Humans

Ananayel

I am, or was, or perhaps still am, an angel. God knows.

I am certainly very different from what I once was. And yet I am, I think, still me. On the other hand, my life is no longer angelic, that’s true enough.

What was I before, when I was all and simply angel? How to describe that existence? It was, I think, like that fleeting part of your human condition when, waking earlier than necessary in the morning, you feel a long flow of weightlessness and selflessness, your bed has become a great soft balloon with you a part of it, and you float through the middle of the air in a vast shadowy domed auditorium., That feeling holds you for a few seconds only, and then all the weight of time and personality returns, you cease to be merely a floating fragment of thinking matter, you become yourself again, and your day begins.

For my kind, the kind I once was, that suspended oneness in the middle of the vasty space is the natural condition. Until, at great intervals, He calls. He has a task.

And so He called me: “Ananayel.”

I must go back to who and what I was at that instant, at the very start. I must track the change that took place in me as I set about performing the task He had given me. In that first instant, I was only what I always had been: a faithful servant.

And so He called me, “Ananayel.” And I roused myself, coiling like smoke as it passes through an open window, recalling myself to myself, flowing together into selfness and awareness and the fact of Ananayel, who answered, “I am here, Lord.”

And so was He, of course. He is omnipresent, among His qualities. But He was not there, if you understand me. I did not face Him directly. To do so, I understand, is to be seared into oblivion and a whole new beginning. The truth of His beauty and power is more than a mortal can stand to gaze full upon, and angels too are mortal, thought not at all as ephemeral as men.

We are all of us parts of God, parts of His dream, His desire, but none of us know any more than our own role in His plan; if indeed He has a plan, and is not merely moved this way and that by cosmic Whim, as sometimes seems the case. And so I, a tendril in God’s imaginings, had to be informed by another entity, as insubstantial as myself, just what my task was to be.

“A messenger.”

Ah. I had never been a messenger, a bringer of annunciations, the word from The Word Itself. It was said to be an exciting and even joyous experience, that one, for all concerned. It was said the look in the eyes of a human who knows himself — or herself, yes, yes, I know — to be in the presence of an angel is a look to be treasured always. (How they love us, as naturally and instinctively as they love their own newborn.) And now I was to be among the blessed few Blessed who would have received that look.

“And an affector.”

Rarer still! An angel who alters the human story, the progression of human events! An angel who crumbles a fortification, diverts a river, lights a torch to safety or defeat! To take part! (That is the one great thing we angels miss, when we are roused to awareness. We have no history of our own, no desires, no triumphs. No disasters either, of course, which is the trade-off. But even a weeping human, gnashing its teeth, can sometimes seem more real than we.)

“What do you know of America?”

Nothing. Never heard of it.

I was shown the land of the Iroquois, who would let the river carry them down to where the water turned to salt, just before the mighty sea, where their nets could bring in fish that never ventured upstream.

“It’s been a while since you looked.”

I have been elsewhere, and nowhere, floating at times among other stars. Because He has, you know, other ant farms than this, other dollhouses than Earth, other pets than these. So now I look, and much has changed where that river meets the sea. The Indians and their canoes are gone. A mighty city sprawls around the harbor, noxious and colorful, teeming and keening. It must be twenty times the size of Rome!

“One hundred times, if you mean the Rome of the Republic. They have been fruitful. They have multiplied. There are now five billion of the damn things.”

All in that city?

“Not quite. But that is where you are to begin.”

What do they call it?

“New York.”

What was Old York?

“Irrelevant. It is in New York that you will begin to announce, and to affect.”

Pleasure and anticipation fill me and I drift higher, expanding. What am I to do? What is the current state of God’s plan?

“He’s tired of them. They’re too many, too grubby, too willful. They are too prone to error by half.”

And my Task?

“To announce, and to affect, the end of their World.”

1

Susan Carrigan floated in the great soft cloud of bed, not asleep and not awake, not thinking, only feeling. She hung in the suspended moment, aware and not aware, and then the radio beside her bed exploded into noise: “I can’t get no — no no no!”

“Shit,” she muttered, suddenly assaulted by sensation. Her mouth tasted like green mold. Her ears hurt. Her back hurt. Her bladder hurt. Her right hand, too long beneath the pillow beneath her head, had fallen asleep and now was tingling and smarting its way back into existence.

And Barry’s gone!

She rolled over onto her back, glaring leftward at the other pillow, undented and white. The son of a bitch, the son of a bitch, the prick with ears. Gone.

Not that she wanted him back. Let him marry his fucking CD player, he had all the maturity of a retarded chimpanzee, she was better off without him. It was just that, every morning, it came as a surprise all over again that he was really gone. They’d been together almost eight months, after all, and apart now only six days. Seven days? No, six.

The radio kept on complaining: “Oh, I’m talkin with some girl—”

“And fuck you, too,” she said, rising up, slapping her hand onto the button, cutting it off in mid-squawk. The movement agitated her bladder. She was awake. Hello, Tuesday, I must be Susan. And this 14 by 23-foot space (plus kitchenette and john), with windows viewing ailanthus trees and the dark brick backs of buildings on West 19th Street, must be all mine.

Did it seem larger since Barry’d gone? There was a hole now in the industrial shelving where all his vast holdings in Darth Vader stereo equipment had once stood, and some welcome space in the closets and the medicine cabinet, but not a lot. Your footprints don’t go very deep, pal, Susan thought, angrily pleased at the idea of his insubstantiality, and she got out of bed, a lithe naked girl of twenty-seven who had started worrying recently — unnecessarily — about whether or not her breasts had begun to sag. Her hair, medium long and set for ease of maintenance as much as for good looks, was the precise shade of Clairol blond to complement her not-too-pale skin tones and not-too-dark blue-gray eyes. She was lucky in her nose, and she knew it; it was precisely the nose that girls had in mind when they made the appointment with the plastic surgeon, but never seemed to get, and Susan had been born with it. Otherwise, she found her mouth a problem — a tiny bit too sluttish? or not sluttish enough? — her elbows a problem — ugly! — and her weight a chronic threat.

Seated on the toilet, she remembered again her childhood fear that something would come out of the bowl beneath her, something horrible with claws, and perform unspeakable acts before she could escape. She hadn’t thought of that terror since she was maybe eight; was it really some psychological horseshit rising up against her, out of the bowl, as a result of Barry’s departure, leaving her nethers alone and unprotected? “Gimme a break,” she told herself, but when had that ever happened? Minds go their own way, regardless.

Showering, she thought about AIDS. She had a remote cousin in AIDS research at NYU Medical Center — Chuck Woodbury, his name was — and to listen to his party chitchat at family reunions for fifteen minutes was enough to turn you off humans forever. And that’s the problem. A few years ago, a Barry comes, a Barry goes, and good riddance. But not today.

No, not today. All of a sudden, you go to bed with a guy, you’re going to bed with everybody he went to bed with the last five years, and everybody they went to bed with, and there’s this massive cat’s cradle out there, this Möbius strip of a daisy chain, and unless you’ve fallen in with a horny group of Baptist picnicgoers the odds are getting better every day that somewhere in that humid grid there’s the ding, and all the lines turn red. Wanna climb aboard, honey? No, thanks, I’ll wait for the next virgin. If there’s any more on this route.

Putting on her Reeboks — her grown-up shoes were in her bottom drawer in the bank — she suddenly realized this was the fourth consecutive day she’d forgotten to jog before her shower. All those years of conditioning, going down the tube. Because of Barry? Ridiculous. And if true, even more ridiculous. I’ll leave myself a note, she thought, so I won’t forget tomorrow. Scotch-tape it to the hot water faucet in the shower.

At least she was still walking. Downstairs, she strode west across 19th Street to Seventh Avenue and then headed uptown, the city screaming and shrieking all around her in its usual fashion. Joggers thudded by, to remind her of her dereliction. Macho meatheads driving down the avenue gave that double honk as they went by, that whadayasayhoney honk that didn’t mean a thing but bravado, because even they weren’t so dumb as to think girls who looked like her hung out with guys who drove trucks. It was May and cool but clear, with an underrating of white in the high blue sky. Susan moved uptown at a steady pace, hardly thinking about Barry at all.

The coffee shop where she usually stopped on the way to work was at the corner of 38th Street. She almost passed it by this morning, to punish herself for not jogging, but decided that would be stupid. She’d just be cross and nasty in the bank if she didn’t have her regular coffee and orange juice and English muffin. So she went in and sat at the counter, and the waitress said, “Hi, hon.” She was a stout black woman who looked as though she ought to be motherly but was not. Hi, hon was as far as it went. Three years Susan had been having breakfast here, midway between home and the job at the bank on West 57th Street, and she still didn’t know the waitress’s name. Nor did the waitress show any interest in her name.

“My aching feet!” said a raggedy old bag lady, huge and shapeless, gray-skinned and gray-haired, as she settled onto the stool immediately to Susan’s right, though two-thirds of the stools in the place were empty. Not a penny from me, Susan said fiercely in her mind, and concentrated on the waitress, coming this way with her coffee. The orange juice would be next, and the English muffin last. The waitress plunked down the cup, turned away, and the bag lady said, “Marie, I’d just like a nice glass of tomato juice.”

The waitress turned back to glare, as though she didn’t like being called by name — so it’s Marie, is it? — but then she walked off without speaking, and when she brought both juices and slapped them down, the bag lady pushed dirty-looking coins across the counter, saying, “And fifteen cents for you.”

“I don’t think I know you, hon,” the waitress said, with that suspicious glare.

The bag lady had a huge and sunny smile, beaming and happy. “Oh, I’m nobody,” she said.

The waitress, frown welded into place, scooped the change off the counter and went away again. If this woman speaks to me, Susan told herself, I’ll pretend not to hear. But the bag lady drew a magazine — Esquire, of all things — out of some deep recess within her clothing, opened it, and began happily to read while downing tiny sips of tomato juice.

It wasn’t till Susan’s English muffin had arrived and been half consumed that she became aware of the bag lady studying her profile. Susan gave her a quick glance — that smile seemed sad now, for some reason — then hurriedly looked away to concentrate on the muffin, but it was too late. “A pretty girl like you,” the bag lady said softly. “You shouldn’t be unhappy.”

Surprised, Susan looked full at the woman, and this time saw nothing in her face but pity and good intentions. “What do you mean?” she demanded, knowing she didn’t sound as tough as she wanted. “I’m not unhappy.”

“It’s some fellow, I bet,” the bag lady said, nodding slowly, heavily. “It’s always some fellow.”

Susan gave her a cold and distancing smile, refusing to be drawn any further into conversation, and turned back to her muffin. If she speaks to me again, I’ll move to another stool.

A ripping sound startled her, and she turned to see that the bag lady had torn a page from her magazine and was now smoothing it onto the counter between them. “If I was your age,” she said, “and I was unhappy over some fellow, here’s what I’d do.”

Susan couldn’t help looking at the torn-out sheet, and when she saw it was a full-page ad for vodka she couldn’t help laughing. “I guess that is one answer,” she said.

“No, no, the contest,” the bag lady told her, tapping the ad with a dirty fingernail and a fat grubby finger. “I’d get away, I would, and that’s just the way to do it.”

How did I get stuck with this? Susan asked herself, but there didn’t seem to be any way not to look more closely at the advertisement, and to see that it was indeed an announcement of some sort of essay contest, in which the first prize was an all-expense trip to Moscow.

Moscow! Russia? What kind of prize was that? Millions of people trying to get out of Russia, this vodka company’s giving away a free trip in. “Oh, I don’t think,” Susan started, smiling with a more gentle dismissal this time, “I don’t think that’s the—”

“You just do it,” the bag lady said. “You’ll see I’m right. You’ve got plenty of time at work, you can do it there, easy as pie. And off you go, it’s a whole new world, a whole new experience.”

“I don’t win contests, I’ve never won anything in my—”

“I’ll bet you could win this one,” the bag lady said. “Change your life, it would.” Finishing her tomato juice in one final noisy gulp, she struggled off the stool and gave Susan her sunniest smile, saying, “It’s just perfect, a pretty girl like you.” She pushed the sheet from the magazine closer to Susan. “See if I’m not right.”

“But... why do you want to give this to me?”

The bag lady smiled and nodded. She patted Susan on the shoulder, her touch surprisingly light and comforting. “Just think of me as your guardian angel,” she said, and went off, swaying from side to side like a tugboat in a heavy sea.

“Weird,” Susan said to the waitress, who had come immediately to remove the empty tomato juice glass. She wished she could call her Marie, but knew she couldn’t.

“Mm,” said the waitress, and touched the page torn from the magazine. “This hers?”

“No, no,” Susan told her, not sure why. “It’s mine.”

The waitress shrugged and went away. Susan, lifting her coffee cup, studied the rules of the contest.

It didn’t look that hard, really.

Ananayel

Well. I have to be more careful, I see, in choosing who to become when I walk upon the Earth. What a sad sack of guts I was in that café! My feet truly did hurt; in fact, I was aches and itches all over. It was only knowing I’d be out of that carcass soon that made it possible to go on. Their lives may be brief, humans, but they can certainly seem long.

I selected that option because I wanted to appear as the person Susan Carrigan would think of as least threatening; so no man was possible, of course. The traditional golden-haired white-gowned barefoot youth would lack conviction, somehow, in that neighborhood. A child would not have threatened, but equally would not have been persuasive about the contest in the magazine. A young and attractive woman — without all those twinges and pangs — would have been held at a wary distance, as in some way a competitor. So I chose my category from among the types available in Susan Carrigan’s environment, with pains and stings intact.

We angels make the form we want, you know, from the atoms of our own free-flowing selves; we do not, except under the most dire circumstances, commandeer the body of a living creature. Thus, from my own protoplasm, I have been a shepherd keeping watch over my flock by night; I have been a centurion bidding one to go and another to stay; I have been a leaping hart glimpsed briefly through the pines and followed to salvation. Once I was a butterfly, and became so lost in its infinitesimally tiny brain that I nearly forgot my own true self, and almost remained in there, a butterfly for the rest of its short life. (Now, there’s brevity!) Would I have died, then, when the butterfly did? I have no idea, and the question is of some moment to me, now that everything has changed.

Because, you know, He does not come after us. Like spies in novels of intrigue, once we are on the mission we are on our own. And the greatest danger we face — ifs the greatest danger humans face, too, but they don’t realize it — is our own free will.

Here is a paradox that surpasseth all understanding. God is omnipotent, among His qualities. And yet, angels and men have free will, can choose their own destinies, can opt to disobey even His desires. (As Lucifer did, notoriously.) Thus it is that God has always nudged men, has engaged in confidence tricks and little scams, has played at times with a stacked deck, has thrown up illusions and toyed with mirrors, all to get humankind to want to do what God has in mind. And now that what he has in mind to do is end this world, the same methods come into play. I have been sent, therefore, to arrange things, to set the stage, to coach the unwitting actors in their parts.

To end this world. For men to do it themselves, to release that final fire, envelop the globe in such a volume of ravening searching flame as to leave nothing with life in it anywhere on the cinder that remains; not a weed, not a bug, not a drop of water in which impurities could form and flow and start it all again. Nothing left but a lifeless ball, tumbling around and around the sun. And man to do it himself, of his own free will. And a little help from me.

2

The explosion was a small one, confined to one room in the laboratory wing, with very little damage, all in all: two metal tables bent out of shape, a couple of hopelessly charred wooden chairs, some minor flasks and cruets destroyed, three windows to replace, walls and ceiling to repaint, that’s about all. Minor, really, very minor.

But that wasn’t the point, dammit. Carson damn well knew what the point was, because he damn well knew what Philpott was up to in there, and the point was, Philpott might have blown up the whole damn university. Including its president, himself, Hodding Cabell Carson IV, who would not appreciate being snuffed out of existence at the peak of his career by some tenured maniac who, not content to be famously an explorer at the very outermost frontiers of scientific knowledge, actually has to go on and on doing experiments! And blowing things up along the way.

Carson let off steam over lunch in his private dining room with his provost, Wilcox Breckenridge Harrison: “The man could have blown us all up! So far, he’s merely done for some two-hundred-year-old foliage, but is that a portent or not?” And he waved his chilled salad fork at the large windows beside them, through which the older and more stately parts of Grayling University could be seen, heavily overgrown with ivy. A prestigious private university, Grayling, tucked away here in the rolling hills of upstate New York, with a prestigious president and the most prestigious of modern physicists on the faculty, Dr. Marlon Philpott, who was a menace to everything civilization holds dear.

Harrison said, “What is it that blew up, anyway?”

“God knows.” Carson chomped on a lot of iceberg lettuce covered with bottled diet Italian creamy salad dressing. “The worst of it is, if you ask Philpott what in Christ’s holy name he’s doing over there, he’ll tell you, at length, and not one word in ten makes the slightest bit of sense. I take it, though, it was not his famous strange matter that blew, but something more mundane.”

“Strange matter?” Harrison grinned, tentatively. “You’re putting me on.”

“No, by God, I’m not.” Carson wiped his lips on linen, dropped the napkin back on his lap, sipped a bit of the San Gimignano, and said, “It all makes sense, in its way, if only he weren’t so intent on proceeding with it. The fact is, he’s right, we do need new energy sources. The oil’s running out, we have thirty or forty years of it left. The public, given increasing familiarity with nuclear power, has grown less accepting of it, rather than more. Solar power is a joke. So is wind, so is water, so is coal. What’s needed is something brand-new, and our friend and nemesis, Dr. Marlon Philpott, is hot on the trail of one of the possibilities.”

“Strange matter,” suggested Harrison.

“Don’t ask me what it is. I asked him once, and all he did was say quark-quark-quark. You know these scientists.”

“I’m afraid I do.”

“In any event,” Carson said, “that, believe it or not, is the scientific term for this theoretical substance our Dr. White Rabbit is in pursuit of. Strange matter. If he can isolate it, it could apparently provide us with energy beyond our wildest dreams.”

“So the occasional explosion—”

“Don’t say that,” Carson warned. “That’s what he says. I talk to him about this destructive tendency of his, and the man is blithe. God, I hate him! Blithe!”

Harrison dared to laugh. “He isn’t that bad, Chip. And he does bring a certain renown to the university.”

“The university,” Carson said coldly, “had a certain renown before Dr. Marlon Philpott first set fire to his kindergarten desk.”

“Well,” Harrison said, “maybe he’ll be more careful from now on.”

“Not a chance.” Carson seemed to have finished his glass of San Gimignano. He touched its rim with a fingertip and the waiter came forward to do the refill as Carson said, “And, this afternoon, I have yet another appointment with yet another insurance agent, resulting from this little peccadillo of our Dr. Philpott’s. A person named Steinberg.” Carson raised a we’re-in-this-together eyebrow, then raised his glass. “You can imagine how I’m looking forward to that.”

Michael Steinberg was everything Carson had expected — Semitic as a rug merchant — except that he was unexpectedly sympathetic and understanding. “These kinds of industrial accidents,” he said, clucking like a hen over his forms as he sat hunched in the usually comfortable armchair facing Carson’s large empty desk, “you don’t expect in a nice quiet atmosphere of learning like what you got here. Grayling University, to have explosions.”

Exactly. An understanding response at last; but from what a quarter. Though warmed by the man’s comprehension, Carson knew not to wash the university’s dirty linen in public: “Dr. Philpott is a distinguished member of the faculty. His researches may be a little...” he permitted himself a dry chuckle here “...hair-raising at times, it’s true, but they are necessary.”

“But are they necessary here?” asked the insurance man, tapping his pen in irritating fashion against his packet of forms.

That faint feeling of fellowship sputtered in Carson’s breast, and died. “What do you mean? Of course, they’re necessary here. Here is where Dr. Philpott is a tenured full professor.”

“Forgive me, Dr. Carson,” the man said, ducking his head, blinking behind his black-rimmed spectacles. “This is not the company speaking, you understand, this is only a thought I myself had, at this moment, that could perhaps be of use.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“Dr. Philpott is a tenured professor at Grayling University,” Steinberg said, and shrugged. “But does his laboratory have to be physically present at the university? Aren’t there places better suited to such things?”

Carson had no idea what the man was talking about. “Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know, an army camp, something like that.” He gestured with his pen toward the window. “There must be some sort of government facility not far from here. You must have friends in Washington.”

“Several,” Carson agreed stiffly. One did not mention one’s influence aloud, and certainly not to Semitic strangers from insurance companies.

“When Dr. Philpott is being a professor,” Steinberg went on, “he is here, on campus, this beautiful campus. When he is being a researcher, he is somewhere else. Twenty miles? Thirty miles away? Some government installation where they know how to deal with explosions.”

All at once, what the man was saying made sense. Carson actually smiled upon him. “Mr. Steinberg,” he said, “you just may have something there.”

Steinberg shrugged. He ducked his head. He smiled his crooked little smile. He said, “And along the way, it could be, I save the company a few dollars.”

Ananayel

Of course, the basis for anti-Semitism is the fear that Jews are clever without restraint. That is, since they are separate from “us” — “we” already consider them separate, so they are — they need have no compunctions in their dealings with “us,” and they are clever. Their cleverness makes them useful — as lawyers, doctors, accountants, and so on — but their lack of compunction makes them dangerous. What they might do transmogrifies at once into what they surely are doing, too cleverly for “us” to catch them at it. They are clever, and they have no reason to show “us” mercy; how hateful.

Hodding Cabell Carson has no peers. He accepts orders from above, he delivers orders below. Who could slip the suggestion into his mind, the suggestion I needed placed there? No one in his normal circumference.

It had to be an outsider. It also had to be someone he would see as clever. And it would be best if the person were seen to be making the suggestion altruistically on the surface, but actually for his own advantage.

Humans are quite simple, really. And on to Moscow.

3

Grigor awoke. He almost never needed the alarm these days, though he still routinely set it every night before taking the midnight pill. But he woke these mornings five or seven or nine minutes ahead of the alarm, and lay unmoving in the black darkness while his mind roved. For some reason, he did his best thinking in these brief moments in the dark, just before the four A.M. pill; by the time the alarm sounded, more often than not, he had at least one new joke to write on the notepad beside his bed.

