted.

“He done paralyzed me with his fiendish venom! I can’t move my fingers!”

“Anacondas ain’t got no venom,” I said. “You’re thinking of rattlesnakes.”

“I’m thinking of being crushed to death!” cried Henry. “Help me!”

“Or maybe cobras,” I said. “I seem to remember that King Cobras are loaded with venom.” I stopped and scratched my head. “You know, now as I come to think on it, I don’t recollect that I ever saw a Queen Cobra. I wouldn’t know how to tell ‘em apart anyway; I don’t imagine they can be much curvier.”

“I’m dying and you’re lecturing me on herpetology!”

“I ain’t so much lecturing as discussing,” I pointed out.

Suddenly the gun fell from his hand.

“Okay, I’m unarmed!” he said. “Now will you get this blasted critter off me?”

“Well,” I said, “it’d be an act of Christian charity, there ain’t no denying that.”

“Then do it!”

“On the other hand, it might well be an act of Christian suicide,” I said. “I got to think this over.”

“Don’t take more than about 20 seconds,” he groaned, “because I’m gonna be all out of air in less than half a minute!”

“What’s going on here?” said a feminine voice. For a moment I thunk maybe the snake’s wife was getting jealous, but then I saw it was Valeria, who’d come back when she heard Henry screaming.

“Get your damned pet off me!” wheezed Henry.

“I’ve warned you not to tease him!” she said harshly. Then she turned to me. “Was he abusing my snake?”

“Just the opposite, as near as I can tell,” I said.

Henry tried to agree with me, but though he moved his lips nothing came out.

“I certainly don’t want to take sides in this little dispute, ma’am,” I said, “especially since he was about to shoot me for saying how much I admired your rare and ethereal beauty, but he’s turning purple.”

“Oh, all right,” she said. “Bubbles, sit!”

The snake released Henry and coiled itself on the ground.

“Down!” she said, and suddenly he lay down belly to the ground, which was an awful lot of belly to hit the ground all at once.

“That dagnabbed snake is always sneaking up on me!” muttered Henry, trying to catch his breath.

I stepped over and picked up the gun before he got back enough strength to reach for it.

“That’s a mighty well-trained snake, Miss Valeria, ma’am,” I said.

“I’ve had him since he was a puppy,” she said.

“Well, you learn something new every day,” I said. “I didn’t know snakes was ever puppies.”

“They aren’t,” she answered. “But I don’t know what to call a baby snake.”

“How about Godless Spawn of Satan?” wheezed Henry, finally dragging himself to his feet.

“Shut up!” snapped Valeria.

“Priestesses can say ‘Shut up’ to a god?” I asked.

“When they look like him, they can say a lot worse,” she said. “Why was he trying to kill you?”

“He was afraid I was going to horn in on the god business, and also he didn’t want me declaring my undying love for you.”

“What is it with you gods?” she said wearily. “Can’t you keep your passions, or at least your hands, to yourselves?”

“Now, Valeria, honey…” began Henry, but Bubbles starting hissing and he decided that silence was the better part of valor.

“I don’t want to put no damper on your religious beliefs, Miss Valeria, ma’am,” I said, “but someone’s got to be the one to let you know that Henry here ain’t no god.”

“That’s a fine time to tell us,” she said angrily, “after we’ve been worshipping him for fifteen years and giving him a steady supply of virgins.”

“You got that many young women around here?” I said. “I sure didn’t see ‘em on the way in.”

“When we ran out of girls we gave him cows,” she answered. “He was usually so drunk he didn’t know the difference.”

“I know they didn’t jabber all night,” said Henry sullenly.

“Before I let Bubbles keep him, how do you know he’s not a god?” she asked.

“Can he bring rain?” I said. “Can he make seven passes in a row at the craps table? Can he turn water into Napoleon brandy? How many winners can he pick if the track comes up muddy?”

“Those are all godly qualifications?” she asked.

“The bringing rain one’s just a trick, but the others are all legitimate,” I said. “Hell, even minor league gods like Zeus and Jupiter can do most of them things.”

“I see,” she said, glaring at Henry. “My people have been a victim of false doctrine.”

“Well, then it’s only just and fitting that I was guided to this here lost continent to bring you the Word,” I said, “me being the Lord’s business agent, so to speak.”

“What will we do with him?” she asked, indicating Henry, who was starting to shiver even though it was shorts and sandals weather.

“You’re not going to listen to this charlatan, are you?” demanded Henry. “I am a god, goddamn it! I’m Rakovekin, Lord of the Outer Realm, Messenger of the Almighty, Spokesman for the Elder Deities, Commander of the Legions of the Dead, Defender of…”

“You’re not going to list all 38 titles, are you?” she asked in bored tones.

“I got an idea, ma’am,” I said. “Let him rassle Bubbles two out of three falls. If he’s a god he shouldn’t have no trouble winning.”

She looked like she was considering it, and finally nodded her approval. “I see no reason why not.”

“Well I see one,” complained Henry. “How can I pin something what ain’t got no shoulders? I can’t give him no full nelson or stepover toe-hold, because he ain’t got no arms nor legs neither.”

She turned to me. “Lucifer, have you an answer?”

“Since Bubbles ain’t got no arms, he can’t put no Mongolian death grip on you,” I said to Henry. “And he ain’t likely to trip you or kick you when you’re down. As I see it, that makes it a fair fight.”

“If it’s a fair fight, you can book my bet,” said Henry. “I want to put fifty dollars on the snake.”

“I’m happy to book it,” I said, “long as you understand that I’m giving seven thousand to one on Bubbles. If you win, I’ll owe you a little less than a penny.”

“See?” he said to Valeria. “That proves it ain’t a fair fight!”

“Miss Valeria,” I said, “I put it to you: couldn’t a real god beat them odds?”

“I think you have a point, Lucifer,” she replied.

“And if he comes his hair just right maybe no one’ll notice it,” said Henry bitterly.

“Come on now, Henry,” I said, “there ain’t no cause to get riled just because you lost fair and square.”

“I ain’t lost nothing yet!” he yelled.

“That’s because you ain’t rassled Bubbles yet,” I said. “But you already lost the love and respect of the delicate frail flower what won my heart the second I seen her.”

“She’s mine!” he roared.

“She’s already guv you everything she’s got except her crown and a couple of armbands,” I said. “Ain’t that enough?”

“To hell with the snake!” he said. “I’ll rassle you for her!”

I turned to Valeria. “You gonna let him insult your snake like that, ma’am?”

She frowned. “He did insult Bubbles, didn’t he?”

“It was a slip of the tongue!” said Henry, backing away. “I didn’t mean nothing by it. I think Bubbles is the nicest, pleasantest, friendliest, most beautiful representative of all the hellborn man-eating critters I ever met!”

“That’s it!” snapped Valeria. “Bubbles?”

