Masterpieces

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN Sandkings

George R. R. Martin’s varied output is divided among science fiction, fantasy, and horror and has earned him multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards as well as the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association. Much of his best writing runs to novella length, where the scope of the narrative allows exploration of a variety of themes and ideas that cut across genre boundaries. “Sandkings” treats in a futuristic setting an idea as old as the horror classic Frankenstein: the irresponsibility of a man who plays at being God, and the peril he faces when his monster turns on him. “Nightflyers,” adapted for the screen in 1987, sets a haunted house scenario inside an interstellar spaceship. “A Song for Lya” explores the religious beliefs of an extraterrestrial culture as an outgrowth of its unique biology. “Meathouse Man” is one of several stories in which he puts a science fiction spin on the classic horror theme of the zombie. Martin began publishing fiction in 1971. His first novel, Dying of the Light, was published six years later and garnered praise for its detailed portrait of an extraterrestrial culture shaped by the singular nature of the planet it inhabits. Nearly all of Martin’s novels are distinguished by their meticulously conceived backgrounds. Fevre Dream, a period vampire tale, offers a vivid re-creation of life on the Mississippi River in the antebellum South. The Armageddon Rag evokes the American counterculture of the 1960s in its account of a rock band whose music channels the destructive energies and chaos of the time. A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords comprise the first three episodes in his epic Song of Ice and Fire heroic fantasy saga. Martin has also written the novel Wind-haven in collaboration with Lisa Tuttle. His short fiction has been collected in A Song for Lya and Other Stories, Songs the Dead Men Sing, Portraits of His Children, and Tuf Voyaging. He has written for a number of television series, including the new Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast, and edited more than twenty anthologies, including fifteen mosaic novels in the Wild Cards series.

SIMON KRESS LIVED alone in a sprawling manor house among the dry, rocky hills fifty kilometers from the city. So, when he was called away unexpectedly on business, he had no neighbors he could conveniently impose on to take his pets. The carrion hawk was no problem; it roosted in the unused belfry and customarily fed itself anyway. The shambler Kress simply shooed outside and left to fend for itself; the little monster would gorge on slugs and birds and rockjocks. But the fish tank, stocked with genuine Earth piranha, posed a difficulty. Kress finally just threw a haunch of beef into the huge tank. The piranha could always eat each other if he were detained longer than expected. They’d done it before. It amused him.

Unfortunately, he was detained much longer than expected this time. When he finally returned, all the fish were dead. So was the carrion hawk. The shambler had climbed up to the belfry and eaten it. Simon Kress was vexed.

The next day he flew his skimmer to Asgard, a journey of some two hundred kilometers. Asgard was Baldur’s largest city and boasted the oldest and largest starport as well. Kress liked to impress his friends with animals that were unusual, entertaining, and expensive; Asgard was the place to buy them.

This time, though, he had poor luck. Xenopets had closed its doors, t’Etherane the Petseller tried to foist another carrion hawk off on him, and Strange Waters offered nothing more exotic than piranha, glowsharks, and spider-squids. Kress had had all those; he wanted something new.

Near dusk, he found himself walking down the Rainbow Boulevard, looking for places he had not patronized before. So close to the starport, the street was lined by importers’ marts. The big corporate emporiums had impressive long windows, where rare and costly alien artifacts reposed on felt cushions against dark drapes that made the interiors of the stores a mystery. Between them were the junk shops—narrow, nasty little places whose display areas were crammed with all manner of offworld bric-a-brac. Kress tried both kinds of shop, with equal dissatisfaction.

Then he came across a store that was different.

It was quite close to the port. Kress had never been there before. The shop occupied a small, single-story building of moderate size, set between a euphoria bar and a temple-brothel of the Secret Sisterhood. Down this far, the Rainbow Boulevard grew tacky. The shop itself was unusual. Arresting.

The windows were full of mist; now a pale red, now the gray of true fog, now sparkling and golden. The mist swirled and eddied and glowed faintly from within. Kress glimpsed objects in the window—machines, pieces of art, other things he could not recognize—but he could not get a good look at any of them. The mists flowed sensuously around them, displaying a bit of first one thing and then another, then cloaking all. It was intriguing.

As he watched, the mist began to form letters. One word at a time. Kress stood and read:

WO. AND. SHADE. IMPORTERS. ARTIFACTS. ART. LIFE-FORMS. AND. MISC.

The letters stopped. Through the fog, Kress saw something moving. That was enough for him, that and the word “Life-forms” in their advertisement. He swept his walking cloak over his shoulder and entered the store.

Inside, Kress felt disoriented. The interior seemed vast, much larger than he would have guessed from the relatively modest frontage. It was dimly lit, peaceful. The ceiling was a starscape, complete with spiral nebulae, very dark and realistic, very nice. The counters all shone faintly, the better to display the merchandise within. The aisles were carpeted with ground fog. In places, it came almost to his knees and swirled about his feet as he walked.

“Can I help you?”

She seemed almost to have risen from the fog. Tall and gaunt and pale, she wore a practical gray jumpsuit and a strange little cap that rested well back on her head.

“Are you Wo or Shade?” Kress asked. “Or only sales help?”

“Jala Wo, ready to serve you,” she replied. “Shade does not see customers. We have no sales help.”

“You have quite a large establishment,” Kress said. “Odd that I have never heard of you before.”

“We have only just opened this shop on Baldur,” the woman said. “We have franchises on a number of other worlds, however. What can I sell you? Art, perhaps? You have the look of a collector. We have some fine Nor T’alush crystal carvings.”

“No,” Simon Kress said. “I own all the crystal carvings I desire. I came to see about a pet.”

“A life-form?”

“Yes.”

“Alien?”

“Of course.”

“We have a mimic in stock. From Celia’s World. A clever little simian. Not only will it learn to speak, but eventually it will mimic your voice, inflections, gestures, even facial expressions.”

“Cute,” said Kress. “And common. I have no use for either, Wo. I want something exotic. Unusual. And not cute. I detest cute animals. At the moment I own a shambler. Imported from Cotho, at no mean expense. From time to time I feed him a litter of unwanted kittens. That is what I think of cute. Do I make myself understood?”

Wo smiled enigmatically. “Have you ever owned an animal that worshiped you?” she asked.

Kress grinned. “Oh, now and again. But I don’t require worship, Wo. Just entertainment.”

“You misunderstand me,” Wo said, still wearing her strange smile. “I meant worship literally.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I think I have just the thing for you,” Wo said. “Follow me.”

She led Kress between the radiant counters and down a long, fog-shrouded aisle beneath false starlight. They passed through a wall of mist into another section of the store, and stopped before a large plastic tank. An aquarium, thought Kress.

Wo beckoned. He stepped closer and saw that he was wrong. It was a terrarium. Within lay a miniature desert about two meters square. Pale sand bleached scarlet by wan red light. Rocks: basalt and quartz and granite. In each corner of the tank stood a castle.

Kress blinked, and peered, and corrected himself; actually only three castles stood. The fourth leaned; a crumbled, broken ruin. The other three were crude but intact, carved of stone and sand. Over their battlements and through their rounded porticoes, tiny creatures climbed and scrambled. Kress pressed his face against the plastic. “Insects?” he asked.

“No,” Wo replied. “A much more complex life-form. More intelligent as well. Considerably smarter than your shambler. They are called sandkings.”

“Insects,” Kress said, drawing back from the tank. “I don’t care how complex they are.” He frowned. “And kindly don’t try to gull me with this talk of intelligence. These things are far too small to have anything but the most rudimentary brains.”

“They share hiveminds,” Wo said. “Castle minds, in this case. There are only three organisms in the tank, actually. The fourth died. You see how her castle has fallen.”

Kress looked back at the tank. “Hiveminds, eh? Interesting.” He frowned again. “Still, it is only an oversized ant farm. I’d hoped for something better.”

“They fight wars.”

“Wars? Hmmm.” Kress looked again.

“Note the colors, if you will,” Wo told him. She pointed to the creatures that swarmed over the nearest castle. One was scrabbling at the tank wall. Kress studied it. It still looked like an insect to his eyes. Barely as long as his fingernail, six-limbed, with six tiny eyes set all around its body. A wicked set of mandibles clacked visibly, while two long, fine antennae wove patterns in the air. Antennae, mandibles, eyes, and legs were sooty black, but the dominant color was the burnt orange of its armor plating. “It’s an insect,” Kress repeated.

“It is not an insect,” Wo insisted calmly. “The armored exoskeleton is shed when the sandking grows larger. If it grows larger. In a tank this size, it won’t.” She took Kress by the elbow and led him around the tank to the next castle. “Look at the colors here.”

He did. They were different. Here the sandkings had bright red armor; antennae, mandibles, eyes, and legs were yellow. Kress glanced across the tank. The denizens of the third live castle were off-white, with red trim. “Hmmm,” he said.

“They war, as I said,” Wo told him. “They even have truces and alliances. It was an alliance that destroyed the fourth castle in this tank. The blacks were getting too numerous, so the others joined forces to destroy them.”

Kress remained unconvinced. “Amusing, no doubt. But insects fight wars too.”

“Insects do not worship,” Wo said.

“Eh?”

Wo smiled and pointed at the castle. Kress stared. A face had been carved into the wall of the highest tower. He recognized it. It was Jala Wo’s face. “How . . . ?”

“I projected a holograph of my face into the tank, kept it there for a few days. The face of god, you see? I feed them; I am always close. The sandkings have a rudimentary psionic sense. Proximity telepathy. They sense me, and worship me by using my face to decorate their buildings. All the castles have them, see.” They did.

On the castle, the face of Jala Wo was serene and peaceful, and very lifelike. Kress marveled at the workmanship. “How do they do it?”

“The foremost legs double as arms. They even have fingers of a sort; three small, flexible tendrils. And they cooperate well, both in building and in battle. Remember, all the mobiles of one color share a single mind.”

“Tell me more,” Kress said.

Wo smiled. “The maw lives in the castle. Maw is my name for her. A pun, if you will; the thing is mother and stomach both. Female, large as your fist, immobile. Actually, sandking is a bit of a misnomer. The mobiles are peasants and warriors; the real ruler is a queen. But that analogy is faulty as well. Considered as a whole, each castle is a single hermaphroditic creature.”

“What do they eat?”

“The mobiles eat pap—predigested food obtained inside the castle. They get it from the maw after she has worked on it for several days. Their stomachs can’t handle anything else, so if the maw dies, they soon die as well. The maw . . . the maw eats anything. You’ll have no special expense there. Table scraps will do excellently.”

“Live food?” Kress asked.

Wo shrugged. “Each maw eats mobiles from the other castles, yes.”

“I am intrigued,” he admitted. “If only they weren’t so small.”

“Yours can be larger. These sandkings are small because their tank is small. They seem to limit their growth to fit available space. If I moved these to a larger tank, they’d start growing again.”

“Hmmmm. My piranha tank is twice this size, and vacant. It could be cleaned out, filled with sand. . . .”

“Wo and Shade would take care of the installation. It would be our pleasure.”

“Of course,” said Kress, “I would expect four intact castles.”

“Certainly,” Wo said.

They began to haggle about the price.

THREE DAYS LATER Jala Wo arrived at Simon Kress’ estate, with dormant sandkings and a work crew to take charge of the installation. Wo’s assistants were aliens unlike any Kress was familiar with—squat, broad bipeds with four arms and bulging, multifaceted eyes. Their skin was thick and leathery, twisted into horns and spines and protrusions at odd spots upon their bodies. But they were very strong, and good workers. Wo ordered them about in a musical tongue that Kress had never heard.

In a day it was done. They moved his piranha tank to the center of his spacious living room, arranged couches on either side of it for better viewing, scrubbed it clean, and filled it two-thirds of the way up with sand and rock. Then they installed a special lighting system, both to provide the dim red illumination the sandkings preferred and to project holographic images into the tank. On top they mounted a sturdy plastic cover, with a feeder mechanism built in. “This way you can feed your sandkings without removing the top of the tank,” Wo explained. “You would not want to take any chances on the mobiles escaping.”

The cover also included climate control devices, to condense just the right amount of moisture from the air. “You want it dry, but not too dry,” Wo said.

Finally one of the four-armed workers climbed into the tank and dug deep pits in the four corners. One of his companions handed the dormant maws over to him, removing them one by one from their frosted cryonic traveling cases. They were nothing to look at. Kress decided they resembled nothing so much as a mottled, half-spoiled chunk of raw meat. With a mouth.

The alien buried them, one in each corner of the tank. Then they sealed it all up and took their leave.

“The heat will bring the maws out of dormancy,” Wo said. “In less than a week, mobiles will begin to hatch and burrow to the surface. Be certain to give them plenty of food. They will need all their strength until they are well established. I would estimate that you will have castles rising in about three weeks.”

“And my face? When will they carve my face?”

“Turn on the hologram after about a month,” she advised him. “And be patient. If you have any questions, please call. Wo and Shade are at your service.” She bowed and left.

Kress wandered back to the tank and lit a joystick. The desert was still and empty. He drummed his fingers impatiently against the plastic, and frowned.

ON THE FOURTH day, Kress thought he glimpsed motion beneath the sand, subtle subterranean stirrings.

On the fifth day, he saw his first mobile, a lone white.

On the sixth day, he counted a dozen of them, whites and reds and blacks. The oranges were tardy. He cycled through a bowl of half-decayed table scraps. The mobiles sensed it at once, rushed to it, and began to drag pieces back to their respective corners. Each color group was very organized. They did not fight. Kress was a bit disappointed, but he decided to give them time.

The oranges made their appearance on the eighth day. By then the other sandkings had begun to carry small stones and erect crude fortifications. They still did not war. At the moment they were only half the size of those he had seen at Wo and Shade’s, but Kress thought they were growing rapidly.

The castles began to rise midway through the second week. Organized battalions of mobiles dragged heavy chunks of sandstone and granite back to their corners, where other mobiles were pushing sand into place with mandibles and tendrils. Kress had purchased a pair of magnifying goggles so he could watch them work, wherever they might go in the tank. He wandered around and around the tall plastic walls, observing. It was fascinating. The castles were a bit plainer than Kress would have liked, but he had an idea about that. The next day he cycled through some obsidian and flakes of colored glass along with the food. Within hours, they had been incorporated into castle walls.

The black castle was the first completed, followed by the white and red fortresses. The oranges were last, as usual. Kress took his meals into the living room and ate seated on the couch, so he could watch. He expected the first war to break out any hour now.

He was disappointed. Days passed; the castles grew taller and more grand, and Kress seldom left the tank except to attend to his sanitary needs and answer critical business calls. But the sandkings did not war. He was getting upset.

Finally, he stopped feeding them.

Two days after the table scraps had ceased to fall from their desert sky, four black mobiles surrounded an orange and dragged it back to their maw. They maimed it first, ripping off its mandibles and antennae and limbs, and carried it through the shadowed main gate of their miniature castle. It never emerged. Within an hour, more than forty orange mobiles marched across the sand and attacked the blacks’ corner. They were outnumbered by the blacks that came rushing up from the depths. When the fighting was over, the attackers had been slaughtered. The dead and dying were taken down to feed the black maw.

Kress, delighted, congratulated himself on his genius.

When he put food into the tank the following day, a three-cornered battle broke out over its possession. The whites were the big winners.

After that, war followed war.

ALMOST A MONTH to the day after Jala Wo had delivered the sandkings, Kress turned on the holographic projector, and his face materialized in the tank. It turned, slowly, around and around, so his gaze fell on all four castles equally. Kress thought it rather a good likeness—it had his impish grin, wide mouth, full cheeks. His blue eyes sparkled, his gray hair was carefully arrayed in a fashionable sidesweep, his eyebrows were thin and sophisticated.

Soon enough, the sandkings set to work. Kress fed them lavishly while his image beamed down at them from their sky. Temporarily, the wars stopped. All activity was directed toward worship.

His face emerged on the castle walls.

At first all four carvings looked alike to him, but as the work continued and Kress studied the reproductions, he began to detect subtle differences in technique and execution. The reds were the most creative, using tiny flakes of slate to put the gray in his hair. The white idol seemed young and mischievous to him, while the face shaped by the blacks—although virtually the same, line for line—struck him as wise and beneficent. The orange sandkings, as ever, were last and least. The wars had not gone well for them, and their castle was sad compared to the others. The image they carved was crude and cartoonish, and they seemed to intend to leave it that way. When they stopped work on the face, Kress grew quite piqued with them, but there was really nothing he could do.

When all the sandkings had finished their Kress-faces, he turned off the holograph and decided that it was time to have a party. His friends would be impressed. He could even stage a war for them, he thought. Humming happily to himself, he began to draw up a guest list.

THE PARTY WAS a wild success.

Kress invited thirty people: a handful of close friends who shared his amusements, a few former lovers, and a collection of business and social rivals who could not afford to ignore his summons. He knew some of them would be discomfited and even offended by his sandkings. He counted on it. Simon Kress customarily considered his parties a failure unless at least one guest walked out in high dudgeon.

On impulse he added Jala Wo’s name to his list. “Bring Shade if you like,” he added when dictating her invitation.

Her acceptance surprised him just a bit. “Shade, alas, will be unable to attend. He does not go to social functions,” Wo added. “As for myself, I look forward to the chance to see how your sandkings are doing.”

Kress ordered them up a sumptuous meal. And when at last the conversation had died down, and most of his guests had gotten silly on wine and joysticks, he shocked them by personally scraping their table leavings into a large bowl. “Come, all of you,” he told them. “I want to introduce you to my newest pets.” Carrying the bowl, he conducted them into his living room.

The sandkings lived up to his fondest expectations. He had starved them for two days in preparation, and they were in a fighting mood. While the guests ringed the tank, looking through the magnifying glasses Kress had thoughtfully provided, the sandkings waged a glorious battle over the scraps. He counted almost sixty dead mobiles when the struggle was over. The reds and whites, who had recently formed an alliance, emerged with most of the food.

“Kress, you’re disgusting,” Cath m’Lane told him. She had lived with him for a short time two years before, until her soppy sentimentality almost drove him mad. “I was a fool to come back here. I thought perhaps you’d changed, wanted to apologize.” She had never forgiven him for the time his shambler had eaten an excessively cute puppy of which she had been fond. “Don’t ever invite me here again, Simon.” She strode out, accompanied by her current lover and a chorus of laughter.

His other guests were full of questions.

Where did the sandkings come from? they wanted to know. “From Wo and Shade, Importers,” he replied, with a polite gesture toward Jala Wo, who had remained quiet and apart through most of the evening.

Why did they decorate their castles with his likeness? “Because I am the source of all good things. Surely you know that?” That brought a round of chuckles.

Will they fight again? “Of course, but not tonight. Don’t worry. There will be other parties.”

Jad Rakkis, who was an amateur xenologist, began talking about other social insects and the wars they fought. “These sandkings are amusing, but nothing really. You ought to read about Terran soldier ants, for instance.”

“Sandkings are not insects,” Jala Wo said sharply, but Jad was off and running, and no one paid her the slightest attention. Kress smiled at her and shrugged.

Malada Blane suggested a betting pool the next time they got together to watch a war, and everyone was taken with the idea. An animated discussion about rules and odds ensued. It lasted for almost an hour. Finally the guests began to take their leave.

Jala Wo was the last to depart. “So,” Kress said to her when they were alone, “it appears my sandkings are a hit.”

“They are doing well,” Wo said. “Already they are larger than my own.”

“Yes,” Kress said, “except for the oranges.”

“I had noticed that,” Wo replied. “They seem few in number, and their castle is shabby.”

“Well, someone must lose,” Kress said. “The oranges were late to emerge and get established. They have suffered for it.”

“Pardon,” said Wo, “but might I ask if you are feeding your sandkings sufficiently?”

Kress shrugged. “They diet from time to time. It makes them fiercer.”

She frowned. “There is no need to starve them. Let them war in their own time, for their own reasons. It is their nature, and you will witness conflicts that are delightfully subtle and complex. The constant war brought on by hunger is artless and degrading.”

Simon Kress repaid Wo’s frown with interest. “You are in my house, Wo, and here I am the judge of what is degrading. I fed the sandkings as you advised, and they did not fight.”

“You must have patience.”

“No,” Kress said. “I am their master and their god, after all. Why should I wait on their impulses? They did not war often enough to suit me. I corrected the situation.”

“I see,” said Wo. “I will discuss the matter with Shade.”

“It is none of your concern, or his,” Kress snapped.

“I must bid you good night, then,” Wo said with resignation. But as she slipped into her coat to depart, she fixed him with a final disapproving stare. “Look to your faces, Simon Kress,” she warned him. “Look to your faces.”