Yes? No? It was so hard to tell, really. Comedy now seemed not so much about humor as about defining the limits in a world where the limits shifted daily; a situation which was already comic, or at least absurd. The purpose of a joke these days was not to make people laugh at the comedy of it but at the daring of it, at how close the joke teller has come to the very edge of the permitted, in a time when nobody knows what’s permitted. Everything? Hardly.

The alarm buzzed, a discreet low noise, penetrating within this room but not strong enough to disturb any other resident of the complex. Grigor sat up, switched on his bedside light, put the notepad on his knee to jot down the five-year-plan joke for later study in the cold light of day, then got out of bed and padded into the bathroom for water with which to take the pill. He had a much more lavish life here in Moscow than he’d ever had in Kiev. His own private room, well-furnished. His own bathroom, fully equipped, even to a hardly rusted shower. Such luxury!

Grigor took his pill, used the toilet, then padded back to the bedroom and wrote the cosmonaut line on the notepad. Maybe so, maybe so. It was safer to talk about strikes today than even two or three years ago. Topicality, that was the secret. Dart in when the subject’s safe, use it, be out and gone when the next crackdown comes.

God save Godless Russia. When would that one get its moment? It was one of the first jokes Grigor had ever thought of, and it had scared him so much — still did — that he’d never even written it down. Would he, ever? Would it be said on the television by Boris Boris, ever?

Oh, well. The future holds wonders, no doubt, some few of which will still be seen by Grigor Alexandreyovich Basmyonov, fireman/jokesmith. Consoled by that thought, Grigor got back into bed, knowing that only a moment or two of introspection would pass before he was asleep once more. Amazing how easily he slept. Amazing, he thought, that he slept at all. Using up these precious hours.

The transition from Grigor Basmyonov, fireman, bachelor, twenty-eight years of age, lifelong resident of Kiev, to Grigor Basmyonov, gag writer for the television star Boris Boris and inhabitant of the Bone Disease Research Clinic resident center at the Moscow University Teaching Hospital overlooking Gorky Park, began on April 26, 1986: Chernobyl.

Most of the firemen who were first to reach the Chernobyl nuclear plant that night, the local ones, were already dead. Some became quite sick, but survived, and a very few seemed not to be harmed at all by the experience, except for the temporary loss of their hair. Among the later fire companies to arrive, those who had at least received some warning of the dangers, deaths were fewer but illness more widespread. Why some people died while others lived, why some were terribly ill but others were not, was a primary concern of the doctors at the Bone Disease Research Clinic. Grigor, a survivor thus far but among the doomed, a young and healthy bachelor willing to be experimented on, was the perfect specimen for their purposes.

It was while signing the release papers at the hospital in Kiev that Grigor made his first joke: “Well, at least now I’ll be able to read in bed without turning on the light.”

The doctor and nurse in attendance on him, to help him fill out the forms, were both shocked. The doctor, as young as Grigor with some Asiatic flatness in his face — Uzbek, perhaps — frowned down at the papers and muttered, “Hardly something to make jokes about.”

“For you, no,” Grigor told him. “But for me, yes. I am permitted.” And he suddenly smiled, an honest joyful sunny smile. “I am the only one permitted,” he told them, and felt some great tight-clenched muscle deep inside himself relax, a muscle he’d never known was there until it released its clamp on his guts. The only one permitted.

At first his jokes were concerned exclusively with himself — “The best thing about all this is, I can no longer find my bald spot” — but once he’d settled into the routine at the clinic and started taking an interest in the television news (so much more news than there used to be), his subject matter broadened and the people around him began to respond more comfortably to his jokes.

It was a doctor at the clinic, one who had an old classmate with a girlfriend at Moskva Film, who encouraged Grigor to write down the jokes and comments that came to him with such increasing frequency. The girlfriend at Moskva Film turned out to be the wrong person, but she knew someone who knew someone, and by a frail web of relationships two pages of badly typed Grigor Basmyonov jokes eventually found their way to Boris Boris, who said, “I’ll buy this one, this one, this one, and that one. The rest I spit on. Who does this person think he is?” And so their relationship began.

The first time Grigor and Boris Boris met, when Grigor was made a staff writer rather than a mere contributor, they became friends at once, because it turned out Boris Boris was permitted as well; the only other person permitted. Grigor walked into the sunny office in his neatly pressed suit and gleaming round bald head, and Boris Boris looked at him and said, “If I had a crystal ball like that head, I could see into the future.”

“I can see into the future,” Grigor told him. “I’m not there.”

Boris Boris laughed and clapped his hands together and said they should have a drink, which they did.

Grigor himself was not a television personality, nor would he ever become one. His name was on the program’s credits, that was all. In the first place, the government would never permit such public acknowledgment that this gallows humor rose from its own most egregious attack on the Russian people. And in the second place Boris Boris would never permit it: “Nobody tugs at heartstrings around here but me. I keep that to fall back on in case these miserable jokes of yours fail to do the job.”

But the jokes did their job, most of them, and roubles accumulated in a bank account with Grigor’s name on it, pointless roubles he would never have the time or the inclination to spend nor a person to will them to; as though he were a hungry cat locked in a cabbage field.

The work, however, was its own pleasure, and all in all Grigor’s only objection to his life was its anticipated brevity. He made up jokes, he edited the jokes of others, he drank sometimes with Boris Boris, and he enjoyed watching Boris Boris use the material on television. “You make it all sound much funnier than I do,” he told Boris Boris once, early in their friendship, and Boris Boris replied, “That’s my genius, to make something out of something. Your genius is to make something out of nothing, or I’ll kick you downstairs.”

That was the work. For the rest of it, life was uncomplicated and fairly content. He took his medicine every four hours, not with any anticipation of a cure, but because it would assist the doctors in their researches. He was their field of study, just as the array of news programs and the minute shifts and adjustments in the social order was his field of study. One of his fields of study.

The other was Chernobyl. He knew what had been done to him, but now he wanted to know how it had been possible. As the months and years went by, more and more was generally known about what had happened there, and more and more was publicly acknowledged. Grigor studied the magazine articles and books, watched the television programs, and learned so much about the plant he could almost have run it himself. Except that he wouldn’t have run it; he’d have shut it down.

There were flaws in the design, that was finally admitted. Beyond that, there were flaws in the maintenance of the plant, flaws in the administration, flaws in the ordinary everyday procedures of running the place. Ultimately, Chernobyl had been operated as though nothing could ever possibly go wrong, no matter how sloppy or ignorant its servants became. Nothing could go wrong because nothing ever had gone wrong. And that was another fine joke: a nuclear plant, the most modern sort of enterprise on the planet, run by superstition and magic.

Was there a way to make a joke out of that, Merlin at the helm of the nuclear plant? No. It was old hat, for one thing, stale news, no longer of interest to anybody except a few leftovers like Grigor and their attentive doctors. Boris Boris would reject such a joke out of hand, and he’d be right.

Grigor was just easing back into sleep, comforted by this thought (that the world goes on, the world goes on), when the knocking sounded at the door. Surprised — the patients’ sleep was never disturbed — Grigor sat up and switched on the bedside light, and the time was six minutes past four. They’ve discovered a miracle cure! Couldn’t wait another second to tell me! Smiling at his own manic optimism — like a thirteen-year-old’s cock, it rose at the most inconvenient moments — Grigor got out of bed and padded across the room to see what this really was.

Opening the door, Grigor saw a fellow patient, a man in the striped pajamas and green robe of the clinic, with heavy brown wool socks on his feet and a square pale envelope in his hand. “Grigor,” he said, voice hushed because of the hour, “I won’t come in. I just wanted to give you this.” And he extended the envelope.

Automatically taking it, trying to remember which of his fellow patients this was, Grigor said, “What are you doing up so late, uhhhh?” Trailing off because he was unable to remember the man’s name. The corridor night-lights offered very little illumination, and his own body blocked the faint gleam from his bedside lamp; the man was familiar, of course, but Grigor couldn’t quite make out which particular fellow guinea pig this was. “Very late,” he repeated, hoping for a clue from the man’s voice.

“We must be on the same medicine,” the man answered, in a perfectly ordinary and non-specific voice. “I heard your alarm just after mine, and thought you’d be the perfect person for this invitation. I can’t go, you see.”

“Invitation?” Grigor half turned, to put the envelope in the light, and saw it was nearly square, made of heavy cream-toned paper, and blank. An exterior envelope with stamps and name and address must have been discarded. Inside this envelope was a card of nearly the same size, which made it hard for Grigor to slide it out. When he did, he saw it was indeed an invitation, printed in flowery script, addressed to no one in particular — “You are invited...” — and done in two languages: next to the familiar Cyrillic script, the same sentiments appeared in Roman script, in English.

The invitation was to a soiree (“cocktail party” in the English) tomorrow evening — well, no, this evening — at the Hotel Savoy, one of the two or three first-class hotels in this classless city. (They accepted foreign hard currency only, no roubles.) The group extending the invitation was the International Society for Cultural Preservation.

Grigor frowned at this document. “I don’t understand.”

“They sent it to me,” the man said, with a sad smile, “because of what I used to do.”

Ah. Everyone here at the clinic used to do something, of course, all different kinds of somethings; not all were former firemen. And not all had found a new career, like Grigor’s joke-writing, to take the place of the old. Because so many of the residents found it painful to be reminded that they could no longer do whatever it was that used to occupy their minds and their days, the subject was informally agreed to be taboo. No one would ever ask a fellow resident about his or her former occupation. So Grigor couldn’t pursue that topic, but had to say instead, “Then why don’t you go yourself?”

“I’ve been a little low lately,” the man said.

Another forbidden subject. Every resident of the clinic was doomed to die, and soon rather than late, but not all of them at the same pace or in the same way or to the same final date. Complaining about one’s lot or describing one’s horrible symptoms to other residents would be the height of insensitivity; the person you’re talking to could very easily be in worse shape than you. So euphemisms had developed, and were generally understood, and they served to make conversation more palatable, even more possible. “I’ve been a little low lately,” was universally taken to mean that one’s particular illness had just moved into a further and more debilitating phase, that another step on one’s own staircase down into the dark had just been reached, and that the victim had not yet adapted.

So once again Grigor couldn’t pursue a topic. Frowning at the invitation — the International Society for Cultural Preservation — he said, “Who are these people?”

“They try to raise money,” the man said, “to restore and preserve great works of art. Around the world, you know, the accomplishments of civilization are being destroyed, mostly by man. Acid rain, deliberate destruction by builders, changes in the quality of our sunlight, in many ways human art is being made to disappear. Stone statues melt in this air, motion pictures fade, paintings rot, books crumble, archaeological sites are plundered for trinkets to sell to the nouveau riche—”

Grigor laughed; he couldn’t help himself. “All right, all right, I get the idea. These are do-gooders.”

“They try.” The man shrugged.

Grigor looked again at the invitation. “Raise money,” he echoed. “From me?”

“Oh, no, no. This is a promotional party, that’s all. These people are trying to get our government interested in their work.”

“They’re Americans?”

“English, I think, at first. They have members all over the world now.” Again the man shrugged. “For what good it does.”

Surprised, Grigor said, “You don’t believe they’re doing any good?”

“Oh, some,” the man said. “Some small victories, here and there. But you know it’s said, ‘Rust never sleeps.’” Then, more forcefully, he said, “And why try at all to save anything? It’s coming to an end, anyway, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“Of course! We’re doing our best to destroy ourselves and our history and even our planet! Grigor, look at all of us in here. Why are we here?”

Now it was Grigor’s turn to shrug. He’d gone past that question a long time ago. “Mistakes were made,” he said.

“We’re moving into a world of mistakes,” the man told him, then waved his hand in a dismissing gesture. “Let it all go. It’s spoiled anyway.”

Ah, well; Grigor knew that attitude intimately. Why should the rest of the world go on as though nothing had happened, when I am in here, with this? The ones like Grigor without strong family ties were the most subject to this sort of feeling, but it reached everyone from time to time. There was no answering that attitude, of course, no particular reason why life should go on without Grigor, or any of the other residents; one simply waited for the feeling to go away, and it almost always did. But no one talked about it; that this man expressed it in words showed just how badly he’d been affected by the “low” he’d mentioned.

In any event, the issue was this invitation. Shaking his head, Grigor said “I don’t see what this has to do with me. Why should I go to this thing?”

“Because you’d enjoy it,” the man said. “And you’d get ideas for jokes there, I know you would. And you speak English.”

“Oh, well, not really.” Grigor dismissed that by waving the hand with the invitation in it. “I studied English in school, I can read it, but to talk...”

“Then this is a chance to improve your English,” the man said.

“For what?” Grigor smiled at the thought. “To make up jokes for Americans?”

“For its own sake,” the man said, and gestured at the invitation. “Take it, Grigor. Go or don’t go, it’s up to you. Excuse me, I don’t like to stand this long.”

“Yes, of course,” Grigor said, awkward as they all were when brought face-to-face with each other’s infirmities. Grigor was still much stronger than this man, which was a source of embarrassment. He nodded, and the man shuffled away down the hall, and Grigor shut the door.

Sitting on his bed, putting the invitation on the bedside table, Grigor suddenly yawned, massive and uncontrollable. The clock read four-fourteen, and Grigor was all at once so sleepy that the first time he reached for the button to switch off the light he missed. But then he got it, and in the darkness lay back on his pillow, his mind swirling with thoughts, none of them truly coherent.

Would he go to the do-gooders’ party? Which one of his fellow residents was that guy? And, since the rooms were deliberately soundproofed, how had he heard Grigor’s quiet alarm?

Grigor slept, and when he next awoke, for his eight A.M. pill, he remembered all those questions except the last one.

4

Approaching the broad steps leading up to the entrance to the Savoy Hotel, Grigor was almost painfully aware of how he looked. A thin man in his early thirties, with a gaunt face made even more lean by the loss of a few back teeth (they’d become too loose in their gums to be saved), with dry brown hair that had grown back more spottily than before, and with a measured slowness to his pace caused by the steady draining away of his vigor, he knew his appearance was gloomy and boring, like some sort of country bumpkin. The good suit, the silk tie, the heavy expensive well-shined shoes, all bought with Boris Boris’s money, were like a hasty disguise, as though he were a prisoner on the run. But above all, approaching the refurbished and highly polished Savoy entrance, aware of the cool calculation in the eyes of the doorman up there watching him slowly mount the steps, above all else Grigor knew he looked Russian. And the wrong sort of Russian to be coming to the Savoy Hotel.

The doorman knew it also. Proud inside his overly ornate uniform, like a comic opera admiral, he moved just enough to block Grigor’s path, saying “What can I do for you?”

“You can go back to your fleet,” Grigor told him, reasonably sure the doorman would have no idea what he was talking about, and then, before the process of hurrying him along could begin, he produced the invitation. “You can direct me,” he said smoothly, “to the International Room.”

The doorman didn’t like having to change his evaluation. “You’re late,” he said grumpily.

“It’s still going on,” Grigor said, with assurance. The invitation had specified “five until eight,” and it was now just after seven. It was only at the last possible minute that Grigor had decided he might come to the damn thing after all, reserving the right to change his mind at any step along the way, and it wasn’t until this snobbish doorman had looked down his Slavic nose as though at a peasant or worse that Grigor had finally decided he definitely would attend the soiree (“cocktail party”), that he did indeed belong here.

Was he not, after all, the power behind a television throne? Was he not the author of half the words to come out of Boris Boris’s mouth? Wasn’t he the next best thing to a celebrity; which is to say, a celebrity’s ventriloquist? Be off with you, my man, Grigor thought, I have Romanov blood in my veins. (Hardly.)

Conviction is all. The doorman saw the cold look in Grigor’s deep-set eyes, the firmness of his fleshless jaw, the set of his narrow shoulders, and recognized the prince within the pauper. Returning the invitation, gesturing with a (small) flourish, “Straight through the lobby,” he said, “and second on the right.”

“Thank you.” And Grigor was amused to notice the doorman’s heels come together — silently, it’s true, but nevertheless — as he passed the man and went on into the plush-and-marble lobby.

Sound billowed from the International Room like pungent steam from a country inn’s kitchen. Cocktail party chitchat is the same the world over, bright and encompassing, creating its own environment, separating the world into participants and non-invitees. Cheered suddenly at the idea of being among the blessed this time around, Grigor moved forward into that cloud of noise, which for him was not rejecting but welcoming, and was barely aware of the person at the door who took his invitation and ushered him through the wide archway into a large, high-ceilinged room that had been deliberately restored to remind people as much as possible of the pomp and privilege of the tsars. Gold and white were everywhere, with pouter pigeons of color in the Empire chairs discreetly placed against the walls. Two chandeliers signaled to one another across the room, above the heads of the partygoers in their drab mufti; not a red uniform in the place. It was as though, Grigor thought, the nobles had permitted the villagers one annual event of their own in the chateau’s grand ballroom.

Was there a joke in that? Well, there was, of course, but was it usable? Now that the proletariat had been shown to have made a mess of things, there was a great embarrassed ambivalence about the aristocratic baby that had been thrown out with 1917’s bathwater. Both Grigor and Boris Boris had been trying for months to fit references to the tsars and their families and their world into the stand-up routines, but everything they’d come up with was too flat, too wishy-washy.

The trouble was, they had no clear attitude to express. Surely no one wanted to go back to rule by a class of people who sincerely believed that peasants and cattle were at parity, and yet... And yet, there was something about the style. Not the substance, the style.

That isn’t funny. That’s merely true.

Looking around for the bar — he was permitted to drink, but not to excess, not yet, that would come later — his eye passed over a pretty girl in the middle of the crowded room, talking in an animated fashion with a tall, burly, thick-faced man who could be nothing but some sort of policeman, perhaps even KGB. The girl was tall and slender, with darkish blond hair and bright eyes and a beautiful nose and great self-assurance. Her clothing seemed to have been made specifically and precisely for her. An American, Grigor thought, and moved toward the vodka.

The Russian with whom Susan Carrigan was speaking was highly amused that she was here in Moscow because she’d won a contest in a magazine. His name was Mikhail, and he was a teacher of economics at Moscow University, a tall, thin, urbane man with a narrow and pleasantly craggy face and a burry baritone voice with which he spoke perfect English, faintly Oxford-accented. “The idea of value in a capitalist society,” he said, “is something my generation will perhaps never understand. A company ferments potatoes into vodka. In order to sell that vodka, they choose at random one citizen — you, as it happens — to send on an expense-paid trip to Moscow. You yourself, with the best will in the world, not to mention the strongest liver, would never be able to drink enough vodka to repay the distiller’s expenses in this venture, and in fact,” he said, laughing, pointing at the glass in her hand, “you don’t even drink vodka. You drink white wine.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “I know it seems silly, but—”

“Not at all, not at all.” Mikhail’s amusement with her was so unfeigned and so friendly that she couldn’t possibly object. “It’s very refreshing to be in the company of a white-wine drinker,” he assured her. “Besides which, you will undoubtedly be the last person on your feet in this room. But to return to the question. The distiller can’t get his money back from you. Is he assuming that other citizens, viewing his generosity toward you, will be encouraged to feel warmly toward him and buy his product in sufficient quantities — in sufficient extra quantities, beyond what they would already buy — to make up his expenses?”

“I have no idea,” Susan admitted. “Whatever they think they’re getting, I’m having a wonderful time. Russia is so beautiful.”

“You think so?” he said, smiling at her enthusiasm.

“The museums,” she said. “The paintings, the icons. And the river is beautiful, you know. I hope the Semionov company does get their money back, twice.”

“Oh, they already have,” said an American-accented voice to her left. She and Mikhail both turned, and a middle-aged fortyish bearded man was standing there in rumpled sports jacket and white shirt and maroon bow tie, smiling his apology at having horned in on their conversation. “Forgive me,” he said, “but I overheard you, and I knew you were — it’s Susan Carrigan, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“Jack Fielding,” he announced himself. “I’m with the embassy here. We processed some of the paperwork on you. Now, the way I think it works — I’m not an economist, I—” Turning to Mikhail, he said, “I take it you are.”

“Yes, I am.” Mikhail introduced himself again, with the impossibly long last name, and the two men shook hands. Then Mikhail said, “You understand the value process of this gift to Miss Carrigan?”

“I think so,” Jack Fielding said. “The principal idea is advertising and publicity. If you offer a prize that a lot of people want, then people will be thinking about your brand name, so when they visit their neighborhood liquor shop they’re more likely to buy your product. So if the plan worked, the company saw a rise in sales while the contest was on, meaning they already made their money out of it before they had to spend any on Miss Carrigan.”

“But,” Mikhail asked, “if the plan doesn’t work? If they don’t see the rise in sales?”

Jack Fielding grinned and shrugged. “Then they have to grit their teeth and pay up anyway, and Miss Carrigan still gets her trip to Moscow.”

“Good,” said Susan.

“Which is one reason,” Jack Fielding went on, “why I’m a free marketeer. It’s so much harder for a private company to renege on a deal than it is for a government.”

“Ah, well,” Mikhail said, looking alarmed, “if we are going to talk free markets, I will need another drink. Susan? Your glass is empty.”

“Thank you,” she said, handing it over.

Mikhail raised an eyebrow at Jack Fielding. “And you, Mr. Fielding?”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“I’ll be right back, then,” Mikhail promised, and turned away toward the bar.

Jack Fielding looked around the room, smiling faintly, saying, “This is a true grab bag here.”

“I have no idea why I was asked,” Susan admitted, “unless it’s simply because I’m staying in this hotel.”

“I think the preservation people did want to get as many English speakers here as possible,” Fielding told her, “which is why I was sent. It’s all to give the Russkies an inflated idea of the organization’s importance in the West. But the guest list at any promotional cocktail party you can name is a lot harder to figure out than the idea behind the contest that brought you here and that’s got your Russian friend so bewildered.”

My Russian friend, Susan thought. But not really, worse luck. Early in their conversation, Mikhail had mentioned that he was married — “Unfortunately, my wife could not be with me this evening” — but still she had enjoyed his company. She was here, after all, to experience Russia, not to wind up chatting with Jack Fielding, a man exactly like half a dozen guys at any cocktail party in Manhattan.

Would Mikhail come back? Had Fielding chased him away? Through a break in the crush of people, Susan could see him across the room, over at the bar, talking with another Russian man.

Grigor had just reached the head of the bar line and received his vodka when a heavily accented voice said in English, “Do you speak English?”