Bubbles kind of snapped to attention, as much as a 25-foot-long killer snake can anyway, and waited for her orders.

“He’s all yours.”

Henry didn’t waste no breath screaming or cursing. He just turned and lit out like Jesse Owens, and Bubbles took off after him like Man o’ War but without the legs and the jockey. Henry was still leading by a couple of lengths as they swung around a stand of trees and was lost to sight.

“I thank you for all your help, Lucifer,” said Valeria, “but now we are without a god.”

“I think we can fix that without no undue effort, Miss Valeria, ma’am,” I said.

“How?” she asked with a eager little tremor of excitement.

Well, let me tell you, when you’re built like Valeria and you ain’t wearing naught but a crown and some gold armbands, and a tremor sweeps over you, even a eager little one, it just naturally is going to have a positive effect on any nearby menfolk. It’s positive effect on me was that I was positive I wanted to spend the rest of my life within arm’s reach of that gorgeous body, except when answering calls of nature or playing cards with the boys once I taught ‘em the intricacies of poker and figured out what a bunch of naked savages had to bet.

“Easy,” I answered. “I ran old Henry out of here, with a little help from your snake, so I figger that makes me an even greater god than he was.”

“But he wasn’t a god at all,” she said. “You proved it.”

“Then no matter what kind of god I am, I’m a greater one than he was,” I said with impeccable logic. “Now, I figger if you and me get hitched, that’ll elevate you to the status of apprentice goddess, so the people’ll be twice as happy with twice as many gods to worship, and it’ll give ‘em a purpose in life, which’ll be to gather food and drink and firewood for us while we’re getting to know each other better.”

“It’s tempting,” she said with a little flutter of emotion, and let me tell you her flutters put her tremors in the shade. “But we have been fooled once already. We must be sure you are truly a god before I agree to become your consort.”

I was about to tell her that I didn’t want her to become my consort and would settle for her becoming my ladyfriend, but she looked like she had her mind made up, so I asked her what kind of godly test she had in mind for me, adding that I didn’t do no heavy lifting because I’d pulled a muscle or two tossing the moon into orbit, and also that I didn’t speak Sumarian, Aramaic, French, or no other nonsense languages.

“We must devise a proper test for your divinity,” said Valeria. She lowered her head in thought for a moment, then looked up. “I suppose if you can swim across a piranha-filled river and live through it, that would prove you were an immortal.”

“I’m allergic to water,” I said. “How about a spelling bee?”

“Or perhaps if each man were to hurl his spear at you, point-blank, and they all bounced off…”

“Ping-pong,” I suggested. “I’ll take on all comers at ping-pong.”

“Or we could cover you with marabunta.”

“What’s marabunta, ma’am?” I asked. “Something like peanut butter?”

“Army ants.”

I never knew that a beautiful naked High Priestess could be so bloodthirsty and single-minded all at the same time.

“I wish I could accommodate you, Miss Valeria, ma’am,” I said, “but you got to understand that no two gods are alike. We’re as different as baseball players and pole vaulters and shoe salesmen.”

“And what makes you a god?” she asked.

“Well,” I said after some thought, “I play a mighty mean game of tiddly winks.”

“Tiddly winks?” she repeated. “I have never heard of it.”

“Darn,” I said. “I guess that means I can’t prove my godliness to you. I suppose you’ll just have to take my word for it and move in with me. If you want to bring a couple of them lesser priestesses to act as cooks and housemaids, that’ll be okay too.”

“I really feel we must end all controversy before it begins, Lucifer,” she said.

“You’re looking at this all wrong,” I explained. “Let ‘em controverse for a few years and get it out of their systems. In the long run it’ll do ‘em a world of good.”

“It will?”

“Sure,” I said. “Now instead of falling asleep right after a few hours of connubial bliss, we’ll make it a law that they have to spend an hour a night discussing whether or not I’m a god. That’s probably a lot more than most husbands and wives ever spend talking to each other after they tie the knot.”

She stared at me kind of funny-like. “I can believe all gods are different. You sound nothing like Henry.”

“Well,” I said condescendingly, “you know them New Jersey gods.”

“I shall have to think about this,” she said.

“Fine,” I said. “We can talk about it right after you and me consummate our godly relationship. In fact, now that I think about it, I just remembered that I ain’t got no apartment here, so I reckon I’ll move into yours.”

She shook her head. “No, I think it best that you keep your distance until this matter is resolved.”

“But Miss Valeria, ma’am, this is one of the best ways I know to prove my godliness.”

“What are you talking about?” she demanded.

I leaned over and whispered what I was talking about into her ear, then stood back with a triumphant smile. “Now be honest,” I said as her face turned a bright red, “could any mortal man do that?”

I saw the slap coming, but I couldn’t duck it.

“In answer to your question,” she said with as much dignity as a naked High Priestess could muster on the spur of the moment, “no mortal man would ever be allowed to do that or even suggest it.”

“So that solves it and now I don’t have to prove I ain’t a mortal man?” I asked, rubbing my jaw where she’d loosened a tooth or two.

“Now you have to prove that you’re not a demon from the pits of hell,” she answered.

She put two fingers in her mouth and whistled, and suddenly the temple was filled with all them men what had been busy worshipping Henry when I arrived, and I found myself facing the business ends of a bunch of spears.

“You’re going about this all wrong, Miss Valeria,” I said. “If I’m a demon I’m gonna kill all your spear-toting friends and relations here, and if I’m not they’re going to kill me and you’re going to feel just awful about having made such a mistake.”

She stared at me. “If I’m wrong I don’t believe I’ll lose a minute of sleep over it.”

“Being a compassionate god or demon, I just can’t countenance such bloodshed,” I said. “I’ll tell you what: I’ll rassle one of ‘em. If I win, everyone admits I’m a god, or at least a demon what’s a hell of a good rassler, you move in with me, and they all agree to worship me.”

“And if you lose?”

“Then I’ll take your solid gold armbands as a romantic remembrance and be on my lonely and heartbroken way.”

Whilst we’d been talking, the whole population of Moo had shown up and kind of gathered around us in a big circle, and a guy who must have been seven feet tall and almost as wide stepped forward. “Let me be the one to fight him, High Priestess!” he shouted.

Pretty soon half a dozen other guys, who all looked like the first one’s bigger, stronger, nastier older brothers were begging for the chance to face me in hand-to-hand combat.

“You are all splendid example of our race,” said Valeria. “I find it difficult to make a choice.” She turned to me. “Lucifer, I will allow you to choose your opponent.”

“You’re sure?” I said. “I mean, once I choose, you promise you won’t go back on your word?”

“The word of the High Priestess is absolute law,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “I choose you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me,” I said. “You told me I could choose my opponent in this here rasslin’ match. I choose you.”

“But I meant…”

“And you told me in front of everyone that the word of the High Priestess was in purple.”