Puzzled, he wandered back to the tank and stared at the castles after she had taken her departure. His faces were still there, as ever. Except—he snatched up his magnifying goggles and slipped them on. Even then it was hard to make out. But it seemed to him that the expression on the face of his images had changed slightly, that his smile was somehow twisted so that it seemed a touch malicious. But it was a very subtle change, if it was a change at all. Kress finally put it down to his suggestibility, and resolved not to invite Jala Wo to any more of his gatherings.

OVER THE NEXT few months, Kress and about a dozen of his favorites got together weekly for what he liked to call his “war games.” Now that his initial fascination with the sandkings was past, Kress spent less time around his tank and more on his business affairs and his social life, but he still enjoyed having a few friends over for a war or two. He kept the combatants sharp on a constant edge of hunger. It had severe effects on the orange sandkings, who dwindled visibly until Kress began to wonder if their maw was dead. But the others did well enough.

Sometimes at night, when he could not sleep, Kress would take a bottle of wine into the darkened living room, where the red gloom of his miniature desert was the only light. He would drink and watch for hours, alone. There was usually a fight going on somewhere, and when there was not he could easily start one by dropping in some small morsel of food.

They took to betting on the weekly battles, as Malada Blane had suggested. Kress won a good amount by betting on the whites, who had become the most powerful and numerous colony in the tank, with the grandest castle. One week he slid the corner of the tank top aside, and dropped the food close to the white castle instead of on the central battleground as usual, so that the others had to attack the whites in their stronghold to get any food at all. They tried. The whites were brilliant in defense. Kress won a hundred standards from Jad Rakkis.

Rakkis, in fact, lost heavily on the sandkings almost every week. He pretended to a vast knowledge of them and their ways, claiming that he had studied them after the first party, but he had no luck when it came to placing his bets. Kress suspected that Jad’s claims were empty boasting. He had tried to study the sandkings a bit himself, in a moment of idle curiosity, tying in to the library to find out to what world his pets were native. But there was no listing for them. He wanted to get in touch with Wo and ask her about it, but he had other concerns, and the matter kept slipping his mind.

Finally, after a month in which his losses totaled more than a thousand standards, Jad Rakkis arrived at the war games carrying a small plastic case under his arm. Inside was a spiderlike thing covered with fine golden hair.

“A sand spider,” Rakkis announced. “From Cathaday. I got it this afternoon from t’Etherane the Petseller. Usually they remove the poison sacs, but this one is intact. Are you game, Simon? I want my money back. I’ll bet a thousand standards, sand spider against sandkings.”

Kress studied the spider in its plastic prison. His sandkings had grown—they were twice as large as Wo’s, as she’d predicted—but they were still dwarfed by this thing. It was venomed, and they were not. Still, there were an awful lot of them. Besides, the endless sandking wars had begun to grow tiresome lately. The novelty of the match intrigued him. “Done,” Kress said. “Jad, you are a fool. The sandkings will just keep coming until this ugly creature of yours is dead.”

“You are the fool, Simon,” Rakkis replied, smiling. “The Cathadayn sand spider customarily feds on burrowers that hide in nooks and crevices and—well, watch—it will go straight into those castles, and eat the maws.”

Kress scowled amid general laughter. He hadn’t counted on that. “Get on with it,” he said irritably. He went to freshen his drink.

The spider was too large to cycle conveniently through the food chamber. Two of the others helped Rakkis slide the tank top slightly to one side, and Malada Blane handed him up his case. He shook the spider out. It landed lightly on a miniature dune in front of the red castle, and stood confused for a moment, mouth working, legs twitching menacingly.

“Come on,” Rakkis urged. They all gathered round the tank. Simon Kress found his magnifiers and slipped them on. If he was going to lose a thousand standards, at least he wanted a good view of the action.

The sandkings had seen the invader. All over the castle, activity had ceased. The small scarlet mobiles were frozen, watching.

The spider began to move toward the dark promise of the gate. On the tower above, Simon Kress’ countenance stared down impassively.

At once there was a flurry of activity. The nearest red mobiles formed themselves into two wedges and streamed over the sand toward the spider. More warriors erupted from inside the castle and assembled in a triple line to guard the approach to the underground chamber where the maw lived. Scouts came scuttling over the dunes, recalled to fight.

Battle was joined.

The attacking sandkings washed over the spider. Mandibles snapped shut on legs and abdomen, and clung. Reds raced up the golden legs to the invader’s back. They bit and tore. One of them found an eye, and ripped it loose with tiny yellow tendrils. Kress smiled and pointed.

But they were small, and they had no venom, and the spider did not stop. Its legs flicked sandkings off to either side. Its dripping jaws found others, and left them broken and stiffening. Already a dozen of the reds lay dying. The sand spider came on and on. It strode straight through the triple line of guardians before the castle. The lines closed around it, covered it, waging desperate battle. A team of sandkings had bitten off one of the spider’s legs, Kress saw. Defenders leaped from atop the towers to land on the twitching, heaving mass.

Lost beneath the sandkings, the spider somehow lurched down into the darkness and vanished.

Jad Rakkis let out a long breath. He looked pale. “Wonderful,” someone else said. Malada Blane chuckled deep in her throat.

“Look,” said Idi Noreddian, tugging Kress by the arm.

They had been so intent on the struggle in the corner that none of them had noticed the activity elsewhere in the tank. But now the castle was still, the sands empty save for dead red mobiles, and now they saw.

Three armies were drawn up before the red castle. They stood quite still, in perfect array, rank after rank, of sandkings, orange and white and black. Waiting to see what emerged from the depths.

Simon Kress smiled. “A cordon sanitaire,” he said. “And glance at the other castles, if you will, Jad.”

Rakkis did, and swore. Teams of mobiles were sealing up the gates with sand and stone. If the spider somehow survived this encounter, it would find no easy entrance at the other castles. “I should have brought four spiders,” Jad Rakkis said. “Still, I’ve won. My spider is down there right now, eating your damned maw.”

Kress did not reply. He waited. There was motion in the shadows.

All at once, red mobiles began pouring out of the gate. They took their positions on the castle, and began repairing the damage the spider had wrought. The other armies dissolved and began to retreat to their respective corners.

“Jad,” said Simon Kress, “I think you are a bit confused about who is eating who.”

THE FOLLOWING WEEK Rakkis brought four slim silver snakes. The sandkings dispatched them without much trouble.

Next he tried a large black bird. It ate more than thirty white mobiles, and its thrashing and blundering virtually destroyed their castle, but ultimately its wings grew tired, and the sandkings attacked in force wherever it landed.

After that it was a case of insects, armored bettles not too unlike the sandkings themselves. But stupid, stupid. An allied force of oranges and blacks broke their formation, divided them, and butchered them.

Rakkis began giving Kress promissory notes.

It was around that time that Kress met Cath m’Lane again, one evening when he was dining in Asgard at his favorite restaurant. He stopped at her table briefly and told her about the war games, inviting her to join them. She flushed, then regained control of herself and grew icy. “Someone has to put a stop to you, Simon. I guess it’s going to be me,” she said. Kress shrugged and enjoyed a lovely meal and thought no more about her threat.

Until a week later, when a small, stout woman arrived at his door and showed him a police wristband. “We’ve had complaints,” she said. “Do you keep a tank full of dangerous insects, Kress?”

“Not insects,” he said, furious. “Come, I’ll show you.”

When she had seen the sandkings, she shook her head. “This will never do. What do you know about these creatures, anyway? Do you know what world they’re from? Have they been cleared by the ecological board? Do you have a license for these things? We have a report that they’re carnivores, possibly dangerous. We also have a report that they are semi-sentient. Where did you get these creatures, anyway?”

“From Wo and Shade,” Kress replied.

“Never heard of them,” the woman said. “Probably smuggled them in, knowing our ecologists would never approve them. No, Kress, this won’t do. I’m going to confiscate this tank and have it destroyed. And you’re going to have to expect a few fines as well.”

Kress offered her a hundred standards to forget all about him and his sandkings.

She tsked. “Now I’ll have to add attempted bribery to the charges against you.”

Not until he raised the figure to two thousand standards was she willing to be persuaded. “It’s not going to be easy, you know,” she said. “There are forms to be altered, records to be wiped. And getting a forged license from the ecologists will be time-consuming. Not to mention dealing with the complainant. What if she calls again?”

“Leave her to me,” Kress said. “Leave her to me.”

HE THOUGHT ABOUT it for a while. That night he made some calls.

First he got t’Etherane the Petseller. “I want to buy a dog,” he said. “A puppy.”

The round-faced merchant gawked at him. “A puppy? That is not like you, Simon. Why don’t you come in? I have a lovely choice.”

“I want a very specific kind of puppy,” Kress said. “Take notes. I’ll describe to you what it must look like.”

Afterward he punched for Idi Noreddian. “Idi,” he said, “I want you out here tonight with your holo equipment. I have a notion to record a sandking battle. A present for one of my friends.”

THE NIGHT AFTER they made the recording, Simon Kress stayed up late. He absorbed a controversial new drama in his sensorium, fixed himself a small snack, smoked a joystick or two, and broke out a bottle of wine. Feeling very happy with himself, he wandered into the living room, glass in hand.

The lights were out. The red glow of the terrarium made the shadows flushed and feverish. He walked over to look at his domain, curious as to how the blacks were doing in the repairs on their castle. The puppy had left it in ruins.

The restoration went well. But as Kress inspected the work through his magnifiers, he chanced to glance closely at the face. It startled him.

He drew back, blinked, took a healthy gulp of wine, and looked again.

The face on the walls was still his. But it was all wrong, all twisted. His cheeks were bloated and piggish, his smile was a crooked leer. He looked impossibly malevolent.

Uneasy, he moved around the tank to inspect the other castles. They were each a bit different, but ultimately all the same.

The oranges had left out most of the fine detail, but the result still seemed monstrous, crude—a brutal mouth and mindless eyes.

The reds gave him a satanic, twitching kind of smile. His mouth did odd, unlovely things at its corners.

The whites, his favorites, had carved a cruel idiot god.

Simon Kress flung his wine across the room in rage. “You dare,” he said under his breath. “Now you won’t eat for a week, you damned . . .” His voice was shrill. “I’ll teach you.” He had an idea. He strode out of the room, and returned a moment later with an antique iron throwing-sword in his hand. It was a meter long, and the point was still sharp. Kress smiled, climbed up and moved the tank cover aside just enough to give him working room, opening one corner of the desert. He leaned down, and jabbed the sword at the white castle below him. He waved it back and forth, smashing towers and ramparts and walls. Sand and stone collapsed, burying the scrambling mobiles. A flick of his wrist obliterated the features of the insolent, insulting caricature the sandkings had made of his face. Then he poised the point of the sword above the dark mouth that opened down into the maw’s chamber, and thrust with all his strength. He heard a soft, squishing sound, and met resistance. All of the mobiles trembled and collapsed. Satisfied, Kress pulled back.

He watched for a moment, wondering whether he’d killed the maw. The point of the throwing-sword was wet and slimy. But finally the white sandkings began to move again. Feebly, slowly, but they moved.

He was preparing to slide the cover back in place and move on to a second castle when he felt something crawling on his hand.

He screamed and dropped the sword, and brushed the sandking from his flesh. It fell to the carpet, and he ground it beneath his heel, crushing it thoroughly long after it was dead. It had crunched when he stepped on it. After that, trembling, he hurried to seal the tank up again, and rushed off to shower and inspected himself carefully. He boiled his clothing.

Later, after several fresh glasses of wine, he returned to the living room. He was a bit ashamed of the way the sandking had terrified him. But he was not about to open the tank again. From now on, the cover stayed sealed permanently. Still, he had to punish the others.

Kress decided to lubricate his mental process with another glass of wine. As he finished it, an inspiration came to him. He went to the tank smiling, and made a few adjustments to the humidity controls.

By the time he fell asleep on the couch, his wine glass still in his hand, the sand castles were melting in the rain.

KRESS WOKE TO angry pounding on his door.

He sat up, groggy, his head throbbing. Wine hangovers were always the worst, he thought. He lurched to the entry chamber.

Cath m’Lane was outside. “You monster,” she said, her face swollen and puffy and streaked by tears. “I cried all night, damn you. But no more, Simon, no more.”

“Easy,” he said, holding his head. “I’ve got a hangover.”

She swore and shoved him aside and pushed her way into his house. The shambler came peering round a corner to see what the noise was. She spat at it and stalked into the living room, Kress trailing ineffectually after her. “Hold on,” he said, “where do you . . . you can’t. . . .” He stopped, suddenly horrorstruck. She was carrying a heavy sledgehammer in her left hand. “No,” he said.

She went directly to the sandking tank. “You like the little charmers so much, Simon? Then you can live with them.”

“Cath!” he shrieked.

Gripping the hammer with both hands, she swung as hard as she could against the side of the tank. The sound of the impact set his head to screaming, and Kress made a low blubbering sound of despair. But the plastic held.

She swung again. This time there was a crack, and a network of thin lines sprang into being.

Kress threw himself at her as she drew back her hammer for a third swing. They went down flailing, and rolled. She lost her grip on the hammer and tried to throttle him, but Kress wrenched free and bit her on the arm, drawing blood. They both staggered to their feet, panting.

“You should see yourself, Simon,” she said grimly. “Blood dripping from your mouth. You look like one of your pets. How do you like the taste?”

“Get out,” he said. He saw the throwing-sword where it had fallen the night before, and snatched it up. “Get out,” he repeated, waving the sword for emphasis. “Don’t go near that tank again.”

She laughed at him. “You wouldn’t dare,” she said. She bent to pick up her hammer.

Kress shrieked at her, and lunged. Before he quite knew what was happening, the iron blade had gone clear through her abdomen. Cath m’Lane looked at him wonderingly, and down at the sword. Kress fell back whimpering. “I didn’t mean . . . I only wanted . . .”

She was transfixed, bleeding, dead, but somehow she did not fall. “You monster,” she managed to say, though her mouth was full of blood. And she whirled, impossibly, the sword in her, and swung with her last strength at the tank. The tortured wall shattered, and Cath m’Lane was buried beneath an avalanche of plastic and sand and mud.

Kress made small hysterical noises and scrambled up on the couch.

Sandkings were emerging from the muck on his living room floor. They were crawling across Cath’s body. A few of them ventured tentatively out across the carpet. More followed.

He watched as a column took shape, a living, writhing square of sandkings, bearing something, something slimy and featureless, a piece of raw meat big as a man’s head. They began to carry it away from the tank. It pulsed.

That was when Kress broke and ran.

IT WAS LATE afternoon before he found the courage to return.

He had run to his skimmer and flown to the nearest city, some fifty kilometers away, almost sick with fear. But once safely away, he had found a small restaurant, put down several mugs of coffee and two anti-hangover tabs, eaten a full breakfast, and gradually regained his composure.

It had been a dreadful morning, but dwelling on that would solve nothing. He ordered more coffee and considered his situation with icy rationality.

Cath m’Lane was dead at his hand. Could he report it, plead that it had been an accident? Unlikely. He had run her through, after all, and he had already told that policer to leave her to him. He would have to get rid of the evidence, and hope that she had not told anyone where she was going this morning. That was probable. She could only have gotten his gift late last night. She said that she had cried all night, and she had been alone when she arrived. Very well; he had one body and one skimmer to dispose of.

That left the sandkings. They might prove more of a difficulty. No doubt they had all escaped by now. The thought of them around his house, in his bed and his clothes, infesting his food—it made his flesh crawl. He shuddered and overcame his revulsion. It really shouldn’t be too hard to kill them, he reminded himself. He didn’t have to account for every mobile. Just the four maws, that was all. He could do that. They were large, as he’d seen. He would find them and kill them.

Simon Kress went shopping before he flew back to his home. He bought a set of skinthins that would cover him from head to foot, several bags of poison pellets for rockjock control, and a spray canister of illegally strong pesticide. He also bought a magnalock towing device.

When he landed, he went about things methodically. First he hooked Cath’s skimmer to his own with the magnalock. Searching it, he had his first piece of luck. The crystal chip with Idi Noreddian’s holo of the sandking fight was on the front seat. He had worried about that.

When the skimmers were ready, he slipped into his skinthins and went inside for Cath’s body.

It wasn’t there.

He poked through the fast-drying sand carefully, but there was no doubt of it; the body was gone. Could she have dragged herself away? Unlikely, but Kress searched. A cursory inspection of his house turned up neither the body nor any sign of the sandkings. He did not have time for a more thorough investigation, not with the incriminating skimmer outside his front door. He resolved to try later.

Some seventy kilometers north of Kress’ estate was a range of active volcanoes. He flew there, Cath’s skimmer in tow. Above the glowering cone of the largest, he released the magnalock and watched it vanish in the lava below.

It was dusk when he returned to his house. That gave him pause. Briefly he considered flying back to the city and spending the night there. He put the thought aside. There was work to do. He wasn’t safe yet.

He scattered the poison pellets around the exterior of his house. No one would find that suspicious. He’d always had a rockjock problem. When that task was completed, he primed the canister of pesticide and ventured back inside.

Kress went through the house room by room, turning on lights everywhere he went until he was surrounded by a blaze of artificial illumination. He paused to clean up in the living room, shoveling sand and plastic fragments back into the broken tank. The sandkings were all gone, as he’d feared. The castles were shrunken and distorted, slagged by the watery bombardment Kress had visited upon them, and what little remained was crumbling as it dried.

He frowned and searched on, the canister of pest spray strapped across his shoulders.

Down in his deepest wine cellar, he came upon Cath m’Lane’s corpse.

It sprawled at the foot of a steep flight of stairs, the limbs twisted as if by a fall. White mobiles were swarming all over it, and as Kress watched, the body moved jerkily across the hard-packed dirt floor.

He laughed, and twisted the illumination up to maximum. In the far corner, a squat little earthen castle and a dark hole were visible between two wine racks. Kress could make out a rough outline of his face on the cellar wall.

The body shifted once again, moving a few centimeters towards the castle. Kress had a sudden vision of the white maw waiting hungrily. It might be able to get Cath’s foot in its mouth, but no more. It was too absurd. He laughed again, and started down into the cellar, finger poised on the trigger of the hose that snaked down his right arm. The sandkings—hundreds of them moving as one—deserted the body and formed up battle lines, a field of white between him and their maw.

Suddenly Kress had another inspiration. He smiled and lowered his firing hand. “Cath was always hard to swallow,” he said, delighted at his wit. “Especially for one your size. Here, let me give you some help. What are gods for, after all?”

He retreated upstairs, returning shortly with a cleaver. The sandkings, patient, waited and watched while Kress chopped Cath m’Lane into small, easily digestible pieces.

SIMON KRESS SLEPT in his skinthins that night, the pesticide close at hand, but he did not need it. The whites, sated, remained in the cellar, and he saw no sign of the others.

In the morning he finished the cleanup of the living room. After he was through, no trace of the struggle remained except for the broken tank.

He ate a light lunch, and resumed his hunt for the missing sandkings. In full daylight, it was not too difficult. The blacks had located in his rock garden, and built a castle heavy with obsidian and quartz. The reds he founds at the bottom of his long-disused swimming pool, which had partially filled with windblown sand over the years. He saw mobiles of both colors ranging about his grounds, many of them carrying poison pellets back to their maws. Kress decided his pesticide was unnecessary. No use risking a fight when he could just let the poison do its work. Both maws should be dead by evening.

That left only the burnt orange sandkings unaccounted for. Kress circled his estate several times, in ever-widening spirals, but found no trace of them. When he began to sweat in his skinthins—it was a hot, dry day—he decided it was not important. If they were out here, they were probably eating the poison pellets along with the reds and blacks.

He crunched several sandkings underfoot, with a certain degree of satisfaction, as he walked back to the house. Inside, he removed his skinthins, settled down to a delicious meal, and finally began to relax. Everything was under control. Two of the maws would soon be defunct, the third was safely located where he could dispose of it after it had served his purpose, and he had no doubt that he would find the fourth. As for Cath, all trace of her visit had been obliterated.

His reverie was interrupted when his viewscreen began to blink at him. It was Jad Rakkis, calling to brag about some cannibal worms he was bringing to the war games tonight.

Kress had forgotten about that, but he recovered quickly. “Oh, Jad, my pardons. I neglected to tell you. I grew bored with all that, and got rid of the sandkings. Ugly little things. Sorry, but there’ll be no party tonight.”

Rakkis was indignant. “But what will I do with my worms?”

“Put them in a basket of fruit and send them to a loved one,” Kress said, signing off. Quickly he began calling the others. He did not need anyone arriving at his doorstep now, with the sandkings alive and infesting the estate.

As he was calling Idi Noreddian, Kress became aware of an annoying oversight. The screen began to clear, indicating that someone had answered at the other end. Kress flicked off.