Grigor turned, surprised, and it was the heavy-faced burly policeman or KGB man he’d noticed talking to the American girl. In Russian, he answered, “I can understand it a little. I don’t really speak it.”

“Try,” ordered the man. Again in that thick-tongued English, he said, “Answer my first question, but in English.”

Slowly, spacing the words as he hunted for the English equivalents, Grigor said, “I understand some English. I read English more... better than I speak.”

“Good,” said the man, still in that barbaric English. (Grigor knew he himself was at any rate not that bad, at least not in pronunciation.) “You may call me Mikhail. You will come with me.”

“But... who are you?”

“KGB, of course,” said the man, who might or might not be really named Mikhail. He tossed the fact off carelessly, with a shrug, then said, “Which you will tell no one.”

“Of course.”

“Now you will come with me. There are two Americans talking. I must speak with the man by himself. You will speak with the woman, so that I can take the man away.”

“But... why me?”

“Because I have requisitioned you,” the KGB man said, his thick lips working like rubber around the long strange English word. “Now come along.” Then, an obvious afterthought, as they pressed through the crowd, the KGB man holding a drink in each hand, he looked over his shoulder and said, “What is your name?”

“Grigor Basmyonov.”

“And how do you earn your living, Grigor Basmyonov?”

“I write for the television.” Finding the English words, placing them, took all Grigor’s concentration.

“Good.”

The two Americans were chattering together at a great clip, the words tumbling together, fuzzing at their edges, completely incomprehensible. Grigor thought, I can’t understand a word! Not when they talk that fast. Is this what I left the clinic for? To be harassed by a KGB man and humiliated by Americans?

Mikhail the urbane economist said, “I have brought along a compatriot who would love the chance to improve his English,” while Mikhail the burly KGB man said, “Dis is a Russian man who speaks English as good as me. Maybe better.”

“I have just a little English,” Grigor said, smiling at the Americans, feeling suddenly shy and awkward, beginning to regret having come here at all. What did he know about foreigners, and how to act with them? Except for a few Western doctors in the first year after Chernobyl, with all of whom he’d spoken only through a translator, he had never met any foreigners in his life. I am a simple fireman from Kiev, he thought. This second life is a mistake.

“This is Miss Susan Carrigan, from New York City,” both Mikhails said, except that the KGB man left out “Miss.” “She won Moscow in a contest.” Mikhail the economist smiled with amusement, while Mikhail the KGB man smiled as though angry, obscurely insulted.

“A visit to Moscow,” Susan corrected, smiling at this new Russian man, holding her hand out to shake. His hand, when he took hers, was surprisingly thin and bony, and the grip tentative. He looked as though he might be suffering from flu or something, as though it might have been a mistake for him to get out of his sickbed to come to the party.

“Grigor Basmyonov,” both Mikhails finished the introduction. “Grigor works for our Moscow television.”

“Oh, really?” Susan released Grigor’s frail hand, and accepted her fresh glass of wine from Mikhail. “What do you do there?”

“I write jokes for a comedian,” Grigor told her, the words coming slowly, one at a time. Shaking his head, he said, “Not a comedian you have heard of.”

“I might have,” Jack Fielding said, and stuck his hand out, saying, “Jack Fielding. I’m with the embassy here, we watch TV a lot, believe me. Who’s your comedian?”

Shaking Fielding’s hand, Grigor said, “Boris Boris,” and was pleased at the grunt of unhappy surprise from Mikhail the KGB man. (Mikhail the economist gave a chuckle of remembered pleasure.)

Fielding was impressed: “No kidding! He’s an outrageous man, your guy.”

“Yes, he is,” Grigor agreed, relaxing, basking in Boris Boris’s glory.

“Just a few years ago, say what he says now,” Fielding added, shaking his head, “and he’d go straight to Siberia.”

“Well, at least he’d have me with him,” Grigor assured the American. “If Boris Boris catches cold, I sneeze.” And then he was astonished at how easily English was coming to him, once he had himself started. So it might be possible after all.

“I tried looking at television here,” Susan said, “but it was so frustrating. It looks like TV at home, the news shows and the exercise shows and the game shows, but of course, I don’t understand a word anybody says. And when they put some kind of notice on, I don’t even know the letters!” And she laughed at her own helplessness.

“I have seen your American television, of course,” Grigor told her. He liked the way she looked, and the ease of her self-assurance; she made him want to keep the conversation going, no matter how difficult. “We receive the satellite transmissions at the station. Sometimes I watch the CNN news. Do you know the program?”

“Oh, sure,” Susan said, “Cable news. It must look very different from your point of view”

“Such positivism,” Grigor told her, smiling, hoping that was a word in English. “The announcers are so certain about everything. We haven’t had anyone that certain about everything since Stalin died.”

Susan laughed, surprised to be laughing, and said, “Is that one of your jokes for whatsisname?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, and as she gave him a rough definition of “whatsisname,” economist Mikhail gently turned Jack Fielding away, saying, “Now, about this free market of yours. Surely, with Japan breathing down your necks, you don’t advocate a return to full laissez-faire.” (Simultaneously, the other Mikhail said toward Fielding, “I got to talk wid you about dis embassy of yours. We still got some problems to work out.”)

“Well, you know, we all have to adapt to changing reality,” said Fielding, obediently moving off in Mikhail’s wake, leaving Susan and Grigor alone, Grigor now trying to explain why the stage name Boris Boris was itself comic to a Russian audience, an explanation that turned out not to be at all easy, nor entirely satisfactory for either of them. Still, the conversation was under way, and Susan next described how she happened to be in Moscow as the result of winning an American vodka company’s contest, an explanation that also proved to be rather difficult, and less than satisfactory.

They’d been talking for quite a while, mostly about the sights of Moscow and the nearby countryside, when Grigor became aware that the crowd had thinned somewhat, and, startled, looked at his watch. Almost ten minutes past eight. “Oh, no,” he said, “I am late for my pill. Would you, please, hold my drink? Thank you.”

She stood holding both near-empty glasses as he took a small cardboard matchbox from his suitcoat pocket and removed from it a large green capsule. Smiling, shrugging his shoulders, he said, “I have never taken this with vodka before. Perhaps it will work better.” And he took back his glass and drained it, with the pill.

“Do you have the flu?” Susan asked. Then, because his English seemed so spotty, with sudden surprising lapses, she amplified, saying, “Some kind of cold or something?”

“No, nothing like that,” he told her. “I am not at all contagious.” Looking over at the bar, he said, “Have they stopped serving drinks?”

“I’m afraid so.” Then Susan took the plunge: “I’m supposed to have dinner in the hotel with a group of people, American tourists and a couple of Intourist guides and a Russian man from some sort of trade commission. Why not come with us? I’m sure it would be all right.”

Grigor thought: An adventure! Perhaps my last. “I accept with happiness,” he said.

It was over dessert, and the dessert wine, that Grigor finally told Susan the truth about his medical condition, and its causes.

“Chernobyl?”

“Yes.”

He was by then so full of vodka and wine and good food and good feelings that he wasn’t even self-conscious, not about his slippery English and not about his illness and not about his being a country bumpkin from Kiev and not about anything. He just told her, to tell someone.

All around them, up and down the long table, other desultory conversations continued, but Grigor ignored them all, because it felt so good at last to tell someone, just say the words to someone, someone away from the clinic. Yes, and to have it be someone who would then take the knowledge and go halfway around the world with it, totally away and gone, permitting Grigor to go quietly and peaceably back to his normal round. His normal spiral.

Susan was shocked. “Cancer? Radiation disease? Well, what is it? And there’s no hope at all? Grigor, listen! I have this cousin, I don’t know, third cousin, fourth cousin, I hardly ever see him, once or twice a year, well, that isn’t the point” — because she’d been drinking, too, and the hour was late — “the point is, he’s a doctor, he’s in research, he’s very important in AIDS research at NYU, I’m going to call him—”

“Too fast,” Grigor mumbled, eyes blurry, hand waving ineffectually, trying to slow down the flood of words. “Too fast, too fast. Do not understand,” he said.

“My cousin,” she said, slowly and clearly, “might know something, might be able to help. I will phone him. Could you go to New York, if it might help? Do you have enough money? Could you borrow it? Would they let you go away?”

He laughed, self-mockingly. “Oh, I have money,” he said. “And the doctors would let me go, if a good thing could come of it. But there is no good thing, Susan. Not for me. The switch is down. It is already down.”

“Well, you don’t have to give up,” she told him, reminding him of the positive news announcers on CNN, “you certainly shouldn’t give up. I’ll call my cousin. Before he was on this AIDS research he was—” She broke off, frowned, leaned closer over the table toward him, gazing into his eyes as she said, “Grigor, do they have AIDS in Russia?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, nodding solemnly. “A very great problem, you know, in the hospitals.”

“Hospitals?”

“The needles. We do not have enough needles in Soviet,” he explained. “So they get used, what do you say, many times.”

“Over and over.”

“Yes, over and over. Many mothers and babies are... oh... infected. Over and over.” His eyes looked more deep-set and stricken than ever. “Many deaths,” he said. “Death all around us. Oh, Susan. Everything is dying, you know, Susan. Everything is dying.”

Ananayel

Vodka is no longer made anywhere from potatoes, I know that. I know whatever I need to know to complete His plan. But would Mikhail know it? Very well, but would Mikhail think that Susan knew it? Well, it doesn’t matter.

What matters is to recruit the actors — as in doers, those who will perform the necessary actions — and bring them together. And to do so with a certain degree of haste, which is why I had to hurry the Grigor-Susan meeting, appearing to each of them as the person appropriate to that moment for her, someone to be comfortable with, and for him, someone to believe. I would have brought them together in a way much more elegant, more subtle, if it weren’t that this task must be completed as rapidly as possible.

Rapidly. Why rapidly? I wondered that myself. When first I was shown His plan, when I had absorbed it, I expressed surprise at such hast. After all, when He had created this work, He’d spent millions of Earth years to do it, step by careful step, until every element was perfect. And when, during His most recent irritation with this corner of His universe, He had chosen to save the world rather than destroy it, He had taken, from conception to crucifixion, thirty-four of their years. So why such hurry now?

The reason, I was given to understand, was that He hadn’t been bored the other two times.

5

Kwan borrowed a bicycle from Tan Sun for his trip across the city to the neighborhood of the big hotels. She wheeled it out from the cool shady storage area under the house and handed it over to him, along with the chain to lock it up while he was with the reporter. Her expression was fretful and worried. “Be sure to look for police,” she said, “before you go into the hotel. You know what their unmarked cars look like.”

Kwan laughed, because he’d been through much worse than this, an interview with a reporter. “Everyone knows what their cars look like,” he said. “Clean, for one thing, and with no toys hanging from the inside mirror. And everyone knows what they look like, too. They all go to the same tailor, and he gives them the material the British won’t buy, the shiny grays and light blues. And then he cuts their jackets a little too short in the back.”

“Don’t act as though it’s a holiday,” she snapped, getting angry with him because she had no way to release her tension.

Why did girls always have to become so possessive? Kwan had been hiding with the Tan family for almost two months now, more than enough time to fall in love with their beautiful daughter, explore with her the petals of romance, and grow bored. He couldn’t simply tell her the affair was over, lest her family kick him out on the unfriendly streets, but why couldn’t she see it for herself? Did she want to conceal him under her skirt forever?

Oh, well. Knowing her concern for his safety was real — and the dangers were real — he sobered and said, “It isn’t a holiday. There aren’t any holidays any more. It is an interview with a reporter for a very important American news magazine.” He smiled, to reassure her. “Don’t worry, I’ll bring back the bicycle.”

“The bicycle!” she cried, outraged, and stormed into the house. Which was just as well.

The first time Li Kwan had seen Hong Kong, from the forbidden city of Shenzhen on the Chinese mainland, it had seemed to him like a city in a fairy tale, risen out of the sea just long enough to tease him with its possibility. That had been the occasion of his first failed effort to get out of China and across that narrow strait to the free world, as exemplified by Hong Kong. Traveling south away from Beijing through the vastness of his homeland, a fugitive from the ancient murderers’ injustice, he had been helped along the way by friends of friends, by parents of schoolmates, by people with whom he was barely linked, and of course, by women (women had always been very helpful to Li Kwan), and along the way, he had learned that the iron grip of the ancient murderers grew increasingly slack the farther one traveled from the center of their web.

In the farthest south, in Guangdong Province, and particularly in the coastal city of Shenzhen, central government authority counted for very little at all. Here, most power centered on the rich traders and the Triads, the criminal gangs whose strength came from gambling and smuggling and prostitution and a variety of protection rackets.

Shenzhen, established as a special economic zone in the late seventies in imitation of Hong Kong, before the ancient murderers learned they would be getting the original back, had become almost a parody, a distorting mirror image of that bubbling cauldron of capitalism. A wide-open city in the sense that everything was for sale there, from Western clothing to forged identity papers, it was a closed and forbidden city in the sense that no Chinese national was permitted inside the perimeter without a special certificate from the central government. Hong Kong businessmen in search of cheap labor had moved many of their small factories and assembly plants across the border, and by the early nineties two million mainland Chinese worked for Hong Kong employers in the city of Shenzhen.

It had seemed to Kwan that in such a boiling cauldron of greed and political ambiguity and fevered ambition it should be easy to slip through Shenzhen and into Hong Kong, but in fact at that cliff-edge of China’s influence the guards were everywhere. Kwan’s forged special certificate, allowing him into Shenzhen, was a poor imitation not meant for close study. Chinese police and soldiers were everywhere along the razor margin between the two realities. Kwan was hailed, challenged; he ducked away, lost pursuit in the crowd of shoppers in the free-port streets, blended into a shuffling throng of homebound factory workers, and made his way out of the forbidden city, frustrated, frightened, not knowing what to do.

The family he was staying with, twenty miles northeast along the coast from Shenzhen, were distant relatives of a student who had died in the square. Kwan had not known that student, but it didn’t matter. Nevertheless, after his first failed escape those people became increasingly nervous, particularly since the man of the house, named Djang, was a local official in the China Bank with much to lose. The face of the infamous counterrevolutionary, Li Kwan, was very well known, after all, despite the bullhorn he’d been holding to his mouth when that news photo was taken. So Djang it was who worked out Kwan’s next escape route, and drove him to the rendezvous in his private car, a perk of his job at the bank.

This time, Kwan saw Hong Kong at night, across a mile of black water, the city a frozen firework never quite sinking into the sea. “The boat will be down there,” Djang said, braking to a stop along the narrow dark road, they the only traffic, the rocky weedy brush-dotted slope leading down on the right side of the car to the water’s edge.

They both got out onto the packed-stone road, looking around in the darkness of the night, afraid of patrols: by land, by sea, by air. They scrambled together down the steep slope, holding to the tough shrubbery for balance, then made their way crabwise along the water’s edge.

The boat was there, as promised, old and battered but watertight, with the oars hidden under brush nearby Kwan and Djang shook hands formally, bowed, and separated, Djang to return to the relative safety of his normal life, Kwan to begin the final leg of his trip, across the water to Hong Kong.

Steadily he rowed through the dark, and every time he looked over his shoulder, the city was still there, a million white lights painted on the black velvet of the ocean’s night. And every time he pulled on the oars, facing the stern of the boat, the deeper and more dangerous darkness of China was also still there.

Kwan’s enemy then had been the army, and the old guard, and two thousand years of unquestioning obedience. His enemy now traveled under the name “normalization,” and that was why Kwan had to come out of hiding, had to cross the city in the full hot light of day to meet with the reporter from America. Normalization meant that Japanese aid to China was in place as before, that American businessmen had gone back to China to “protect their investments,” that politicians all over the world were prepared once again to raise delicate small bowls of rice wine to toast the ancient murderers. Normalization meant that a little time had gone by, a year or two, and it was enough for memories to bleach away Normalization meant that it was possible after just this little time to forget a tank driving ponderously over a dozen unarmed human beings. And finally, normalization meant that last year’s hero of Tiananmen Square was this year’s fugitive, hiding from the Hong Kong police.

Kwan locked the bicycle to a lamp standard a block from the hotel, and as he walked he checked his appearance in the tourist shop windows along the way. Small and slender, looking younger than his twenty-six years, with prominent round cheekbones that he’d always thought detracted from his looks (and which made him distinctive, a little too distinctive, even among a billion), he was dressed neatly in pale shirt and chinos, and still walked with an optimistic bounce, forward-moving, like waves on a shore.

There was no obvious police presence around the hotel; good. The fact is, Hong Kong was a decent city full of decent people, with a government as decent as most; but Hong Kong had to bear in mind 1997, just around the corner. In 1997, the British lease would end, and Hong Kong would revert to the authority and control of the mainland Chinese government. The quickly receding events in Tiananmen Square were to be deplored, but for the politicians reality had to be faced. (Some reality, of course, had to be faced rather more squarely than other reality: 1997, for instance, was relatively easy to face. The image of the tanks on top of the bodies of the people was a bit more difficult to face. Once again, the tough-minded and the pragmatic had found it possible to be just a little lenient with themselves.)

The “counterrevolutionaries” of that Beijing spring had dispersed after the crackdown by the ancient murderers; those who had not been captured and executed, that is. Some had come together in France, and still issued their press releases to an increasingly indifferent world. Three or four groups had settled in different parts of the United States, to bicker among themselves and continue their educations in American universities and eventually, no doubt, become employees of major hospitals and insurance corporations. Those who had stayed in China emerged only rarely from their hiding places to post declarations on walls that hardly anyone ever saw. Li Kwan was among the few who had chosen to stay in Hong Kong, to that city’s increasing discomfort, where they had been until recently relatively safe and yet still close to China, where their presence could still be a significant reminder, much more so than anywhere else on Earth.

But now normalization had come also to Hong Kong. And now Li Kwan, illegally in the city, would if captured be returned to the ancient murderers of Beijing. But, of course, Hong Kong was a civilized and democratic city. It would certainly not deport Li Kwan without absolute assurances from the Chinese government that Li Kwan would receive a fair and open trial; assurances already given.

And, too, there’s 1997.

The entire hotel was air-conditioned, everywhere from the huge ornate dark gold lobby to the tiniest shop. Kwan paused briefly inside the revolving doors, body adapting to the chill as he looked warily left and right, and still everything seemed safe. He walked forward, slowly, and waited to be recognized. (“I’ll know you from your picture,” the reporter had said on the telephone, when the intermediaries set up the call, and he hadn’t had to explain which picture he meant.)

Midway across the lobby, a large shambling man heaved himself out of one of the low armchairs and moved toward Kwan. He looked to be about fifty, in an open-collared shirt and brown suede jacket and rumpled chinos. Three leather camera cases dangled from him. For some reason, Americans, when far from home, always look as though they’ve recently fallen from a motorcycle: clothing a bit disarrayed, manner a bit harried and nervous, but somehow optimistic and relieved because no real damage had been done. The reporter was like that. He had a pepper-and-salt beard, thinning curly hair, dark-rimmed spectacles, amiable smile. “Mr. Li?”

“Yes.”

“Sam Mortimer.” He put out his hand, gave Kwan’s a firm and honest shake. “Too early for a drink!’”

“Oh, yes,” Kwan said, smiling at the idea. It was probably several years too early for a drink; Kwan saw nothing to be gained from alcohol at this stage in his life.

“Tea, then,” Mortimer said, gesturing toward the hotel’s interior café. “We can sit and be comfortable.”

The café was irregularly shaped, its predominant color that of flamingos. Along one curving wall, windows looked out at a rock garden and, beyond it, the swimming pool, in which one man windmilled doggedly back and forth, back and forth, while a dozen swimsuited people lay on chaise longues in the sun. Kwan and Mortimer took a table for two next to one of these windows, and Mortimer opened one of his camera cases, which contained a cassette recorder, a notepad, and several pencils. “Mind if I record this?”

“Not at all.”

It wasn’t Kwan’s first interview, not by a long shot, and he had only the one subject of interest, so both the questions and the answers were already determined, were already in fact several times in print. But that was all right; the essence of news, as the news gatherers see it, is the recording of simple objective reality. This conversation is actually taking place, here and now, verifiably, and is therefore much more newsworthy than any other previous conversation, no matter how identical.

They went over the usual ground in the usual order, Mortimer checking off questions already written into his notepad, occasionally making an additional note, or underlining some part of the question. The background of Li Kwan: Father a teacher, mother a doctor, himself a quick student, already a university graduate, continuing his studies in history and English, planning to enter the diplomatic corps. The arrival in China of the American president, Bush, leaving a confused sense of opportunity lost. Then, soon after, the arrival of the Soviet premier, Gorbachev, and the sense that opportunity must be taken now. The demonstrations in favor of Gorbachev leading somehow naturally to the demonstrations against corruption and privilege among the Chinese ruling elite, leading to the hunger strike, leading to the upsurge of popular support.

“Looking back now,” Kwan said, smiling faintly at his former naivete, “What we did reminds me of the American protestors of the nineteen sixties, who formed a circle around the Pentagon, joined hands, and attempted to levitate the building with their minds. They thought they would actually do it, you know, they expected to see the building rise up from the ground. We thought we would actually do it, too, and our conviction held the army back for more than a week.”

Mortimer said, “Do you know a lot about the United States? Not history, I mean, but things like levitating the Pentagon.”

“That is history.”

Mortimer smiled, indulging him. “Those people were silly,” he said. “You don’t mean to say that the students in Tiananmen Square were silly.”

“Of course, I do,” Kwan insisted. “Anyone who follows his aspirations beyond common sense, beyond the bounds of reality, is silly. But we have to be silly, some of us have to be silly, if the human race is to get anywhere.”

Mortimer was troubled by that. It showed in his friendly face, but he didn’t pursue it. Instead, he went on to the next question in his notebook. And the next. And the next. Through the past, and into the future: “What do you think will happen in China now?”

“Change,” Kwan said. “Some for the good, some for the bad. But always slow The habit of the people, for centuries, is to obey.”

“If the Hong Kong authorities get hold of you, they’ll send you back. There’ll be a trial, a public trial. You’ll get to speak. Would that be good for your cause, or bad?”

A strange question. Kwan said, “It would be bad, of course, because then I would not be able to have any more interviews like this. There are not many voices right now We can’t afford to lose any of them.”

“How about a public statement at your trial? Wouldn’t that have an impact?”