“Inviolate,” she corrected me. Then she turned to the assembled warriors and priestesses and lesser beings. “I gave my word.” She took her crown off and handed it another gorgeous naked lady who I guessed was her Vice High Priestess.

The crowd formed kind of a circle around us. I’d have took off my shirt, but I’d been wearing it so long it was kind of stuck to me, so I just spit on my hands, rubbed ‘em together, and got ready for the referee to ring the bell.

It was when Valeria punched me in the stomach that I realized that we didn’t have no referee nor no bell, and when she sunk her teeth into my ear I figgered out that we didn’t have no rules neither.

I pulled back, leaving some ear in her mouth, and we started circling around each other. Then she reached out to grab me, and I reached out to grab her, and a second later she slapped my face again.

“Don’t do that!” she snapped.

I didn’t know whether to apologize or tell her to protect herself in the clinches, so I settled for circling around her again and grabbing a little lower this time, which just got me another slap in the face.

“Damn it, Lucifer, are you wrestling me or molesting me?”

Before I could answer she launched herself through the air at me, and I fell over backward with her on top of me. After that things happened real fast for the next few seconds, and then she slapped me yet again.

“No kissing!” she yelled.

I grabbed ahold of her left wrist with my right hand and her right wrist with my left hand. She wrapped her legs around my waist and started squeezing the air out of me, and while she was doing that she wrapped her other legs around my ankles so’s I couldn’t move, which surprised me because up until that very moment I’d thunk she only had two legs.

Then she wrapped some more legs around my thighs, and then I heard her legs starting to hiss, and I realized that Bubbles had decided his mistress was in trouble and had come on over to protect her.

“Foul!” I yelled.

“What are you talking about?” she grated. “I haven’t done anything to you yet.”

“You get that snake off’n me or I’m gonna bring my godly wrath down on both your heads!” I said.

She twisted around to see what I was talking about.

“Bubbles!” she cried. “Go back to your dog house!”

Bubbles looked plaintively at her.

“Now!”

Bubbles gave my legs one final squeeze for good measure and crawled off.

Valeria watched him slither off, and since her attention was took elsewhere, I gave her a delicate little pinch in a delicate little place to see if I could encourage her to get off me, and all I can tell you is that if basketball players could jump like that they’d have to give serious consideration to raising the hoop to maybe twelve or fifteen feet.

As for me, I figgered if I got up she’d just knock me down again, and if I actually put any hold on her, she’d either slap my face (depending on where the hold was) or Bubbles would come hissing and sliding to her rescue again, so I reasoned that the best thing was to stay right on the ground where I was.

“Get up, Lucifer!” she snarled. “I’m going to tear you to pieces!”

“I can’t,” I said. “Your snake done busted up my legs.”

“I didn’t hear anything break,” she said.

“Muscles don’t make as loud a snapping sound as bones do,” I said. “But if you wanted this to be a fair fight in front of your people, we’re gonna have to postpone it until I got my legs back under me.”

“All right,” she said reluctantly. “But if you’re lying…”

“Gods ain’t capable of lying,” I said, crossing my heart.

“I’d have sworn there were a lot of things gods weren’t capable of before I got in the ring with you,” she said bitterly.

“I suppose that means you don’t want to kiss and make up?”

She just glared at me and then ordered a couple of the bigger guys who had wanted to rassle me to carry me over to the altar, where I’d have room to lie down and stretch my feet out. One of them pulled his knife out and turned to her.

“As long as he’s here anyway, Priestess,” he said, “it seems a shame to waste the opportunity.”

“No, I must keep my word,” said Valeria. “We will continue our battle when his legs have healed.”

“You know,” I said, “as long as we’re postponing it, we could pass the word to neighboring continents and sell tickets.”

“What’s a ticket?” asked Valeria.

“What’s a neighboring continent?” asked the guy with the knife.

Well, I could see that they were just a bunch of ignorant peasants, half of ‘em beautiful and half of ‘em ugly, and all of them badly in need of a god what could teach ‘em the ways of civilized societies. But before I could tell them why they were in serious need of me, Valeria ordered them all out, except for two nubile lesser priestesses what wasn’t wearing no more clothes than she herself was.

“On the off chance that you really are a god, you will stay here in the temple until you can walk again,” said Valeria. “I am leaving these two handmaidens to bring you food and tend to your wounds.”

“You ain’t staying your own self?” I asked.

I thunk she was gonna slap me again, but instead she just glared at me for a moment, then turned to the two girls.

“You know your duties,” she said. “But be very careful whenever you get within arm’s reach of him.”

“But isn’t he a god, High Priestess?” asked one of them.

“Possibly,” said Valeria. “But if so, then he is a dirty old god. You have been warned.”

Then she was gone.

I sat up and slung my feet over the side of the altar. “Well, ladies,” I said, “what’s for dinner?”

“Henry, if they catch him before sundown,” said the one on the left.

“Are you really a god?” asked the other one.

“Cross my heart and swear to myself I am,” I answered.

“What’s heaven like?”

“Funny you should ask,” I said. “I thunk we might just experience a little bit of it before we eat.”

“You can actually transport us to heaven?” she asked, all kind of wide-eyed and trusting.

“Sure can.”

“How?”

“Come on over here and I’ll show you,” I said.

About three seconds later she slapped my face.

“Don’t they teach you anything in priestess school besides sunbathing and face-slapping?” I asked, rubbing my cheek.

“Don’t they teach you gods anything besides pinching and grabbing?” she shot back.

“I was just practicing my rasslin’ holds,” I said.

“I know what you were practicing,” she said.

“Actually, it looked like fun,” said the other one. “And, well, if he really is a god, it’d be a shame to miss an opportunity to learn what lies ahead of us in heaven.”

“You know,” said the first one, “I never looked at it that way.”

“Sure,” said the other one. “And if he’s as clumsy as Henry, then we’ll know he’s a mortal and we’ll feed him to Bubbles.”

“No,” said the first. “The High Priestess says Bubbles is gaining too much weight. We’ll just chop him up into little pieces and feed him to the piranhas.”

“I don’t know,” said the other one. “Then they’ll want to be fed every day, and it won’t be safe to go swimming.” She paused for a moment, considering their options. “We could tie him up and put a bunch of hungry scorpions on his belly.”

The first one made a face. “I don’t like scorpions.”

“Rats, then,” suggested the other. Then she shook her head. “No, that won’t work. Bubbles has eaten most of the rats. I suppose we could make him swallow a bunch of marabunta and let them eat their way out.”

“Remember that Chinaman who wandered in here, delirious from fever, and kept raving about the Death of a Thousand Cuts?” said the first.

Well, the two of ‘em kept discussing the penalties for my potential failure in their delicate ladylike way for the next ten minutes, and got so wrapped up in it that they didn’t even notice that I’d climbed down off the altar and had made my way to a side door.