Idi arrived on schedule an hour later. She was surprised to find the party canceled, but perfectly happy to share an evening alone with Kress. He delighted her with his story of Cath’s reaction to the holo they had made together. While telling it, he managed to ascertain that she had not mentioned the prank to anyone. He nodded, satisfied, and refilled their wine glasses. Only a trickle was left. “I’ll have to get a fresh bottle,” he said. “Come with me to my wine cellar, and help me pick out a good vintage. You’ve always had a better palate than I.”

She came along willingly enough, but balked at the top of the stairs when Kress opened the door and gestured for her to precede him. “Where are the lights?” she said. “And that smell—what’s that peculiar smell, Simon?”

When he shoved her, she looked briefly startled. She screamed as she tumbled down the stairs. Kress closed the door and began to nail it shut with the boards and air-hammer he had left for that purpose. As he was finishing, he heard Idi groan. “I’m hurt,” she called. “Simon, what is this?” Suddenly she squealed, and shortly after that the screaming started.

It did not cease for hours. Kress went to his sensorium and dialed up a saucy comedy to blot it out of his mind.

When he was sure she was dead, Kress flew her skimmer north to the volcanoes and discarded it. The magnalock was proving a good investment.

ODD SCRABBLING NOISES were coming from beyond the wine cellar door the next morning when Kress went down to check it out. He listened for several uneasy moments, wondering if Idi Noreddian could possibly have survived, and was now scratching to get out. It seemed unlikely; it had to be the sandkings. Kress did not like the implications of that. He decided that he would keep the door sealed, at least for the moment, and went outside with a shovel to bury the red and black maws in their own castles.

He found them very much alive.

The black castle was glittering with volcanic glass, and sandkings were all over it, repairing and improving. The highest tower was up to his waist, and on it was a hideous caricature of his face. When he approached, the blacks halted in their labors, and formed up into two threatening phalanxes. Kress glanced behind him and saw others closing off his escape. Startled, he dropped the shovel and sprinted out of the trap, crushing several mobiles beneath his boots.

The red castle was creeping up the walls of the swimming pool. The maw was safely settled in a pit, surrounded by sand and concrete and battlements. The reds crept all over the bottom of the pool. Kress watched them carry a rockjock and a large lizard into the castle. He stepped back from the poolside, horrified, and felt something crunch. Looking down, he saw three mobiles climbing up his leg. He brushed them off and stamped them to death, but others were approaching quickly. They were larger than he remembered. Some were almost as big as his thumb.

He ran. By the time he reached the safety of the house, his heart was racing and he was short of breath. The door closed behind him, and Kress hurried to lock it. His house was supposed to be pest-proof. He’d be safe in here.

A stiff drink steadied his nerve. So poison doesn’t faze them, he thought. He should have known. Wo had warned him that the maw could eat anything. He would have to use the pesticide. Kress took another drink for good measure, donned his skinthins, and strapped the canister to his back. He unlocked the door.

Outside, the sandkings were waiting.

Two armies confronted him, allied against the common threat. More than he could have guessed. The damned maws must be breeding like rockjocks. They were everywhere, a creeping sea of them.

Kress brought up the hose and flicked the trigger. A gray mist washed over the nearest rank of sandkings. He moved his hand from side to side.

Where the mist fell, the sandkings twitched violently and died in sudden spasms. Kress smiled. They were no match for him. He sprayed in a wide arc before him and stepped forward confidently over a litter of black and red bodies. The armies fell back. Kress advanced, intent on cutting through them to their maws.

All at once the retreat stopped. A thousand sandkings surged toward him.

Kress had been expecting the counterattack. He stood his ground, sweeping his misty sword before him in great looping strokes. They came at him and died. A few got through; he could not spray everywhere at once. He felt them climbing up his legs, sensed their mandibles biting futilely at the reinforced plastic of his skinthins. He ignored them, and kept spraying.

Then he began to feel soft impacts on his head and shoulders.

Kress trembled and spun and looked up above him. The front of his house was alive with sandkings. Blacks and reds, hundreds of them. They were launching themselves into the air, raining down on him. They fell all around him. One landed on his faceplate, its mandibles scraping at his eyes for a terrible second before he plucked it away.

He swung up his hose and sprayed the air, sprayed the house, sprayed until the airborne sandkings were all dead and dying. The mist settled back on him, making him cough. He coughed, and kept spraying. Only when the front of the house was clean did Kress turn his attention back to the ground.

They were all around him, on him, dozens of them scurrying over his body, hundreds of others hurrying to join them. He turned the mist on them. The hose went dead. Kress heard a loud hiss, and the deadly fog rose in a great cloud from between his shoulders, cloaking him, choking him, making his eyes burn and blur. He felt for the hose, and his hand came away covered with dying sandkings. The hose was severed; they’d eaten it through. He was surrounded by a shroud of pesticide, blinded. He stumbled and screamed, and began to run back to the house, pulling sandkings from his body as he went.

Inside, he sealed the door and collapsed on the carpet, rolling back and forth until he was sure he had crushed them all. The canister was empty by then, hissing feebly. Kress stripped off his skinthins and showered. The hot spray scalded him and left his skin reddened and sensitive, but it made his flesh stop crawling.

He dressed in his heaviest clothing, thick workpants and leathers, after shaking them out nervously. “Damn,” he kept muttering, “damn.” His throat was dry. After searching the entry hall thoroughly to make certain it was clean, he allowed himself to sit and pour a drink. “Damn,” he repeated. His hand shook as he poured, slopping liquor on the carpet.

The alcohol settled him, but it did not wash away the fear. He had a second drink, and went to the window furtively. Sandkings were moving across the thick plastic pane. He shuddered and retreated to his communications console. He had to get help, he thought wildly. He would punch through a call to the authorities, and policers would come out with flamethrowers and. . . .

Simon Kress stopped in mid-call, and groaned. He couldn’t call in the police. He would have to tell them about the whites in his cellar, and they’d find the bodies there. Perhaps the maw might have finished Cath m’Lane by now, but certainly not Idi Noreddian. He hadn’t even cut her up. Besides, there would be bones. No, the police could be called in only as a last resort.

He sat at the console, frowning. His communications equipment filled a whole wall; from here he could reach anyone on Baldur. He had plenty of money, and his cunning—he had always prided himself on his cunning. He would handle this somehow.

He briefly considered calling Wo, but soon dismissed the idea. Wo knew too much, and she would ask questions, and he did not trust her. No, he needed someone who would do as he asked without questions.

His frown faded, and slowly turned into a smile. Simon Kress had contacts. He put through a call to a number he had not used in a long time.

A woman’s face took shape on his viewscreen: white-haired, bland of expression, with a long hook nose. Her voice was brisk and efficient. “Simon,” she said. “How is business?”

“Business is fine, Lissandra,” Kress replied. “I have a job for you.”

“A removal? My price has gone up since last time, Simon. It has been ten years, after all.”

“You will be well paid,” Kress said. “You know I’m generous. I want you for a bit of pest control.”

She smiled a thin smile. “No need to use euphemisms, Simon. The call is shielded.”

“No, I’m serious. I have a pest problem. Dangerous pests. Take care of them for me. No questions. Understood?”

“Understood.”

“Good. You’ll need . . . oh, three or four operatives. Wear heat-resistant skinthins, and equip them with flamethrowers, or lasers, something on that order. Come out to my place. You’ll see the problem. Bugs, lots and lots of them. In my rock garden and the old swimming pool you’ll find castles. Destroy them, kill everything inside them. Then knock on the door, and I’ll show you what else needs to be done. Can you get out here quickly?”

Her face was impassive. “We’ll leave within the hour.”

LISSANDRA WAS TRUE to her word. She arrived in a lean black skimmer with three operatives. Kress watched them from the safety of a second-story window. They were all faceless in dark plastic skinthins. Two of them wore portable flamethrowers, a third carried lasercannon and explosives. Lissandra carried nothing; Kress recognized her by the way she gave orders.

Their skimmer passed low overhead first, checking out the situation. The sandkings went mad. Scarlet and ebon mobiles ran everywhere, frenetic. Kress could see the castle in the rock garden from this vantage point. It stood tall as a man. Its ramparts were crawling with black defenders, and a steady stream of mobiles flowed down into its depths.

Lissandra’s skimmer came down next to Kress’ and the operatives vaulted out and unlimbered their weapons. They looked inhuman, deadly.

The black army drew up between them and the castle. The reds—Kress suddenly realized that he could not see the reds. He blinked. Where had they gone?

Lissandra pointed and shouted, and her two flamethrowers spread out and opened up on the black sandkings. Their weapons coughed dully and began to roar, long tongues of blue-and-scarlet fire licking out before them. Sandkings crisped and blackened and died. The operatives began to play the fire back and forth in an efficient, interlocking pattern. They advanced with careful, measured steps.

The black army burned and disintegrated, the mobiles fleeing in a thousand different directions, some back toward the castle, others toward the enemy. None reached the operatives with the flamethrowers. Lissandra’s people were very professional.

Then one of them stumbled.

Or seemed to stumble. Kress looked again, and saw that the ground had given way beneath the man. Tunnels, he thought with a tremor of fear—tunnels, pits, traps. The flamer was sunk in sand up to his waist, and suddenly the ground around him seemed to erupt, and he was covered with scarlet sandkings. He dropped the flamethrower and began to claw wildly at his own body. His screams were horrible to hear.

His companions hesitated, then swung and fired. A blast of flame swallowed human and sandkings both. The screaming stopped abruptly. Satisfied, the second flamer turned back to the castle and took another step forward, and recoiled as his foot broke through the ground and vanished up to the ankle. He tried to pull it back and retreat, and the sand all around him gave way. He lost his balance and stumbled, flailing, and the sandkings were everywhere, a boiling mass of them, covering him as he writhed and rolled. His flamethrower was useless and forgotten.

Kress pounded wildly on the window, shouting for attention. “The castle! Get the castle!”

Lissandra, standing back by her skimmer, heard and gestured. Her third operative sighted with the lasercannon and fired. The beam throbbed across the grounds and sliced off the top of the castle. He brought it down sharply, hacking at the sand and stone parapets. Towers fell. Kress’ face disintegrated. The laser bit into the ground, searching round and about. The castle crumbled; now it was only a heap of sand. But the black mobiles continued to move. The maw was buried too deeply; they hadn’t touched her.

Lissandra gave another order. Her operative discarded the laser, primed an explosive, and darted forward. He leaped over the smoking corpse of the first flamer, landed on solid ground within Kress’ rock garden, and heaved. The explosive ball landed square atop the ruins of the black castle. White-out light seared Kress’ eyes, and there was a tremendous gout of sand and rock and mobiles. For a moment dust obscured everything. It was raining sandkings and pieces of sandkings.

Kress saw that the black mobiles were dead and unmoving.

“The pool,” he shouted down through the window. “Get the castle in the pool.”

Lissandra understood quickly; the ground was littered with motionless blacks, but the reds were pulling back hurriedly and re-forming. Her operative stood uncertain, then reached down and pulled out another explosive ball. He took one step forward, but Lissandra called him and he sprinted back in her direction.

It was all so simple then. He reached the skimmer, and Lissandra took him aloft. Kress rushed to another window in another room to watch. They came swooping in just over the pool, and the operative pitched his bombs down at the red castle from the safety of the skimmer. After the fourth run, the castle was unrecognizable, and the sandkings stopped moving.

Lissandra was thorough. She had him bomb each castle several additional times. Then he used the lasercannon, crisscrossing methodically until it was certain that nothing living could remain intact beneath those small patches of ground.

Finally they came knocking at his door. Kress was grinning manically when he let them in. “Lovely,” he said, “lovely.”

Lissandra pulled off the mask of her skinthins. “This will cost you, Simon. Two operatives gone, not to mention the danger to my own life.”

“Of course,” Kress blurted. “You’ll be well paid, Lissandra. Whatever you ask, just so you finish the job.”

“What remains to be done?”

“You have to clean out my wine cellar,” Kress said. “There’s another castle down there. And you’ll have to do it without explosives. I don’t want my house coming down around me.”

Lissandra motioned to her operative. “Go outside and get Rajk’s flamethrower. It should be intact.”

He returned armed, ready, silent. Kress led them down to the wine cellar.

The heavy door was still nailed shut, as he had left it. But it bulged outward slightly, as if warped by some tremendous pressure. That made Kress uneasy, as did the silence that held reign about them. He stood well away from the door as Lissandra’s operative removed his nails and planks. “Is that safe in here?” he found himself muttering, pointing at the flamethrower. “I don’t want a fire, either, you know.”

“I have the laser,” Lissandra said. “We’ll use that for the kill. The flamethrower probably won’t be needed. But I want it here just in case. There are worse things than fire, Simon.”

He nodded.

The last plank came free of the cellar door. There was still no sound from below. Lissandra snapped an order, and her underling fell back, took up a position behind her, and leveled the flamethrower square at the door. She slipped her mask back on, hefted the laser, stepped forward, and pulled open the door.

No motion. No sound. It was dark down there.

“Is there a light?” Lissandra asked.

“Just inside the door,” Kress said. “On the right-hand side. Mind the stairs, they’re quite steep.”

She stepped into the door, shifted the laser to her left hand, and reached up with her right, fumbling inside for the light panel. Nothing happened. “I feel it,” Lissandra said, “but it doesn’t seem to . . .”

Then she was screaming, and she stumbled backward. A great white sandking had clamped itself around her wrist. Blood welled through her skinthins where its mandibles had sunk in. It was fully as large as her hand.

Lissandra did a horrible little jig across the room and began to smash her hand against the nearest wall. Again and again and again. It landed with a heavy, meaty thud. Finally the sandking fell away. She whimpered and fell to her knees. “I think my fingers are broken,” she said softly. The blood was still flowing freely. She had dropped the laser near the cellar door.

“I’m not going down there,” her operative announced in clear firm tones.

Lissandra looked up at him. “No,” she said. “Stand in the door and flame it all. Cinder it. Do you understand?”

He nodded.

Simon Kress moaned. “My house,” he said. His stomach churned. The white sandking had been so large. How many more were down there? “Don’t,” he continued. “Leave it alone. I’ve changed my mind. Leave it alone.”

Lissandra misunderstood. She held out her hand. It was covered with blood and greenish-black ichor. “Your little friend bit clean through my glove, and you saw what it took to get it off. I don’t care about your house, Simon. Whatever is down there is going to die.”

Kress hardly heard her. He thought he could see movement in the shadows beyond the cellar door. He imagined a white army bursting forth, all as large as the sandking that had attacked Lissandra. He saw himself being lifted by a hundred tiny arms, and dragged down into the darkness where the maw waited hungrily. He was afraid. “Don’t,” he said.

They ignored him.

Kress darted forward, and his shoulder slammed into the back of Lissandra’s operative just as the man was bracing to fire. He grunted and unbalanced and pitched forward into the black. Kress listened to him fall down the stairs. Afterward there were other noises—scuttlings and snaps and soft squishing sounds.

Kress swung around to face Lissandra. He was drenched in cold sweat, but a sickly kind of excitement was on him. It was almost sexual.

Lissandra’s calm cold eyes regarded him through her mask. “What are you doing?” she demanded as Kress picked up the laser she had dropped. “Simon!”

“Making a peace,” he said, giggling. “They won’t hurt god, no, not so long as god is good and generous. I was cruel. Starved them. I have to make up for it now, you see.”

“You’re insane,” Lissandra said. It was the last thing she said. Kress burned a hole in her chest big enough to put his arm through. He dragged the body across the floor and rolled it down the cellar stairs. The noises were louder—chitinous clackings and scrapings and echoes that were thick and liquid. Kress nailed up the door once again.

As he fled, he was filled with a deep sense of contentment that coated his fear like a layer of syrup. He suspected it was not his own.

HE PLANNED TO leave his home, to fly to the city and take a room for a night, or perhaps for a year. Instead Kress started drinking. He was not quite sure why. He drank steadily for hours, and retched it all up violently on his living room carpet. At some point he fell asleep. When he woke, it was pitch dark in the house.

He cowered against the couch. He could hear noises. Things were moving in the walls. They were all around him. His hearing was extraordinarily acute. Every little creak was the footstep of a sandking. He closed his eyes and waited, expecting to feel their terrible touch, afraid to move lest he brush against one.

Kress sobbed, and was very still for a while, but nothing happened.

He opened his eyes again. He trembled. Slowly the shadows began to soften and dissolve. Moonlight was filtering through the high windows. His eyes adjusted.

The living room was empty. Nothing there, nothing, nothing. Only his drunken fears.

Simon Kress steeled himself, and rose, and went to a light.

Nothing there. The room was quiet, deserted.

He listened. Nothing. No sound. Nothing in the walls. It had all been his imagination, his fear.

The memories of Lissandra and the thing in the cellar returned to him unbidden. Shame and anger washed over him. Why had he done that? He could have helped her burn it out, kill it. Why . . . he knew why. The maw had done it to him, put fear in him. Wo had said it was psionic, even when it was small. And now it was large, so large. It had feasted on Cath, and Idi, and now it had two more bodies down there. It would keep growing. And it had learned to like the taste of human flesh, he thought.

He began to shake, but he took control of himself again and stopped. It wouldn’t hurt him. He was god. The whites had always been his favorites.

He remembered how he had stabbed it with his throwing-sword. That was before Cath came. Damn her anyway.

He couldn’t stay here. The maw would grow hungry again. Large as it was, it wouldn’t take long. Its appetite would be terrible. What would it do then? He had to get away, back to the safety of the city while it was still contained in his wine cellar. It was only plaster and hard-packed earth down there, and the mobiles could dig and tunnel. When they got free. . . . Kress didn’t want to think about it.

He went to his bedroom and packed. He took three bags. Just a single change of clothing, that was all he needed; the rest of the space he filled with his valuables, with jewelry and art and other things he could not bear to lose. He did not expect to return.

His shambler followed him down the stairs staring at him from its baleful glowing eyes. It was gaunt. Kress realized that it had been ages since he had fed it. Normally it could take care of itself, but no doubt the pickings had grown lean of late. When it tried to clutch at his leg, he snarled at it and kicked it away, and it scurried off, offended.

Kress slipped outside, carrying his bags awkwardly, and shut the door behind him.

For a moment he stood pressed against the house, his heart thudding in his chest. Only a few meters between him and his skimmer. He was afraid to cross them. The moonlight was bright, and the front of his house was a scene of carnage. The bodies of Lissandra’s two flamers lay where they had fallen, one twisted and burned, the other swollen beneath a mass of dead sandkings. And the mobiles, the black and red mobiles, they were all around him. It was an effort to remember that they were dead. It was almost as if they were simply waiting, as they had waited so often before.

Nonsense, Kress told himself. More drunken fears. He had seen the castles blown apart. They were dead, and the white maw was trapped in his cellar. He took several deep and deliberate breaths, and stepped forward onto the sandkings. They crunched. He ground them into the sand savagely. They did not move.

Kress smiled, and walked slowly across the battleground, listening to the sounds, the sounds of safety.

Crunch. Crackle. Crunch.

He lowered his bags to the ground and opened the door to his skimmer.

Something moved from shadow into light. A pale shape on the seat of his skimmer. It was as long as his forearm. Its mandibles clacked together softly, and it looked up at him from six small eyes set all around its body.

Kress wet his pants and backed away slowly.

There was more motion from inside the skimmer. He had left the door open. The sandking emerged and came toward him, cautiously. Others followed. They had been hiding beneath his seats, burrowed into the upholstery. But now they emerged. They formed a ragged ring around the skimmer.

Kress licked his lips, turned, and moved quickly to Lissandra’s skimmer.

He stopped before he was halfway there. Things were moving inside that one too. Great maggoty things, half-seen by the light of the moon.

Kress whimpered and retreated back toward the house. Near the front door, he looked up.

He counted a dozen long white shapes creeping back and forth across the walls of the building. Four of them were clustered close together near the top of the unused belfry where the carrion hawk had once roosted. They were carving something. A face. A very recognizable face.

Simon Kress shrieked and ran back inside.

A SUFFICIENT QUANTITY of drink brought him the easy oblivion he sought. But he woke. Despite everything, he woke. He had a terrific headache, and he smelled, and he was hungry. Oh so very hungry. He had never been so hungry.

Kress knew it was not his own stomach hurting.

A white sandking watched him from atop the dresser in his bedroom, its antennae moving faintly. It was as big as the one in the skimmer the night before. He tried not to shrink away. “I’ll . . . I’ll feed you,” he said to it. “I’ll feed you.” His mouth was horribly dry, sandpaper dry. He licked his lips and fled from the room.