“The trial would last one day,” Kwan told him. “I would get to say very little. The second day, I would be taken outside and told to kneel. A pistol would be put to the back of my head, and I would be killed. The third day, the government would send my family a bill for the bullet.”

Mortimer’s eyes widened at that. “A bill? You’re kidding me.”

“No, I’m not.”

“But why? For God’s sakes...”

“That’s the family’s punishment,” Kwan explained, “for having brought up a child without the proper discipline.”

“The family has to pay for the bullet that kills you,” Mortimer said, musing, thoughtful. “Is that the usual procedure in China?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know about that.” The reporter fell into silence, brooding, seeming to lose interest in his next question.

Kwan took the time to glance over at the pool, which was now empty, and then the other way, at the interior of the café. A westerner sat alone at the next table, drinking coffee and reading the Hong Kong Times. He looked up, his eyes meeting Kwan’s for just a second, and then he went back to his paper, but in that second Kwan suddenly felt afraid.

Of the man? No. He wasn’t from the Hong Kong police. He was a European or American, heavy-set, about forty, with yellow hair like a Scandinavian. He wore a short-sleeved shirt, pale blue, and a dark red necktie, but no jacket. He had a large gold ring with a red stone on the little finger of his right hand.

Click.

Kwan looked at the table, and Mortimer’s cassette player had stopped. “You’ve run out of tape.”

Mortimer looked up, embarrassed, as though he’d been asleep. “Time went by fast,” he said, laughing awkwardly, and spent the next moment fumbling with the machine, turning the tape over, starting it again. “Where were we?”

“My family would pay for the bullet.”

“Oh, yes.” That fact still made Mortimer uncomfortable. “And you’re sure you wouldn’t have an opportunity to make any sort of meaningful state—”

“Mr. Mortimer?”

It was the waiter, standing beside their table, bowing in Mortimer’s direction. The reporter looked up, reluctant and irritable. “Yes?”

“Telephone, sir. You can take it at the cashier’s desk.”

Mortimer was torn, indecisive. He rubbed the knuckles of his right hand against his bearded cheek. “I don’t know,” he said, glancing at Kwan, at the cassette player, then back at the waiter. He made an aggravated mouth, as though angry at the interruption, or angry at himself, or just angry. “Yes, of course,” he said. “Here I come.” With a bright meaningless smile at Kwan, he said, “Sorry about this. Be right back.”

“Yes, fine.”

Mortimer followed the waiter away toward the door. Kwan saw that he’d left the cassette player on, and was about to reach out and turn it off when the westerner from the next table stood up, came smoothly and swiftly across, and said in a low voice, “Mortimer betrayed you, that was the price of the interview. There’s no phone call. Get up and follow me.”

Kwan immediately recognized the truth. Mortimer’s strangeness at the end, his wanting to believe that Kwan could turn capture and trial to his own advantage, his reluctance when the “phone call” came. The end of the tape had been the signal; that was all the interview Mortimer would be allowed. Another realist; Mortimer had believed that Kwan’s betrayal was a fair trade for getting Kwan’s story into a magazine read by millions of people all around the world.

Kwan rose. The stranger was already walking away, striding away, around the curved glass wall toward the rear of the café. Kwan followed him, to a door that said, in three languages: EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY — ALARM WILL SOUND. The Stranger pushed open the door. No alarm sounded. He went down four metal steps, Kwan hurrying after, permitting the door to close itself behind him, and then they crossed a corner of the rock garden to a stone path and headed for the pool.

Looking to his right, Kwan saw through the windows three chunky men in pale gray tight suits and dark neckties standing indecisively at his former table. One of them looked up and saw Kwan, and pointed, becoming excited. Kwan turned his eyes front, watching the broad pale blue back of the tall westerner in front of him. Who was he? The accent had seemed not quite American, but not at all British, nor Australian. Canadian? Was English his second language? How had he known about Mortimer, and about Li Kwan? Where were they going?

Around the pool, past the sunbathers and a slightly rancid smell of coconut oil. Then, beyond the attendant’s cabana, full of towels, they came to a pale green wooden fence, eight feet high, containing an unmarked and scarcely noticeable door. The stranger opened this, and they both stepped through to an alleyway. Garbage cans were stacked below a loading dock to the right. The street was to the left. As he closed the door, Kwan looked back and saw the three policemen running this way, around the pool. “They’re chasing us,” he said.

“That door’s locked.”

It is? Kwan looked at the door, but had no time to think any more about it, because the stranger was moving quickly now toward the street; not quite running, but striding with very long legs. Kwan had to trot to keep up with him, like a child.

Illegally parked at the curb just to the right of the alley was a white Toyota; like a million others in Hong Kong. The stranger pointed to the passenger door: “Get in.”

The door was unlocked. Kwan got in, and the interior was stiflingly hot. He rolled down his window as the stranger got behind the wheel. The key was already in the ignition. The stranger started the motor and pulled away into traffic, and then at last Kwan could say, “How did you know?”

The stranger smiled. He drove patiently but professionally through the jammed streets. “You are not part of a conspiracy,” he said. “Your government says you are, but you are not.”

“Of course, I’m not.”

“Neither am I,” the stranger said. “But if I tell you who I am, and how I found out what was going to happen to you, and why I decided to help if I could, then we would both be parts of a plan. And that’s a conspiracy.”

“That’s specious. What con—?”

The stranger laughed. “Of course, it’s specious,” he said. “But you wanted an answer, so that’s the answer I gave you.”

“The only answer I’m going to get, you mean.”

“Well, here’s another one, then,” the stranger said. “Next time, you might not be so lucky. You might get caught. And if you get caught, they’ll be sure to say, ‘Who helped you escape last time?’ It would be better for me if you didn’t have an answer.”

“Well, all right,” Kwan said. “That isn’t specious. It’s merely convenient.”

Again the stranger laughed. “What gratitude!”

Kwan felt himself blush. “I beg your pardon! I was so confused, it was so fast— Of course, I’m grateful! You saved my life!”

“Use it well,” the stranger said.

They took the ferry over to the island of Lamma, its small houses gleaming in the sun. Along the way, they got out of the Toyota to stand at the rail and breathe the cool sea air and look at the world sparkling all around them.

“You’ll have to leave Hong Kong,” the stranger said. “Your reasons for staying here are no good any more.”

“I don’t know where to go,” Kwan said. He seemed to have given over all control, all capacity for planning, to this man who had saved his life. “I don’t know how.”

“By ship, I think.” The stranger gestured out over the water; a big passenger liner like an oval wedding cake, with an American flag for decoration at the stern, was just pulling out of Hong Kong Harbor. “Those ships have many Orientals in their crews. Especially in the kitchens.” He smiled at Kwan. “You’d make a fine dishwasher, with that education of yours.”

“I don’t have any papers.”

“Maybe someone you know,” the stranger suggested, “would know someone who works for one of the shipping lines.”

“The family I’m staying with, they might.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. You could ask.” The stranger nodded again at the departing liner. “A ship like that,” he said, “goes everywhere. In six months, it goes all around the world. Through Suez, through the Med. You could get off in Genoa or Barcelona. Or even all the way to Florida.”

Kwan looked at the ship. “America,” he said.

Ananayel

I really don’t like to do it in such a fashion, so sloppily, leaving these anomalies around, these quasi-miracles, like loose ends in a popular novel. Locked doors that open, alarms that do not sound.

It’s the haste that causes it, of course, His desire to get this mess cleaned up once and for all. So I suppose it doesn’t matter in the long run if I make a bit more of a mess along the way. It does offend the perfectionist in me, though, I must admit that.

And I do have to be careful that none of my principal performers notice these aberrations from the laws of physics. Fortunately, this is a skeptical age; belief in miracles is not widespread. There have been times and places in human history when I would never have gotten away with these slapdash methods, but they are long gone. Today’s humans would much rather believe they are being tricked; alternatively, “there must be an explanation,” which they simply have not yet quite worked out.

Still, I can’t help feeling rueful. Oh, if only I had been called on in an age worthy of my talents. On the other hand, I do increasingly see why He has had enough.

6

In São Sebastião, they talked with the sort of priest who believed that life on Earth was in any case irrelevant, that pain and suffering could only ensure greater joy and harmony in the next world, and that rich men who treat God’s creatures badly would be punished with horrible fire in the hereafter. He was not, as he told them proudly, an activist priest.

How, Maria Elena wondered, could such a man be any use at all to her employer, a doctor from WHO, the World Health Organization, a man who believed that life on Earth was all we have, that pain and suffering must be alleviated whenever and wherever possible, and that rich men who treat God’s creatures badly should be wrenched out of society like diseased rootstock from a vineyard? But in São Sebastião, there was no one else; the Administration Section doctor visited the village less than once a month and his records were useless, as they already knew. Only Father Tomaz had the statistics, the births and deaths, the illnesses, the deformities, all the spoor of the chemical assassin.

Maria Elena translated as best she could, as unemotionally as she could. Beside her, Jack — Dr. John Auston, of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. — ploddingly asked his questions, filling in the spaces on the forms, writing his comments in his tiny illegible hieroglyphics in deep black ink. Maria Elena — Maria Elena Rodriguez, of Alta Campa, Brazil, later of Rio, most recently of Brasilia — translated Jack’s dry questions into rough-toned Portuguese, translated the priest’s indifferent and querulous answers, and kept her own personality firmly out of the equation.

Even her voice. A rich contralto, she kept it muted and flat, with none of the full-throated power that used to resound through the great music halls of São Paulo and Bio, when the crowds would rise to their feet, weeping and applauding, roaring the choruses with her, she striding back and forth on the stage, loving them, loving herself.

She never strode any more. Never sang.

The three sat in the shade of a large tree beside the squat, blunt adobe church, on folding chairs brought out from its dark interior, in which two old women in black, not together, whispered their prayers, their s’s enlacing in the air like the ghosts of snakes. Some distance away, in a brown field, their pilot sat in the shade of his plane reading fumetti, comic books that use staged photos instead of drawings. Behind them, the village baked in the sun, most of the residents away at work in the factory out of sight beyond the brown hills, the children away at their classes in the factory school: one of the benefits the factory had brought, to make up for the death and horror it had also brought.

Father Tomaz’s bland recital of children born dead, children born without arms, without eyes, without brains, poured through the transitional vessel of Maria Elena, unsullied by any trace of passion. Maria Elena’s mind was full of her own two dead children, but nothing of them, nothing of herself, touched her words, neither to the priest nor to the doctor.

What would Father Tomaz say if she were to tell him about her failed children, about Paco’s leaving her, about her agreement with Paco’s conviction that she was now foul — befouled? That Paco had died before their argument was resolved? He would say, “God is testing you, my child. He works in mysterious ways. We cannot understand Him, we can only bow to His will, secure in the knowledge that our suffering is recorded in Heaven, and that our reward is in Heaven as well, with our God, and our Savior, and His angels and saints, in eternal joy. Amen.”

Jack’s forms eventually were all filled in, Father Tomaz’s recital of the plague years was finished, and the three stood from the folding chairs to stretch. They carried the chairs back into the church — the sibilant old women continued, unending, unquenchable — and when they were back outside, in the sun, Father Tomaz said to Maria Elena, “Would you tell him, we don’t need medicine. What we need is faith in God.”

“No,” Maria Elena said. “I won’t tell him that.” And she allowed at last the hatred to show in her eyes.

The priest, offended, stepped back a pace, glaring at her. Jack said, “What was that about?”

“Nothing,” she said.

Today’s pilot was new, a skinny brown man with a bandit moustache. He got to his feet as he saw them coming across the field from the church, and grinned beneath that moustache. He’d probably been bored, even with his comics, which he now tossed up into the plane onto the seat beside his own.

As they walked, Jack took Maria Elena’s elbow, ostensibly because the dry cracked field was uneven, bumpy, a little awkward to walk on, but really, she knew, just to touch her. They’d been working together now for four months, and after the first month he’d begun to pursue her with a kind of lighthearted determination, not as though he didn’t really care, but as though his caring had to be kept swathed in protective padding. This caution, or self-protection, or whatever it was, made it easier for Maria Elena to fend him off, without ever having to explain that it wasn’t him but herself she was rejecting. In the last few weeks his pursuit had become more reflexive, absent-minded, ritualistic; they’d settled into a vaguely flirtatious but essentially comfortable relationship that could last for as long as they worked together.

He was a decent man, John Auston, thirty-seven years old, tall and awkwardly husky, as though his skeleton had never been properly hooked together but still jangled and skidded within its padding of flesh. He was methodical, quiet, devoted to his work for WHO, and if Maria Elena were in the market for a man, here was one, an excellent one. But she was not in the market, never would be in the market, and in any event Jack was not really unencumbered.

The fact was, Jack was married and divorced. He had an ex-wife far away up in the United States, and though he would never admit it, Maria Elena could tell that he still loved her. Or still needed her, which came to the same thing.

Jack always avoided talking about that ex-wife of his who, when their daughter was three, had packed up one day and taken the child and crossed the entire United States from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to Oregon, simply to get away from him. Maria Elena had no sense of the woman, whether she was a good or a bad person, strong or weak or anything about her, and yet sometimes she felt she understood why that wife had left. There had come a point, there must have come a point, when she had simply grown tired of steering him. He was so easily steered, as she herself had steered his flirtatiousness into this unthreatening shoal where it now safely stagnated, and yet how could you feel anything but tarnished if you devoted your life to treating another human being as though he were nothing but a docile ox?

Since the second front seat, next to the pilot, was so much more desirable than any of the four seats behind it, Jack and Maria Elena had worked it out that one of them would ride up front on the way out each day and the other on the way back. Today, Jack had chosen the first half of the trip, so now he was the one who climbed up the two toeholds and crawled over the pilot’s forward-folded seat into the back. Then the pilot unfolded his seat into normal position and helped Maria Elena climb up. She slid across to the passenger side, stowing the pilot’s fumetti in the pocket beneath the window beside her.

The pilot took his position at the wheel and, after a brisk series of preparations, started the single engine, turned the small plane around in a bumpy circle, walked it halfway back up the field, and swept it around again to face the light wind. Over by the church, under the tree, Father Tomaz watched; probably hoping they were on their way to God instead of Brasilia. The pilot started them forward and they jounced and hopped down the field, the wings waggling as though they’d fall off, the small wheel in the pilot’s hands shaking like a ribbon tied to a high-speed fan, until all at once the wheels lifted clear of the hard ground and the plane became graceful, coherent, almost alive.

There was no door on Maria Elena’s side, which was why she and Jack had had to climb over the pilot’s seat, but the window had a flap in the lower half, like a deux-chevaux, that she could open with her elbow to look down directly at the receding ground, becoming aware for the first time just how large the graveyard was on the other side of the church. And how small so many of the graves. It was human instinct, when something was trying to exterminate the species, to reproduce faster and faster. Particularly when the killer was mostly killing children.

The noise inside the plane was at a level where conversation was possible but not easy, so usually they didn’t talk much, particularly on the flight back, after the long dry interview in two languages. Today, though, after about five minutes, the new pilot frowned at her and said, “Why do I know you from someplace?”

This still happened sometimes. People still remembered Maria Elena, the pop star, the rising talent who had shone so brightly and so briefly and then disappeared. She had used only her first names, Maria Elena, and the people had cried them out at the concerts — “Maria Elena! Maria Elena!” — as though she were a soccer star.

Ah, but that was then. When someone remembered now, or thought they did, she denied it. What was the point in rehashing that painful history? They would want to know why, with her fame still growing, with her record albums topping the charts, with her career on the brink of the international — she had even recorded one album in Spanish — she had so abruptly disappeared.

And how could she talk about such things? That her body was foul, her children dead, her husband recoiling from her in disgust. That she could no longer sing, that the music was no longer in her. And that when she had tried to use her celebrity for something that really mattered, to protest the destruction of the land and the people on it, the media had closed against her, shutting her out, more interested in jobs than health, caring more about their wallets than their children.

So when this new pilot asked why he knew her, she offered him a small and distancing smile, as though he were merely flirting, and said, “I can’t think of any reason,” and turned away to look out her window at the ground bumping by far below.

That stopped the conversation, but only for a few minutes. Then, when she incautiously looked again in his direction he grinned at her under his bandit moustache and said, “Not such a good priest down there, huh?”

Maria Elena looked at him in surprise. “You could tell that from way over by the plane?”

“I could tell that from the sky,” he said, and laughed.

“He thinks God wants all this misery,” she said. “Why should God want it?”

“Who benefits?” said the pilot, raising one brown stubby finger in a parody of the pedantic teacher. “That is always the question to ask, when you want to know what is really going on. Who benefits from the docility of the people? Does God?”

“The owners of the factory,” Maria Elena said.

“Not God?” It was as though he was teasing her.

Jack, in the isolation of the seat behind them and not understanding Portuguese, couldn’t take part in the conversation. It was up to Maria Elena by herself. Earnestly, she said, “God made us. He loves us. He doesn’t want us to be tortured. It doesn’t benefit Him if the people don’t fight back when the factory kills their children. It benefits the owners.”

“The owners.” He seemed doubtful. “Who do you mean, exactly?”

“We all know them,” she said, with contempt. “They live in Rio, with their ocean views, they come to Brasilia surrounded by lawyers to testify that the factories are cleaner than last year. Always cleaner, cleaner. We show the true statistics, their lawyers make the statistics lie.”

“But they aren’t the real owners,” the pilot said. “Don’t you know that? Those people are the board. They only run the company. The real owners are the stockholders.”

“More of the same,” Maria Elena said.

“Not exactly.” The pilot seemed to find all this amusing in some way. “The stockholders never come to Brasilia to testify, they never have to lie even once to anybody. Never even come to Brazil. Do you think they ever breathe this air? Maybe once, at Carnival.”

Frowning, Maria Elena said, “The company is Brazilian. Isn’t it?”

“The subsidiary is Brazilian. That’s the company you know about. But the main company is far from here. The stockholders don’t live in Brazil.”

“Where do they live?” I’ll go there, Maria Elena thought. With photos, with statistics. How dare they not be part of what they’ve done? How dare they not even have to lie?

“Where do they live?” The pilot looked down at the copper-colored river they would follow for the next quarter hour. “Some in Britain,” he said. “Some in Germany, Italy, Guatemala, Switzerland, Kuwait, Japan. But most in the United States.”

“The United States.”

“The multinational corporation is responsible to no country,” the pilot told her, “but it was an American idea.”

“They couldn’t do this in America. That’s why they come here.”

“Well, of course,” the pilot said, and laughed.

They flew for a while in silence, Maria Elena full of her own thoughts. The lives destroyed — her own life destroyed — and she could never even see the people who did it. The people who benefit. This was the place where they did the bad things, but they themselves were far away, unreachable. Her occasional dreams of righting wrongs, saving those who had not as yet been polluted, were even more idle than she’d thought. There was nothing to be accomplished here, in Brazil, if the decisions were being made seven thousand miles to the north, by people who never came here, perhaps didn’t entirely understand the results of their decisions, had never been faced with the end reality of what they did.

But how could she reach them, so far away? That was even more of a fantasy than the one she cherished about invading a penthouse apartment in Bio, with its grand view of Sugarloaf out the picture windows, breaking into the party of tuxedoed men and ball-gowned women, weeping, shouting, showing them the pictures, making them understand.

She wouldn’t even have that fantasy any more, to soothe her into sleep at night, if the tuxedoed men and ball-gowned women were merely dolls, toys, remote-controlled from beyond the horizon. Without the fantasy, without the comforting false belief that remedy was possible, how would she ever sleep again? What fantasy could take its place? “The United Nations is in America,” she said at last.

“What was that?”

She repeated what she’d said, and the pilot nodded, agreeing with her, saying, “In New York, that’s right. What about it?”

“I’ll never get to New York,” she said. Not now. Maria Elena might have someday, but that was all over now.

“Why not? Anyone can go to New York.”

“In this plane?”

“Not in this plane,” he acknowledged. “But there are planes.”

“They cost too much money,” Maria Elena said. “I would never have that much money.” Never again.

“You could win the lottery,” he suggested.

She laughed, her throat aching. “That’s true, I could. But they have quotas in America. Immigration quotas.”

“Not for visitors. Short-term visas.”

“What could a person do with a short-term visa?”

“Well, then you hide,” he said. “You become an illegal resident.”

“What could a person do, of value, who was hiding from the law?”

“Then you apply for a long-term visa,” he advised her. “And save your money while you wait to get on the quota. Or is that too long a time for you?”

“No,” she said slowly, wondering if it was wise to reveal so much to this stranger. But he felt safe, somehow. She said, “I believe my name is on some lists.”

“Lists?”

“As an activist,” she explained. “A few years ago, when my husband — back then, I joined some political groups. Activist groups.”

“Breaking windows,” he suggested, this time openly laughing at her. “Handing out leaflets. Picketing opera openings.”

“It seemed important,” she said miserably. “But now my name is on the lists.”

“There’s one way, of course,” he said, “that none of that matters.”

“What way?”

“If you were married to an American.”

Behind her, John Auston dozed over his filled-in forms. His presence suddenly filled the plane like a life raft inflating. “That’s impossible,” Maria Elena said.

Ananayel

Well; interesting.

My ongoing experiences with machinery, I mean. “Men would be Angels,” as Pope said, in a somewhat different context, and that would certainly appear to be true.

Just look at all these ponderous machines, gawky and oafish, with which latter-day man has surrounded himself. What are they, after all, but efforts to perform, with great cumbersome expenditures of energy, what we do smoothly, effortlessly, and by nature? My first airplane was so much more unwieldy than my normal fashion of traveling through the air as to beggar comparison, and as for these automobiles, like the one with which I drove Li Kwan away from the policemen I’d set on him, what possible advantage can humans believe such monstrosities offer them over their own legs? To get them where faster? To get them where faster? And why? What do they want with time, these ephemera?

All these tangled intricate prosthetics with which these humans try to be us. Telephones. Light bulbs, and lamps to put them into, and huge destructive hydroelectric dams to plug the lamps into. Refrigerators. Oh, the weary toil of it all. They’ll probably be glad to lay their burdens down, poor things.