“All right,” announced one of ‘em at last. “We’re ready to be transported to heaven on a sea of sexual bliss.”

“Or else,” said the other ominously.

They may have said some more things, but by then I was running back down the hill I’d climbed when I first found the lost continent of Moo, and I didn’t slow down nor miss a step until I’d put quite a distance betwixt me and it.

I was mentally patting myself on the back for making good my escape when I felt a thumping somewhere between my shoulder blades. This struck me as kind of unusual. I knew I had a right powerful brain, but I didn’t know it was strong enough to translate mental pats into real ones, so I turned around and who should I find myself facing but Henry, who was covered by dirt and a bunch of cuts where he’d brushed by thorny bushes on his way out of Moo.

“I hate you!” he said. “You ruined the god business for both of us!”

“Maybe not,” I said. “There’s a couple of heavenly handmaidens in the temple that are just waiting to be transported on a wave of bliss, or maybe it was a sea of passion. Anyway, it was something wet, I’m pretty sure of that. Just go back up there after dark and they’ll think it’s me.”

“What the hell good will that do?” demanded Henry. “I see they ran you off too.”

“No, I run off on my own,” I said. “Believe me, there’s two beautiful naked priestess just dying for a little male companionship.”

“Really?” he said, his face brightening under the dirt and the beard.

“I give you my godly word on it,” I said. “Just make sure it’s dark when you get there, and it probably wouldn’t hurt none to lose your beard first, or at least convince ‘em it’s fast-growing since I didn’t have none when I took my leave of them a few hours ago.”

He stuck out his hand. As first I thunk he was looking for money, but then I realized it wasn’t palm up so I took it and we shook in friendship.

“I guess you ain’t all that bad a guy, as lying, backstabbing, claim-jumping bastards go,” said Henry.

“And you’re certainly better than the average greedy, uncouth, foul-smelling fiend from New Jersey,” I said.

So we parted friends after all, and I figured it was time to continue my quest for the perfect spot to build my tabernacle. I wandered across that huge cow pasture for almost a week, and finally I came to a little outpost made all of logs except for the parts that weren’t, and I walked in and made a beeline for the bar.

“What’ll it be, stranger?” said the bartender.

“Gimme a shot of your best whiskey and a chaser,” I told him.

“What kind of chaser?”

“Another whiskey,” I said.

“You’re new around here, ain’t you?” he said. “Where do you hail from?”

“I just arrived from the lost continent of Moo.”

He stared at me for a moment. “Funny,” he said. “You don’t look Mooish.”

“Tell me something, Brother,” I said. “Where’s the nearest civilized city what’s got an abundance of sinners, especially of the female persuasion, that’s in serious need of saving?”

“Well, you for a lot of choices,” he answered. “It’s getting close to carnival time in Rio off to the east, they say they just discovered emeralds up north in Equador, I hear tell they found some lost Inca city filled with gold and other trinkets off to the west in Peru, and the gauchos are having their annual round-up just south of here and there figures to be a lot of money at the other end of it, ready to buy a few million tons of beef, and where there’s money there’s almost always sinners.”

“True, true,” I agreed. “Thanks for your help, Brother.” I downed my drinks, had a few more, got my face slapped yet again when I thunk one of the ladies at the bar was looking lonely and lovelorn, and finally I wandered outside to watch the sunset.

I’d been guv a lot information about where to go next. Too much, you might say. So I did the only reasonable thing. I waited until the breeze died down, turned my left hand palm up, spat in it, then slapped my right hand down right hard, and decided that whichever the way the spit flew was the direction in which a passel of sinners would soon find themselves saved.

As my next narrative will show, it wasn’t near as easy as it figgered to be.

Review: Jack Knife and Map of Dreams

Jack Knife

By Virginia Baker (Jove/346 pages/$7.99)

MAP OF DREAMS

By M. Rickert (Golden Gryphon/310 pages/$24.95)

Reviewed by Dorman T. Shindler

Half of this latest entry in my reviews for Subterranean falls under the “books I overlooked” category. Both of the titles are by women writers fairly new to the genre scene, and both of them are worthy of your attention. The first, Jack Knife, by Virginia Baker (a Writers of the Future grand prize winner for “Rachel’s Wedding”), is an entertaining but familiar twist on the Jack-the-Ripper mystery, which has gotten a lot of play in the SF and fantasy field, with TV shows like Star Trek and Babylon 5 making use of it, and writers as varied as Robert Bloch, Harlan Elllison, Alan Moore and Karl Alexander using it for fictional fodder. Like Alexander (whose book Time After Time was adapted to film), Baker makes use of time travel in her novel, resulting in something both formulaic and original.

The formulaic part comes in the premise: two time travelers, Sara Grant and David Eliot–Americans both–are hot on the trail of time-traveling, continuum-changing rogue Jonathan Avery. The rogue is none other than the scientist who invented the time-traveling machine. Miffed because he wasn’t chosen to be the first time traveler (fellow scientist Grant got that honor), Avery violates protocol, commits an act of violence that takes someone’s life, and heads back in time. Special Ops Agent Eliot accompanies Grant back to the late 19th Century to capture Avery before he can do something to seriously alter the future. Once they arrive in London, the pair discovers Avery may be linked to the Ripper murders in White Chapel. That’s the hackneyed, derivative part–and it’s a lot–of Baker’s debut. What elevates the tale to the level of an entertaining, worth-at-least one read, novel is Baker’s sure-handedness in drawing scenes and creating characters from 19th Century London, as well as offering up obscure facts and suspects in the age-old mystery that still fascinates most everyone. Good fun!

It’s a rarely admitted but sad fact: most reviewers (and editors, and writers, etc.) in the field don’t have time to read everything that’s published. Somehow, I managed to miss all of M. Rickert’s poetic and powerful stories being published in various genre magazines, but fortunately the always excellent Golden Gryphon Press managed to remedy that situation by publishing Map of Dreams. And although I managed to set aside Rickert’s 2006 debut for far too long, it kindly waited for me. Good thing, too, because Map of Dreams is a must-read collection of stories by a writer whose growing body of work already puts her among the finest of her generation–genre and mainstream writers alike. The title story alone is worth the price of entry. It deals so unerringly with the grief of a parent that even those of us who haven’t suffered such a horrendous loss know this is so (like a character says in The World According to Garp, another piece of fiction that dealt with loss, “It’s just so true”). After Annie Merchant’s daughter is shot and killed by a sniper in New York City, life as she knows it ceases to exist (any loving parent will relate to this notion). Fending off those good-natured but ultimately annoying attempts by others to help her resume life, Annie commits herself to the possibility–via a vaguely magical, vaguely scientific method (think quantum physics)–of finding her daughter in time and space. Her relentless pursuit brings her to an island just off of Australia–where an author who lost his wife to the same killer supposedly resides. Once there, Annie meets a man named Herrick (who has also suffered loss), as well as Daisy and O’ Toole, two people who seem to have stepped out of a parallel universe–or something far more unfathomable. It’s a tour-de-force that sounds the territory of grief and, to use the author’s words, succeeds in “measuring the height of sorrow, the rivered depths of despair.”