The house was full of sandkings; he had to be careful where he put his feet. They all seemed busy on errands of their own. They were making modifications in his house, burrowing into or out of his walls, carving things. Twice he saw his own likeness staring out at him from unexpected places. The faces were warped, twisted, livid with fear.

He went outside to get the bodies that had been rotting in the yard, hoping to appease the white maw’s hunger. They were gone, both of them. Kress remembered how easily the mobiles could carry things many times their own weight.

It was terrible to think that the maw was still hungry after all of that.

When Kress reentered the house, a column of sandkings was wending its way down the stairs. Each carried a piece of his shambler. The head seemed to look at him reproachfully as it went by.

Kress emptied his freezers, his cabinets, everything, piling all the food in the house in the center of his kitchen floor. A dozen whites waited to take it away. They avoided the frozen food, leaving it to thaw in a great puddle, but they carried off everything else.

When all the food was gone, Kress felt his own hunger pangs abate just a bit, though he had not eaten a thing. But he knew the respite would be short-lived. Soon the maw would be hungry again. He had to feed it.

Kress knew what to do. He went to his communicator. “Malada,” he began casually when the first of his friends answered, “I’m having a small party tonight. I realize this is terribly short notice, but I hope you can make it. I really do.”

He called Jad Rakkis next, and then the others. By the time he had finished, nine of them had accepted his invitation. Kress hoped that would be enough.

KRESS MET HIS guests outside—the mobiles had cleaned up remarkably quickly, and the grounds looked almost as they had before the battle—and walked them to his front door. He let them enter first. He did not follow.

When four of them had gone through, Kress finally worked up his courage. He closed the door behind his latest guest, ignoring the startled exclamations that soon turned into shrill gibbering, and sprinted for the skimmer the man had arrived in. He slid in safely, thumbed the starplate, and swore. It was programmed to lift only in response to its owner’s thumbprint, of course.

Jad Rakkis was the next to arrive. Kress ran to his skimmer as it set down, and seized Rakkis by the arm as he was climbing out. “Get back in, quickly,” he said pushing. “Take me to the city. Hurry, Jad. Get out of here!”

But Rakkis only stared at him, and would not move. “Why, what’s wrong, Simon? I don’t understand. What about your party?”

And then it was too late, because the loose sand all around them was stirring, and the red eyes were staring at them, and the mandibles were clacking. Rakkis made a choking sound, and moved to get back in his skimmer, but a pair of mandibles snapped shut about his ankle, and suddenly he was on his knees. The sand seemed to boil with subterranean activity. Jad thrashed and cried terribly as they tore him apart. Kress could hardly bear to watch.

After that, he did not try to escape again. When it was all over, he cleaned out what remained in his liquor cabinet, and got extremely drunk. It would be the last time he would enjoy that luxury, he knew. The only alcohol remaining in the house was stored down in the wine cellar.

Kress did not touch a bite of food the entire day, but he fell asleep feeling bloated, sated at last, the awful hunger vanquished. His last thoughts before the nightmares took him were of whom he could ask out tomorrow.

MORNING WAS HOT and dry. Kress opened his eyes to see the white sandking on his dresser again. He shut them again quickly, hoping the dream would leave him. It did not, and he could not go back to sleep. Soon he found himself staring at the thing.

He stared for almost five minutes before the strangeness of it dawned on him; the sandking was not moving.

The mobiles could be prematurely still, to be sure. He had seen them wait and watch a thousand times. But always there was some motion about them—the mandibles clacked, the legs twitched, the long fine antennae stirred and swayed.

But the sandking on his dresser was completely still.

Kress rose, holding his breath, not daring to hope. Could it be dead? Could something have killed it? He walked across the room.

The eyes were glassy and black. The creature seemed swollen, somehow, as if it were soft and rotting inside, filling up with gas that pushed outward at the plates of white armor.

Kress reached out a trembling hand and touched it.

It was warm—hot even—and growing hotter. But it did not move.

He pulled his hand back, and as he did, a segment of the sandking’s white exoskeleton fell away from it. The flesh beneath was the same color, but softer-looking, swollen and feverish. And it almost seemed to throb.

Kress backed away, and ran to the door.

Three more white mobiles lay in his hall. They were all like the one in his bedroom.

He ran down the stairs, jumping over sandkings. None of them moved. The house was full of them, all dead, dying, comatose, whatever. Kress did not care what was wrong with them. Just so they could not move.

He found four of them inside his skimmer. He picked them up one by one, and threw them as far as he could. Damned monsters. He slid back in, on the ruined half-eaten seats, and thumbed the starplate.

Nothing happened.

Kress tried again, and again. Nothing. It wasn’t fair. This was his skimmer, it ought to start, why wouldn’t it lift, he didn’t understand.

Finally he got out and checked, expecting the worst. He found it. The sandkings had torn apart his gravity grid. He was trapped. He was still trapped.

Grimly, Kress marched back into the house. He went to his gallery and found the antique ax that had hung next to the throwing-sword he had used on Cath m’Lane. He set to work. The sandkings did not stir even as he chopped them to pieces. But they splattered when he made the first cut, the bodies almost bursting. Inside was awful; strange half-formed organs, a viscous reddish ooze that looked almost like human blood, and the yellow ichor.

Kress destroyed twenty of them before he realized the futility of what he was doing. The mobiles were nothing, really. Besides, there were so many of them. He could work for a day and night and still not kill them all.

He had to go down into the wine cellar and use the ax on the maw.

Resolute, he started down. He got within sight of the door, and stopped.

It was not a door any more. The walls had been eaten away, so that the hole was twice the size it had been, and round. A pit, that was all. There was no sign that there had ever been a door nailed shut over that black abyss.

A ghastly, choking, fetid odor seemed to come from below.

And the walls were wet and bloody and covered with patches of white fungus.

And worst, it was breathing.

Kress stood across the room and felt the warm wind wash over him as it exhaled, and he tried not to choke, and when the wind reversed direction, he fled.

Back in the living room, he destroyed three more mobiles, and collapsed. What was happening? He didn’t understand.

Then he remembered the only person who might understand. Kress went to his communicator again, stepping on a sandking in his haste, and prayed fervently that the device still worked.

When Jala Wo answered, he broke down and told her everything.

She let him talk without interruption, no expression save for a slight frown on her gaunt, pale face. When Kress had finished, she said only, “I ought to leave you there.”

Kress began to blubber. “You can’t. Help me. I’ll pay. . . .”

“I ought to,” We repeated, “but I won’t.”

“Thank you,” Kress said. “Oh, thank . . .”

“Quiet,” said Wo. “Listen to me. This is your own doing. Keep your sandkings well, and they are courtly ritual warriors. You turned yours into something else, with starvation and torture. You were their god. You made them what they are. That maw in your cellar is sick, still suffering from the wound you gave it. It is probably insane. Its behavior is . . . unusual.

“You have to get out of there quickly. The mobiles are not dead, Kress. They are dormant. I told you the exoskeleton falls off when they grow larger. Normally, in fact, it falls off much earlier. I have never heard of sandkings growing as large as yours while still in the insectoid stage. It is another result of crippling the white maw, I would say. That does not matter.

“What matters is the metamorphosis your sandkings are now undergoing. As the maw grows, you see, it gets progressively more intelligent. Its psionic powers strengthen, and its mind becomes more sophisticated, more ambitious. The armored mobiles are useful enough when the maw is tiny and only semi-sentient, but now it needs better servants, bodies with more capabilities. Do you understand? The mobiles are all going to give birth to a new breed of sandking. I can’t say exactly what it will look like. Each maw designs its own, to fit its perceived needs and desires. But it will be biped, with four arms, and opposable thumbs. It will be able to construct and operate advanced machinery. The individual sandkings will not be sentient. But the maw will be very sentient indeed.”

Simon Kress was gaping at Wo’s image on the viewscreen. “Your workers,” he said, with an effort. “The ones who came out here . . . who installed the tank. . . .”

Jala Wo managed a faint smile. “Shade,” she said.

“Shade is a sandking,” Kress repeated numbly. “And you sold me a tank of . . . of . . . infants, ah. . . .”

“Do not be absurd,” Wo said. “A first-stage sandking is more like a sperm than an infant. The wars temper and control them in nature. Only one in a hundred reaches second stage. Only one in a thousand achieves the third and final plateau, and becomes like Shade. Adult sandkings are not sentimental about the small maws. There are too many of them, and their mobiles are pests.” She sighed. “And all this talk wastes time. That white sandking is going to waken to full sentience soon. It is not going to need you any longer, and it hates you, and it will be very hungry. The transformation is taxing. The maw must eat enormous amounts before and after. So you have to get out of there. Do you understand?”

“I can’t,” Kress said. “My skimmer is destroyed, and I can’t get any of the others to start. I don’t know how to reprogram them. Can you come out for me?”

“Yes,” said Wo. “Shade and I will leave at once, but it is more than two hundred kilometers from Asgard to you and there is equipment we will need to deal with the deranged sandking you’ve created. You cannot wait there. You have two feet. Walk. Go due east, as near as you can determine, as quickly as you can. The land out there is pretty desolate. We can find you easily with an aerial search, and you’ll be safely away from the sandking. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Simon Kress. “Yes, oh, yes.”

They signed off, and he walked quickly toward the door. He was halfway there when he heard the noise—a sound halfway between a pop and a crack.

One of the sandkings had split open. Four tiny hands covered with pinkish-yellow blood came up out of the gap and began to push the dead skin aside.

Kress began to run.

HE HAD NOT counted on the heat.

The hills were dry and rocky. Kress ran from the house as quickly as he could, ran until his ribs ached and his breath was coming in gasps. Then he walked, but as soon as he had recovered he began to run again. For almost an hour he ran and walked, ran and walked, beneath the fierce hot sun. He sweated freely, and wished that he had thought to bring some water. He watched the sky in the hopes of seeing Wo and Shade.

He was not made for this. It was too hot, and too dry, and he was in no condition. But he kept himself going with the memory of the way the maw had breathed, and the thought of the wriggling little things that by now were surely crawling all over his house. He hoped Wo and Shade would know how to deal with them.

He had his own plans for Wo and Shade. It was all their fault, Kress had decided, and they would suffer for it. Lissandra was dead, but he knew others in her profession. He would have his revenge. He promised himself that a hundred times as he struggled and sweated his way east.

At least he hoped it was east. He was not that good at directions, and he wasn’t certain which way he had run in his initial panic, but since then he had made an effort to bear due east, as Wo had suggested.

When he had been running for several hours, with no sign of rescue, Kress began to grow certain that he had gone wrong.

When several more hours passed, he began to grow afraid. What if Wo and Shade could not find him? He would die out here. He hadn’t eaten in two days; he was weak and frightened; his throat was raw for want of water. He couldn’t keep going. The sun was sinking now, and he’d be completely lost in the dark. What was wrong? Had the sandkings eaten Wo and Shade? The fear was on him again, filling him, and with it a great thirst and a terrible hunger. But Kress kept going. He stumbled now when he tried to run, and twice he fell. The second time he scraped his hand on a rock, and it came away bloody. He sucked at it as he walked, and worried about infection.

The sun was on the horizon behind him. The ground grew a little cooler, for which Kress was grateful. He decided to walk until last light and settle in for the night. Surely he was far enough from the sandkings to be safe, and Wo and Shade would find him come morning.

When he topped the next rise, he saw the outline of a house in front of him.

It wasn’t as big as his own house, but it was big enough. It was habitation, safety. Kress shouted and began to run toward it. Food and drink, he had to have nourishment, he could taste the meal now. He was aching with hunger. He ran down the hill toward the house, waving his arms and shouting to the inhabitants. The light was almost gone now, but he could still make out a half-dozen children playing in the twilight. “Hey there,” he shouted. “Help, help.”

They came running toward him.

Kress stopped suddenly. “No,” he said, “oh, no. Oh, no.” He backpedaled, slipped on the sand, got up and tried to run again. They caught him easily. They were ghastly little things with bulging eyes and dusky orange skin. He struggled, but it was useless. Small as they were, each of them had four arms, and Kress had only two.

They carried him toward the house. It was a sad, shabby house built of crumbling sand, but the door was quite large, and dark, and it breathed. That was terrible, but it was not the thing that set Simon Kress to screaming. He screamed because of the others, the little orange children who came crawling out from the castle, and watched impassive as he passed.

All of them had his face.

HARRY TURTLEDOVE The Road Not Taken

Harry Turtledove is the leading contemporary exponent of alternate-world fantasy and science fiction. In many of his stories and novels, he posits an outcome for an influential moment in time that is inconsistent with known history, or he considers the earlier or later appearance of a technology that has indelibly shaped the world as we know it, and then follows the alternate succession of events that might have unfolded in its aftermath. His work is known for its rigorous and detailed rendering of history as a force that shapes the smallest nuances of a world, and for characters who support his plots with perspectives and outlooks molded by their altered reality. In the stories collected in 1987 as Agent of Byzantium, Mohammed’s conversion to Christianity results in a world where the Arab empires never came to be. That same year saw the publication of The Misplaced Legion, the first novel in his Videssos series about the experiences of a Roman legion translated to a world that runs on magic. Since then, he has explored the impact of historical events altered by outside manipulation. His ambitious Worldwar series—which includes In the Balance, Tilting the Balance, Striking the Balance, Upsetting the Balance, and other novels—projects an alternate World War II in which an invasion from outer space in 1942 forges alliances between Axis and Allied opponents to fight the common enemy. In Guns of the South, time travelers provide the Confederacy with the firepower from the future it needs to win the American Civil War. The three volumes in his Great War saga—American Front, Walk in Hell, and Breakthrough—present an America in which the United States and the Confederacy survive into the twentieth century and support opposing sides in World War I. Turtledove has also coedited the anthology Alternate Generals. His many other works include the short-fiction collection Departures, the comic fantasy The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, and the linked novels Into the Darkness, Darkness Descending, and Through the Darkness, epic tales of empire building set in a fantasy world where cataclysmic wars are fought with magic.

CAPTAIN TOGRAM WAS using the chamberpot when the Indomitable broke out of hyperdrive. As happened all too often, nausea surged through the Roxolan officer. He raised the pot and was abruptly sick into it.

When the spasm was done, he set the thundermug down and wiped his streaming eyes with the soft, gray-brown fur of his forearm. “The gods curse it!” he burst out. “Why don’t the shipmasters warn us when they do that?” Several of his troopers echoed him more pungently.

At that moment, a runner appeared in the doorway. “We’re back in normal space,” the youth squeaked, before dashing on to the next chamber. Jeers and oaths followed him: “No shit!” “Thanks for the news!” “Tell the steerers—they might not have got the word!”

Togram sighed and scratched his muzzle in annoyance at his own irritability. As an officer, he was supposed to set an example for his soldiers. He was junior enough to take such responsibilities seriously, but had had enough service to realize he should never expect too much from anyone more than a couple of notches above him. High ranks went to those with ancient blood or fresh money.

Sighing again, he stowed the chamberpot in its niche. The metal cover he slid over it did little to relieve the stench. After sixteen days in space, the Indomitable reeked of ordure, stale food, and staler bodies. It was no better in any other ship of the Roxolan fleet, or any other. Travel between the stars was simply like that. Stinks and darkness were part of the price the soldiers paid to make the kingdom grow.

Togram picked up a lantern and shook it to rouse the glowmites inside. They flashed silver in alarm. Some races, the captain knew, lit their ships with torches or candles, but glowmites used less air, even if they could only shine intermittently.

Ever the careful soldier, Togram checked his weapons while the light lasted. He always kept all four of his pistols loaded and ready to use; when landing operations began, one pair would go on his belt, the other in his boot tops. He was more worried about his sword. The perpetually moist air aboard ship was not good for the blade. Sure enough, he found a spot of rust to scour away.

As he polished the rapier, he wondered what the new system would be like. He prayed for it to have a habitable planet. The air in the Indomitable might be too foul to breathe by the time the ship could get back to the nearest Roxolan-held planet. That was one of the risks starfarers took. It was not a major one—small yellow suns usually shepherded a life-bearing world or two—but it was there.

He wished he hadn’t let himself think about it; like an aching fang, the worry, once there, would not go away. He got up from his pile of bedding to see how the steerers were doing.

As usual with them, both Ransisc and his apprentice Olgren were complaining about the poor quality of the glass through which they trained their spyglasses. “You ought to stop whining,” Togram said, squinting in from the doorway. “At least you have light to see by.” After seeing so long by glowmite lantern, he had to wait for his eyes to adjust to the harsh raw sunlight flooding the observation chamber before he could go in.

Olgren’s ears went back in annoyance. Ransisc was older and calmer. He set his hand on his apprentice’s arm. “If you rise to all of Togram’s jibes, you’ll have time for nothing else—he’s been a troublemaker since he came out of the egg. Isn’t that right, Togram?”

“Whatever you say.” Togram liked the white-muzzled senior steerer. Unlike most of his breed, Ransisc did not act as if he believed his important job made him something special in the gods’ scheme of things.

Olgren stiffened suddenly; the tip of his stumpy tail twitched. “This one’s a world!” he exclaimed.

“Let’s see,” Ransisc said. Olgren moved away from his spyglass. The two steerers had been examining bright stars one by one, looking for those that would show discs and prove themselves actually to be planets.

“It’s a world,” Ransisc said at length, “but not one for us—those yellow, banded planets always have poisonous air, and too much of it.” Seeing Olgren’s dejection, he added, “It’s not a total loss—if we look along a line from that planet to its sun, we should find others fairly soon.”

“Try that one,” Togram said, pointing toward a ruddy star that looked brighter than most of the others he could see.

Olgren muttered something haughty about knowing his business better than any amateur, but Ransisc said sharply, “The captain has seen more worlds from space than you, sirrah. Suppose you do as he asks.” Ears drooping dejectedly, Olgren obeyed.

Then his pique vanished. “A planet with green patches!” he shouted.

Ransisc had been aiming his spyglass at a different part of the sky, but that brought him hurrying over. He shoved his apprentice aside, fiddled with the spyglass’s focus, peered long at the magnified image. Olgren was hopping from one foot to the other, his muddy brown fur puffed out with impatience to hear the verdict.

“Maybe,” the senior steerer said, and Olgren’s face lit, but it fell again as Ransisc continued, “I don’t see anything that looks like open water. If we find nothing better, I say we try it, but let’s search a while longer.”

“You’ve just made a luof very happy,” Togram said. Ransisc chuckled. The Roxolani brought the little creatures along to test new planets’ air. If a luof could breathe it in the airlock of a flier, it would also be safe for the animal’s masters.

The steerers growled in irritation as several stars in a row stubbornly stayed mere points of light. Then Ransisc stiffened at his spyglass. “Here it is,” he said softly. “This is what we want. Come here, Olgren.”

“Oh my, yes,” the apprentice said a moment later.

“Go report it to Warmaster Slevon, and ask him if his devices have picked up any hyperdrive vibrations except for the fleet’s.” As Olgren hurried away, Ransisc beckoned Togram over. “See for yourself.”

The captain of foot bent over the eyepiece. Against the black of space, the world in the spyglass field looked achingly like Roxolan: deep ocean blue, covered with swirls of white cloud.

A good-sized moon hung nearby. Both were in approximately half-phase, being nearer their star than was the Indomitable.

“Did you spy any land?” Togram asked.

“Look near the top of the image, below the ice cap,” Ransisc said. “Those browns and greens aren’t colors water usually takes. If we want any world in this system, you’re looking at it now.”

They took turns examining the distant planet and trying to sketch its features until Olgren came back. “Well?” Togram said, though he saw the apprentice’s ears were high and cheerful.

“Not a hyperdrive emanation but ours in the whole system!” Olgren grinned. Ransisc and Togram both pounded him on the back, as if he were the cause of the good news and not just its bearer.

The captain’s smile was even wider than Olgren’s. This was going to be an easy one, which, as a professional soldier, he thoroughly approved of. If no one hereabouts could build a hyperdrive, either the system had no intelligent life at all or its inhabitants were still primitives, ignorant of gunpowder, fliers, and other aspects of warfare as it was practiced among the stars.

He rubbed his hands. He could hardly wait for landfall.

BUCK HERZOG WAS bored. After four months in space, with five and a half more staring him in the face, it was hardly surprising. Earth was a bright star behind the Ares III, with Luna a dimmer companion; Mars glowed ahead.

“It’s your exercise period, Buck,” Art Snyder called. Of the five-person crew, he was probably the most officious.

“All right, Pancho.” Herzog sighed. He pushed himself over to the bicycle and began pumping away, at first languidly, then harder. The work helped keep calcium in his bones in spite of free-fall. Besides, it was something to do.

Melissa Ott was listening to the news from home. “Fernando Valenzuela died last night,” she said.

“Who?” Snyder was not a baseball fan.