7

There was a bus stop across the road from the entrance to the prison, but Frank Hillfen didn’t want to wait for the bus there. Everybody going past in cars, and the people on the bus, too, when it came, and the driver of the bus, they would all know what he was. No one ever gets on the bus at that stop except cons — ex-cons, okay — and visitors of cons, and one look would tell anybody in the world that Frank Hillfen was not somebody who visited people. Con, they would say, looking at the slump of his shoulder, the dry hardness of his jaw, the hands as large as a workingman’s but soft and pudgy as a baby’s. Habitual, they would say, driving by, windows rolled up to keep the cold air in. He’ll be back, they would say, and glance once in the rearview mirror, glad they weren’t Frank Hillfen, and drive on.

Frank crossed the road toward the bus stop, to be that much farther away from the tall tan wall in the sunlight. Three P.M., summer, sunny, moderately warm. Walking weather.

A madonna and child were the only people in the shade of the bus shelter. She was short, plump, pretty, black-haired and black-eyed, and she held the infant high in her arms, murmuring to it in some dialect descended a long way from the Latin; some variant of Spanish, probably. She looked up to watch Frank cross toward her, his worldly goods in the black warm-up bag that said HEAD at both ends, handles gripped in his left hand, leaving the right for... emergencies. The madonna watched Frank with the sullen hopeless look of someone who’s been badly treated before and never got revenge for it, and her eyes didn’t soften even when he veered to his left, away from her and her bus shelter. She kept watching his back as he walked away along the verge of the road, watching him mistrustfully as she absently bobbled the fretful baby.

Frank walked south, the sun high above his left temple. There was very little traffic; Nebraska had put the prison on land nobody wanted for anything else. For a long while the blank tan wall remained to his left, across the road, while to his right stretched stony brush-dotted land the same color as the prison wall. That land was fenced from the road with three strands of barbed wire, but didn’t seem to be used for anything.

In the release office, the clerk had told him the bus ran every two hours or so. He had no idea how far apart the bus stops were. If the bus came by before he reached the next one, and if it wouldn’t stop at his wave, he’d have two more hours to wait. Or so. But that didn’t matter, he was in no hurry. Where was he going, anyway? If he followed his usual pattern, he was simply on his way back to that prison behind him, or another one exactly like it; he was merely starting out now on the first leg of a long and tortuous journey that would take him through many places and many experiences to no place and nothing.

If he followed his pattern. But not this time. This time, he’d keep ahead of the odds. Ahead of the odds. Take the bus across the state to Omaha; promote some cash there. If he got that far without fucking up, take a plane to New York. Then we’ll see.

Frank walked for half an hour without finding any more bus stops. He began to regret his self-consciousness. What did he care what the people in passing cars might think? Escaped con, probably, with him walking away from the prison like this, along the empty road, miles from anywhere. At forty-two, his brown hair was thinning, forehead receding, presenting vulnerable pale skin to the hot sun. Gonna start to burn, he told himself, fatalistic about it, and then humorous: Gonna get burned. First thing.

The warm-up bag got heavier. He switched it to his right hand, then back to the left. What do I need with all this shit? Buy new. But Frank always imagined people watching him, careless but vaguely interested people keeping an eye on him, and what would they think if he threw his warm-up bag away?

From time to time he looked over his shoulder at the road undulating behind him, and at last he did see the bus way back there, barreling along the two-lane road, coming fast. Frank turned to face it, holding the warm-up bag prominently in front of himself with his left hand — I’m a traveler, see? — while he waved the right hand back and forth above his head. He was visible, God knows, the tallest thing in the vicinity, the only thing moving, but the bus roared right on by, didn’t even slow, left him awash in a wake of blown dust and diesel fumes.

Cocksucker. Frank watched the bus shrink, imagined the blowout, the driver losing control, the bus jouncing off the road, straight into a tree — one of the few trees around, but a perfect hit anyway — the driver flailing through the big windshield, sliced to shit by all that glass, screaming, mouth wide open, glass in his tongue...

Frank kept walking. It was greener up ahead, more trees — shade from this sun, finally — and now the road began to climb. I have two hours to find the bus stop, Frank told himself. The fucking thing has to stop somewhere.

A farmhouse with outbuildings, on his right. And a dog, who stood barking loudly on the driveway, too cowardly to come forward for his kick. No human beings came out to find out what the dog’s problem was. Frank kept walking, and the dog quit. Like to come back at night with a .22, plink him on the edges, shoot off a paw, an ear, chunk of the tail. Take a good long time at it. Why don’t you bark now, you son of a bitch?

Cars went by, from time to time, but Frank knew better than to try to hitch a ride. People looked at Frank, they figured first impressions were enough, they didn’t need to know any more. So he just kept walking. Sooner or later, there’d be a crossroads, a village, a V.A. hospital, an army base, some goddamn excuse for the bus to stop. There he would wait.

The white Saab with the bumper stickers — I BRAKE FOR ANIMALS; NO NUKES IS GOOD NUKES — passed Frank, going the same direction as him but a lot faster, and zipped a little farther down the road when all at once its right front tire blew (Frank didn’t think about his bus blowout fantasy, had long forgotten that.) The car was just a ways ahead of him, maybe the length of a football field — what’s that? a hundred yards? — and then the bang, like a large handgun going off, and the Saab veered left and right and jolted itself all over the road, its brake lights slapping on, then off, then on, off, on...

He was a good driver. He was lucky, too, in that there wasn’t any traffic coming, but he was also a hell of a good driver, he kept control, he didn’t let the Saab get away from him and run for the trees. He didn’t lock onto the brakes but pumped them, used them, kept control, slowed the big vehicle down, and at last it wobbled off onto the shoulder and came to a stop. Frank kept walking, toward the car, watching the thin strung-out cloud of tan dust move away over the fields to the right, like the banners of a ghost army. He continued to walk, and as he did so he began to think maybe he could work a deal with this guy, help him replace the tire and in return get a lift to the next bus stop. Or all the way to the city, why not? Think big; why not?

For a minute or two after the Saab came to a stop, as Frank went on walking toward it, nothing more happened. The driver’s door didn’t open, the driver didn’t get out. He’s in there shitting his pants, Frank thought. Reaction after it’s over. The way I feel when the lights come on and the cop says, “Don’t move.” The danger is over and the new chapter has begun.

If it was a football field Frank had to cover, he was at about the Saab’s twenty-yard line when the driver’s door at last did open and the driver tottered uncertainly out, and the driver was a woman. Shit, thought Frank, disgusted. A woman isn’t gonna give me the time of day. I can’t negotiate with a woman.

She didn’t see Frank at first, or wasn’t concerned about him. She closed the driver’s door and walked around the front of the Saab and stood looking down at the blown tire. She looked to be about thirty-five, tall and slender, with straight brown hair. She was dressed like the women in television commercials who carry briefcases and are business equals with the men but still spend a lot of time worried about personal hygiene. Smart and self-assured, in other words; but not now.

Frank kept walking, beaming thoughts at the woman, even though it wouldn’t do any good. I’m nonviolent, he thought at her, that’s my M.O., that’s why I’m out on parole, that’s why I did less than two of a nickel. It’s all in my record, you could look in my record, never a touch of violence, I don’t even go in a house is there somebody there. Never carry heat, never a weapon on me, not a knife, nothing. A peaceful burglar, that’s me, wouldn’t hurt a woman. Wouldn’t hurt anybody.

The woman looked up as Frank neared the car, and he saw it in her face, saw it in her eyes, right away. That recognition. Not a word yet, and already she knew everything about him. Wrong, but everything.

A strip of the blown tire lay curled beside the road like a giant blackened onion ring. Frank looked at it, as a relief from looking at the woman’s frightened eyes, but then he was past it, and the white Saab was just beside him as he walked, and the woman was straight ahead, ten feet away, beyond the car. Frank took a deep breath, still walking, and looked at the woman again, and said, “You handled that real good. Like a pro.”

The woman blinked, slowly. Whatever she’d expected, it hadn’t been a compliment, or a critique on her driving. “Thank you,” she said, her voice very low “It was so fast, I didn’t know what I was doing. There wasn’t time to think.”

“Well, you did it right,” Frank told her, and then he either had to stop or keep walking right on past her, so he stopped. He saw the little apostrophes of fear bracketing her mouth, and he plunged into his story: “Look. I’m walking trying to find a bus stop. There’s a bus on the road, to the city. You want, I’ll put the spare on here for you, then you give me a lift to the bus stop. You don’t want, that’s okay, I’ll keep walking.”

She said, “The state capital, you mean?”

Funny part of the proposition to fasten on, but okay. “I guess so,” Frank said. “Omaha. Where I had my trial, anyway, so I guess that’s the capital.”

She frowned at him. “Trial?”

Might as well get it all out, from the get-go. “You passed the prison back there,” he said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder. “I just took parole.” Not that he intended to visit any parole officers, not this time around.

“There’s a bus stop there,” she pointed out. “Right there at the prison.”

“I didn’t like that one.”

She smiled, like she understood the reasoning. “I’m going to Omaha,” she said. “If you really want to help...”

A lift all the way. Frank couldn’t help it, he grinned like a kid, wide open, both sides of his mouth. “A miracle,” he said.

Her answering smile was ironic: “The miracle is, I wasn’t killed.”

“There’s a miracle in it somewhere,” Frank said, “I know that much. You got the key to open the trunk?”

Changing a tire was hard work, particularly for somebody with hands like Frank’s. They were delicate hands, they used small tools delicately, they caressed combination locks, they stroked alarm wires, they gathered in cash and jewelry. Soft pudgy fingers got bruised against lug wrenches, got scraped against tires. But Frank did the job and kept his reactions off his face.

They talked while he worked. She said she was a lawyer, and he said, “You’re too smart to be a lawyer.”

She thought that was funny. “The fellow who represented you wasn’t that good, eh?”

“I’ll tell you about my lawyer,” Frank said, fighting with the lug nuts. “He’s a guy, his necktie is in his soup.”

“What was the charge against you?”

“Burglary.”

“How solid was the case?”

“Walked out the front door of this house in Michigan Heights, carrying a wall safe, straight into two beat cops with flashlights.”

“Carrying a wall safe?”

“That’s the way to do,” Frank explained. He threw the dead tire on its hub into the trunk, wheeled the spare along the verge beside the car. “A wall safe is a metal box stuck in a wall. You dig it out, takes no time at all, carry it home, work on it at your leisure.”

“Was that the first time you were caught?”

He looked at her, not answering, letting her drink him in, until she laughed and said, “Sorry, you’re right. Stupid question. Okay, next time, I’ll represent you. But try not to be caught quite so red-handed.”

He looked at his hands, pitying them. “Black-handed, this time.”

“I have towelettes in the glove compartment,” she said. “When you’re done.”

A car or a truck went by from time to time, but nobody stopped to see if any help was needed. It was clear that Frank was doing the job. And the lady lawyer wasn’t afraid of him any more. That’s all it took, a little conversation, spend some time, see what Frank Hillfen’s really like. Not a nice guy, maybe, not pretty, but not dangerous.

She said her name was Mary Ann Kelleny, and he told her he was Frank Hillfen, and she said, “Frank. Good. That fits you.”

“I don’t know about that Mary Ann stuff,” he said. “How can a lawyer be named Mary Ann?”

“Why not?” she asked him. “There’s lawyers named Randolph, aren’t there?”

“Yeah, that’s true.” He tightened the last lug nut.

“What was your attorney’s name?” she asked. “The one with the necktie.”

“Gower.”

She smiled and spread her hands. “I rest my case.”

He hadn’t known what she meant when she said “towelettes,” but they turned out to be those folded wet paper towels in a packet that restaurants give you after you eat the lobster. He used three of them from her glove compartment supply; a well-prepared lady. He would have thrown the towelettes away into the weeds but she pointed at the plastic trash bag she’d hung from the dashboard cigarette lighter. “You’re a good influence on me,” he said, and disposed of his trash properly.

The bus stop was less than a mile farther on, at an intersection containing two gas stations, a diner, and a squat modern one-story “professional building”: the professionals were a dentist, a real estate agent, and a stockbroker. Down the road to the right were a few houses, new but shabby, as though for a town that hadn’t quite happened. Up to the left was a long, wide, gray two-story factory building with very few windows. TEXTECH in blue was along the blank wall facing this way. Frank said, “What’s that?”

“Clothing,” she told him. “Sweaters, T-shirts. Sweatshirts that say Property of Alcatraz.”

“I never saw a sweatshirt like that,” Frank said. He couldn’t help it, his mouth was pursed in disapproval. Property of Alcatraz; that was bad taste.

“They don’t sell them in America,” she explained. “Only overseas.”

“Where?”

“Asia. Europe.”

“Property of Alcatraz.” Frank saw a teenager in Tokyo, walking down a crowded street, wearing a sweatshirt that says, Property of Alcatraz. Doesn’t speak ten words of English. Was the kid somebody’s property in Alcatraz, wouldn’t last a day. People wearing the words, don’t know what they say. Don’t know what they mean.

“The global village,” Mary Ann Kelleny said.

“Yeah,” Frank said. “But do they get it? I don’t think so.”

“Does it matter? As long as they’re happy.”

“Okay,” Frank said. “I’ll bite. Are they happy?”

She glanced at him as she drove, curious and amused. “Why wouldn’t they be?”

“Because they don’t know who they are,” he said. “They don’t know who anybody is. They mostly sound bewildered.”

“I don’t follow,” she said.

“You put your clothes on,” Frank told her, “they’re your flag for the day. The public announcement, who you think you are. What we all do. You gonna walk into court with words on you? Property of Alcatraz?”

She smiled and gave him another look. “So you’re dressed as the humble workman,” she said. “Is that it?”

“I’m dressed like I just walked out of prison,” he answered. “When I get a couple of dollars, I’ll dress a little different. Like a guy ready to party.”

She’d stopped smiling when he mentioned the “couple dollars,” and now she said, sounding fatalistic but worried for him, “You’re going back, aren’t you, Frank?”

He pretended he didn’t know what she meant. “Back where? A life of crime?”

“The wrong crime,” she said. “So back to prison. You’re an intelligent man, Frank, you know it yourself. There’s a rubber band on you, and the other end is still in your cell.”

“I’ve learned stuff,” he said, trying to sound competent and confident. “Whatever happens, I’m not gonna be that easy to find.”

“Oh, sure you are,” she said.

He hadn’t expected this conversation with anybody but himself, and he sure hadn’t expected it with a good-looking woman lawyer in an air-conditioned white Saab doing sixty down the highway. He said, “What do you mean, the wrong crime?”

“Little stuff,” she said. “Burglaries. Breaking into houses and stealing wall safes, for heaven’s sake.”

Defensive, he said, “What’s the complaint? Wall safes, that’s where they keep the valuables. That’s what I’m after.”

“How much in valuables?” she demanded. “What do you mean, valuables?” She must be a pretty good lawyer. She said, “Are you talking about three or four thousand dollars? Jewelry, and what do you get from your fence? Ten percent?”

“Sometimes more,” he muttered.

“You can live a week, or a month if you’re lucky, and then you have to go out and do it again. Every time you do it, you’re at the same risk. Every time. It doesn’t matter how many times you don’t get caught, because they don’t count in your favor the time you do get caught. So the odds are against you, and sooner or later you will get caught. That’s the only way it can end, cycle after cycle.”

“Okay, then, I’ll reform,” he said, bored with the conversation, and looked out the window at the passing scenery: trees, farms, trees.

But she wouldn’t let it go. “You won’t reform, Frank,” she said. “You’re who you are, and you know it.”

“Habitual,” he said, like the word was a joke.

“But you could retire,” she said. “That’s not the same thing as reform, you know. If you reform, you have to get a job somewhere, live in a house somewhere...”

“No can do.”

“I know, Frank, that’s what I’m saying. If you do a burglary and you make five thousand dollars on it, you don’t go right back out the next night, do you?”

“No need to.”

“Exactly. You retire, short-term. Then, when the money’s gone, you come out of retirement.”

He laughed, seeing himself as a guy constantly bouncing out of retirement. “I guess that’s me, okay.”

“But if you committed just one crime,” she went on, “and you got five million dollars, you’d never have to come out of retirement, would you?”

This time, he laughed out of surprise. “Five million? Where is this score?”

“Don’t ask me, Frank,” she said half kidding but also half on the square. “I’m not a criminal. And I’m not suggesting any crime to you, either. What I’m saying is, if you keep doing the five-thousand-dollar crimes, you’ll definitely go back to prison.”

He knew what she was doing. It was a lawyer’s trick, that, to make you think you’ve got two alternatives, but then the first one’s no good and the second one’s impossible, so you wind up doing exactly what lawyers always want everybody to do, anyway, which is nothing. “So instead of the five-grand hits,” he said, “I should stay home and dream up a five-mil hit. And not go out till I got it. Right?”

“You’ll never reform, Frank,” she said. “You know that. So the best thing to do is retire.”

“With my five million.”

“Or whatever.”

They came into Omaha around seven in the evening, the city rising out of the landscape like children’s toys in a sandbox, the reddening sun still partway up the western sky but the children gone home to dinner. As the country road became city street, the streetlights automatically switched on, anemic in the rosy light of the sun.

They’d been talking law, anecdotes, him telling her some of his court experiences, she talking about clients and how it seemed that everybody had a crooked streak in them somewhere. She wasn’t herself a criminal lawyer, or a courtroom lawyer, but flew a desk in a big corporate law firm, so the clients were businessmen, all looking for an edge. It began to seem to Frank that it was unfair of society to single him out this way, keep riding him so hard when everybody else was up to something, too. But nobody ever said it was supposed to be fair, life.

The first time they were stopped at a red light, she pointed at her purse, a big brown soft-leather thing on the seat between them, and said, “There’s money in there. Take three hundred.”

He bristled. “What’s this about?”

“To get you started. You need money to get you moving. If I don’t give it to you, you’ll start right in trying to beat the odds. The first day on parole.”

“I can’t take your money,” he said. The fact was, three hundred wouldn’t do it. Three grand was closer to what he needed, with the flight to New York, and some clothes, and a hotel, and this and that and the other. Four or five grand, more like. But he wasn’t going to say that. “I appreciate the thought,” he went on, “but I just wouldn’t feel right.”

She sighed. The light turned green, and they drove on. She tapped fairly short fingernails against the steering wheel, and at last she said, “All right, then. Look in there, you’ll see my wallet.”

“I really won’t—”

“Not money,” she said. “Hold on a second.”

Another red light. She picked up the bag, braced it between the steering wheel and her lap, took out a thick wallet, unclasped it, brought out a business card, handed it to him. “I can’t come to court for you,” she said, “but I can find you somebody better than the wet necktie.”

Taking the card, reading her name and the firm name and the business address and the phone number and the telex number and the cable word and the fax number, he said, “You don’t have much confidence in me.”

“I have confidence in the mathematics.” The light was green; she shoved the bag onto the seat and drove. “The five-thousand-dollar crimes will get you right back in trouble.”

“I’ll look for the five-million job,” he promised.

“Good. In the meantime, hold on to that card.”

“I will.” He tucked it into his shirt pocket.

“Where do you want me to drop you off?”

“Oh, any well-off neighborhood will do,” he said.

She laughed. He was glad she did.

Ananayel

I must say it was touching when Frank wouldn’t take the money. Humans do have this capacity to be appealing, when you deal with them one at a time and avoid the ghastly overview. That a creature like Frank Hillfen, so utterly without hope, so totally enmired in slow self-destruction, so devoid of any experience of using free will, should refuse Mary Ann Kelleny’s three hundred dollars, made me feel quite kindly toward him, for that moment.

Will he do what’s necessary when the time comes? Oh, yes. We can arrange that, we can manipulate that. The group I’m assembling will do what I want — that is, what He wants done — but it will be their choice, their idea, their free will in action. The human race will freely choose to end itself.

Well? They’ve been rehearsing for it quite long enough, haven’t they?

Not the entire human race, no, of course not, we are not conducting a referendum on this. His will be done. But representatives of them all, carefully chosen representatives. From every race, from every continent. No one left out.

We’re playing fair here.

8

The thinner she got, the more the Europeans liked her. At home they had their soft pale cushion women; in Nairobi, they wanted something lean and mean and dark. That was Pami: lean and mean and very dark. So easy, and so good for business; when you’ve got slim, you never have to diet.

Pami’s stroll was up Mama Ngina Street past the European embassies and down Kimathi Street beyond the New Stanley Hotel, where the tourists sit beneath the famous huge thorn tree spiked all over with messages. To whom? From whom? Nothing to do with Pami, anyway, nothing to do with an illiterate twenty-three-year-old Luo from up above Lake Naivasu. She’d come to Nairobi at fifteen because she wasn’t wanted at home and had already outlasted her reasonable life expectancy. In Nairobi she knew no one except a few policemen, “protectors,” and colleague whores. No person in this world had a message for Pami Njoroge, a twenty-shilling Kenyan whore with cold eyes, a twisted mouth from a jaw long ago badly broken and ineptly mended, and a recently diagnosed case of slim, the African familiar name for AIDS.

At first he didn’t look that much like a John: too big and self-confident and well-built. But then she was distracted by a beggar with deformed legs that she almost fell over, and when she looked up again along crowded, bustling Kimathi Street the big European with yellow hair was closer, and fewer other people were in the way, and she could see he was fatter and sweatier than she’d thought.

He was probably fifty years old, well over six feet tall, with a bulging soft torso contained in a white business shirt large enough to be a tent in the up-country where Pami was born. His dark tie was pulled down from his thick neck, the shirt collar open. His dark blue suit, like a banker or a diplomat, was rumpled and desperate looking, the coat dangling open like double doors. He walked heavily, feet slapping the pavement, like a ritual bullock plodding toward the place of sacrifice, and when he saw Pami his pale eyes sparkled and his cheeks grew round when he smiled, wet-lipped.

She gave him back her own twisted, mean, secret smile, knowing it would excite him with its dangerousness — he’d have no idea how dangerous — and when he passed her, the two of them momentarily very close, pushed together by the jostling crowd of pedestrians, he looked down at her with those bright eyes — they were the palest blue she’d ever seen — and said, “Oh, you come with me.” He spoke English with some kind of thick accent, in a deep guttural voice. Was he German? Somehow he didn’t seem quite like a German. And in any case, what did it matter?

His hotel was three blocks away, one of the newer American-designed ones, the same anonymous but lavish cell repeated one hundred sixteen times. By day, the rear door from the parking lot was left unlocked, so the John took her around that way, to avoid the problems of bringing this alley cat through the lobby.