Heart-wrenching, funny, poetic and damn-near perfect in execution, “Map of Dreams” is a piece of fiction that grabs the reader by his or her emotions and doesn’t let go until every last drop of blood, sweat and tears has been wrung out. That’s just the first story! There are fifteen more extremely well-written stories in this collection, including “Cold Fire,” “Moorina of the Seals” and “The Harrowing,” every last one of them engaging, well-crafted works of fiction.

Pick up this collection by Rickert and prepared to be enthralled and entertained, moved and maddened. Then make sure to shelve it next to works by Harlan Ellison, Luisa Valenzuela, Connie Willis, Angela Carter and Lucius Shepard. Right where it belongs.

Review: Nebula Awards Showcase 2007 edited by Mike Resnick

(Roc/400 pages/$15.95, trade paper)

Reviewed by Dorman T. Shindler

The annual Nebula Awards Showcase anthologies always have something interesting to offer up, and the 2007 edition of this stalwart sports some stories most likely familiar to avid genre readers—especially those by Kelly Link, “The Faery Handbag” and “Magic for Beginners,” winners for novelette and novella, respectively.

It’s no accident that Link won a double-shot of recognition for her writing last year. Her fiction is that good. What’s more, Link is representative of a new school of writer, one that brings the sensibilities of both genre and mainstream fiction to stories. For lack of a better description, Kelly Link’s fiction often comes off like a cross between Ray Bradbury, Raymond Carver and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. “Magic For Beginners” is a bemused, slightly distant narrative (in an I got a great buzz from that beer/joint or whatever way) that follows the lives of Jeremy Mars (the son of a shop-lifting, semi-successful horror writer) and his teenage friends—Elizabeth, Talis and Karl—as well as a cult fantasy television show called “The Library” (which is reminiscent of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Twin Peaks” and half a dozen other strange but wonderful shows). Link intersperses the narrative of the show with the narrative of the teenage friends, so that reality and fantasy overlap (within her own fantasy tale, of course). The kids all lead fractured lives (dysfunctional parents, etc.) and eventually begin to feel as if they are, themselves, starring in a television show. The way Link blurs the line between fantasy and reality is indicative of anyone’s adolescent years—and not a few adult years as well—making a powerful statement about the nature of reality and fantasy, and the role entertainment plays in our everyday life.

Although her name may not yet be as well known as Link’s, and although her story didn’t win an award in the last Nebula round, Anne Harris has a distinctive voice and sensibility that—with persistence—could win her a strong following and mantle-full of shiny plaques and statues as well. “Still Life With Boobs” is one of the most outrageous, insightful and original works of fantasy to come down the pike in some time. The premise is simple, as is the narrative: a young woman given to seeking out her share of good times and pleasure awakens one morning to the realization that her boobs, George and Gracie (which her boyfriend, in a moment of whimsy, nicknamed), have been stepping out on their own. The visible scratches and “smears” of “less identifiable substances” is a dead giveaway to the betrayal by her breasts. And if her suspicions aren’t evidence enough, she awakens one night after dozing in front of the TV to find her mammary glands are gone—and tracks them down to a club where they are cavorting with all manner of “detached body parts.” Pretty soon, the errant boobs are even taking off in the middle of the daytime during dinner!

A startling well-balanced mix of erotica, slap-stick comedy and clever insightfulness on the American mindset toward sex—either puritanical or self-indulgent—“Still Life With Boobs” is a hilarious and moving little fable reminiscent of the best writing of stalwarts like Connie Willis.

There are plenty of other solid, entertaining pieces in this anthology, including stories by James Patrick Kelly (“Men Are Trouble”) and Carol Emshwiller (“I Live With You”), nonfiction pieces on the state of the genre, and even an excerpt from the Nebula Award-winning novel of 2006, Joe Haldeman’s Camouflage.

Since Harlan Ellison was just added onto the distinguished list of Grand Masters that the Nebula Committee honors, author Barry N. Malzberg lobbied the editors of this edition to include an old, but still powerful, mainstream story—“The Resurgence of Miss Ankle-Strap Wedgie”—about an actress named Valerie Lone (based, it’s been said, on Veronica Lake), who’s Hollywood boat has long sailed, and the attempts by a couple of opportunists to make use of her in their film—on the premise that their efforts will rekindle her already dead career. The story’s structure gives it that much more oomph, and the tale of obsession and greed and self-serving is told in a noirish narrative well-suited to the story. It’s powerful stuff, and not a word of it is science fiction…or fantasy. But it’s also a fine reminder that the best writers in the field of SF& fantasy don’t pay attention boundaries, borders, streams or pigeonholes, preferring to blaze their own trails and look back in wonder when all is said and done.

Review: On the Road with Harlan Ellison volume 3

HARLAN ELLISON: ON THE ROAD WITH ELLISON: Volume Three

(Deep Shag Records/$17.99)

Reviewed by Dorman T. Shindler

For those of you who can’t get enough, here is this week’s mini-bonus review, covering the latest in an ongoing cavalcade of Harlan Ellison’s spoken word recordings.

For years, when anyone asked about his penning a biography–despite guaranteed bestsellerdom should he ever do so–Harlan Ellison replied he wasn’t interested, and that he’d already done so in his dozens of introductions and essays. Add to that his CDs produced by Deepshag. Each of the (so far) three volumes has contained between nine and fifteen tracks which are basically memoirs of the dirty life and times of Harlan Ellison. This time out, Ellison covers things like his two hour stint as an employee of Disney or the strange story of his attacking convention goers with a chandelier. Of course, very few orators–outside of Lenny Bruce or Mark Twain–could recount their own lives with such hilarity and perfect timing, but that, as Ellison would say, is another story.

Suffice it to say that for fans of Ellison and of the SF genre, there are (as in the first two volumes) a number of familiar tales told. But as with the first two volumes, gems are here for the taking. Such as track 12, in which Ellison offers up one his most hilarious anecdotes–about the publishing industry–replete with an impression of Humphrey Bogart and Peter Falk. Or the story about his almost getting a job as a talk show host (the antithesis of Mort Downey, Jr.–or Bill O’ Reilly), and how his views on the Middle East–still, sadly, relevant today–lost him the job.

It’s all here: how Robert Redford’s film efforts in Colorado may, in fact, be a front for NORAD, the willful ignorance of the mass of Americans and how Ellison has to hum a tune while serving his wife, Susan, breakfast, or risk having sausage and eggs decorate his ceilings. Coming off like Robin Williams’ older brother, Harlan Ellison could make even the recital of his latest grocery list entertaining.