Herzog was, and a Californian to boot. “I saw him at an Old-Timers’ game once, and I remember my dad and my grandfather always talking about him,” he said. “How old was he, Mel?”

“Seventy-nine,” she answered.

“He always was too heavy,” Herzog said sadly.

“Jesus Christ!”

Herzog blinked. No one on the Ares III had sounded that excited since liftoff from the American space station. Melissa was staring at the radar screen. “Freddie!” she yelled.

Frederica Lindstrom, the ship’s electronics expert, had just gotten out of the cramped shower space. She dove for the control board, still trailing a stream of water droplets. She did not bother with a towel; modesty aboard the Ares III had long since vanished.

Melissa’s shout even made Claude Jonnard stick his head out of the little biology lab where he spent most of his time. “What’s wrong?” he called from the hatchway.

“Radar’s gone to hell,” Melissa told him.

“What do you mean, gone to hell?” Jonnard demanded indignantly. He was one of those annoying people who think quantitatively all the time, and think everyone else does, too.

“There are about a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty, objects on the screen that have no right to be there,” answered Frederica Lindstrom, who had a milder case of the same disease. “Range appears to be a couple of million kilometers.”

“They weren’t there a minute ago, either,” Melissa said. “I hollered when they showed up.”

As Frederica fiddled with the radar and the computer, Herzog stayed on the exercise bike, feeling singularly useless: what good is a geologist millions of kilometers away from rocks? He wouldn’t even get his name in the history books—no one remembers the crew of the third expedition to anywhere.

Frederica finished her checks. “I can’t find anything wrong,” she said, sounding angry at herself and the equipment both.

“Time to get on the horn to Earth, Freddie,” Art Snyder said. “If I’m going to land this beast, I can’t have the radar telling me lies.”

Melissa was already talking into the microphone. “Houston, this is Ares III. We have a problem—”

Even at light-speed, there were a good many minutes of waiting. They crawled past, one by one. Everyone jumped when the speaker crackled to life. “Ares III, this is Houston Control. Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t quite know how to tell you this, but we see them too.”

The communicator kept talking, but no one was listening to her anymore. Herzog felt his scalp tingle as his hair, in primitive reflex, tried to stand on end. Awe filled him. He had never thought he would live to see humanity contact another race. “Call them, Mel,” he said urgently.

She hesitated. “I don’t know, Buck. Maybe we should let Houston handle this.”

“Screw Houston,” he said, surprised at his own vehemence. “By the time the bureaucrats down there figure out what to do, we’ll be coming down on Mars. We’re the people on the spot. Are you going to throw away the most important moment in the history of the species?”

Melissa looked from one of her crewmates to the next. Whatever she saw in their faces must have satisfied her, for she shifted the aim of the antenna and began to speak: “This is the spacecraft Ares III, calling the unknown ships. Welcome from the people of Earth.” She turned off the transmitter for a moment. “How many languages do we have?”

The call went out in Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, even Latin. (“Who knows the last time they may have visited?” Frederica said when Snyder gave her an odd look.)

If the wait for a reply from Earth had been long, this one was infinitely worse. The delay stretched far, far past the fifteen-second speed-of-light round trip. “Even if they don’t speak any of our languages, shouldn’t they say something?” Melissa demanded of the air. It did not answer, nor did the aliens.

Then, one at a time, the strange ships began darting away sunward, toward Earth. “My God, the acceleration!” Snyder said. “Those are no rockets!” He looked suddenly sheepish. “I don’t suppose starships would have rockets, would they?”

The Ares III lay alone again in its part of space, pursuing its Hohmann orbit inexorably toward Mars. Buck Herzog wanted to cry.

AS WAS THEIR practice, the ships of the Roxolan fleet gathered above the pole of the new planet’s hemisphere with the most land. Because everyone would be coming to the same spot, the doctrine made visual rendezvous easy. Soon only four ships were unaccounted for. A scoutship hurried around to the other pole, found them, and brought them back.

“Always some water-lovers every trip.” Togram chuckled to the steerers as he brought them the news. He took all the chances he could to go to their dome, not just for the sunlight but also because, unlike many soldiers, he was interested in planets for their own sake. With any head for figures, he might have tried to become a steerer himself.

He had a decent hand with quill and paper, so Ransisc and Olgren were willing to let him spell them at the spyglass and add to the sketchmaps they were making of the world below.

“Funny sort of planet,” he remarked. “I’ve never seen one with so many forest fires or volcanoes or whatever they are on the dark side.”

“I still think they’re cities,” Olgren said, with a defiant glance at Ransisc.

“They’re too big and too bright,” the senior steerer said patiently; the argument, plainly, had been going on for some time.

“This is your first trip offplanet, isn’t it, Olgren?” Togram asked.

“Well, what if it is?”

“Only that you don’t have enough perspective. Egelloc on Roxolan has almost a million people, and from space it’s next to invisible at night. It’s nowhere near as bright as those lights, either. Remember, this is a primitive planet. I admit it looks like there’s intelligent life down there, but how could a race that hasn’t even stumbled across the hyperdrive build cities ten times as great as Egelloc?”

“I don’t know,” Olgren said sulkily. “But from what little I can see by moonlight, those lights look to be in good spots for cities—on coasts, or along rivers, or whatever.”

Ransisc sighed. “What are we going to do with him, Togram? He’s so sure he knows everything, he won’t listen to reason. Were you like that when you were young?”

“Till my clanfathers beat it out of me, anyway. No need getting all excited, though. Soon enough the flyers will go down with their luofi, and then we’ll know.” He swallowed a snort of laughter, then sobered abruptly, hoping he hadn’t been as gullible as Olgren when he was young.

“I HAVE ONE of the alien vessels on radar,” the SR-81 pilot reported. “It’s down to 80,000 meters and still descending.” He was at his own plane’s operational ceiling, barely half as high as the ship entering atmosphere.

“For God’s sake, hold your fire,” ground control ordered. The command had been dinned into him before he took off, but the brass were not about to let him forget. He did not really blame them. One trigger-happy idiot could ruin humanity forever.

“I’m beginning to get a visual image,” he said, glancing at the head-up display projected in front of him. A moment later he added, “It’s one damn funny-looking ship, I can tell you that already. Where are the wings?”

“We’re picking up the image now too,” the ground-control officer said. “They must use the same principle for their in-atmosphere machines as they do for their spacecraft: some sort of antigravity that gives them both lift and drive capability.”

The alien ship kept ignoring the SR-81, just as all the aliens had ignored every terrestrial signal beamed at them. The craft continued its slow descent, while the SR-81 pilot circled below, hoping he would not have to go down to the aerial tanker to refuel.

“One question answered,” he called to the ground. “It’s a warplane.” No craft whose purpose was peaceful would have had those glaring eyes and that snarling, fang-filled mouth painted on its belly. Some USAF ground-attack aircraft carried similar markings.

At last the alien reached the level at which the SR-81 was loitering. The pilot called the ground again. “Permission to pass in front of the aircraft?” he asked. “Maybe everybody’s asleep in there and I can wake ’em up.”

After a long silence, ground control gave grudging assent. “No hostile gestures,” the controller warned.

“What do you think I’m going to do, flip him the finger?” the pilot muttered, but his radio was off. Acceleration pushed him back in his seat as he guided the SR-81 into a long, slow turn that would carry it about half a kilometer in front of the vessel from the spacefleet.

His airplane’s camera gave him a brief glimpse of the alien pilot, who was sitting behind a small, dirty windscreen.

The being from the stars saw him, too. Of that there was no doubt. The alien jinked like a startled fawn, performing maneuvers that would have smeared the SR-81 pilot against the walls of his pressure cabin—if his aircraft could have matched them in the first place.

“I’m giving pursuit!” he shouted. Ground control screamed at him, but he was the man on the spot. The surge from his afterburner made the pressure he had felt before a love pat by comparison.

Better streamlining made his plane faster than the craft from the starships, but that did not do him much good. Every time its pilot caught sight of him, the alien ship danced away with effortless ease. The SR-81 pilot felt like a man trying to kill a butterfly with a hatchet.

To add to his frustration, his fuel warning light came on. In any case, his aircraft was designed for the thin atmosphere at the edge of space, not the increasingly denser air through which the alien flew. He swore, but he had to pull away.

As his SR-81 gulped kerosene from the tanker, he could not help wondering what would have happened if he’d turned a missile loose. There were a couple of times he’d had a perfect shot. That was one thought he kept firmly to himself. What his superiors would do if they knew about it was too gruesome to contemplate.

THE TROOPERS CROWDED round Togram as he came back from the officers’ conclave. “What’s the word, captain?” “Did the luof live?” “What’s it like down there?”

“The luof lived, boys!” Togram said with a broad smile.

His company raised a cheer that echoed deafeningly in the barracks room. “We’re going down!” they whooped. Ears stood high in excitement. Some soldiers waved plumed hats in the fetid air. Others, of a bent more like their captain’s, went over to their pallets and began seeing to their weapons.

“How tough are they going to be, sir?” a gray-furred veteran named Ilingua asked as Togram went by. “I hear the flier pilot saw some funny things.”

Togram’s smile got wider. “By the heavens and hells, Ilingua, haven’t you done this often enough before to know better than to pay heed to rumors you hear before planetfall?”

“I hope so, sir,” Ilingua said, “but these are so strange I thought there might be something to them.” When Togram did not answer, the trooper shook his head at his own foolishness and shook up a lantern so he could examine his dagger’s edge.

As inconspicuously as he could, the captain let out a sigh. He did not know what to believe himself, and he had listened to the pilot’s report. How could the locals have flying machines when they did not know contragravity? Togram had heard of a race that used hot-air balloons before it discovered the better way of doing things, but no balloon could have reached the altitude the locals’ flier had achieved, and no balloon could have changed direction, as the pilot had violently insisted this craft had done.

Assume he was wrong, as he had to be. But how was one to take his account of towns as big as the ones whose possibility Ransisc had ridiculed, of a world so populous there was precious little open space? And lantern signals from other ships showed their scout pilots were reporting the same wild improbabilities.

Well, in the long run it would not matter if this race was numerous as reffo at a picnic. There would simply be that many more subjects here for Roxolan.

“THIS IS A terrible waste,” Billy Cox said to anyone who would listen as he slung his duffel bag over his shoulder and tramped out to the waiting truck. “We should be meeting the starpeople with open arms, not with a show of force.”

“You tell ’em, Professor.” Sergeant Santos Amoros chuckled from behind him. “Me, I’d sooner stay on my butt in a nice, air-conditioned barracks than face L.A. summer smog and sun any old day. Damn shame you’re just a Spec-1. If you was president, you could give the orders any way you wanted, instead o’ takin’ ’em.”

Cox didn’t think that was very fair either. He’d been just a few units short of his M.A. in poli-sci when the big buildup after the second Syrian crisis sucked him into the army.

He had to fold his lanky length like a jackknife to get under the olive-drab canopy of the truck and down into the passenger compartment. The seats were too hard and too close together. Jamming people into the vehicle counted for more than their comfort while they were there. Typical military thinking, Cox thought disparagingly.

The truck filled. The big diesel rumbled to life. A black soldier dug out a deck of cards and bet anyone that he could turn twenty-five cards into five pat poker hands. A couple of greenhorns took him up on it. Cox had found out the expensive way that it was a sucker bet. The black man was grinning as he offered the deck to one of his marks to shuffle.

Riffff! The ripple of the pasteboards was authoritative enough to make everybody in the truck turn his head. “Where’d you learn to handle cards like that, man?” demanded the black soldier, whose name was Jim but whom everyone called Junior.

“Dealing blackjack in Vegas.” Riffff!

“Hey, Junior,” Cox called, “all of a sudden I want ten bucks of your action.”

“Up yours too, pal,” Junior said, glumly watching the cards move as if they had lives of their own.

The truck rolled northward, part of a convoy of trucks, MICVs, and light tanks that stretched for miles. An entire regiment was heading into Los Angeles, to be billeted by companies in different parts of the sprawling city. Cox approved of that; it made it less likely that he would personally come face-to-face with any of the aliens.

“Sandy,” he said to Amoros, who was squeezed in next to him, “even if I’m wrong and the aliens aren’t friendly, what the hell good will hand weapons do? It’d be like taking on an elephant with a safety pin.”

“Professor, like I told you already, they don’t pay me to think, or you neither. Just as well, too. I’m gonna do what the lieutenant tells me, and you’re gonna do what I tell you, and everything is gonna be fine, right?”

“Sure,” Cox said, because Sandy, while he wasn’t a bad guy, was a sergeant. All the same, the Neo-Armalite between Cox’s boots seemed very futile, and his helmet and body armor as thin and gauzy as a stripper’s negligee.

THE SKY OUTSIDE the steerers’ dome began to go from black to deep blue as the Indomitable entered atmosphere. “There,” Olgren said, pointing. “That’s where we’ll land.”

“Can’t see much from this height,” Togram remarked.

“Let him use your spyglass, Olgren,” Ransisc said. “He’ll be going back to his company soon.”

Togram grunted; that was more than a comment—it was also a hint. Even so, he was happy to peer through the eyepiece. The ground seemed to leap toward him. There was a moment of disorientation as he adjusted to the inverted image, which put the ocean on the wrong side of the field of view. But he was not interested in sightseeing. He wanted to learn what his soldiers and the rest of the troops aboard the Indomitable would have to do to carve out a beachhead and hold it against the locals.

“There’s a spot that looks promising,” he said. “The greenery there in the midst of the buildings in the eastern—no, the western—part of the city. That should give us a clear landing zone, a good campground, and a base for landing reinforcements.”

“Let’s see what you’re talking about,” Ransisc said, elbowing him aside. “Hmm, yes, I see the stretch you mean. That might not be bad. Olgren, come look at this. Can you find it again in the Warmaster’s spyglass? All right then, go point it out to him. Suggest it as our setdown point.”

The apprentice hurried away. Ransisc bent over the eyepiece again. “Hmm,” he repeated. “They build tall down there, don’t they?”

“I thought so,” Togram said. “And there’s a lot of traffic on those roads. They’ve spent a fortune cobblestoning them all, too; I didn’t see any dust kicked up.”

“This should be a rich conquest,” Ransisc said.

Something swift, metallic, and predator-lean flashed past the observation window. “By the gods, they do have fliers, don’t they?” Togram said. In spite of the pilots’ claims, deep down he hadn’t believed it until he saw it for himself.

He noticed Ransisc’s ears twitching impatiently, and realized he really had spent too much time in the observation room. He picked up his glowmite lantern and went back to his troopers.

A couple of them gave him a resentful look for being away so long, but he cheered them up by passing on as much as he could about their landing site. Common soldiers loved nothing better than inside information. They second-guessed their superiors without it, but the game was even more fun when they had some idea of what they were talking about.

A runner appeared in the doorway. “Captain Togram, your company will planet from airlock three.”

“Three,” Togram acknowledged, and the runner trotted off to pass orders to other ground troop leaders. The captain put his plumed hat on his head (the plume was scarlet, so his company could recognize him in combat), checked his pistols one last time, and ordered his troopers to follow him.

The reeking darkness was as oppressive in front of the inner airlock door as anywhere else aboard the Indomitable, but somehow easier to bear. Soon the doors would swing open and he would feel fresh breezes riffling his fur, taste sweet clean air, enjoy sunlight for more than a few precious units at a stretch. Soon he would measure himself against these new beings in combat.

He felt the slightest of jolts as the Indomitable’s fliers launched themselves from the mother ship. There would be no luofi aboard them this time, but rather musketeers to terrorize the natives with fire from above, and jars of gunpowder to be touched off and dropped. The Roxolani always strove to make as savage a first impression as they could. Terror doubled their effective numbers.

Another jolt came, different from the one before. They were down.

A SHADOW SPREAD across the UCLA campus. Craning his neck, Junior said, “Will you look at the size of the mother!” He had been saying that for the last five minutes, as the starship slowly descended.

Each time, Billy Cox could only nod, his mouth dry, his hands clutching the plastic grip and cool metal barrel of his rifle. The Neo-Armalite seemed totally impotent against the huge bulk floating so arrogantly downward. The alien flying machines around it were as minnows beside a whale, while they in turn dwarfed the USAF planes circling at a greater distance. The roar of their jets assailed the ears of the nervous troops and civilians on the ground. The aliens’ engines were eerily silent.

The starship landed in the open quad between New Royce, New Haines, New Kinsey, and New Powell Halls. It towered higher than any of the two-story red brick buildings, each a reconstruction of one overthrown in the earthquake of 2034. Cox heard saplings splinter under the weight of the alien craft. He wondered what it would have done to the big trees that had fallen five years ago along with the famous old halls.

“All right, they’ve landed. Let’s move on up,” Lieutenant Shotton ordered. He could not quite keep the wobble out of his voice, but he trotted south toward the starship. His platoon followed him past Dickson Art Center, past New Bunche Hall. Not so long ago, Billy Cox had walked this campus barefoot. Now his boots thudded on concrete.

The platoon deployed in front of Dodd Hall, looking west toward the spacecraft. A little breeze toyed with the leaves of the young, hopeful trees planted to replace the stalwarts lost to the quake.

“Take as much cover as you can,” Lieutenant Shotton ordered quietly. The platoon scrambled into flowerbeds, snuggled down behind thin tree trunks. Out on Hilgard Avenue, diesels roared as armored fighting vehicles took positions with good lines of fire.

It was all such a waste, Cox thought bitterly. The thing to do was to make friends with the aliens, not to assume automatically they were dangerous.

Something, at least, was being done along those lines. A delegation came out of Murphy Hall and slowly walked behind a white flag from the administration building toward the starship. At the head of the delegation was the mayor of Los Angeles; the president and governor were busy elsewhere. Billy Cox would have given anything to be part of the delegation instead of sprawled here on his belly in the grass. If only the aliens had waited until he was fifty or so, had given him a chance to get established—

Sergeant Amoros nudged him with an elbow. “Look there, man. Something’s happening—”

Amoros was right. Several hatchways which had been shut were swinging open, allowing Earth’s air to mingle with the ship’s.

The westerly breeze picked up. Cox’s nose twitched. He could not name all the exotic odors wafting his way, but he recognized sewage and garbage when he smelled them. “God, what a stink!” he said.

“BY THE GODS, what a stink!” Togram exclaimed. When the outer airlock doors went down, he had expected real fresh air to replace the stale, overused gases inside the Indomitable. This stuff smelled like smoky peat fires, or lamps whose wicks hadn’t quite been extinguished. And it stung! He felt the nictitating membranes flick across his eyes to protect them.

“Deploy!” he ordered, leading his company forward. This was the tricky part. If the locals had nerve enough, they could hit the Roxolani just as the latter were coming out of their ship, and cause all sorts of trouble. Most races without hyperdrive, though, were too overawed by the arrival of travelers from the stars to try anything like that. And if they didn’t do it fast, it would be too late.

They weren’t doing it here. Togram saw a few locals, but they were keeping a respectful distance. He wasn’t sure how many there were. Their mottled skins—or was that clothing?—made them hard to notice and count. But they were plainly warriors, both by the way they acted and by the weapons they bore.

His own company went into its familiar two-line formation, the first crouching, the second standing and aiming their muskets over the heads of the troops in front.

“Ah, there we go,” Togram said happily. The bunch approaching behind the white banner had to be the local nobles. The mottling, the captain saw, was clothing, for these beings wore entirely different garments, somber except for strange, narrow neckcloths. They were taller and skinnier than Roxolani, with muzzleless faces.

“Ilingua!” Togram called. The veteran trooper led the right flank squad of the company.

“Sir!”

“Your troops, quarter-right face. At the command, pick off the leaders there. That will demoralize the rest,” Togram said, quoting standard doctrine.

“Slowmatches ready!” Togram said. The Roxolani lowered the smoldering cords to the touchholes of their muskets. “Take your aim!” The guns moved, very slightly. “Fire!”

“TEDDY BEARS!” SANDY Amoros exclaimed. The same thought had leaped into Cox’s mind. The beings emerging from the spaceship were round, brown, and furry, with long noses and big ears. Teddy bears, however, did not normally carry weapons. They also, Cox thought, did not commonly live in a place that smelled like sewage. Of course, it might have been perfume to them. But if it was, they and Earthpeople were going to have trouble getting along.

He watched the Teddy bears as they took their positions. Somehow their positioning did not suggest that they were forming an honor guard for the mayor and his party. Yet it did look familiar to Cox, although he could not quite figure out why.

Then he had it. If he had been anywhere but at UCLA, he would not have made the connection. But he remembered a course he had taken on the rise of the European nation-states in the sixteenth century, and on the importance of the professional, disciplined armies the kings had created. Those early armies had performed evolutions like this one.