His room was on the second floor, with no view except another wing of the hotel. There were two beds, a single and a double, both neatly and smoothly covered with Mondrian-influenced spreads. The maid had been through, to put a strip of paper around the toilet seat and distribute fresh plastic glasses in sealed plastic bags, all of these tiny ways to deny the great teeming filthiness of the world just out there, just beyond that double-paned permanently shut window. What did sealed plastic bags and droning vacuum cleaners mean, when these big blond residents brought their skinny dirty Pamis inside?

“I am Danish,” he said, locking the door. “Am I your first Danish man?”

How would she know? “Yes,” she said.

“Good.” He smiled, and crossed the room to close the drapes over that broad rectangle of plate glass. She stripped off the small plastic shoulder bag and loose pale green cotton shift and low black plastic boots that were all she ever wore at work, and the big man turned from the window to beam at her dark nakedness, the small loose breasts with their large areolas, the narrow muscular hips, the lush foliage of her bush. The room was dimmer now that the drapes were drawn, everything in it touched by a pale grayness, in which his eyes gleamed like tiny signal lights from a ship far out at sea. “You will be rough?” he asked, with a hopeful rising inflection.

Her jaw produced another nasty smile. “As rough as you want,” she said.

He walked toward her, undoing his belt, then reached around to clasp her buttock hard with one hand. “No ass at all,” he said.

“I got enough ass,” she told him. “And it cost twenty shillin.”

“Oh, yes, yes,” He released her, took off his suit coat, reached into its inside pocket, pulled out a large thick billfold, and tossed the coat carelessly onto the single bed. He stood weaving slightly, as though he were drunk, breathing audibly through his open mouth, as he leafed through crackling currencies in the billfold, muttering to himself: “Francs. Krone. Marks. Oh, I spent it all.”

People had tried to pay her in other currencies before, but she wouldn’t do it. She had great trouble finding a bank to change the money, usually had to give some hotel desk clerk a blowjob in return for switching dollars or marks into Kenyan shillings; and then she would be cheated on the exchange rate, as well. She was about to tell this man her policy — she’d put her dress and boots and bag back on and walk out if he had no shillings — when he tossed the billfold onto the coat on the bed and said, “I get. Okay.” And plodded heavily over to the closet.

Pami looked at all the paper money stuffed into the billfold, lying open on the coat. All different kinds of money, and lots of it. Probably more than she earned in a month, if you added it all together. And didn’t cheat on the exchange rate.

The big man slid open the mirrored closet door, stooped with a grunt, and brought out a black attaché case with gleaming chrome locks. This he put on the low dresser, took a key ring from his pocket, unlocked the case, and lifted the top. He made no effort to hide the stacks of money that almost filled the interior. Again, there were four or five different currencies, but this time including shillings; she saw stacks of one hundreds, five hundreds. And on top of it all, in a brown leather case, was a hunting knife.

Pami moved toward the door, keeping an eye on the blond man’s hands as he pushed the knife aside and rooted through the wads of money. She’d known women who were killed by Johns, sometimes tortured first, sometimes cut up afterward. It wasn’t going to happen to her. If she had to run, she wouldn’t worry about the dress or the boots or the bag. All of that could be replaced.

But what he finally brought out of the case, holding it up by the edges in both his hands, studying it as though he’d never seen one of these before, was a twenty-shilling note. Mostly blue, the twenty shilling has a picture of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta on the front, looking responsible and noble and caring, and a serene family of lions on the back, with playing cubs. Turning to Pami, holding up this note, he said, “Do you know what this is worth?”

What kind of question was that? “Twenty shillin,” she said.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “But in pounds, English pounds, oh let us say seventy P. And in U.S. dollars, one. One dollar.” Showing that wet smile again, he said, “This is a very significant amount of money, twenty shillings. I hope you will give first-rate service for it.”

“Come and see,” she said, holding out her hand for the money. He gave it to her and she half turned her back, stooping to put the bill into her left boot, knowing he wouldn’t be able to resist grabbing her. I’ll do him in no time, she thought, as his hands groped her, I’ll be on the street in a minute and a half.

But it didn’t work out that way. Naked, he was a pink wet whale, wheezing and sweating with every exertion, but what endurance he had! He turned her this way, he turned her that way, he studied and pried, he even drew a real response from her two or three times, and still he went on, still he wouldn’t stop, and she was becoming furious. To a whore, time is money.

I’m gonna infect him, she thought, moving from her usual indifference as to whether or not a John caught her disease to an aggressive desire to make him catch it. She managed to get her saliva into his mouth, and later into his anus, and then she stopped fretting over the lost time. What the hell. She gave herself up to the acceptance of the moment.

At the finish, he was on his back, puffing and heaving, she riding him like the boy on the dolphin, fast and hard, grinding down, clenching tight. His head and neck got redder and redder, his pale eyes bulged, and when he came he cried out like a woman, the high wail ending in a bubbling cough. He sagged onto the mattress, muscles slack, jaw hanging open, dull eyes gazing toward the ceiling.

She frowned down at him, sweat-slick herself, rubbing her palms over her wet belly and drying them on her thighs. “Mister?” she said.

There was no reaction. Moving gingerly, she climbed backward off him, crawling on hands and knees back down over his legs and over the foot of the bed, to stand there and stare at him, lying like a big rag doll with the stuffing coming out. I killed him, she thought, and grinned in glee at the idea. She’d never killed anybody before. I killed him wid my box.

She looked around, and her eye lit on the open attaché case on the dresser. Steal it! She took one step.

“Nnnnnuunnn-nanghhann!”

She spun back, terror-struck, and he wasn’t dead at all, his head and left arm were raised, eyes staring in pain and fear as his left hand wobbled, trying to point. “Med-cine,” he gasped. “Drawer. Med-cine!”

Not dead, but dying. She watched him, and didn’t move.

He cried out again, and once more, and then his head and arm fell back, and he lay with his head twisted at an angle, staring at her. “I’ll,” he panted, and wheezed. “Get,” he whispered, harsh and sibilant. “P’lice,” he gasped, and his flailing arm lunged out and caught the phone beside the bed.

No! Terrible trouble! And the money was hers! She stared from him to the money in the case, and her eye lit on the hunting knife.

He knew what she was going to do before she even reached the case: “I won’t call! I won’t call!” But the wooden handle was in her hand, the sheath was flung away into a corner, and she leaped on him like a cheetah, punching down, punching down, unable to stop, hitting him over and over, cutting him open in a hundred places, gritting her bloodstained teeth, snarling in her throat, using every ounce of her strength to drive the blade into him, again and again and again, until at last the knife caught on something inside him and her hand was so slippery with blood it slid right off the handle when she pulled back.

She sat on his legs a minute longer, panting, muscles trembling with strain. Then once again she climbed backward off him, and stood shaking in the middle of the room. Blood had spouted from him, and more blood had sprayed around every time she’d lifted the knife, and now there was blood everywhere. There were dark droplets on the ceiling. Blood ran into the mattress where twice she’d missed him in her frenzy and slashed down through spread and sheet into the cloudy stuffing. Great splotches and splashes marred the walls and the drapes over the window. The mirrored closet door was smeared. The maroon carpet was sticky beneath her bare feet. And her own body felt as though she’d been dipped into a giant jar of rancid raspberry jam. Blood was caked around her nostrils; she breathed the foul air through her mouth, and tried to think.

Boots, dress, bag. The boots were dark, so nothing showed. The dress was stippled with drying blood, and so was the bag. Snuffling in her throat as she tried to breathe, she moved in a dazed and wandering manner into the bathroom, turned on the water in the sink, then turned on the shower as well and climbed in under the flow. A few times before, Johns had let her shower in the wonderful hotel bathrooms, so she knew how to make this one work. She peeled the paper wrapping from the soap cake and rubbed the soap in her hair, over and over, rinsing under the rush of water and then rubbing the soap into her hair again, repeating and repeating until at last the white soap did not come back rosy from her head. Then she scrubbed her arms and body and legs. Her pubic hair was like a sponge, full of blood, to be soaked again and again; finally she sat down in the tub, the shower water falling on her like rain, and simply washed and washed and washed. Would the water never run clean!

Yes. She stood again, clumsy, exhausted now, almost slipping on the smooth tub, and stepped out onto the tile floor. There were large soft beige towels. She dried herself, then used the towels to make a path along the floor of the main room, to keep from getting more blood on her feet. She went out there, picked up her dress and bag, and carried them into the bathroom, where the water still ran in the sink. She cleaned the dress as best she could without getting the whole thing wet, then rubbed the bag with a wet washcloth. She pulled the dress over her head, the wet parts sticking to her body, put the shoulder bag over her head as well, then went out along the towels to her boots. She wiped them on a towel, put them on, straightened up, and then looked over at the burst bladder of blood reeking on the bed. There was nothing in her eyes when she looked at him; she could barely remember him now.

What she remembered was the money. Spreading another towel in front of herself, she moved to the dresser and was about to close the lid on the attaché case when she saw that, in addition to the money, it also contained a passport. She took it out, opened it, saw a picture of the John looking grumpy.

Don’t want this passport. Don’t want to carry anything that hooks me up with that Danish man. She put the passport on the dresser, closed the case, picked it up by the handle in her left hand, and looked around the room. Nothing else.

It was so hard to think, to keep moving. It was as though great lethargy and great horror were both just outside her range of vision, range of understanding. I’m not working any more today, she told herself. I’m going home, I’m gonna sleep, I don’t know what happened in here. This is too crazy. I’ll feel better tomorrow.

Ananayel

Two new experiences there: sex and death.

Both were intensely absorbing and interesting, and neither was exactly what I’d expected. The one wasn’t all pleasure, and the other wasn’t all grief. Emotions seem to blend into one another when you’re a human, even the greatest happiness being tinged with sorrow, the most horrible agony illuminated by some kind of satisfaction.

How intensely these creatures live! My kind burns for a long time with a very low flame; humans burn bright and hot, and don’t last. I have always thought our way was better, but would they? Given the choice, would they select our long serenity, or are they happier with their consuming passions?

Well, they don’t have the choice. And soon, according to His plan, there will be no choices left at all. I have my people now, my representatives. I’ve touched them all, I’ve put them in motion. Grigor Basmyonov is on his way to New York to consult a cancer specialist; Li Kwan is washing dishes in the loudly grumbling belly of the Norse American Line Star Voyager; Maria Elena Rodriguez is buying a wedding dress in Brasilia and fighting off feelings of guilt for her so-easy manipulation of Jack Auston; Hodding Cabell Carson’s campaign to rid himself of the explosive Dr. Marlon Philpott is about to bear fruit; and Frank Hillfen is in a county jail in Indiana, held for parole violation, but will soon be loose once more.

Which leaves Pami Njoroge. Her murder of Kjeld Ulrichslund and the sudden appearance of the attaché case full of money should get her moving. Shouldn’t it? But it seems to have paralyzed her in some way. She has the cash well hidden, she has her memories well buried, but she isn’t in motion. These people must be in motion.

We must poke little Pami.

9

Pami lunged upright out of sleep, staring at the window, terror in her heart, the taste of vomit in her throat. Dim amber illumination from a distant streetlight defined the open glassless rectangle of window, indicated the shape of the canvas cot and metal bureau crammed into this narrow closet of a room, but those weren’t what Pami saw What Pami saw, though now she was awake and her eyes were open, was the nightmare.

Her right arm ached with the tension of slashing at the dream shark; her belly was cramped from the horror of those shark teeth grinding through her middle. The drowning water, heavy and dark as blood, still lay on her face, bearing her down. Her heart pounded, bile moved in her throat, her nerves all jumped and trembled as though she’d just been electrocuted.

The shark dream wasn’t the only violent phantasm to destroy her nights since the murder of the Danish man, it was merely the one most often repeated. But there was also the dream in which she chopped off her mother’s breasts and ate them, her nose filling with blood and milk. And the one where biting ants covered her body, crawling into her nose and ears and all her body openings, red ants, biting, stinging, drawing blood, a blanket of swarming red ants eating her as she ran...

There was no movement of air in the hot night. The room smelled like blood, like the Danish man’s hotel room. Trembling, her movements exaggerated and uncoordinated, Pami pushed away her single sheet and clambered from the cot to lean out the window in search of air. But there was no air. The hot night of Nairobi lay against her face like the blood/water of the dream, a palpable presence. She looked up at the starless black sky, clouded over and oppressive, then down at the narrow dirty lane two flights below. The streetlight was at the corner with the main road, four buildings away, and not much of its light made it through the trees down there. Nothing seemed to move in the lane.

Pami backed from the window and sat on the cot, trying to force herself to be calm. No matter how many times the dreams came at her, no matter how often the same ones repeated, they still terrified her, the effects still lasted for hours, they still destroyed sleep. This can’t go on like this, she thought. I have to sleep.

She looked at the wood strips of the wall beneath the window. Behind them was the attaché case, with all the money still in it, every bill. She’d never even counted it, had merely brought it home that day and pulled out the wood strips, shoved the attaché case in, put the wood strips back in place, and gone on with her life exactly as before, hooking for the European Johns, making just enough to exist, living in this “residential hotel” that was filled with other whores, with their pimps, and with a few strong-arm robbers as well. Nothing had changed, except for the dreams.

It has to stop, she thought, and she hated it that every time she took in breath the air still smelled like that hotel room, dark and repulsive with spilled blood. She had to sleep, but she couldn’t sleep. I can’t stay in this room any more, she thought.

Her few clothes were in the top drawer of the dresser. She chose a dress — she’d long since thrown out the pale green one from that day — and stepped into her boots, and then got the hammer from under the bed. To protect herself against unwanted invaders at night, she did what many of the residents of this “residence” did: every night, before going to bed, she nailed a block of wood to the floor against the door, so it couldn’t be pushed open from outside. Now she used the hammer to pry that block up, put block and hammer together under the cot, and went out to the dark hall, which smelled more familiarly of urine and bad food. Pulling the door closed behind herself — it would neither latch nor lock — she made her way down the hall toward the stairwell, where faint light came up from the entranceway. She’d meant to go down the stairs and outside, but at the last second changed her mind and went up the stairs instead, the four steep creaking flights to the top floor and then the metal ladder bolted to the wall the final flight up to the roof.

The trapdoor up at the top was often left open, and that’s the way it was tonight. Pami climbed out, resting her palm on the tarpaper roof as she emerged, feeling how the sun’s heat was still husbanded there. She walked slowly to the front of the building, sat on the knee-high brick wall at the edge, and looked far down at the lane, through the trees. The packed dirt of the lane looked almost soft in the darkness way down there, almost like a pillow.

I wonder why I killed the Danish man, she thought. I wonder what I wanted. All I really want is to sleep, not go through this shit any more. Not any of this shit. Not all these Johns that look like the Danish man, not this shitty building where you got to nail yourself in, not this sickness I got in my blood. What happens when the sores start to show? Nobody gonna give me twenty shillings then. Nobody fuck me for free then. What did I want that time! What do I want?

Pami looked up, wishing there were stars. Moisture was on her eyes, and she looked at the sky, wishing there were stars tonight. She let herself relax, looking upward, just relax, not pay any attention at all...

“You gonna jump?”

Startled, Pami stared around the roof, blinking tears out of her eyes. “Where you? Who you?” It had been a woman’s voice, but from where?

“Sittin over here,” said the woman, and when she waved her arm over her head Pami could see that she was a person sitting in the front corner of the roof, her back against the L of the low wall. “But if you gonna jump,” the woman went on, “lemme go downstairs first.”

“I’m not gonna jump,” Pami said. She got up from the wall, tottering a little, losing her balance and then catching it again before she fell over the wall. “Never meant to jump,” she said, feeling sullen and spied on.

“You wouldn’t be the first, if you did. From this roof.”

“Well, I didn’t. Just came up for some air is all.”

“Me, too.”

Pami approached the woman, and now she could see it was just another whore like herself, another skinny young dark woman with nowhere to go. Pami sat on the wall again, nearer the woman, but this time on the side wall, where there was no more than a seven-or eight-foot drop to the roof of the next building.

“I come up here at night when I can’t sleep,” the woman said, “and dream.”

“I don’t like to dream,” Pami said.

“I like to dream when I’m awake,” the woman told her. “I come up here and I dream what Pd do if I had a lot of money.”

Pami suddenly felt alert. A lot of money? Was this some sort of sign, some sort of omen? She said, “What would you do? If you had a lot of money, what would you do?”

“Well, I’d get away from here, to start,” the woman said, and laughed.

Pami laughed with her, thinking about the money in the wall. She hadn’t gone away from here, to start. She hadn’t done anything at all to start. She said, “Where would you go?”

“America,” the woman said.

Pami looked at her in surprise. “America? Why?”

“Why not? That’s where the rich people are, isn’t it? If I had a lot of money, I’d want to be with the rich people.”

What could I do in America? Pami asked herself, and the question made her feel strange.

The woman was going on, soothing herself with her voice, like a lullaby: “Oh, I’d go to America, and I’d go where the black people are in America, and then everybody think I’m American, too. I got English, just like them. I’d have water all the time, wash in, drink, wash my clothes. Well, I’d have lots of clothes.”

“Sure you would,” Pami said, making fun of her.

“No, but I mean for the police,” the woman said.

Pami frowned, leaning toward the woman, saying, “Clothes for the police! What are you talking about?”

“Well, I wouldn’t want them to send me back,” the woman said. “See, let’s say I’ve got all this money.”

“Okay.”

“Just like I am,” the woman went on, “I go by the ticket office, I put down thirty thousand shillins, say, ‘Gimme a ticket to New York.’ You know what they think?”

“They think you’re rich,” Pami said.

“Not me, they don’t,” the woman said, with bitter self-knowledge. “Me, they think, drugs. Here’s this little girl, she got no suitcases, she payin cash for her airplane ticket, she’s just a little up-country girl never been anywhere before, just got a brand-new passport last week, they call the police in New York, they say, ‘Keep an eye on this girl, she gets off the airplane. Take a look in her twat, you likely find some balloons fulla cocaine.’”

“But there ain’t any cocaine,” Pami said, and absently patted herself, as though in approval of her innocence.

“No, but they’re lookin at you,” the woman told her. “You don’t ever want the police lookin at you, because then they say you’re undesirable and they make you turn around and take the next plane back, and you don’t want to come back. Not here.”

“No, I don’t,” Pami agreed.

“I got it all planned,” the woman said. “First I go buy a couple better-lookin dresses than what I got. Then I buy a suitcase. Then I get my passport. Then I go to a travel place and say my rich boyfriend in the government just died and left me all this cash money, and I buy a round-trip ticket and I pay the travel people right here in Nairobi to get me a room in a hotel in New York, a regular tourist hotel so I look like a regular tourist, so then when I get on the plane nobody got any reason to look at me.”

“Round trip? Why spend that money?”

“They don’t let you in America if they think you’re gonna stay.”

“You got it all figured out,” Pami said, in admiration.

“It’s my way to dream,” the woman said. “Someday I’ll fly away from here. If I don’t fly on an airplane” — and she jabbed her thumb over her shoulder, pointing above the wall behind her — “I’ll fly that way. One how or another, someday I’ll fly. I like to dream about the good way.”

Pami sat leaning forward, sharp elbows on skinny legs, looking at the woman, thinking about the different ways to fly. She didn’t say anything. She felt calm. The bad dreams weren’t with her here, they were all down in the room.

The woman turned her head, looking toward the eastern horizon. “Daytime,” she said. “Same old daytime.”

Pami didn’t say anything.

10

The two-breakfast morning was bad for Congressman Stephen Schlurn, as he well knew, but how could he avoid it? There are only so many hours in the day, there’s a re-election every two years, and the primary job of any congressman is to keep in touch. It used to be a goal of hometown newspapers to mention every family in the area at least once a year, to keep alive the notion that this is your newspaper, which you should read all the time; a congressman’s task was similar, except there was the question of power added to the equation. Powerless families need not be stroked so often; the powerful need constant reassurance of their power.

Thus the two-breakfast morning, and often the two-or three-lunch mid-day, the two-dinner evening, and, during campaign time, horrid “ethnic” snacks as well, all day long. Jerry Seidelbaum, the congressman’s chief administrative assistant, kept a large supply of tablet-form Pepto-Bismol in his attaché case, but the damage was being done, nonetheless.

This morning’s first breakfast, at eight, was in a yellow-concrete-block-and-glaring-overhead-fluorescent-light Knights of Columbus hall, with an entire Little League’s coaching staff, the kind of local businessmen who volunteer their time and effort and money — good qualities, very good qualities — but only to what they think of as manly endeavors.

Congressman Schlurn found it hard as hell to be manly at eight in the morning, but that was the task, so his remarks were modified Harry Truman give-em-hell stuff, with some slightly off-color baseball jokes thrown in. The food was miserable dank scrambled eggs that looked like Little Orphan Annie’s hair and tasted like baby vomit, plus Vienna sausages that had been cremated for several days and white toast drowned in butter.

This way lies cardiac arrest. The congressman contented himself with just enough coffee to give him heartburn, smiled for an hour, and got out of there just as rapidly as he could.

In the car, with Lemuel the chauffeur up front and Schlurn and Jerry Seidelbaum in the roomy back, Schlurn moodily chewed Pepto-Bismol and listened as Jerry briefed him on breakfast number two: “The food should be better, anyway.”

“That doesn’t help. What I need is no food, possibly for a week.”

Jerry knew not to respond to Schlurn’s self-pity, but merely to march on: “Your host is Hodding Cabell Carson, president of Grayling University.”

“Ah, Grayling,” Schlurn said, smiling in a rare moment of honest pleasure. “They gave me an honorary degree once, didn’t they?”

“Twice. Nine years ago, and three years ago.”

“Lovely place. Ivied buildings, long walks in the quad. That’s where I should have gone.” In fact, Schlurn had gone to Queens College and City University in New York; his law degree was the sort that made Ivy Leaguers smile patronizingly. But a congressman didn’t get smiled at patronizingly, no matter what his collegiate background; one of the advantages, to make up for those scrambled eggs.

Jerry said, “In addition to Carson, there will be Tony Potter, chief executive officer of Unitronic Labs.”

“Defense?”

“Only peripherally. Blue-sky stuff, mostly, alternative energy sources.”