Review: Softspoken by Lucius Shepard

SOFTSPOKEN by Lucius Shepard (Nightshade Books/179 pages/$23.95)

Reviewed by Dorman T. Shindler

Readers familiar with the writing of Lucius Shepard – from his many short stories to novels like Green Eyes, Trujillo or A Handbook of American Prayer—know he is, perhaps, one of the few writers to emerge from the SF field who writes the same sort of powerful prose as do mainstream stalwarts like Robert Stone, Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene. The best of his fiction packs the power of myth and wields the magic of poetry. His latest novel, Softspoken, brings all of that and then some to the telling of a southern gothic tale filled with mystery, madness and plenty of hauntings.

Sanie Bullard, a writer, and her lawyer husband Jackson move into his South Carolina, ancestral home, sharing it with his siblings. The place, as Sanie observes, is “Cobweb central,” dilapidated at best. Jackson’s father, a lawyer himself, was supposedly mad as a hatter. When Sanie begins hearing a distinct voice, she thinks it’s her peyote-chewing, prankster brother-in-law; then she realizes Will has heard the ghost as well. Trying the drug herself, Sanie actually sees the spirits inhabiting the antebellum home: “Half bodied ladies in evening wear mingle and merge in pale, penetrating intimacy with eyeless gentlemen and soldiers with missing limbs that are not the result of battle.” Sanie also begins to realize what the ghost is trying to tell her. Apparently, there is more than one secret, one mystery, hidden in the Bullard family closets. The revelation, when it comes, results in a stunning, bloody and surreal denouement. It’s an ending that seems inevitable in retrospect, and which plays out perfectly. The beauty of Shepard’s prose is that while it never flinches away from describing the gritty, low-end of the new south, it does so with the sweetness of a Magnolia in full bloom, as when the author describes Sanie’s view of the Bullard home after a stroll:

“…the house emerges from behind the screen of two water oaks, ramshackle and many-eyed with black windows, presenting the impression of a ditsy old matriarch, her torso rising from waist-high yellowing weeds of skirts so ragged, the corroded wrought-iron fence of her bustle shows through.”

Further down, on the same page, Shepard turns Sanie’s nearly imperceptible feeling about the ghost she has encountered into something feline:

“Anxiety bristles up in her, but she also feels a mild burst of affection for the voice, and she thinks she detects a faint vibe of devotion, as it it’s been waiting inside to squeeze out the cracked door, nearly tripping her up, and rub against her ankles.”

Ranking up with the haunted house novels (which are rarely about haunted houses)—The Haunting of Hill House, Ghost Story, Bag of Bones—Shepard’s Softspoken is a classic ghost story that comes off like a collaboration between Shirley Jackson and Tennessee Williams, with just a touch of James M. Cain. The end result is, of course, all Shepard. Softspoken is both a taut psychological thriller and a beautifully rendered portrait of the New American South, told with unflinching honesty, humor, insight and compassion.

Review: The Last Mimzy by Henry Kuttner

(Del Rey/352 pages/$13.95, trade paper)

Reviewed by Dorman T. Shindler

It may be sacrilege among the faithful to make such a proclamation, but “Mimsy Were the Borogroves” really isn’t that great of a story. It’s a very fascinating, very interesting premise: A box containing the knowledge of how to gain entrance to an alternate is found; but the problem is, no one but children can understand the “instructions” because as we humans get older, we began to think and reason in a different fashion. It’s a premise that Kuttner cleverly glommed from reading A High Wind In Jamaica by Richard Hughes (the title of his story is taken from a stanza of a song in Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll). Yes, Mimsy is a clever concept, but as a story, it doesn’t quite work, failing to sustain narrative flow, losing steam and direction about mid-center. At that point, a character named Rex Holloway enters the picture and commits the sin of so many of the scientist characters in 1950s science fiction flicks (and not a few modern SF novels) make, over-explaining this facet or that theory. Check out this excerpt, taken from—I kid you not—nearly two pages of such meandering by the good Dr. Holloway: “The brain’s a colloid, a very complicated machine. We don’t know much about its potentialities. We don’t even know how much it can grasp.” I won’t go on further except to say whatever editor bought the story fell down on the job. A bit more clipping and a genuine classic would have, indeed, been born. As it is, “Mimsy” is still a good short story.

Why such attention to a story written to a story nearly a century ago? Because New Line Cinema has made a film of the Kuttner classic; and because Del Rey has reissued The Best of Henry Kuttner under a new title, The Last Mimzy, deigning to use the filmmaker’s misspelling of mimsy (but as well all know, most filmmakers, and not a few folks in publishing, rarely make smart choices). Despite that clunky middle ground, “Mimsy Were the Borogroves” is a dark and twisty landscape with enough unseen brambles and potholes about (as well a killer ending) that readers will forgive the narrative hiccup.

In Worlds of Wonder, the sublime anthology edited by Robert Silverberg, the Grand Master speculates on the writings of Henry Kuttner and his wife C.L. Moore (after marriage, both writers worked on each other’s stories). Silverberg notes early work was marked by “emotional intensity and evocative coloration” while Kuttner’s fiction was always versatile, clever and technically adept. Leading one to speculate that the stronger parts of “Mimsy,” near the tale’s end, might have been provided by Moore; if so, good on her for elevating the tale from merely clever to artful.

These few nits aside, potential readers should not let the above musings stop them from picking up The Last Mimzy to sample the rest of this best of collection devoted to Kuttner, because there’s plenty to entertain. Such as “The Twonky” (originally published under Kuttner’s Lewis Padgett byline) in which paranoia reigns as characters discover that certain everyday item of entertainment in homes is actually a robot designed to turn humans into bovine-like creatures—or eliminate them (had the story been written a bit later, Kuttner and Moore would no doubt have substituted a television or internet-linked computer, and rightly so). Other highlights include “Two-Handed Engine,” “The Proud Robot” and “Absalom.” In truth, all of the stories in this collection will serve readers well and entertain them beyond their wildest expectations.

Review: The Yiddish Policeman’s Union By Michael Chabon

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union

By Michael Chabon (HarperCollins/414 pages/ $26.95)

Reviewed by Dorman T. Shindler

For those who wish a mainstream writer would get it right when writing genre fiction, the latest tome by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, will put a smile on their faces.

Unlike Philip Roth, who claimed ignorance of other alternative history novels (easily dismissing great works like The Man in the High Castle or even fun reads like Fatherland) when in talking about the origins of The Plot Against America, Chabon, who edited McSweeny’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales among others, has a solid knowledge of genre fiction; Chabon also has an astute eye for details, which is why he based his new novel on a fairly obscure bit of history. The author’s starting point? What if, as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt suggested, Alaska became the homeland for Jews after World War II? “These are strange times to be a Jew” is the refrain repeated by various characters, a litany which gives voice to the book’s theme.