It was a funny coincidence. He was about to mention it to his sergeant when the world blew up.

Flames spurted from the aliens’ guns. Great gouts of smoke puffed into the sky. Something that sounded like an angry wasp buzzed past Cox’s ear. He heard shouts and shrieks from either side. Most of the mayor’s delegation was down, some motionless, others thrashing.

There was a crash from the starship, and another one an instant later as a round-shout smashed into the brickwork of Dodd Hall. A chip stung Cox in the back of the neck. The breeze brought him the smell of fireworks, one he had not smelled for years.

“RELOAD!” TOGRAM YELLED. “Another volley, then at ’em with the bayonet!” His troopers worked frantically, measuring powder charges and ramming round bullets home.

“SO THAT’S HOW they wanna play!” Amoros shouted. “Nail their hides to the wall!” The tip of his little finger had been shot away. He did not seem to know it.

Cox’s Neo-Armalite was already barking, spitting a stream of hot brass cartridges, slamming against his shoulder. He rammed in clip after clip, playing the rifle like a hose. If one bullet didn’t bite, the next would.

Others from the platoon were also firing. Cox heard bursts of automatic weapons fire from different parts of the campus, too, and the deeper blasts of rocket-propelled grenades and field artillery. Smoke not of the aliens’ making began to envelop their ship and the soldiers around it.

One or two shots came back at the platoon, and then a few more, but so few that Cox, in stunned disbelief, shouted to his sergeant, “This isn’t fair!”

“Fuck ’em!” Amoros shouted back. “They wanna throw their weight around, they take their chances. Only good thing they did was knock over the mayor. Always did hate that old crackpot.”

THE HARSHTAC-TAC-TAC did not sound like any gunfire Togram had heard. The shots came too close together, making a horrible sheet of noise. And if the locals were shooting back at his troopers, where were the thick, choking clouds of gunpowder smoke over their position?

He did not know the answer to that. What he did know was that his company was going down like grain before a scythe. Here a soldier was hit by three bullets at once and fell awkwardly, as if his body could not tell in which direction to twist. There another had the top of his head gruesomely removed.

The volley the captain had screamed for was stillborn. Perhaps a squad’s worth of soldiers moved toward the locals, the sun glinting bravely off their long, polished bayonets. None of them got more than a half-sixteen of paces before falling.

Ilingua looked at Togram, horror in his eyes, his ears flat against his head. The captain knew his were the same. “What are they doing to us?” Ilingua howled.

Togram could only shake his head helplessly. He dove behind a corpse, fired one of his pistols at the enemy. There was still a chance, he thought—how would these demonic aliens stand up under their first air attack?

A flier swooped toward the locals. Musketeers blasted away from firing ports, drew back to reload.

“Take that, you whoresons!” Togram shouted. He did not, however, raise his fist in the air. That, he had already learned, was dangerous.

“INCOMING AIRCRAFT!” SERGEANT Amoros roared. His squad, those not already prone, flung themselves on their faces. Cox heard shouts of pain through the combat din as men were wounded.

The Cottonmouth crew launched their shoulder-fired AA missile at the alien flying machine. The pilot must have had reflexes like a cat’s. He sidestepped his machine in midair, no plane built on Earth could have matched that performance. The Cottonmouth shot harmlessly past.

The flier dropped what looked like a load of crockery. The ground jumped as the bombs exploded. Cursing, deafened, Billy Cox stopped worrying whether the fight was fair.

But the flier pilot had not seen the F-29 fighter on his tail. The USAF plane released two missiles from point-blank range, less than a mile. The infrared-seeker found no target and blew itself up, but the missile that homed on radar streaked straight toward the flier. The explosion made Cox bury his face in the ground and clap his hands over his ears.

So this is war, he thought: I can’t see, I can barely hear, and my side is winning. What must it be like for the losers?

HOPE DIED IN Togram’s hearts when the first flier fell victim to the locals’ aircraft. The rest of the Indomitable’s machines did not last much longer. They could evade, but had even less ability to hit back than the Roxolan ground forces. And they were hideously vulnerable when attacked in their pilots’ blind spots, from below or behind.

One of the starship’s cannon managed to fire again, and quickly drew a response from the traveling fortresses Togram got glimpses of as they took their positions in the streets outside this parklike area.

When the first shell struck, the luckless captain thought for an instant that it was another gun going off aboard the Indomitable. The sound of the explosion was nothing like the crash a solid shot made when it smacked into a target. A fragment of hot metal buried itself in the ground by Togram’s hand. That made him think a cannon had blown up, but more explosions on the ship’s superstructure and fountains of dirt flying up from misses showed it was just more from the locals’ fiendish arsenal.

Something large and hard struck the captain in the back of the neck. The world spiraled down into blackness.

“CEASE FIRE!” THE order reached the field artillery first, then the infantry units at the very front line. Billy Cox pushed up his cuff to look at his watch, stared in disbelief. The whole firefight had lasted less than twenty minutes.

He looked around. Lieutenant Shotton was getting up from behind an ornamental palm. “Let’s see what we have,” he said. His rifle still at the ready, he began to walk slowly toward the starship. It was hardly more than a smoking ruin. For that matter, neither were the buildings around it. The damage to their predecessors had been worse in the big quake, but not much.

Alien corpses littered the lawn. The blood splashing the bright green grass was crimson as any man’s. Cox bent to pick up a pistol. The weapon was beautifully made, with scenes of combat carved into the grayish wood of the stock. But he recognized it as a single-shot piece, a small-arm obsolete for at least two centuries. He shook his head in wonderment.

Sergeant Amoros lifted a conical object from where it had fallen beside a dead alien. “What the hell is this?” he demanded.

Again Cox had the feeling of being caught up in something he did not understand. “It’s a powderhorn,” he said.

“Like in the movies? Pioneers and all that good shit?”

“The very same.”

“Damn,” Amoros said feelingly. Cox nodded in agreement.

Along with the rest of the platoon, they moved closer to the wrecked ship. Most of the aliens had died still in the two neat rows from which they had opened fire on the soldiers.

Here, behind another corpse, lay the body of the scarlet-plumed officer who had given the order to begin that horrifyingly uneven encounter. Then, startling Cox, the alien moaned and stirred, just as might a human starting to come to. “Grab him; he’s a live one!” Cox exclaimed.

Several men jumped on the reviving alien, who was too groggy to fight back. Soldiers began peering into the holes torn in the starship, and even going inside. There they were still wary; the ship was so incredibly much bigger than any human spacecraft that there were surely survivors despite the shellacking it had taken.

As always happens, the men did not get to enjoy such pleasures long. The fighting had been over for only minutes when the first team of experts came thuttering in by helicopter, saw common soldiers in their private preserve, and made horrified noises. The experts also promptly relieved the platoon of its prisoner.

Sergeant Amoros watched resentfully as they took the alien away. “You must’ve known it would happen, Sandy,” Cox consoled him. “We do the dirty work and the brass takes over once things get cleaned up again.”

“Yeah, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if just once it was the other way round?” Amoros laughed without humor. “You don’t need to tell me: fat friggin’ chance.”

WHEN TOGRAM WOKE up on his back, he knew something was wrong. Roxolani always slept prone. For a moment he wondered how he had got to where he was . . . too much water-of-life the night before? His pounding head made that a good possibility.

Then memory came flooding back. Those damnable locals with their sorcerous weapons! Had his people rallied and beaten back the enemy after all? He vowed to light votive lamps to Edieva, mistress of battles, for the rest of his life if that was true.

The room he was in began to register. Nothing was familiar, from the bed he lay on to the light in the ceiling that glowed bright as sunshine and neither smoked nor flickered. No, he did not think the Roxolani had won their fight.

Fear settled like ice in his vitals. He knew how his own race treated prisoners, had heard spacers’ stories of even worse things among other folk. He shuddered to think of the refined tortures a race as ferocious as his captors could invent.

He got shakily to his feet. By the end of the bed he found his hat, some smoked meat obviously taken from the Indomitable, and a translucent jug made of something that was neither leather nor glass nor baked clay nor metal. Whatever it was, it was too soft and flexible to make a weapon.

The jar had water in it: not water from the Indomitable. That was already beginning to taste stale. This was cool and fresh and so pure as to have no taste whatever, water so fine he had only found its like in a couple of mountain springs.

The door opened on noiseless hinges. In came two of the locals. One was small and wore a white coat—a female, if those chest projections were breasts. The other was dressed in the same clothes the local warriors had worn, though those offered no camouflage here. That one carried what was plainly a rifle and, the gods curse him, looked extremely alert.

To Togram’s surprise, the female took charge. The other local was merely a bodyguard. Some spoiled princess, curious about these outsiders, the captain thought. Well, he was happier about treating with her than meeting the local executioner.

She sat down, waved for him also to take a seat. He tried a chair, found it uncomfortable—too low in the back, not built for his wide rump and short legs. He sat on the floor instead.

She set a small box on the table by the chair. Togram pointed at it. “What’s that?” he asked.

He thought she had not understood—no blame to her for that; she had none of his language. She was playing with the box, pushing a button here, a button there. Then his ears went back and his hackles rose, for the box said, “What’s that?” in Roxolani. After a moment he realized it was speaking in his own voice. He swore and made a sign against witchcraft.

She said something, fooled with the box again. This time it echoed her. She pointed at it. “ ‘Recorder,’ ” she said. She paused expectantly.

What was she waiting for, the Roxolanic name for that thing? “I’ve never seen one of those in my life, and I hope I never do again,” he said. She scratched her head. When she made the gadget again repeat what he had said, only the thought of the soldier with the gun kept him from flinging it against the wall.

Despite that contretemps, they did eventually make progress on the language. Togram had picked up snatches of a good many tongues in the course of his adventurous life; that was one reason he had made captain in spite of low birth and paltry connections. And the female—Togram heard her name as Hildachesta—had a gift for them, as well as the box that never forgot.

“Why did your people attack us?” she asked one day, when she had come far enough in Roxolanic to be able to frame the question.

He knew he was being interrogated, no matter how polite she sounded. He had played that game with prisoners himself. His ears twitched in a shrug. He had always believed in giving straight answers; that was one reason he was only a captain. He said, “To take what you grow and make and use it for ourselves. Why would anyone want to conquer anyone else?”

“Why indeed?” she murmured, and was silent a little while; his forthright reply seemed to have closed off a line of questioning. She tried again: “How are your people able to walk—I mean, travel—faster than light, when the rest of your arts are so simple?”

His fur bristled with indignation. “They are not! We make gunpowder, we cast iron and smelt steel, we have spyglasses to help our steerers guide us from star to star. We are no savages huddling in caves or shooting at each other with bows and arrows.”

His speech, of course, was not that neat or simple. He had to backtrack, to use elaborate circumlocutions, to playact to make Hildachesta understand. She scratched her head in the gesture of puzzlement he had come to recognize. She said, “We have known all these things you mention for hundreds of years, but we did not think anyone could walk—damn, I keep saying that instead of ‘travel’—faster than light. How did your people learn to do that?”

“We discovered it for ourselves,” he said proudly. “We did not have to learn it from some other starfaring race, as many folk do.”

“But how did you discover it?” she persisted.

“How do I know? I’m a soldier; what do I care for such things? Who knows who invented gunpowder or found out about using bellows in a smithy to get the fire hot enough to melt iron? These things happen, that’s all.”

She broke off the questions early that day.

“IT’S HUMILIATING,” HILDA Chester said. “If these fool aliens had waited a few more years before they came, we likely would have blown ourselves to kingdom come without ever knowing there was more real estate around. Christ, from what the Roxolani say, races that scarcely know how to work iron fly starships and never think twice about it.”

“Except when the starships don’t get home,” Charlie Ebbets answered. His tie was in his pocket and his collar open against Pasadena’s fierce summer heat, although the Caltech Atheneum was efficiently air-conditioned. Along with so many other engineers and scientists, he depended on linguists like Hilda Chester for a link to the aliens.

“I don’t quite understand it myself,” she said. “Apart from the hyperdrive and contragravity, the Roxolani are backward, almost primitive. And the other species out there must be the same, or someone would have overrun them long since.”

Ebbets said, “Once you see it, the drive is amazingly simple. The research crews say anybody could have stumbled over the principle at almost any time in our history. The best guess is that most races did come across it, and once they did, why, all their creative energy would naturally go into refining and improving it.”

“But we missed it,” Hilda said slowly, “and so our technology developed in a different way.”

“That’s right. That’s why the Roxolani don’t know anything about controlled electricity, to say nothing of atomics. And the thing is, as well as we can tell so far, the hyperdrive and contragravity don’t have the ancillary applications the electromagnetic spectrum does. All they do is move things from here to there in a hurry.”

“That should be enough at the moment,” Hilda said. Ebbets nodded. There were almost nine billion people jammed onto the Earth, half of them hungry. Now, suddenly, there were places for them to go and a means to get them there.

“I think,” Ebbets said musingly, “we’re going to be an awful surprise to the peoples out there.”

It took Hilda a second to see what he was driving at. “If that’s a joke, it’s not funny. It’s been a hundred years since the last war of conquest.”

“Sure—they’ve gotten too expensive and too dangerous. But what kind of fight could the Roxolani or anyone else at their level of technology put up against us? The Aztecs and Incas were plenty brave. How much good did it do them against the Spaniards?”

“I hope we’ve gotten smarter in the last five hundred years,” Hilda said. All the same, she left her sandwich half eaten. She found she was not hungry anymore.

“RANSISC!” TOGRAM EXCLAIMED as the senior steerer limped into his cubicle. Ransisc was thinner than he had been a few moons before, aboard the misnamed Indomitable. His fur had grown out white around several scars Togram did not remember.

His air of amused detachment had not changed, though. “Tougher than bullets, are you, or didn’t the humans think you were worth killing?”

“The latter, I suspect. With their firepower, why should they worry about one soldier more or less?” Togram said bitterly. “I didn’t know you were still alive, either.”

“Through no fault of my own, I assure you,” Ransisc said. “Olgren, next to me—” His voice broke off. It was not possible to be detached about everything.

“What are you doing here?” the captain asked. “Not that I’m not glad to see you, but you’re the first Roxolan face I’ve set eyes on since—” It was his turn to hesitate.

“Since we landed.” Togram nodded in relief at the steerer’s circumlocution. Ransisc went on, “I’ve seen several others before you. I suspect we’re being allowed to get together so the humans can listen to us talking with each other.”

“How could they do that?” Togram asked, then answered his own question. “Oh, the recorders, of course.” He perforce used the English word. “Well, we’ll fix that.”

He dropped into Oyag, the most widely spoken language on a planet the Roxolani had conquered fifty years before. “What’s going to happen to us, Ransisc?”

“Back on Roxolan, they’ll have realized something’s gone wrong by now,” the steerer answered in the same tongue.

That did nothing to cheer Togram. “There are so many ways to lose ships,” he said gloomily. “And even if the High Warmaster does send another fleet after us, it won’t have any more luck than we did. These gods-accursed humans have too many war-machines.” He paused and took a long, moody pull at a bottle of vodka. The flavored liquors the locals brewed made him sick, but vodka he liked. “How is it they have all these machines and we don’t, or any race we know of? They must be wizards, selling their souls to the demons for knowledge.”

Ransisc’s nose twitched in disagreement. “I asked one of their savants the same question. He gave me back a poem by a human named Hail or Snow or something of that sort. It was about someone who stood at a fork in the road and ended up taking the less-used track. That’s what the humans did. Most races find the hyperdrive and go traveling. The humans never did, and so their search for knowledge went in a different direction.”

“Didn’t it!” Togram shuddered at the recollection of that brief, terrible combat. “Guns that spit dozens of bullets without reloading, cannon mounted on armored platforms that move by themselves, rockets that follow their targets by themselves . . . And there are the things we didn’t see, the ones the humans only talk about—the bombs that can blow up a whole city, each one by itself.”

“I don’t know if I believe that,” Ransisc said.

“I do. They sound afraid when they speak of them.”

“Well, maybe. But it’s not just the weapons they have. It’s the machines that let them see and talk to one another from far away; the machines that do their reckoning for them; their recorders and everything that has to do with them. From what they say of their medicine, I’m almost tempted to believe you and think they are wizards—they actually know what causes their diseases, and how to cure or even prevent them. And their farming: this planet is far more crowded than any I’ve seen or heard of, but it grows enough for all these humans.”

Togram sadly waggled his ears. “It seems so unfair. All that they got, just by not stumbling onto the hyperdrive.”

“They have it now,” Ransisc reminded him. “Thanks to us.”

The Roxolani looked at each other, appalled. They spoke together: “What have we done?”

WILLIAM GIBSON AND MICHAEL SWANWICK Dogfight

William Gibson began publishing short fiction in 1977, but his reputation was made with his first novel, Neuromancer, which appeared in 1984 and has since earned the status of a revolutionary work of contemporary science fiction. The book, which won the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards, became the bible of the cyberpunk movement, and an important breakthrough novel that seeped into the cultural mainstream where the many concepts it explored—cyberspace, virtual reality, the internet, computer crime, artificial intelligence—were fast making the transition from speculative fancy to irrefutable reality. A fusion of the hardboiled detective narrative and the cutting-edge science fiction story, Neuromancer and the two follow-up novels with which it forms a loose trilogy—Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive—blazed trails through the hitherto unexplored frontier of computer technology and microchip-driven telecommunications. It popularized the concept of “plugging in” to link the human brain directly with the neural network of computer systems. The human/machine interface it envisioned, though built on traditional science fiction themes, marked a conceptual shift that turned science fiction’s normally outward-looking perspective inward. The complex and often inscrutable reality it extrapolates is one where traditional geographic and cultural boundaries have disintegrated and been reshaped by the uses and abuses of computer-generated data. The hacker subculture dominates the world of these novels, and its often criminal members have the status of outlaw heroes. The novels are also memorable for their dazzling, kinetic styles, which update the stylistic experimentation of the New Wave movement with contemporary techno-jargon, and narrative cuts and splices characteristic of video and computer entertainment. The impact of computer technology has been as inescapable in the rest of Gibson’s fiction as it has in the modern world. The Difference Engine, which he wrote in collaboration with Bruce Sterling, is a celebrated “steampunk” novel that projects the world that might have been had Charles Babbage’s early work on computers taken root in Victorian England. His novels Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow’s Parties all share characters and explore a variety of computer-oriented themes, including nanotechnology, computer personality constructs, and “nodal points” or fluxes in the data stream that are auguries of transformational events in history. Gibson’s short fiction has been collected in Burning Chrome, which includes “Johnny Mnemonic,” the basis for the Robert Longo film of the same name.

Michael Swanwick emerged as one of the stunning new talents of science fiction in the 1980s initially through the publication of his richly allusive, multilayered short stories, which show the influence of literary postmodernism as much as the traditions of fantasy and science fiction. The best of his short stories have been collected in Gravity’s Angels and Tales of Old Earth, which includes his Hugo Award–winning “The Very Pulse of the Machine.” His work as a novelist is equally unconventional, ranging in its approaches from cyberpunk to heroic fantasy and focuses on the interplay of new science and old social structures in their shaping of a civilization and the individual. His first novel, In the Drift, is set in a postapocalyptic America where nuclear catastrophe creates a fragmented society struggling to stabilize. Vacuum Flowers, Griffin’s Egg and the Nebula Award–winning Stations of the Tide all are explorations of the impact of cataclysmic natural disasters and sociopolitical events on human societies established in alien worlds that have grown estranged from the mother planet’s influence. Swanwick has also written Jack Faust, a modern variation on the Faust theme, and The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, an epic hi-tech high fantasy. He is the author of several provocative and controversial essays on the craft of fantasy and science fiction, several of which have been collected in A Geography of Unknown Lands and The Postmodern Archipelago. He is also a recipient of the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

HE MEANT TO keep on going, right down to Florida. Work passage on a gunrunner, maybe wind up conscripted into some ratass rebel army down in the war zone. Or maybe, with that ticket good as long as he didn’t stop riding, he’d just never get off—Greyhound’s Flying Dutchman. He grinned at his faint reflection in cold, greasy glass while the downtown lights of Norfolk slid past, the bus swaying on tired shocks as the driver slung it around a final corner. They shuddered to a halt in the terminal lot, concrete lit gray and harsh like a prison exercise yard. But Deke was watching himself starve, maybe in some snowstorm out of Oswego, with his cheek pressed up against that same bus window, and seeing his remains swept out at the next stop by a muttering old man in faded coveralls. One way or the other, he decided, it didn’t mean shit to him. Except his legs seemed to have died already. And the driver called a twenty-minute stopover—Tidewater Station, Virginia. It was an old cinder-block building with two entrances to each rest room, holdover from the previous century.