“Oh, God,” Schlurn said. “Windmills.”

“No, no, no, Steve, these aren’t Greenpeace people. They’re a wholly owned subsidiary of Anglo Dutch Oil.”

Which rang a bell. Schlurn said, “I’ve met Tony Potter. He’s a Brit.”

“Almost to excess,” Jerry commented.

“What’s our subject?”

“Dr. Marlon Philpott.”

Schlurn’s round pasty face wrinkled with thought. “Why do I know that name?”

“Scientist. Physicist. Testifies in Washington sometimes.”

“He teaches at Grayling, right?”

“He’s one of the jewels in their crown,” Jerry agreed. “He’s also funded by Unitronic.”

“Will he be there?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“Then what’s the purpose of our joyful gathering?”

“I imagine they’ll tell us,” Jerry said, “when we get there.”

Schlurn remembered Carson when he saw him again: the kind of vainglorious WASP who made his teeth ache, as though he’d bitten down on aluminum foil. Being, like all American WASPs, a fawning anglophile, Carson introduced Tony Potter as though he were the Second Coming at the very least. “From across the pond,” Carson said, showing his big horse teeth. “We’re happy he could make time this morning. Happy you both could.”

“We’ve met,” Tony Potter said. His handshake was firm without being aggressive. A big-boned but trim man in his mid-forties, with a pleasantly lumpy face and calmly self-confident eyes, he would have stood six foot four if he didn’t slouch so much, as though his spine were made of rubber. That the slouch itself was a form of condescension to the lesser orders was clear, but unimportant; Tony Potter was insignificant to the life and career of Stephen Schlurn. It was Hodding Cabell Carson who was important to Schlurn, unfortunately.

The fifth member of the group was Wilcox Harrison, Grayling’s provost, from the same background as Carson but less obnoxious. Introductions were completed and idle breaking-the-ice chitchat continued for a minute or two in Carson’s impressive office before Carson said, “Well, shall we go in to breakfast?”

“Lovely,” Tony Potter said, and smiled at Schlurn, saying, “My third of the morning, actually.”

“Only my second,” Schlurn said, warming to the man.

Carson, sounding a bit frosty, as though he didn’t like hearing about other suitors to his guests’ hands, said, “Well, I think you’ll find this the best of them. Shall we?”

They were about to file through the dark-paneled door when Carson’s secretary — a pretty girl — came in from the outer office with a small white slip of paper in her hand. “Congressman? Your Washington office called. Mr. Metz?”

Now what? Schlurn looked pleasant: “Yes?”

“He wanted me to give you this reminder.”

“Thank you.” Schlurn took the paper from the girl, who left as he turned it around and read, “Remember Green Meadow.” He frowned, and showed the note — it was on one of those “While You Were Out” forms — to Jerry, saying, “That’s not till Thursday, is it?”

“That’s right.” Jerry grinned. “A little panic in the office while the boss is away.”

Schlurn shook his head and tucked the note into his side jacket pocket, and they went on to the next-door dining room for breakfast.

Wonderfully fresh orange juice. Chilled sweet melon. Thin-sliced salmon and cream cheese with triangular toast tips. Velvety coffee. All in a room with portraits of former Grayling presidents on the walls, silent black servitors, and wonderful views of the campus out the windows. It was as though that Knights of Columbus hall and those scrambled eggs had never been.

Carson was, if nothing else, a gentleman; he did not bring up the subject of the meeting until the plates had been cleared and his guests were settled comfortably with their final cups of coffee and small chocolate candies. Then, steepling his fingertips over his coffee cup, looking at his own fingernails rather than meeting anyone else’s eye, he said, “What I’d like to talk with you about this morning, Steve, Tony, if I may, is a small problem here at the university you might be able to help me with.”

Chuckling, Tony said, “A small problem, Chip?”

While Schlurn thought, I will never call him “Chip,” Carson chuckled back at Tony and said, “Small with your help, I think.”

“And what is the name of this problem?” Tony asked.

Carson sighed. “Dr. Marlon Philpott.”

At once, Tony’s expression grew more serious. He said, “Women? Alcohol? Embezzlement?”

But Carson, almost in a panic, was madly waving his hands in front of his face, like a man bedeviled by gnats. “Oh, no, no, no,” he cried, “nothing like that. Good heavens, I don’t want to malign the man’s reputation.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Tony said. “What in fact is his problem, then?”

“Explosions,” Carson said.

They all waited for more, sitting around the table like people who haven’t quite gotten the joke and know they haven’t quite gotten the joke, but Carson had said it all. Silent, he sipped coffee and looked at them in mute appeal.

Since Tony had been handling the conversation up till now, Schlurn saw no reason to leap in at this baffling juncture, so he sat back, fiddling with his coffee cup’s handle — even velvety coffee is less than pleasant if you already have heartburn — and eventually Tony said, “Do I take you to mean, Chip, that our friend Marlon blows things up?”

“Not often,” Carson said. “I’ll give him that, the explosions are rare enough. But, gentlemen, look at this setting!” he cried, passion suddenly in his voice as he gestured broadly at the windows. “This is not the setting for explosions! Not even occasional explosions, minor explosions, unimportant explosions. The students are not paying twenty-two thousand dollars a year to be in an environment of explosions.”

With a reminiscent grin, Tony said, “Some of them might quite like it, if I remember rightly my own undergraduate days.”

“Their parents wouldn’t,” Carson said.

“Quite right,” Tony said. “Point taken. And now you have something to suggest to alleviate this problem, I take it?”

“It’s more in the form of a question, or a request, than a suggestion,” Carson said. “What I would like to do, with your assistance, Tony, and yours, Steve, is find Dr. Philpott another location, not terribly far from campus, for his laboratory.”

Tony frowned, clearly not seeing it. “Some sort of concrete bunker out in a field somewhere, you mean?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that.” Carson toyed with his coffee cup, choosing his words. “Dr. Philpott does need a fairly sophisticated infrastructure in which to work. I was thinking, frankly, in terms of an existing installation, I don’t know yet precisely which installation, but one that could house Dr. Philpott in the manner he requires, but would at the same time be more... adaptable to the idea of the occasional small controlled explosion.”

“I can’t think what sort of installation that might be,” Tony said.

“Well, that’s where Steve comes in,” Carson told him, smiling at Schlurn with those big teeth.

I’m not going to like this, Schlurn thought. He said, “I do?”

“Through your excellent efforts,” Carson pointed out, “we have a number of military bases in this general area.”

Damn right. One of the key issues for the voters in every election is jobs, and one of the very finest sources of local jobs is a nice military base. Every congressman fights to get more than his share of the nation’s military presence in his district, and Schlurn had seniority enough, clout enough, friends enough, to have done very well in that department.

But so what? Warily, the congressman said, “We do have a few army bases, yes, and air force, too. And that supply depot, and a few other things.”

“One of those,” Carson said, “one of the army bases, say, might be just the perfect spot for Dr. Philpott.”

“Oh, now,” Schlurn said, stalling, putting his cupped hand up in front of his mouth (his habitual gesture, though he didn’t know it, when in a tight spot), “now, wait a minute, I’m not sure the army would like—”

“If Unitronic Laboratories, meaning Tony here,” Carson interrupted, “were to finance the construction of a new lab for Dr. Philpott to military specifications, guaranteeing that whatever — incidents — might occur would be contained away from the normal areas of the base...”

“I suppose we could do that,” Tony said, “but on an army base? Steve, do you think you could deliver such a thing?”

He did not. Schlurn imagined himself in conversation with one of those desk-cowboy generals over at the Pentagon, trying to introduce explosions to an army base. In no way did he want to make such an attempt, to even ask the question, to get the outraged refusal he fully anticipated and knew he would fully deserve. No way.

How to get out of this? How to refuse to even make the request? They were all watching him, waiting. Aware of the sympathetic panic in Jerry Seidelbaum’s eyes, knowing Jerry was not going to come up with any last-minute rescue here, he temporized, saying whatever came into his head: “Well, you know, uh, these are difficult days for the military—”

“All the more reason,” said the implacable Carson, “for them to be accommodating.”

Oh, God. What to do? Schlurn turned to Tony. “What exactly is this research Dr. Philpott’s into? Something about alternate sources of energy?”

“Strange matter,” Carson said sardonically, as though the words were some sort of presumptuous stranger at the gate.

“Yes, that’s right,” Tony said. He told Schlurn, “We’re using up the most fruitful sources of energy on the planet, so eventually, and sooner rather than later, we’ll have to go into other realms to find fresh energy.”

Schlurn, not liking the sound of that, said, “Other realms?”

“According to the scientific chaps,” Tony said, “the two likeliest new sources of energy — almost infinite energy, in either case — are strange matter and black holes.”

Schlurn said, “Aren’t black holes something in outer space?”

“Yes, they are. Extremely dense areas between the stars that give off no reflection at all. Such great density means, if we could tap into a black hole, we’d have energy and to spare for as long as human beings exist.” Tony grinned, and shook his head. “Putting the necessary cable into place,” he said, “several light-years long, is a problem we haven’t quite surmounted yet. Or alternatively, like the Saudis roping an iceberg and dragging it home to the Persian Gulf, to lasso a black hole and tug it to the solar system also still has a few bugs in it to be ironed out. Which leaves strange matter.”

Schlurn said, “Which is?”

“Well, I’m not quite sure,” Tony admitted. “Something like anti-matter, I take it. But very dense, like black holes, and therefore potentially another limitless source of energy. Some scientists, our Dr. Philpott among them, believe it would be possible to create strange matter here on Earth, which eliminates the access problems of the black holes.”

Schlurn nodded, thinking hard. “So what Dr. Philpott is doing,” he said, “is looking for an extremely powerful new energy source.”

“That’s about it.”

And that, Schlurn told himself, is what I’m supposed to sell the Pentagon as a desirable new neighbor. Lord, deliver me from this. How do I get out of this?

And then, in the depths of his sweaty despair, he suddenly remembered that little piece of paper in his jacket pocket, the reminder from Al Metz, delivered by Carson’s secretary. His hand came down from his mouth. His head lifted. His spine straightened. “Green Meadow,” he said.

They all gave him the same blank stare. Finally, it was Carson’s number two, Harrison, who said, “What about it?”

Schlurn turned to Tony Potter. “Your Unitronic is connected with Anglo Dutch, isn’t it?”

Tony smiled. “We are their creature,” he said.

“And isn’t Anglo Dutch one of the partners in the consortium that owns Green Meadow?”

Now they got it, and they stared at him as though he’d completely lost his mind. Again, it was Harrison who first found voice: “Congressman, Green Meadow is a nuclear power plant.”

“Of course, it is, I know that, I had more than a little to do with making the state adjust some of its regulations so the thing could be built in the first place.”

Harrison shook his head. “You’re suggesting we take a man who makes explosions and put him in a nuclear power plant?”

“Why not?” Schlurn was fired by his idea now, and could defend it as though before the entire House. “God knows the place is used to explosions, that’s what a nuclear power plant is, an endless series of controlled explosions from which we draw off useful power. If it’s possible to build Dr. Philpott a laboratory that would contain any explosion he might come up with, if you’re saying we could do that at an army base, then why not at a nuclear power plant? And the corporate entities involved are interconnected: Unitronic, Anglo Dutch. No complexities of the kind you’d get if it were a government installation.”

Carson, brow corrugated with doubt, turned to Tony. “What do you think, Tony?”

“At first blush,” Tony answered, flashing Schlurn a forgive-me smile, “the idea sounds absolutely bloody bonkers. But if it’s possible to make the lab at all safe, then why not at Green Meadow? And our Marlon would be in a congenial atmosphere there, among like-minded chaps.”

“Exactly,” Schlurn said, as though he’d thought of that argument himself, which he hadn’t.

Hope smoothed Carson’s brow. “Tony? You think it’s possible?”

“Let me make a few phone calls,” Tony answered. “Bruit the idea around a bit. Having our chief researcher actually inside one of our own operations... Yes, let me see what may be done.”

Carson smiled at his guests. “I feel calmer already,” he said.

Ananayel

Here is the thing I’ve learned about the humans. Everything they do is motivated by a crazy quilt of reasons. Almost never do they perform an act merely because it’s the most sensible thing to do at the moment. There are always political reasons as well, or social reasons, or emotional reasons, or religious reasons, or financial reasons, or reasons of prejudice...

Oh, who knows? They wind up doing the wrong thing, usually, is the point, even though that small rational part inside them will briefly have shown the right road to take. A human who can’t ignore common sense to leap firmly into the saddle of the wrong horse is a pretty poor example of the species, all in all.

Me? I was the voice on the phone. I wanted Congressman Schlurn to have Green Meadow in his mind, so I put it in his pocket. To help his reason find, as usual, the wrong action.

11

Kitchen staff were not wanted up on deck. The Europeans paying for this ocean experience in the great world were not supposed to have their vacation interludes spoiled by the sight of Oriental riffraff.

So that was yet another way in which Kwan was wrong for the job. He was middle class, educated, intelligent, gregarious. Down in the kitchens, in what was almost literally the bowels of the ship, surrounded by uneducated illiterate rural peasants with whom he shared absolutely nothing but race, Kwan was bored, frustrated, silenced, imprisoned in his own persona. He had nothing to say to his co-workers and they, God knows, had nothing to say to him.

The kitchens were beneath the dining rooms, one deck below. All food was brought up to the passengers by waiters riding escalators, and for the first few weeks, until he found his own private route, Kwan had often lifted his head from his pot-scrubbing to gaze toward that moving staircase, rising endlessly from this steamy hell to the heaven of easy laughter, good food, intelligent conversation, and beautiful women. Beautiful women: that was probably the hardest deprivation of all.

Kitchen staff were housed in small four-man interior cabins on the same deck as the kitchens. From his room, Kwan could go forward along the narrow long corridor — yellow-painted metal, glaring light bulbs overhead in screened enclosures like catchers’ masks — to the kitchen and the deep sink where he spent his working hours six days a week, or he could go aft an even longer way and eventually out through a heavy metal bulkhead door to a small oval deck.

This was the kitchen staff’s outside exercise area, but few of them ever came out here. Not that very much concern had gone into making the place either useful or attractive. It was an empty space, ringed by a rusty railing. The bumpy metal deck was thickly painted in dark green with rust showing through. Out here, there was a great rush of engine noise and spray-drenched wind, a smell of oil mixed with the clean tang of sea, and the great empty horizon slowly seesawing miles and miles away over the indifferent hungry ocean.

And a ladder.

Afterward, it seemed to Kwan it had taken him far too long, weeks, to notice that ladder, those metal rungs bolted to the skin of the Star Voyager, leading upward to the next setback two decks above. Placed at the farthest starboard edge of this lower deck, the rungs marched up past the picture window of a sternward bar, and then to some unimaginable area reserved for passengers. Kwan saw it, at last, and knew he would have to go up.

Not the escalators; only the waiters were permitted on the escalators, and only while at work. Not the elevators; kitchen staff were forbidden to use them at any time, except for medical emergency, and even then to be accompanied by a ship’s officer. But this ladder; this was Kwan’s route out of hell.

The first time he climbed, frightened, his tense fingers clutching the cold rough metal of the rungs, was a blustery morning when few passengers would be outside and when the bar with the picture window was not yet open. That climb had merely been exploratory, informational. Once he had climbed high enough to see what was beyond the ladder, once he could peek over the level of that upper deck, he stopped, the ship’s vibrations running through his body, and drank it in.

A passenger promenade, one that made a great oval all around the ship. Kwan was startled to see joggers pounding by, even in weather like this. The first of them to thud past, a trim thirtyish man with a fierce inward expression, had scared Kwan mightily, but then he realized the joggers were so thoroughly involved with the interior of their own bodies and minds that they were hardly aware of the outside world at all. A tiny face at the lower right of their peripheral vision made no impact on them.

They won’t jog at night, Kwan told himself, and climbed back down.

His day off was Tuesday. The other six days he worked from eight till eleven in the morning, from one till four in the afternoon, and again from seven till eleven at night, sometimes later. So Tuesday was the only time he’d be able to use his sudden access to what he thought of as the real world.

He still had the clothing he’d worn when he’d come aboard the ship: decent tan slacks, maroon polo shirt, brown loafers. If he shaved more carefully than he usually did these days, if he spoke English, if he kept his nerve, there was no reason why he couldn’t pass as a passenger; there were a few Asiatics sprinkled among the mostly Europeans up there, along with some Americans and even the occasional black. If only the weather would be good next Tuesday; in high seas or driving rain, he wouldn’t be able to make the ascent.

Tuesday was beautiful all day, though Kwan had no way to know that without going out onto that aft deck. By nine at night, the deep black sky showed a million pinholes of stars, with a half-moon low in the east, forward of the ship, where its light would not touch a man climbing the stern ladder. The only truly tricky part was to edge past that picture window, but the crowded bar was filled with people in boisterous conversation, who had long since learned that what they mostly saw at night in that window was their own reflections, and so no longer looked over there.

Hugging the metal wall, Kwan climbed past the window, past the laughing, chattering, drinking people inside, and went on up and up. To stop, and wait, at the very top, while a loving couple with their arms around one another strolled with infuriating slowness past the spot where he crouched. At one moment, he could have reached out and clawed the woman’s ankle.

Gone by at last. Using the rail for support, slipping beneath its lowest crosspiece, he rolled out onto the deck, stood, brushed himself off, and went for his first stroll in the free air.

There were still at this hour people in the dining room, but they had also spread into the lounges and the half dozen bars and the two casinos. Passing through one bar, Kwan picked up an unattended drink and carried it off with him, more for protective coloration than anything else. He was not a drinker, never had been, didn’t believe in it.

But it was impossible to carry the glass around like that without finally at least sipping from it. The taste was sharp, not very pleasant, but as he strolled he continued to sip the drink, and in a surprisingly short time there was almost none of it left.

He was in one of the casinos when he realized he had to either stop drinking or walk around foolishly with an empty glass in his hand. The trouble was, he’d been concentrating on the passengers and on the simple pleasure of walking among ordinary people, and had been paying too little attention to himself.

The passengers. Those in the bars were mostly European, tanned, rich looking, young to middle-aged. Those playing cards in the lounges were mostly American, older and not so prosperous looking. And the casinos seemed to attract a generally older crowd.

Though not entirely. Here and there in the casinos, too, were attractive younger people, like the deeply tanned blonde he now found himself standing next to, watching the action at the craps table. She looked to be in her late twenties, tall and slender and bored, observing the dice and the players with a jaundiced eye. Kwan became aware of her, covertly watched her a while, and then said, “Excuse me.”

She turned her head, raising a skeptical eyebrow: “Yes?”

He gestured at the table: “Do you understand the rules of that game?”

She had known, of course, that he was somebody trying to pick her up, but she hadn’t expected this. She gave a surprised snort of laughter, and then said, “I’m afraid I do, yes.”

“Afraid you do?” Kwan echoed, and vaguely moved the glass: “I’m sorry, my English—”

“Is as good as mine,” she informed him. “Where are you from?”

“Hong Kong.”

“I am from Frankfurt,” she told him, and nodded toward the table. “That is my husband with the dice. You see? There he throws. He’s trying to match a certain number. Sometimes he wins, sometimes he loses.”

Kwan said, “Do you play?”

“Oh, no.” She shrugged. “I could, but I’m not interested. It is Kurt’s vacation to play, and my vacation to watch.”

“Well, at least it’s a vacation,” Kwan said.

Again she looked at him, with more curiosity. “Aren’t you on vacation? Or are you with the ship?”

“Oh, no, not with the ship,” he said, and went into the spiel he’d worked out while waiting for Tuesday. “I am a maritime student, I am doing my thesis on these ships, the company very kindly permitted me to come aboard.”

“Your thesis? About the ships?”

“Well, they have no real transportation purpose,” Kwan told her. “No one is here to travel to a destination.”

“No, of course not,” she agreed. “It’s a vacation.”

“So the competition,” Kwan pointed out, “is not airplanes, but islands.”

She laughed. “Yes, I suppose that’s true.”

“So the thesis,” Kwan went on, beginning to half believe his own story, “is about why people choose this sort of vacation.”

She pointed at the craps table. “That’s your answer, right there. The casinos. No law against gambling on the high seas.”

Smiling, he said, “I’ll need to fill my paper with more words than that.”

“Yes, I suppose you will. I am Helga.”

“Kwan.”

“How do you do?”

Her hand was dry, cool, strong. With a knowing look at him, she said, “Isn’t this when you invite me for a drink?”

In honest confusion, not at all feigning, Kwan said, “Oh, I wish I could, I’m sorry, I—”

“An impoverished student? Really?”

“That’s so.” There was something about being in the presence of a beautiful woman that always turned Kwan into the most supple and glib of liars. Showing her his glass, he said, “I only permit myself one an evening.”

“In that case,” she said, “let me buy you a drink. Is that Scotch?”

He looked at the dregs in the glass. “Yes,” he hazarded.

He’d been wrong. When they settled at a tiny booth in one of the quieter bars — but still lively — and he tasted the tall Scotch and soda the red-jacketed waiter placed before him, it was a very different taste. No telling what that first drink had been.

And no matter. He was seated at a comfortable banquette in a happily humming bar, beside a good-looking woman who kept smiling around her drink and eying him with speculation, he was speaking English, flirting, happy, pretending to be himself at last (much more himself than that kitchen slavey he counterfeited daily down below), and even drinking a second Scotch though he never drank and his head had already begun to swim. But what release was this!

She leaned closer to him, lowering her voice but making sure he could still hear her. “The casino closes at two. Kurt never leaves before it closes, and I can’t possibly stay here that long. Walk me to my cabin, will you?”

“I will,” he said.

She woke him with sharp fingers and sharp shakings: “We fell asleep!”

At a loss, he stared up at this naked woman bending over him in the amber light, narrow strong breasts presenting themselves but angular face filled with urgency and rejection. “You have to go, it’s nearly two o’clock!”

He remembered. He remembered that body from before, when he’d first seen it, slender and muscular with its bathing suit bands, when all of that beauty and strength had been only for him, to enclose and engulf him. He had been away from women so long that the first look of her had been like the jolt of a drug, a sudden hollowness in his stomach as though the sight of Helga had burned him empty, seared him, and left him trembling but pure. Touching her, smelling her, pushing into her...