Working off that interesting premise, Chabon pulls his readers into a world called “Alyeska,” a Jewish settlement in Alaska’s panhandle. Gangs of young, Orthodox Jews (replete with long curls of hair and knee breeches) known as “Black Hats” roam around the streets of a central city known as Sitka, looking like a bizzaro-world version of the gangs from West Side Story. In their midst is Meyer Landsman, a Jewish Detective who could’ve stepped out of a novel by Raymond Chandler or John D. MacDonald. Landsman is an old-school tough guy who practically oozes alcohol and cigarette smoke when he talks: “…the most decorated shammes in the District of Sitka…” Saddled with all of the conventional problems of any gumshoe worth his salt, Landsman is dealing with the ghost of a broken marriage, the memories of a dead sister, and a case of career ennui that would challenge even Humphrey Bogart When the landlord Tenenboym of the Hotel Zamenhof wakes the drunken Detective up one morning to investigate suspicious happenings with a neighbor in the apartment building, Landsman finds that the neighbor is, of course, dead. Said neighbor was not only a chess prodigy and a heroin addict, he was the son of Sitka’s most prominent and powerful clergyman, Rabbi Lasker.

For reasons not quite clear to him, this murder suddenly awakens a long-dead spirit inside Landsman. With the help of his partner, Berko Shemets (who is half Jewish, half Tlinget–a Native American tribe), Landsmand sets out to solve the murder mystery. Standing in his way is the fact that in two months Alaska will no longer be a sanctuary for Jews–seems the new homeland was only a rental–the fact that someone (or a group of someones) doesn’t want him to solve the murder, and that his ex-wife, Bina Glebfish, is now Chief of Police!

Chabon tackled the mystery genre with The Final Solution, an interesting mix of Sherlock Holmes and Holocaust history, proving he can tackle just about any genre (he covered YA fantasy with Summerland). Taking that already honed skill, he breathes some interesting new life into the formulaic, noirish detective story. Hilarious and moving, suspenseful and contemplative, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is, like all good genre novels, a twisted, fun-house mirror gaze into the heart of our own troubled times. Of course, it’s also damned good, entertaining little mystery story and an interesting study of a down-and-out character who redeems himself with an eleventh hour act of heroism and detective work. Filled with wordplay, compassion for all the characters involved, and a genuine sense of Weldschmertz (angst at the pain of the world’s citizens–all of them), The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is wild ride through what might have been, a reflection of what might currently be, and another tour-de-force of storytelling from one of America’s premiere novelists.

Review: White Night by Jim Butcher & Wizards edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois

White Night

by Jim Butcher (Roc/416 pages/$23.95)

Wizards

Edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (Berkely/402 pages/$25.00)

Reviewed by Dorman T. Shindler

Although wizards have been popular in genre fiction since the days of Dorothy and the Scarecrow or Gandalf, the appearance of Harry Potter and friends in the last decade and a half has upped the ante and the interest. The resulting overflow of books about wizards and/or witches seems to be spilling out into the aisles of late. Two such publications are the focus of this week’s column.

To be fair, The Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher owes as much to the Rockford Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer as it does to Hogwarts. More so, in fact. After all, Chicago-based Wizard Harry Dresden is a low-rent wizard who works as a consultant (for those in need of advice on how to slay preternatural creatures), performs lost and found services and does just a lot of private investigation work. If you’re a regular watcher of the Sci-fi Network, you may already know of Harry via the television show which has run one season thus far (its renewal is being decided this spring). If you’re a reader who hasn’t caught the TV show, you might like to know that Harry also drives a beat-up Volkswagen, and lives with a talking skull (the skull is actually haunted by the ghost of Bob, a sarcastic magical entity who loves Harry despite all evidence to the contrary).

Jim Butcher’s amalgam of fantasy and tough-guy private eye genres is one of the better paranormal series currently riding that popular subgenre wave. And White Night, the ninth entry, is one of Butcher’s best efforts, although some political intrigue involving group dynamics and politics (in this case, the White Court of psychic vampires and the Red Court of blood-drinking vampires) threatens to weigh it down at times (strangely, that same albatross currently hangs around the “necks” of the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Series by Laurell K. Hamilton and the Sookie Stackhouse Southern Gothic Vampire series by Charlaine Harris).

This time out, Harry is investigating the deaths of several second-class practitioners of magic in the Chicago area. Called on by Detective Karin Murphy - an old buddy in the Special Investigations division of the police department who was recently demoted from Lieutenant to Sergeant - Harry learns that what was thought to be a suicide turned out to be a case of murder. It seems someone is carrying out a vendetta; and Harry finds a card left specifically for him at the first murder scenes. The card bears a quote from the bible, Exodus 22:18 - “Suffer not a witch to live.” Worse, as the investigation continues, evidence Harry uncovers points to his half-brother Thomas (a member of the White Court) as a prime suspect. Getting help from his apprentice, Molly Carpenter, and assorted other eccentric (secondary) characters, Harry eventually finds himself hip-deep in trouble, battling ghouls, vampires and assorted creatures of the night.

Full of well-written banter, fast-paced plotting and memorable characters, “The Dresden Files” is just a lot of noirish, spell-casting fun - both Harry Dresden and White Night, a series high point, are sure to appeal to the fans of that other wizard with the same first name.

Unusual for a theme-based anthology, Wizards is full of surprisingly good stories centered on wizards and magic. And it starts from strength with Neil Gaiman’s “The Witch’s Headstone.” Rumored to be part of a novel in progress, the story reads as if written by a descendant of Ray Bradbury, with its poetic prose style, its reverence for traditions, and an unusual bit of family dynamics. Eight-year-old Bod (Nobody Owens) is being raised and schooled by a family of ghouls and ghosts while living in a graveyard: the fanged Silas, the zombified Pennyworth. But it’s the lessons of a Sorceress that prove most important. Although Gaiman ends the tale at the just the right spot, knowing it’s part of a larger work will leave some readers wanting more.

Orson Scott Card’s “Stonefeather” tells the story of a seemingly unremarkable, Fifteenth Century kid who suddenly discovers heretofore unknown powers after leaving home in search of his destiny. Elizabeth Hand delivers one of her stunning, unexpected endings in “Winter’s Wife,” a New England magical tale which pits modern-day pragmatism against old magic, and Terry Bisson does some interesting things with well-worn images and plotlines when a young boy meets the Devil himself in “Billy and the Wizard.” Other highpoints include stories by Gene Wolfe, Patricia A. McKillip, Jane Yolen and Jeffery Ford. There are a total of eighteen stories in all, with only a couple of clunkers, and most of them well worth the read. As editors Dann and Dozois point out in their preface, “Wizards have stalked through the human imagination for thousands and thousands of years…the figure of the wizard is still a deeply significant one.”

Five million or more Harry Potter fans would most likely agree.