Legs like wood, he made a halfhearted attempt at ghosting the notions counter, but the black girl behind it was alert, guarding the sparse contents of the old glass case as though her ass depended on it. Probably does, Deke thought, turning away. Opposite the washrooms, an open doorway offered GAMES, the word flickering feebly in biofluorescent plastic. He could see a crowd of the local kickers clustered around a pool table. Aimless, his boredom following him like a cloud, he stuck his head in. And saw a biplane, wings no longer than his thumb, blossom bright orange flame. Corkscrewing, trailing smoke, it vanished the instant it struck the green-felt field of the table.

“Tha’s right, Tiny,” a kicker bellowed, “you take that sumbitch!”

“Hey,” Deke said. “What’s going on?”

The nearest kicker was a bean pole with a black mesh Peterbilt cap. “Tiny’s defending the Max,” he said, not taking his eyes from the table.

“Oh, yeah? What’s that?” But even as he asked, he saw it: a blue enamel medal shaped like a Maltese cross, the slogan Pour le Mérite divided among its arms.

The Blue Max rested on the edge of the table, directly before a vast and perfectly immobile bulk wedged into a fragile-looking chrome-tube chair. The man’s khaki work shirt would have hung on Deke like the folds of a sail, but it bulged across that bloated torso so tautly that the buttons threatened to tear away at any instant. Deke thought of southern troopers he’d seen on his way down; of that weird, gut-heavy endotype balanced on gangly legs that looked like they’d been borrowed from some other body. Tiny might look like that if he stood, but on a larger scale—a forty-inch jeans inseam that would need a woven-steel waistband to support all those pounds of swollen gut. If Tiny were ever to stand at all—for now Deke saw that that shiny frame was actually a wheelchair. There was something disturbingly childlike about the man’s face, an appalling suggestion of youth and even beauty in features almost buried in fold and jowl. Embarrassed, Deke looked away. The other man, the one standing across the table from Tiny, had bushy sideburns and a thin mouth. He seemed to be trying to push something with his eyes, wrinkles of concentration spreading from the corners. . . .

“You dumbshit or what?” The man with the Peterbilt cap turned, catching Deke’s Indo proleboy denims, the brass chains at his wrists, for the first time. “Why don’t you get your ass lost, fucker. Nobody wants your kind in here.” He turned back to the dogfight.

Bets were being made, being covered. The kickers were producing the hard stuff, the old stuff, liberty-headed dollars and Roosevelt dimes from the stamp-and-coin stores, while more cautious bettors slapped down antique paper dollars laminated in clear plastic. Through the haze came a trio of red planes, flying in formation. Fokker D VIIs. The room fell silent. The Fokkers banked majestically under the solar orb of a two-hundred-watt bulb.

The blue Spad dove out of nowhere. Two more plunged from the shadowy ceiling, following closely. The kickers swore, and one chuckled. The formation broke wildly. One Fokker dove almost to the felt, without losing the Spad on its tail. Furiously, it zigged and zagged across the green flatlands but to no avail. At last it pulled up, the enemy hard after it, too steeply—and stalled, too low to pull out in time.

A stack of silver dimes was scooped up.

The Fokkers were outnumbered now. One had two Spads on its tail. A needle-spray of tracers tore past its cockpit. The Fokker slip-turned right, banked into an Immelmann, and was behind one of its pursuers. It fired, and the biplane fell, tumbling.

“Way to go, Tiny!” The kickers closed in around the table.

Deke was frozen with wonder. It felt like being born all over again.

FRANK’S TRUCK STOP was two miles out of town on the Commercial Vehicles Only route. Deke had tagged it, out of idle habit, from the bus on the way in. Now he walked back between the traffic and the concrete crash guards. Articulated trucks went slamming past, big eight-segmented jobs, the wash of air each time threatening to blast him over. CVO stops were easy makes. When he sauntered into Frank’s, there was nobody to doubt that he’d come in off a big rig, and he was able to browse the gift shop as slowly as he liked. The wire rack with the projective wetware wafers was located between a stack of Korean cowboy shirts and a display for Fuzz Buster mudguards. A pair of Oriental dragons twisted in the air over the rack, either fighting or fucking, he couldn’t tell which. The game he wanted was there: a wafer labeled SPADS & FOKKERS. It took him three seconds to boost it and less time to slide the magnet—which the cops in D.C. hadn’t even bothered to confiscate—across the universal security strip.

On the way out, he lifted two programming units and a little Batang facilitator-remote that looked like an antique hearing aid.

HE CHOSE A highstack at random and fed the rental agent the line he’d used since his welfare rights were yanked. Nobody ever checked up; the state just counted occupied rooms and paid.

The cubicle smelled faintly of urine, and someone had scrawled Hard Anarchy Liberation Front slogans across the walls. Deke kicked trash out of a corner, sat down, back to the wall, and ripped open the wafer pack.

There was a folded instruction sheet with diagrams of loops, rolls, and Immelmanns, a tube of saline paste, and a computer list of operational specs. And the wafer itself, white plastic with a blue biplane and logo on one side, red on the other. He turned it over and over in his hand: SPADS & FOKKERS, FOKKERS & SPADS. Red or blue. He fitted the Batang behind his ear after coating the inductor surface with paste, jacked its fiberoptic ribbon into the programmer, and plugged the programmer into the wall current. Then he slid the wafer into the programmer. It was a cheap set, Indonesian, and the base of his skull buzzed uncomfortably as the program ran. But when it was done, a sky-blue Spad darted restlessly through the air a few inches from his face. It almost glowed, it was so real. It had the strange inner life that fanatically detailed museum-grade models often have but it took all of his concentration to keep it in existence. If his attention wavered at all, it lost focus, fuzzing into a pathetic blur.

He practiced until the battery in the earset died, then slumped against the wall and fell asleep. He dreamed of flying, in a universe that consisted entirely of white clouds and blue sky, with no up and down, and never a green field to crash into.

HE WOKE TO a rancid smell of frying krillcakes and winced with hunger. No cash, either. Well, there were plenty of student types in the stack. Bound to be one who’d like to score a programming unit. He hit the hall with the boosted spare. Not far down was a door with a poster on it: THERE’S A HELL OF A GOOD UNIVERSE NEXT DOOR. Under that was a starscape with a cluster of multicolored pills, torn from an ad for some pharmaceutical company, pasted over an inspirational shot of the “space colony” that had been under construction since before he was born. LET’S GO, the poster said, beneath the collaged hypnotics.

He knocked. The door opened, security slides stopping it at a two-inch slice of girlface. “Yeah?”

“You’re going to think this is stolen.” He passed the programmer from hand to hand. “I mean because it’s new, virtual cherry, and the bar code’s still on it. But listen, I’m not gonna argue the point. No. I’m gonna let you have it for only like half what you’d pay anywhere else.”

“Hey, wow, really, no kidding?” The visible fraction of mouth twisted into a strange smile. She extended her hand, palm up, a loose fist. Level with his chin. “Lookahere!”

There was a hole in her hand, a black tunnel that ran right up her arm. Two small red lights. Rat’s eyes. They scurried toward him—growing, gleaming. Something gray streaked forward and leaped for his face.

He screamed, throwing hands up to ward it off. Legs twisting, he fell, the programmer shattering under him.

Silicate shards skittered as he thrashed, clutching his head. Where it hurt, it hurt—it hurt very badly indeed.

“Oh, my God!” Slides unsnapped, and the girl was hovering over him. “Here, listen, come on.” She dangled a blue hand towel. “Grab on to this and I’ll pull you up.”

He looked at her through a wash of tears. Student. That fed look, the oversize sweatshirt, teeth so straight and white they could be used as a credit reference. A thin gold chain around one ankle (fuzzed, he saw, with baby-fine hair). Choppy Japanese haircut. Money. “That sucker was gonna be my dinner,” he said ruefully. He took hold of the towel and let her pull him up.

She smiled but skittishly backed away from him. “Let me make it up to you,” she said. “You want some food? It was only a projection, okay?”

He followed her in, wary as an animal entering a trap.

“HOLY SHIT,” DEKE said, “this is real cheese. . . .” He was sitting on a gutsprung sofa, wedged between a four-foot teddy bear and a loose stack of floppies. The room was ankle-deep in books and clothes and papers. But the food she magicked up—Gouda cheese and tinned beef and honest-to-God greenhouse wheat wafers—was straight out of the Arabian Nights.

“Hey,” she said. “We know how to treat a prole boy right, huh?” Her name was Nance Bettendorf. She was seventeen. Both her parents had jobs—greedy buggers—and she was an engineering major at William and Mary. She got top marks except in English. “I guess you must really have a thing about rats. You got some kind of phobia about rats?”

He glanced sidelong at her bed. You couldn’t see it, really; it was just a swell in the ground cover. “It’s not like that. It just reminded me of something else, is all.”

“Like what?” She squatted in front of him, the big shirt riding high up one smooth thigh.

“Well . . . did you ever see the—” his voice involuntarily rose and rushed past the words—“Washington Monument? Like at night? It’s got these two little . . . red lights on top, aviation markers or something, and I, and I . . .” He started to shake.

“You’re afraid of the Washington Monument?” Nance whooped and rolled over with laughter, long tanned legs kicking. She was wearing crimson bikini panties.

“I would die rather than look at it again,” he said levelly.

She stopped laughing then, sat up, studied his face. White, even teeth worried at her lower lip, like she was dragging up something she didn’t want to think about. At last she ventured, “Brainlock?”

“Yeah,” he said bitterly. “They told me I’d never go back to D.C. And then the fuckers laughed.”

“What did they get you for?”

“I’m a thief.” He wasn’t about to tell her that the actual charge was career shoplifting.

“LOTTA OLDCOMPUTER hacks spent their lives programming machines. And you know what? The human brain is not a goddamn bit like a machine, no way. They just don’t program the same.” Deke knew this shrill, desperate rap, this long, circular jive that the lonely string out to the rare listener; knew it from a hundred cold and empty nights spent in the company of strangers. Nance was lost in it, and Deke, nodding and yawning, wondered if he’d even be able to stay awake when they finally hit that bed of hers.

“I built that projection I hit you with myself,” she said, hugging her knees up beneath her chin. “It’s for muggers, you know? I just happened to have it on me, and I threw it at you ’cause I thought it was so funny, you trying to sell me that shit little Indojavanese programmer.” She hunched forward and held out her hand again. “Look here.” Deke cringed. “No, no, it’s okay, I swear it, this is different.” She opened her hand.

A single blue flame danced there, perfect and ever-changing. “Look at that,” she marveled. “Just look. I programmed that. It’s not some diddly little seven-image job either. It’s a continuous two-hour loop, seven thousand, two hundred seconds, never the same twice, each instant as individual as a fucking snowflake!”

The flame’s core was glacial crystal, shards and facets flashing up, twisting and gone, leaving behind near-subliminal images so bright and sharp that they cut the eye. Deke winced. People mostly. Pretty little naked people, fucking. “How the hell did you do that?”

She rose, bare feet slipping on slick magazines, and melodramatically swept folds of loose printout from a raw plywood shelf. He saw a neat row of small consoles, austere and expensive-looking. Custom work. “This is the real stuff I got here. Image facilitator. Here’s my fast-wipe module. This is a brainmap one-to-one function analyzer.” She sang off the names like a litany. “Quantum flicker stabilizer. Program splicer. An image assembler . . .”

“You need all that to make one little flame?”

“You betcha. This is all state of the art, professional projective wetware gear. It’s years ahead of anything you’ve seen.”

“Hey,” he said, “you know anything about SPADS & FOKKERS?”

She laughed. And then, because he sensed the time was right, he reached out to take her hand.

“Don’t you touch me, motherfuck, don’t you ever touch me!” Nance screamed, and her head slammed against the wall as she recoiled, white and shaking with terror.

“Okay!” He threw up his hands. “Okay! I’m nowhere near you. Okay?”

She cowered from him. Her eyes were round and unblinking; tears built up at the corners, rolled down ashen cheeks. Finally, she shook her head. “Hey, Deke. Sorry. I should’ve told you.”

“Told me what?” But he had a creepy feeling . . . already knew. The way she clutched her head. The weakly spasmodic way her hands opened and closed. “You got a brainlock, too.”

“Yeah.” She closed her eyes. “It’s a chastity lock. My asshole parents paid for it. So I can’t stand to have anybody touch me or even stand too close.” Eyes opened in blind hate. “I didn’t even do anything. Not a fucking thing. But they’ve both got jobs and they’re so horny for me to have a career that they can’t piss straight. They’re afraid I’d neglect my studies if I got, you know, involved in sex and stuff. The day the brainlock comes off I am going to fuck the vilest, greasiest, hairiest . . .”

She was clutching her head again. Deke jumped up and rummaged through the medicine cabinet. He found a jar of B-complex vitamins, pocketed a few against need, and brought two to Nance, with a glass of water. “Here.” He was careful to keep his distance. “This’ll take the edge off.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said. Then, almost to herself, “You must really think I’m a jerk.”

THE GAMES ROOM in the Greyhound station was almost empty. A lone, long-jawed fourteen-year-old was bent over a console, maneuvering rainbow fleets of submarines in the murky grid of the North Atlantic.

Deke sauntered in, wearing his new kicker drag, and leaned against a cinder-block wall made smooth by countless coats of green enamel. He’d washed the dye from his proleboy butch, boosted jeans and T-shirt from the Goodwill, and found a pair of stompers in the sauna locker of a highstack with cutrate security.

“Seen Tiny around, friend?”

The subs darted like neon guppies. “Depends on who’s asking.”

Deke touched the remote behind his left ear. The Spad snap-rolled over the console, swift and delicate as a dragonfly. It was beautiful; so perfect, so true it made the room seem an illusion. He buzzed the grid, millimeters from the glass, taking advantage of the programmed ground effect.

The kid didn’t even bother to look up. “Jackman’s,” he said. “Down Richmond Road, over by the surplus.”

Deke let the Spad fade in midclimb.

Jackman’s took up most of the third floor of an old brick building. Deke found Best Buy War Surplus first, then a broken neon sign over an unlit lobby. The sidewalk out front was littered with another kind of surplus—damaged vets, some of them dating back to Indochina. Old men who’d left their eyes under Asian suns squatted beside twitching boys who’d inhaled mycotoxins in Chile. Deke was glad to have the battered elevator doors sigh shut behind him.

A dusty Dr. Pepper clock at the far side of the long, spectral room told him it was a quarter to eight. Jackman’s had been embalmed twenty years before he was born, sealed away behind a yellowish film of nicotine, of polish and hair oil. Directly beneath the clock, the flat eyes of somebody’s grandpappy’s prize buck regarded Deke from a framed, blown-up snapshot gone the slick sepia of cockroach wings. There was the click and whisper of pool, the squeak of a work boot twisting on linoleum as a player leaned in for a shot. Somewhere high above the green-shaded lamps hung a string of crepe-paper Christmas bells faded to dead rose. Deke looked from one cluttered wall to the next. No facilitator.

“Bring one in, should we need it,” someone said. He turned, meeting the mild eyes of a bald man with steel-rimmed glasses. “My name’s Cline. Bobby Earl. You don’t look like you shoot pool, mister.” But there was nothing threatening in Bobby Earl’s voice or stance. He pinched the steel frames from his nose and polished the thick lenses with a fold of tissue. He reminded Deke of a shop instructor who’d patiently tried to teach him retrograde biochip installation. “I’m a gambler,” he said, smiling. His teeth were white plastic. “I know I don’t much look it.”

“I’m looking for Tiny,” Deke said.

“Well,” replacing the glasses, “you’re not going to find him. He’s gone up to Bethesda to let the V.A. clean his plumbing for him. He wouldn’t fly against you any how.”

“Why not?”

“Well, because you’re not on the circuit or I’d know your face. You any good?” When Deke nodded, Bobby Earl called down the length of Jackman’s, “Yo, Clarence! You bring out that facilitator. We got us a flyboy.”

Twenty minutes later, having lost his remote and what cash he had left, Deke was striding past the broken soldiers of Best Buy.

“Now you let me tell you, boy,” Bobby Earl had said in a fatherly tone as, hand on shoulder, he led Deke back to the elevator. “You’re not going to win against a combat vet—you listening to me? I’m not even especially good, just an old grunt who was on hype fifteen, maybe twenty times. Ol’ Tiny, he was a pilot. Spent his entire enlistment hyped to the gills. He’s got membrane attenuation real bad . . . you ain’t never going to beat him.”

It was a cool night. But Deke burned with anger and humiliation.

“JESUS, THAT’S CRUDE,” Nance said as the Spad strafed mounds of pink underwear. Deke, hunched up on the couch, yanked her flashy little Braun remote from behind his ear.

“Now don’t you get on my case too, Miss rich-bitch gonna-have-a-job—”

“Hey, lighten up! It’s nothing to do with you—it’s just tech. That’s a really primitive wafer you got there. I mean, on the street maybe it’s fine. But compared to the work I do at school, it’s—hey. You ought to let me rewrite it for you.”

“Say what?”

“Lemme beef it up. These suckers are all written in hexadecimal, see, ’cause the industry programmers are all washed-out computer hacks. That’s how they think. But let me take it to the reader-analyzer at the department, run a few changes on it, translate it into a modern wetlanguage. Edit out all the redundant intermediaries. That’ll goose up your reaction time, cut the feedback loop in half. So you’ll fly faster and better. Turn you into a real pro, Ace!” She took a hit off her bong, then doubled over laughing and choking.

“Is that legit?” Deke asked dubiously.

“Hey, why do you think people buy gold-wire remotes? For the prestige? Shit. Conductivity’s better, cuts a few nanoseconds off the reaction time. And reaction time is the name of the game, kiddo.”

“No,” Deke said. “If it were that easy, people’d already have it. Tiny Montgomery would have it. He’d have the best.”

“Don’t you ever listen?” Nance set down the bong; brown water slopped onto the floor. “The stuff I’m working with is three years ahead of anything you’ll find on the street.”

“No shit,” Deke said after a long pause. “I mean, you can do that?”

IT WAS LIKE graduating from a Model T to a ninety-three Lotus. The Spad handled like a dream, responsive to Deke’s slightest thought. For weeks he played the arcades, with not a nibble. He flew against the local teens and by ones and threes shot down their planes. He took chances, played flash. And the planes tumbled. . . .

Until one day Deke was tucking his seed money away, and a lanky black straightened up from the wall. He eyed the laminateds in Deke’s hand and grinned. A ruby tooth gleamed. “You know,” the man said, “I heard there was a casper who could fly, going up against the kiddies.”

“JESUS,” DEKE SAID, spreading Danish butter on a kelp stick. “I wiped the floor with those spades. They were good, too.”

“That’s nice, honey,” Nance mumbled. She was working on her finals project, sweating data into a machine.

“You know, I think what’s happening is I got real talent for this kind of shit. You know? I mean, the program gives me an edge, but I got the stuff to take advantage of it. I’m really getting a rep out there, you know?” Impulsively, he snapped on the radio. Scratchy Dixieland brass blared.

“Hey,” Nance said. “Do you mind?”

“No, I’m just—” He fiddled with the knobs, came up with some slow, romantic bullshit. “There. Come on, stand up. Let’s dance.”

“Hey, you know I can’t—”

“Sure you can, sugarcakes.” He threw her the huge teddy bear and snatched up a patchwork cotton dress from the floor. He held it by the waist and sleeve, tucking the collar under his chin. It smelled of patchouli, more faintly of sweat. “See, I stand over here, you stand over there. We dance. Get it?”

Blinking softly, Nance stood and clutched the bear tightly. They danced then, slowly, staring into each other’s eyes. After a while, she began to cry. But still, she was smiling.

DEKE WAS DAYDREAMING, imagining he was Tiny Montgomery wired into his jumpjet. Imagined the machine responding to his slightest neural twitch, reflexes cranked way up, hype flowing steadily into his veins.

Nance’s floor became jungle, her bed a plateau in the Andean foothills, and Deke flew his Spad at forced speed, as if it were a full-wired interactive combat machine. Computerized hypos fed a slow trickle of high-performance enhancement mélange into his bloodstream. Sensors were wired directly into his skull—pulling a supersonic snapturn in the green-blue bowl of sky over Bolivian rain forest. Tiny would have felt the airflow over control surfaces.

Below, grunts hacked through the jungle with hype-pumps strapped above elbows to give them that little extra death-dance fury in combat, a shot of liquid hell in a blue plastic vial. Maybe they got ten minutes’ worth in a week. But coming in at treetop level, reflexes cranked to the max, flying so low the ground troops never spotted you until you were on them, phosgene agents released, away and gone before they could draw a bead . . . it took a constant trickle of hype just to maintain. And the direct neuron interface with the jumpjet was a two-way street. The onboard computers monitored biochemistry and decided when to open the sluice gates and give the human component a killer jolt of combat edge.