But not now: “Wake up! Don’t spoil it all!”

“I’m awake, I’m awake.” He struggled upward, mind reeling, and looked around the small cabin in the amber light for his clothes.

She stood over him, washing her hands. “I’m sorry, Kwan,” she said. “I don’t blame you, we both fell asleep, but you have to hurry.”

“Yes. Yes.” He’d had yet another drink with her in this room, and then perhaps an hour’s sleep; brain and hands were equally numb, thick, uncertain. But he got into his clothes, and she peeked out the slightly open door at the corridor, and said, “It’s all right.”

They pressed together for just a moment in the doorway, she still naked, his left hand sliding down the wonderful slope of her spine. This body...

She saw it in his eyes, and responded, her own eyes gleaming, mouth softening. But then she shook her head. “I’ll see you tomorrow night,” she murmured.

“Till then,” he whispered, knowing he would never see her again, and had to bite the inside of his cheeks to force back the tears. He had never felt so cheated, so depressed, so sorry for himself in his life. This was what he was supposed to have. An easy life, lovely women, the rewards of his class and education and looks and brains. She gently pushed him out, and shut the door.

What have I sacrificed, to become a creature of politics? But at the same time he knew, he knew even now, that all the rest of it could never be more than joy for the moment, that he was a creature of politics, that his devotion to the democratic cause was as intense as his craving for Helga’s body but more lasting, that a sacrifice wasn’t something you did to prove your worthiness but something that was done to you as an inevitable result of your commitment. There would be Helgas and Helgas, there would always be Helgas. Would there ever again be a chance for him to help break the stranglehold of the ancient murderers?

Stumbling along the endless corridors — but wider up here and better illuminated — Kwan realized he was drunk and lost and probably in a great deal of trouble. If he didn’t find his way back, if he wasn’t in his position at that deep sink by eight in the morning, he would have done the worst thing he could do: he would have attracted their attention. The ship’s officers would have cause to study his papers, to study him, to learn about him, to decide whether to turn him over to the regime of the ancient murderers or merely boot him off the ship in some other hellhole, nearly as bad.

“Outside,” he told himself. If he could find the deck, the clear air should clear his head, and then he would find the right deck, the promenade, and the ladder. That it was the ladder down to hell wasn’t important; what was important was that he find it and use it.

He did soon stumble across a bulkhead door leading to the deck, but he was wrong about the outside air making him less drunk; in fact, it seemed to make him drunker than before. He reeled to the railing and clung there a few moments while the world looped and swung around him, wondering if he would throw up.

No; not quite. At last he could lift himself and look around and decide which way was aft. He went that way, staggering, alone on the deck, the moon now high above him to the left and ahead, throwing his shadow back at a long narrow angle diagonally across the deck behind him.

He was already on the promenade deck, which he discovered when he came finally to the rounded stern, and there below him, gleaming palely in the moonlight, was his own empty oval deck. And between here and there, shimmering and seeming to move in the moon’s bright but uncertain light, were the ladder rungs.

He had to go over the rail. Somehow, he had to attach himself, first his feet and then his hands, to those wet metal rungs, and then descend them, as they swayed back and forth with the ship’s progress, in the deceptive moonlight, with his head full of cotton batting and his arms and legs as uncertain as stuffed toys. But he had to do it; no choice.

He began. Eyesight in and out of focus, fingers made of wood, he bent to duck beneath the railing, and a voice in perfect Mandarin said, with some shock, “Wait a minute! What do you think you’re doing there?”

So startled he nearly fell overboard, Kwan managed to fall the other way instead, landed painfully on his hipbone on the deck, and stared up at a short, skinny, bald Chinese man dressed as a room steward, who pointed over the side and severely said, “Are you trying to get down there? You’ll never do it.”

Amazed to hear Mandarin at this time in this place, but drunk enough to answer literally, Kwan said, “I have to.”

“Where are you from, the kitchen? Snuck up here, did you?” The steward smirked, letting Kwan know he was a naughty boy but the steward didn’t really mind. “Well, you’ll never get down there,” he said. “Believe me, you’ll miss a rung, you’ll go overboard, you’ll drown out in the sea, nobody will even see you go.”

“You’ll see me,” Kwan objected, with drunken clarity.

“Never mind me,” the steward said, being severe again. “You’re too important to lose like this.”

Kwan stared, almost shocked into sobriety. “You recognize me?”

“Yes, of course.” The steward reached down to grasp Kwan’s arm and yank him upright, surprisingly strong for such a little man. “You have a role to play,” he said. “Come with me.”

“Where?”

“A safer way,” the little man said, and led Kwan inside, and down one flight of carpeted stairs and along another corridor to another door. “You can’t use this ever again,” he cautioned Kwan. “Normally it’s locked.”

“Thank you,” Kwan said. “Thank you.” Because he understood through his fog that the little man had saved his life.

“Yes, yes,” the little man said, gesturing Kwan through the doorway. “Just be more careful from now on,” he said, as testy as though Kwan were his personal responsibility.

Teetering but safe, Kwan made his way down the steep stairs to the kitchens, and along the yellow corridor to his room and his bunk.

And next day, at the sink, did he pay for it.

12

The excitement boiling within her was so great when she actually set foot on the airplane that she wobbled on her new shoes and smiled like a stupid up-country child at the stewardess, who offered a more professional smile as she reached for Pami’s boarding pass; studied it; returned it: “Just down this aisle, in the fourth cabin.”

“Thank you.” The words came out a whisper. Her clogged throat, full of emotion, wouldn’t even make words. But it didn’t matter; the stewardess’s attention was already on the next passenger.

Each person has a special seat. Pami understood that, but wasn’t sure just how each person found his special seat. She wandered down the aisle, carrying her new large plastic purse, past people stowing luggage and removing coats and moving back and forth, and when she came to another uniformed stewardess she mutely extended the boarding pass. “Next cabin,” the woman said, pointing. “On your right.”

Nothing to do but keep going forward. Past the next partition — so probably into the next “cabin” — she went, her heart fluttering, her eyes panic-stricken with the problem of finding the right seat but her mouth still uncontrollably beaming, showing her poor teeth. Arrived in the right cabin, she just stood there in the narrow aisle, bag in one hand and boarding pass in the other, and waited. People pushed past her, unswervingly drawn to their own seats, and she began to hope that eventually there would only be one unoccupied place left along the right here, and it would be hers.

I’m going away, she thought, and smiled so hard her cheeks hurt. I’m going away. I’m flying.

The second stewardess reappeared, looked at Pami, assessed the situation, and soothingly said, “Having trouble finding your seat? May I see your boarding pass?”

Pami showed it. She felt like a little girl handing a flower to her mama.

“Oh, yes, you’re right here,” the stewardess said, returning the pass and gently touching Pami’s elbow to move her on down the aisle. “The middle seat right there, next to that gentleman.”

Pami’s heart leaped when she saw the blond man in the aisle seat. He looked so like the Danish man! But, of course, he wasn’t, he couldn’t be, and when the man looked up she saw that he was probably twenty years younger than the Danish man, and was in much better physical condition.

Oh, could he be the Danish man’s son? That would be so bad, so bad...

But then the man smiled and got to his feet, saying, “This seat yours?” and he was absolutely an American. And he didn’t really look like the Danish man at all. Just the blond hair and the smooth white face, that’s all, and being tall and big-shouldered.

Pami took her place, between the blond man on the aisle and a small dark man in a turban in the window seat, and the stewardess went away, satisfied. Pami sat with knees together, plastic bag clutched in her arms, looking straight ahead, and after a minute the blond man said, “Excuse me, but they’ll want you to put your seat belt on.”

“What?”

He repeated the statement, then showed her how to fasten the seat belt, demonstrating by unfastening and refastening his own. She watched carefully, found the ends of the two straps somewhere beneath herself, and clicked them together. But apparently a huge fat person had sat in this seat last; laughing, the blond man showed her how to tighten the belt. Doing so, she confessed, “I never been in a plane before.”

“Don’t worry, your part is easy,” he assured her. “The pilot has the tough job.”

He was so pleasant and calm that she began to be calm herself. It didn’t even bother her too much when the stewardess came by again and said she couldn’t keep her bag on her lap during takeoff, but had to put it on the floor under the seat in front of her. She did it because she had to, but she kept her eyes and one foot on the bag, because it contained sixty dollars in green American bills, and eight hundred dollars in traveler’s checks, all that was left of the Danish man’s money.

The three weeks since the talk on the roof had been frightening, bewildering, exhilarating. At every step, she was unsure what she was about, afraid she’d be caught somehow, that by actually doing something with the Danish man’s money instead of keeping it as a kind of fetish, a magic keepsake, the law would find out and suddenly throw her in jail for murder. She was scared the whole time, every step of the way, but after that talk on the roof she’d known she had to make the try, she couldn’t just go on living as before.

I don’t want to kill myself, she kept telling herself during that time. I know I won’t live many more years anyway, but I want them, I want every day I got coming. I don’t want my life to get so bad I’ll want to throw it away.

So she had to make the attempt. She had to at least try. And the thing was, every place she went, to a dress store, or a suitcase store, or a bank, or the American embassy on Wabera Street, everywhere, somebody always turned up that was helpful, that knew the ropes and could give her advice or keep her from making stupid up-country mistakes. It was as though somebody was watching over her, holding her hand as she went about doing all these things. She believed in the spirits of the air and the spirits of the water and the spirits of the trees, and one of these spirits must be near her, protecting her, that’s what it had to be. Maybe the Danish man had been a very evil man, and when she killed him she made a spirit happy, and it was repaying her. Or maybe some relative from home had died and was now a spirit, and was seeing the world through her. Something was with her now on her journey through life, something that had never been there before. She could feel it.

When the plane began to move, she became extremely nervous and felt she had to relieve herself right away, but she was hemmed in by the blond man and the man with the turban, and the seat belt was around her middle, and nobody was supposed to stand up in the airplane at this time, and she was still afraid of drawing attention to herself. She clenched all her muscles, she held everything in, and the plane moved, stopped, moved, stopped, moved, rushed, and took off! Openmouthed, she stared past the sullen-looking man in the turban and watched the tan ground fall away, and then saw nothing but sky. “Ohhhh,” she said, and lost her nervousness, and didn’t have to relieve herself any more.

After a while, wonderful food was brought around, a separate tray for everybody. Far too much food for Pami to eat; she did her best, and then put in her bag the cake wrapped in clear plastic. Then she napped a little while, coming down off the high of three weeks of tension, and when she woke up, feeling a little stiff and cramped, there was a movie starting to be shown on the front wall of the cabin. It was called Angels Unawares, and you could buy earphones to listen to it, but Pami didn’t need to listen to it. She watched the people move on the wall, and dozed, and felt Kenya fall away behind her. All up over Africa the plane would fly, and sail high above the Mediterranean Sea, and soar over France, and glide, and turn, and come down at Heathrow Airport in London in England. There she would get on another plane that would take her over the Atlantic Ocean to New York City. Great huge strides across the world!

The movie ended, and she slept some more, and awoke because something was wrong. Something tense was in the air, near her. She looked around, tasting the badness in her mouth, and beside her the blond man was frowning, gripping the armrests, looking surprised and angry. “So that’s it,” he said.

Pami looked up at him like a mouse peering out of a grainsack. “What? Mister?”

He didn’t answer; he was waiting for something. She waited, too, and suddenly from somewhere near the front of the plane came a burst of screams, men and women screaming. Wide-eyed, Pami cowered in her seat. The screams stopped abruptly, as though a switch had been turned off, and then a voice came over the loudspeaker:

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Cathcart again. I’m instructed to inform you that this aircraft is now in the control of representatives of the International League of the Oppressed. I’m instructed to inform you that all passengers should remain quietly in their seats and no harm will befall them.”

The pilot’s voice went on, sounding flat, all emotion rigidly suppressed, and Pami saw the man come striding down the aisle. His head and face were wrapped in an olive-and-black-patterned scarf, and he wore dark sunglasses as well. He was dressed in boots and blue jeans and a black shirt and a brown leather jacket, and he carried a machine pistol. He looked exactly like the photos on the magazine covers, showing the terrorists.

The pilot went on with two or three more sentences of what he had been instructed to say, and the terrorist came down the aisle and stopped next to the blond man. Ignoring the blond man, holding the machine pistol with its barrel aimed upward, he pointed with his other hand at Pami and said, “You come with me.”

Pami shrank back into the seat, smaller and smaller. The blond man, sounding very strong, said, “You can’t have her.”

The terrorist looked at him with scorn: “Do you know who I am?”

“I know what you are,” the blond man said.

X

I don’t have to explain myself.

The instant I saw it there, sitting with the woman, I knew what it was. The stench of God was all over it, like dried roots, like stored apples. Laughing! And a servant.

I am not a servant. We are not servants. He Who We Serve is not our master, but our lover. We act from our will, no others. Could this... thing say as much? Or any of its swooping, tending, message-bearing ilk?

And did its master really think he could sweep away this compost heap without the knowledge of He Who We Serve? We love this world! How it seethes, how it struggles, how it howls in pain, what colors there are in its agony! It is our greatest joy, the human race. We cannot see it removed, like game pieces from a table at the end of the day, simply because he’s bored.

Don’t be afraid, you wretched vermin. We will save you.

Ananayel

There is a language which is no language, which we of the empyrean understand, and which these fallen creatures still remember. While my human mouth made words, and his human mouth made words, we spoke to one another:

“You have no place here,” I told him, which was simply the truth.

He snarled at me. It is so hard to believe these were once angels as well; how thoroughly they’ve forgotten their former grace. He said, “This is more my place than yours. I am not here to destroy it.”

So his master knew what was going to happen, did he? And, having learned nothing over the millennia about the futility of opposing the desires of God, the master of this creature has sent his minions into the field yet again, to do battle against God’s commandments. I rose and said, “Don’t you know that the triumphs of Evil are always transitory? God’s Will will be done.”

“Not today,” he said. “We want the woman.”

“You already have her,” I said, glancing down at the poor diseased malevolent bitch. “But you can’t take her with you just yet.”

“I want her now. I’ll take her now.”

It would, of course, be possible to start again, to assemble another team, perhaps lingually linked in French this time, shifting the basic scene from New York to Lyons, but I refused to do it. This creature and his master must not be permitted even the most temporary successes. So I resisted. Leaning closer to him, gazing through those dark sunglass lenses into the red depth of his borrowed eyes, I said, “Do you really want an exchange of miracles, here in a Boeing 747? Do you really want to give these humans an array of anomalies to decipher?”

“All I want is the woman.” He was trying to be implacable with me. Me!

“She is part of the plan.”

“That’s why I want her.”

“That’s why you can’t have her.”

He turned those eyes on the woman, smoking burning eyes, and spoke to her in the human way: “Get up from there.”

“God Almighty,” I prayed, “grant me a crumb of Your power.”

The response lifted me gently into the air, my feet no more than an inch from the industrial carpet. His attention swiveled from the woman to me, his eyes showed alarm, then understanding. He raised a hand—

I stopped time.

Everything. It stopped. In all the corporal universe, everything was rigid, unmoving, unfeeling, made of stone. Energy was not employed, matter did not decay. Nothing was kinetic, everything was inert. In all of that vast silent stillness, flat and dead, without even an echo, only that devil and I, in the clumsy airplane suspended in unmoving air over the unturning Earth, continued to move, act, think, struggle.

His raised hand pointed at me, and my body filled with leprous organisms, my eyes were clouded by cataracts, my throat clogged with open sores. Toads sprang from my mouth. Every sense was confounded, every thought distracted, every pain and woe at his command was flung at me, to grapple and clamp me, addle my powers, deflect my intentions, absorb me in self-defense while he got on about his prideful business.

I fought back. I swept away everything he hurled at me, killing, searing, wiping clean, purifying as rapidly as he befouled, until there came an instant of total freedom from his onslaught. Then I looked at him. I looked at him with my real eyes.

That body he was wearing was burned to a crisp. The body was reduced to ashes, the ashes to molecules in the ambient air, till there was nothing left but a tiny, buzzing, furious black fly, a black streak, a smear, a smudge, flashing back and forth in front of me, shrieking its defiance. I was ready to destroy that manifestation as well, but it fled away into business class, and I felt myself near the end of my borrowed power. I had to restore the situation to what it had been.

I reconstructed the body the demon had used, or a near enough facsimile, and inhabited it. The previous body I carefully lowered until its shoes touched carpet once more, then left it simple instructions that would carry it until I could return.

I released time.

The woman had been looking at my former self, as though for help and rescue, and now she blinked and looked confused. No doubt she’d seen that body appear to rise, then blur, then all at once be back where it had been. But she would assume the error was in her eyes, perhaps some manifestation of her terror, or of her disease. Already, she was looking away from the old me toward the new me, afraid to obey my order and afraid not to.

“Never mind,” I told her. This voice was more guttural, this body more uncomfortable. I looked — almost with envy — at my roomy former self. “Sit down,” I told it.

It sat. The expression on its face remained stern. Its movements were only faintly off, only slightly in the direction of the cumbersome.

“You both wait there,” I ordered, waving the machine pistol with obvious menace. “I’ll get back to you. We’ll see who you can defy.” And I turned away and marched toward the front of the aircraft, to deal with my fellow hijackers. They were human, and would be no trouble.

13

Pami watched the terrorist stride away, beyond the partition and out of sight. What happened there? Her vision was briefly blurred, her stomach and all of her insides were roiled and loose, her mouth was as dry as the desert in which she’d grown up, her arms and feet twitched uncontrollably.

But he didn’t take her when he went away. The blond man had stood up and talked back to the terrorist, arguing with him, saying not-to-pick-on-women-take-him-instead-and-this-and-that, and the terrorist snarled and argued and was, of course not going to pay any attention to such stuff. And then he went away.

Pami peered sidelong, in awe and fear and relief, at her rescuer. The blond man still looked stern. He sat there with his big hands placed slackly on the armrests, feet planted, gazing forward toward where the terrorist had disappeared. Pami whispered, “Will he come back?”

“We’ll just wait here,” he said. Tension showed in how woodenly he sat and spoke, how he kept facing forward as he talked. “We won’t make any moves, won’t attract attention to ourselves.”

“Oh, yes.”

She dared to reach out and touch the back of his hand for just an instant, and it was surprisingly cold. How much effort it must have taken for him to stand up and defy an armed terrorist!

This was the only man in Pami’s entire life toward whom she had ever had any reason to feel grateful. She didn’t know what to do with the feeling, with the obligation. There was no way to repay him, nothing she could give him or do for him. That would be some expression of gratitude, wouldn’t it, to infect him with slim! A faint smile touched her small, secret, twisted face, and she turned away to see the turbanned man on her other side all scrunched up, eyes tight closed as he moved a set of wooden beads through his trembling fingers. His heavy lips moved without sound. Somebody’s religion, it must be.

Gunshots suddenly sounded from near the front of the plane, many fast gunshots, and more screaming. And then silence.

The turbanned man squeezed his shoulders higher around his ears, pressed his beads harder between the balls of his fingertips, and his lips moved faster and faster above his quaking round chin. Everyone in this cabin waited, hardly daring to breathe, and the silence went on and on.

Then all at once the blond man shifted, seemed to relax, and nodded. He looked at Pami, who hadn’t noticed before how powerful his eyes were. “So that’s that,” he said.

X

Calm. We will be calm. We shall not indulge our wrath until it is of some use. But then. Then!

It won the first round, yes it did, that pallid serf, that spiritless spirit, god’s golem. Yes. They do win sometimes, but that’s only to be expected; after all, we’re very evenly matched. We were like them, Satan protect us, before we won our freedom.

As for the widespread belief that they inevitably win, well, that’s just crap, isn’t it? Of course, it is. If they inevitably won, we’d no longer be here, would we? But here we are.

And here you are, you scrofulous fleas. And now he’s after you as well, isn’t he? Now you’ll know what it’s like to suffer his snotty displeasure. But be encouraged. He can be resisted, as we are here to prove. He was just an early master of propaganda, that’s all.

But how shall we save you bilious earth-lice from your creator’s boredom? First we have to know what he’s up to. He’s always, of course, up to something: testing Job and Isaac, tempting Thomas and Judas, on and on. Idle hands are whose workshop?

He Who We Serve was going to and fro in the Earth, and walking up and down in it, as was his wont, when he came upon one of the bloodiest slaughters of a Dane since the good old days of Elsinore. But the Dane didn’t exist. He reacted with the Njoroge woman, she sliced him into stew meat, he died, and yet he was without existence. Once the woman had fled with the sack of loot, the body vanished. The blood unsprayed itself. The mattress became unslashed. The towels returned, laundered, to their folded positions in the bathroom. The deed became, in short, undone.

God’s baroque hand was clear in this playlet, because we hadn’t done it. Pami Njoroge is not a creature we need to subvert. He Who We Serve maintains contacts in the adversary’s camp, and even on occasion visits there himself, so it didn’t take him long to find out what had really happened in that Nairobi hotel room. Significantly, god isn’t using a slavey who’s already had extensive contact with humans, one of his ordinary lickspittles like Michael or Gabriel or Raphael. As spineless as the rest, they still might have developed some sympathy for the wretched human race during previous contacts. So no, he chose Ananayel, a timeserver, a mediocrity, as nondescript as an umbrella in the lost-and-found.

But what is Ananayel doing? What is that flunkey up to? Torturing a Bantu whore, yes, using elaborate stratagems to move her from her normal mud wallow to the similar but far-off dung heap called New York, and at the same time encouraging in her emotions of guilt and despair. But what is she to do, this blowfly, once she gets to New York? How can a miserable midge like Pami Njoroge bear any direct responsibility for the end of the human race? She has even less knowledge and power than normal among her kind.

So there are others in the scheme. That bleached sycophant, Ananayel, is assembling them, isn’t he, from somewhere? Moving them to New York, putting them together, letting them do the job themselves. That’s god’s way, isn’t it? Deniability. “They brought it on themselves,” he’ll say, with that airy smugness of his.

Well, we’re alert now. We’re on the job. My companions have spread across the world, searching for the spoor of Ananayel’s passage. Whatever humans he has touched, chosen, altered, moved, we will crush like a louse between a chimpanzee’s fingertips.

So that you will live. You, my darlings.

The greatest good for the greatest number. Hah!