Review:The Best of the Best Volume 2 20 Years of The Best Short Science Fiction Novels

Edited By Gardner Dozois (St. Martin’s Press/642 pages/$40.00)

Reviewed by Dorman T Shindler

More astute reviewers than this one have pointed out that novellas are the perfect form for science fiction writers: just enough time to develop believable premises and worlds, as well as characters, without going on for too long.

After putting out The Best of the Best Volume 1, a culling of what Dozois believed are the best short stories from twenty years worth of “Year’s Best” collections, the former editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction has done the same for novellas.

Happily for this reviewer and long-time reader, many favorites are included. Foremost among them is “The Hemingway Hoax” by Joe Haldeman, one of the most perfect novellas I’ve ever read. Haldeman manages to mix bits of crime fiction and mainstream fiction flavor into his outlandish tale of time travel and literary forgery, making it that much more delectable. His protagonist, John Baird, a college professor and Hemingway buff, bears a not-so coincidental resemblance to Haldeman. Both were wounded in the Vietnam War, and both are married. Of course, things diverge from there, since Baird’s wife is willing to play her husband for a patsy when Sylvester Castlemaine enters the picture, trying to convince both of them to commit forgery. Castlemaine’s idea begins slouching toward reality when Baird mentions that Hemingway’s first wife managed to lose a brief case full of his early stories while traveling by train from France to Switzerland. After some persuading from his wife (who was encouraged by Castlemaine), Baird decides to look into the possibility of forging one of those lost stories: properly aged paper has to be obtained, as well as the correct sort of typewriter.

Baird travels to New England doing research and his wife stays in Florida, twisting bed sheets with Castlemaine.

That’s when a mysterious, time-traveling entity that looks like Hemingway (sometimes the old Hemingway, sometimes the young) throws a monkey wrench in everyone’s plans by appearing to Baird and warning him that his petty criminal act threatens the fabric of time, and that the entity will have to kill Baird if he doesn’t desist. Baird, of course, ends up not listening; but the entity’s efforts to kill Baird only send him into a parallel universe, where the strange ballet of death and deconstruction begin all over again.

With its chapter headings taken from Hemingway’s own tales, it’s Roman-a-clef flavor and it’s moebius strip structure (not to mention a section that runs backwards and reads almost like poetry), “The Hemingway Hoax” is a tour-de-force of storytelling, and much-deserving of the Nebula and Hugo Awards bestowed upon it.

Haldeman’s story is just one of the treasures readers will find in this trove of literary wonders. There’s Robert Sliverberg’s moving, elegiac, “Sailing to Byzantium” (another Nebula and Hugo winner), in which a 20th century man finds himself in a future that seems magical–and soulless; “Griffin’s Egg” by Michael Swanwick, in which human settlements on the moon and controlled mental evolution play a part; telepathic marine animals and a god-like alien in “Surfacing” by Walter Jon Williams; and a return to Ursula K. LeGuin’s Hainish interstellar community in “Forgiveness Day.”

From hard SF to the sort that treads a line between fantasy and science fiction, the novellas herein–many of them award-winners–as well as the authors truly represent some of the best that the genre has to offer.

Review: Harlan Ellison’s Dream Corridor Volume 2

(Dark Horse/152 pages/$19.95)

Reviewed by Dorman T. Shindler

After a cable network couldn’t put together a sort of Twilight Zone/Alfred Hitchcock Hour/Outer Limits type show, Harlan Ellison turned to the one form that best emulates screen and teleplays: the comic book. With the help of Dark Horse and dozens of writers and artists, Ellison produced six not-so regular issues of Harlan’s Ellison’s Dream Corridor, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the good old days of The House of Mystery and The House of Secrets. In truth, even those venerable stalwarts never looked anything like “Dream Corridor,” with its wildly careening styles (from zany to realistic to nearly abstract), and none of the stories in those pioneer anthology comic books were ever quite as dark or sharp-edged. With the exception of a story adapted by John Byrne (“I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream”), the first five issues of Ellison’s comic were gathered together and published as Harlan Ellison’s Dream Corridor Volume One. Along with the adapted stories, there were short-shorts written by Ellison just for each issue (“Chatting With Anubis” actually won a Bram Stoker Award), so fans and newcomers got a double-dose of Ellison. The series was to continue on a fairly regular basis, but sickness, lawsuits and, unfortunately, poor sales, conspired to bring about the end of the comic.

Harlan Ellison’s Dream Corridor Volume Two (none of which was issued in stand alone issues) is the final installment of what is arguably one of the wildest, most inventive, most talent-festooned titles in comic book history. And like the first volume, the stories herein run the gamut from science fiction (“The Silver Corridor”) to fantasy (“Djinn No Chaser,” “Gnomebody”) to crime fiction (“Moonlighting”) and horror (“Rock God”). As always, the art is nothing short of jaw-dropping: from the realistic styles of Gene Ha and Neal Adams (“Silver Corridor” and “Rock God,” respectively) to the whacky “funism” of Jay Lynch when bringing “Djinn No Chaser” to life. The brightly lit, brightly colored panels of that story and “Gnomebody” eventually lead into the stark black and white of Gene Colan’s noirish artwork for “Moonlighting” as well as a colored version of same; and that leads into the black and white “Rock God” piece drawn by Adams. For comic book aficionados, the contrast of the original black and white drawings by and the colored/finished version (with captions and balloon dialogues) makes for an interesting behind-the-scenes look at how one of these stories is put together. And a third–very brief–black and white piece, a few sketches by Curt Swan for Steve Niles’ adaptation of “Eyes of Dust” before he died, provides a behind-the-scenes look at how comic book scripts are written.

Finally, as with Volume One, Ellison has included two original short stories, written around paintings by Terese Neilsen and Kent Bash. The former is an ethereal painting with a touch of whimsy that matches “The Lingering Scent of Woodsmoke,” Ellison’s story written about the painting. It’s a short, sharp little jab at both the destroyers of nature and the most recent, formidable enemies of the Jews. The painting by Kent Bash, on the other hand, which accompanies “Goodbye to All That,” was painted after the author told the artist of a vision he’d had. Then Ellison sat down to write the story, producing a tale stylistically similar to much of the shorter work he has penned in the last 15 or 16 years: like a blending of Jorge Luis Borges and Donald Westlake. It has a strange, out-of-left-field whimsicality that will appeal to those with broad senses of humor–all the rest will be sadly lost (so it goes). The story garnered a Nebula Award nomination for Ellison.

Those opening this book looking for the same-old slam-bang, formulaic, super hero, action-type comics found on every creaky turnstile rack will be disappointed. Those in search of artwork and writing that define the words brilliant and original will walk away with rueful smiles on their faces, wishing the rest of the human race would go ahead and catch up already with the genius of Harlan Ellison’s wildly creative intellect.