Dosages like that ate you up. Ate you good and slow and constant, etching the brain surfaces, eroding away the brain-cell membranes. If you weren’t yanked from the air promptly enough, you ended up with brain-cell attenuation—with reflexes too fast for your body to handle and your fight-or-flight reflexes fucked real good. . . .

“I aced it, proleboy!”

“Hah?” Deke looked up, startled, as Nance slammed in, tossing books and bag onto the nearest heap.

“My finals project—I got exempted from exams. The prof said he’d never seen anything like it. Uh, hey, dim the lights, wouldja? The colors are weird on my eyes.”

He obliged. “So show me. Show me this wunnerful thing.”

“Yeah, okay.” She snatched up his remote, kicked clear standing space atop the bed, and struck a pose. A spark flared into flame in her hand. It spread in a quicksilver line up her arm, around her neck, and it was a snake, with triangular head and flickering tongue. Molten colors, oranges and reds. It slithered between her breasts. “I call it a firesnake,” she said proudly.

Deke leaned close, and she jerked back.

“Sorry. It’s like your flame, huh? I mean, I can see these tiny little fuckers in it.”

“Sort of.” The firesnake flowed down her stomach. “Next month I’m going to splice two hundred separate flame programs together with meld justification in between to get the visuals. Then I’ll tap the mind’s body image to make it self-orienting. So it can crawl all over your body without your having to mind it. You could wear it dancing.”

“Maybe I’m dumb. But if you haven’t done the work yet, how come I can see it?”

Nance giggled. “That’s the best part—half the work isn’t done yet. Didn’t have the time to assemble the pieces into a unified program. Turn on that radio, huh? I want to dance.” She kicked off her shoes. Deke tuned in something gutsy. Then, at Nance’s urging, turned it down, almost to a whisper.

“I scored two hits of hype, see.” She was bouncing on the bed, weaving her hands like a Balinese dancer. “Ever try the stuff? In-credible. Gives you like absolute concentration. Look here.” She stood en pointe. “Never done that before.”

“Hype,” Deke said. “Last person I heard of got caught with that shit got three years in the infantry. How’d you score it?”

“Cut a deal with a vet who was in grad school. She bombed out last month. Stuff gives me perfect visualization. I can hold the projection with my eyes shut. It was a snap assembling the program in my head.”

“On just two hits, huh?”

“One hit. I’m saving the other. Teach was so impressed he’s sponsoring me for a job interview. A recruiter from I. G. Feuchtwaren hits campus in two weeks. That cap is gonna sell him the program and me. I’m gonna cut out of school two years early, straight into industry, do not pass jail, do not pay two hundred dollars.”

The snake curled into a flaming tiara. It gave Deke a funny-creepy feeling to think of Nance walking out of his life.

“I’m a witch,” Nance sang, “a wetware witch.” She shucked her shirt over her head and sent it flying. Her fine, high breasts moved freely, gracefully, as she danced. “I’m gonna make it”—now she was singing a current pop hit—“to the . . . top!” Her nipples were small and pink and aroused. The firesnake licked at them and whipped away.

“Hey, Nance,” Deke said uncomfortably. “Calm down a little, huh?”

“I’m celebrating!” She hooked a thumb into her shiny gold panties. Fire swirled around hand and crotch. “I’m the virgin goddess, baby, and I have the pow-er!” Singing again.

Deke looked away. “Gotta go now,” he mumbled. Gotta go home and jerk off. He wondered where she’d hidden that second hit. Could be anywhere.

THERE WAS A protocol to the circuit, a tacit order of deference and precedence as elaborate as that of a Mandarin court. It didn’t matter that Deke was hot, that his rep was spreading like wildfire. Even a name flyboy couldn’t just challenge whom he wished. He had to climb the ranks. But if you flew every night. If you were always available to anybody’s challenge. And if you were good . . . well, it was possible to climb fast.

Deke was one plane up. It was tournament fighting, three planes against three. Not many spectators, a dozen maybe, but it was a good fight, and they were noisy. Deke was immersed in the manic calm of combat when he realized suddenly that they had fallen silent. Saw the kickers stir and exchange glances. Eyes flicked past him. He heard the elevator doors close. Coolly, he disposed of the second of his opponent’s planes, then risked a quick glance over his shoulder.

Tiny Montgomery had just entered Jackman’s. The wheelchair whispered across browning linoleum, guided by tiny twitches of one imperfectly paralyzed hand. His expression was stern, blank, calm.

In that instant, Deke lost two planes. One to deresolution—gone to blur and canceled out by the facilitator—and the other because his opponent was a real fighter. Guy did a barrel roll, killing speed and slipping to the side, and strafed Deke’s biplane as it shot past. It went down in flames. Their last two planes shared altitude and speed, and as they turned, trying for position, they naturally fell into a circling pattern.

The kickers made room as Tiny wheeled up against the table. Bobby Earl Cline trailed after him, lanky and casual. Deke and his opponent traded glances and pulled their machines back from the pool table so they could hear the man out. Tiny smiled. His features were small, clustered in the center of his pale, doughy face. One finger twitched slightly on the chrome handrest. “I heard about you.” He looked straight at Deke. His voice was soft and shockingly sweet, a baby-girl little voice. “I heard you’re good.”

Deke nodded slowly. The smile left Tiny’s face. His soft, fleshy lips relaxed into a natural pout, as if he were waiting for a kiss. His small, bright eyes studied Deke without malice. “Let’s see what you can do, then.”

Deke lost himself in the cool game of war. And when the enemy went down in smoke and flame, to explode and vanish against the table, Tiny wordlessly turned his chair, wheeled it into the elevator, and was gone.

As Deke was gathering up his winnings, Bobby Earl eased up to him and said, “The man wants to play you.”

“Yeah?” Deke was nowhere near high enough on the circuit to challenge Tiny. “What’s the scam?”

“Man who was coming up from Atlanta tomorrow canceled. Ol’ Tiny, he was spoiling to go up against somebody new. So it looks like you get your shot at the Max.”

“Tomorrow? Wednesday? Doesn’t give me much prep time.”

Bobby Earl smiled gently. “I don’t think that makes no nevermind.”

“How’s that, Mr. Cline?”

“Boy, you just ain’t got the moves, you follow me? Ain’t got no surprises. You fly just like some kinda beginner, only faster and slicker. You follow what I’m trying to say?”

“I’m not sure I do. You want to put a little action on that?”

“Tell you truthful,” Cline said, “I been hoping on that.” He drew a small black notebook from his pocket and licked a pencil stub. “Give you five to one. They’s nobody gonna give no fairer odds than that.”

He looked at Deke almost sadly. “But Tiny, he’s just naturally better’n you, and that’s all she wrote, boy. He lives for that goddamned game, ain’t got nothing else. Can’t get out of that goddamned chair. You think you can best a man who’s fighting for his life, you are just lying to yourself.”

NORMAN ROCKWELL’S PORTRAIT of the colonel regarded Deke dispassionately from the Kentucky Fried across Richmond Road from the coffee bar. Deke held his cup with hands that were cold and trembling. His skull hummed with fatigue. Cline was right, he told the colonel. I can go up against Tiny, but I can’t win. The colonel stared back, gaze calm and level and not particularly kindly, taking in the coffee bar and Best Buy and all his drag-ass kingdom of Richmond Road. Waiting for Deke to admit to the terrible thing he had to do.

“The bitch is planning to leave me anyway,” Deke said aloud. Which made the black countergirl look at him funny, then quickly away.

“DADDY CALLED!” NANCE danced into the apartment, slamming the door behind her. “And you know what? He says if I can get this job and hold it for six months, he’ll have the brainlock reversed. Can you believe it? Deke?” She hesitated. “You okay?”

Deke stood. Now that the moment was on him, he felt unreal, like he was in a movie or something. “How come you never came home last night?” Nance asked.

The skin on his face was unnaturally taut, a parchment mask. “Where’d you stash the hype, Nance? I need it.”

“Deke,” she said, trying a tentative smile that instantly vanished. “Deke, that’s mine. My hit. I need it. For my interview.”

He smiled scornfully. “You got money. You can always score another cap.”

“Not by Friday! Listen, Deke, this is really important. My whole life is riding on this interview. I need that cap. It’s all I got!”

“Baby, you got the fucking world! Take a look around you—six ounces of blond Lebanese hash! Little anchovy fish in tins. Unlimited medical coverage, if you need it.” She was backing away from him, stumbling against the static waves of unwashed bedding and wrinkled glossy magazines that crested at the foot of her bed. “Me, I never had a glimmer of any of this. Never had the kind of edge it takes to get along. Well, this one time I am gonna. There is a match in two hours that I am going to fucking well win. Do you hear me?” He was working himself into a rage, and that was good. He needed it for what he had to do.

Nance flung up an arm, palm open, but he was ready for that and slapped her hand aside, never even catching a glimpse of the dark tunnel, let alone those little red eyes. Then they were both falling, and he was on top of her, her breath hot and rapid in his face. “Deke! Deke! I need that shit, Deke, my interview, it’s the only . . . I gotta . . . gotta . . .” She twisted her face away . . . crying into the wall. “Please, God, please don’t . . .”

“Where did you stash it?”

Pinned against the bed under his body, Nance began to spasm, her entire body convulsing in pain and fear.

“Where is it?”

Her face was bloodless, gray corpse flesh, and horror burned in her eyes. Her lips squirmed. It was too late to stop now; he’d crossed over the line. Deke felt revolted and nauseated, all the more so because on some unexpected and unwelcome level, he was enjoying this.

“Where is it, Nance?” And slowly, very gently, he began to stroke her face.

DEKE SUMMONED JACKMAN’S elevator with a finger that moved as fast and straight as a hornet and landed daintily as a butterfly on the call button. He was full of bouncy energy, and it was all under control. On the way up, he whipped off his shades and chuckled at his reflection in the finger-smudged chrome. The blacks of his eyes were like pinpricks, all but invisible, and still the world was neon bright.

Tiny was waiting. The cripple’s mouth turned up at the corners into a sweet smile as he took in Deke’s irises, the exaggerated calm of his motions, the unsuccessful attempt to mime an undrugged clumsiness. “Well,” he said in that girlish voice, “looks like I have a treat in store for me.”

The Max was draped over one tube of the wheelchair. Deke took up position and bowed, not quite mockingly. “Let’s fly.” As challenger, he flew defense. He materialized his planes at a conservative altitude, high enough to dive, low enough to have warning when Tiny attacked. He waited.

The crowd tipped him. A fatboy with brilliantined hair looked startled, a hollow-eyed cracker started to smile. Murmurs rose. Eyes shifted slow-motion in heads frozen by hyped-up reaction time. Took maybe three nanoseconds to pinpoint the source of attack. Deke whipped his head up, and—

Sonofabitch, he was blind! The Fokkers were diving straight from the two-hundred-watt bulb, and Tiny had suckered him into staring right at it. His vision whited out. Deke squeezed lids tight over welling tears and frantically held visualization. He split his flight, curving two biplanes right, one left. Immediately twisting each a half-turn, then back again. He had to dodge randomly—he couldn’t tell where the hostile warbirds were.

Tiny chuckled. Deke could hear him through the sounds of the crowd, the cheering and cursing and slapping down of coins that seemed to syncopate independent of the ebb and flow of the duel.

When his vision returned an instant later, a Spad was in flames and falling. Fokkers tailed his surviving planes, one on one and two on the other. Three seconds into the game and he was down one.

Dodging to keep Tiny from pinning tracers on him, he looped the single-pursued plane about and drove the other toward the blind spot between Tiny and the light bulb.

Tiny’s expression went very calm. The faintest shadow of disappointment—of contempt, even—was swallowed up by tranquility. He tracked the planes blandly, waiting for Deke to make his turn.

Then, just short of the blind spot, Deke shoved his Spad into a drive, the Fokkers overshooting and banking wildly to either side, twisting around to regain position.

The Spad swooped down on the third Fokker, pulled into position by Deke’s other plane. Fire strafed wings and crimson fuselage. For an instant nothing happened, and Deke thought he had a fluke miss. Then the little red mother veered left and went down, trailing black, oily smoke.

Tiny frowned, small lines of displeasure marring the perfection of his mouth. Deke smiled. One even, and Tiny held position.

Both Spads were tailed closely. Deke swung them wide, and then pulled them together from opposite sides of the table. He drove them straight for each other, neutralizing Tiny’s advantage . . . neither could fire without endangering his own planes. Deke cranked his machines up to top speed, slamming them at each other’s nose.

An instant before they crashed, Deke sent the planes over and under one another, opening fire on the Fokkers and twisting away. Tiny was ready. Fire filled the air. Then one blue and one red plane soared free, heading in opposite directions. Behind them, two biplanes tangled in midair. Wings touched, slewed about, and the planes crumpled. They fell together, almost straight down, to the green felt below.

Ten seconds in and four planes down. A black vet pursed his lips and blew softly. Someone else shook his head in disbelief.

Tiny was sitting straight and a little forward in his wheelchair, eyes intense and unblinking, soft hands plucking feebly at the grips. None of that amused and detached bullshit now; his attention was riveted on the game. The kickers, the table, Jackman’s itself, might not exist at all for him. Bobby Earl Cline laid a hand on his shoulder; Tiny didn’t notice. The planes were at opposite ends of the room, laboriously gaining altitude. Deke jammed his against the ceiling, dim through the smoky haze. He spared Tiny a quick glance, and their eyes locked. Cold against cold. “Let’s see your best,” Deke muttered through clenched teeth.

They drove their planes together.

The hype was peaking now, and Deke could see Tiny’s tracers crawling through the air between the planes. He had to put his Spad into the line of fire to get off a fair burst, then twist and bank so the Fokker’s bullets would slip by his undercarriage. Tiny was every bit as hot, dodging Deke’s fire and passing so close to the Spad their landing gears almost tangled as they passed.

Deke was looping his Spad in a punishingly tight turn when the hallucinations hit. The felt writhed and twisted—became the green hell of Bolivian rain forest that Tiny had flown combat over. The walls receded to gray infinity, and he felt the metal confinement of a cybernetic jumpjet close in around him.

But Deke had done his homework. He was expecting the hallucinations and knew he could deal with them. The military would never pass on a drug that couldn’t be fought through. Spad and Fokker looped into another pass. He could read the tensions in Tiny Montgomery’s face, the echoes of combat in deep jungle sky. They drove their planes together, feeling the torqued tensions that fed straight from instrumentation to hindbrain, the adrenaline pumps kicking in behind the armpits, the cold, fast freedom of airflow over jetskin mingling with the smells of hot metal and fear sweat. Tracers tore past his face, and he pulled back, seeing the Spad zoom by the Fokker again, both untouched. The kickers were just going ape, waving hats and stomping feet, acting like God’s own fools. Deke locked glances with Tiny again.

Malice rose up in him, and though his every nerve was taut as the carbon-crystal whiskers that kept the jumpjets from falling apart in superman turns over the Andes, he counterfeited a casual smile and winked, jerking his head slightly to one side, as if to say “Looka here.”

Tiny glanced to the side.

It was only for a fraction of a second, but that was enough. Deke pulled as fast and tight an Immelmann—right on the edge of theoretical tolerance—as had ever been seen on the circuit, and he was hanging on Tiny’s tail.

Let’s see you get out of this one, sucker.

Tiny rammed his plane straight down at the green, and Deke followed after. He held his fire. He had Tiny where he wanted him.

Running. Just like he’d been on his every combat mission. High on exhilaration and hype, maybe, but running scared. They were down to the felt now, flying treetop-level. Break, Deke thought, and jacked up the speed. Peripherally, he could see Bobby Earl Cline, and there was a funny look on the man’s face. A pleading kind of look. Tiny’s composure was shot; his face was twisted and tormented.

Now Tiny panicked and dove his plane in among the crowd. The biplanes looped and twisted between the kickers. Some jerked back involuntarily, and others laughingly swatted at them with their hands. But there was a hot glint of terror in Tiny’s eyes that spoke of an eternity of fear and confinement, two edges sawing away at each other endlessly. . . .

The fear was death in the air, the confinement a locking away in metal, first of the aircraft, then of the chair. Deke could read it all in his face: Combat was the only out Tiny had had, and he’d taken it every chance he got. Until some anonymous nationalista with an antique SAM tore him out of that blue-green Bolivian sky and slammed him straight down to Richmond Road and Jackman’s and the smiling killer boy he faced this one last time across the faded cloth.

Deke rocked up on his toes, face burning with that million-dollar smile that was the trademark of the drug that had already fried Tiny before anyone ever bothered to blow him out of the sky in a hot tangle of metal and mangled flesh. It all came together then. He saw that flying was all that held Tiny together. That daily brush of fingertips against death, and then rising up from the metal coffin, alive again. He’d been holding back collapse by sheer force of will. Break that willpower, and mortality would come pouring out and drown him. Tiny would lean over and throw up in his own lap.

AND DEKE DROVE it home. . . .

There was a moment of stunned silence as Tiny’s last plane vanished in a flash of light. “I did it,” Deke whispered. Then, louder, “Son of a bitch, I did it!”

Across the table from him, Tiny twisted in his chair, arms jerking spastically; his head lolled over on one shoulder. Behind him, Bobby Earl Cline stared straight at Deke, his eyes hot coals.

The gambler snatched up the Max and wrapped its ribbon around a stack of laminateds. Without warning, he flung the bundle at Deke’s face. Effortlessly, casually, Deke plucked it from the air.

For an instant, then, it looked like the gambler would come at him, right across the pool table. He was stopped by a tug on his sleeve. “Bobby Earl,” Tiny whispered, his voice choking with humiliation, “you gotta get me . . . out of here. . . .”

Stiffly, angrily, Cline wheeled his friend around, and then away, into shadow.

Deke threw back his head and laughed. By God, he felt good! He stuffed the Max into a shirt pocket, where it hung cold and heavy. The money he crammed into his jeans. Man, he had to jump with it, his triumph leaping up through him like a wild thing, fine and strong as the flanks of a buck in the deep woods he’d seen from a Greyhound once, and for this one moment it seemed that everything was worth it somehow, all the pain and misery he’d gone through to finally win.

But Jackman’s was silent. Nobody cheered. Nobody crowded around to congratulate him. He sobered, and silent, hostile faces swam into focus. Not one of these kickers was on his side. They radiated contempt, even hatred. For an interminably drawn-out moment the air trembled with potential violence . . . and then someone turned to the side, hawked up phlegm, and spat on the floor. The crowd broke up, muttering, one by one drifting into the darkness.

Deke didn’t move. A muscle in one leg began to twitch, harbinger of the coming hype crash. The top of his head felt numb, and there was an awful taste in his mouth. For a second he had to hang on to the table with both hands to keep from falling down forever, into the living shadow beneath him, as he hung impaled by the prize buck’s dead eyes in the photo under the Dr. Pepper clock.

A little adrenaline would pull him out of this. He needed to celebrate. To get drunk or stoned and talk it up, going over the victory time and again, contradicting himself, making up details, laughing and bragging. A starry old night like this called for big talk.

But standing there with all of Jackman’s silent and vast and empty around him, he realized suddenly that he had nobody left to tell it to.

Nobody at all.

KAREN JOY FOWLER Face Value

Science fiction is just one of several “dialects” Karen Joy Fowler uses to tell her colorful, emotionally rich tales of human relationships. Fowler began writing science fiction in 1986, and initially concentrated on short stories, many of which have been collected in Artificial Things (which won her the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer), Letters from Home (featuring stories by her and by Pat Cadigan), and Black Glass. Her stories are filled with characters who find their lack of personal fulfillment and emotional crises objectified in fantastical situations. “Face Value” juxtaposes a failing love relationship with the study of an inscrutable alien culture on another planet. In “Lieserl,” Albert Einstein receives a set of cryptic letters that recount the life of his daughter in compressed fashion as he is formulating his theory of special relativity. “The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things” is a powerful meditation on the Vietnam War in which a woman’s use of artificial means to reclaim the memory of a boyfriend killed in the war forces her to confront her own shortcomings in her treatment of him. Fowler’s three novels are period stories that explore the universality of personal and social relations. Sarah Canary is a memorable variation on the theme of first contact in which the efforts of an alien in human female form to integrate with American society in the Northwest frontier in 1873 illuminate the plight of other social groups disenfranchised on the basis of gender and race. Fowler has also written the mainstream novels The Sweetheart Season and Sister Noon.

IT WAS ALMOST like being alone. Taki, who had been alone one way or another most of his life, recognized this and thought he could deal with it. What choice did he have? It was only that he had allowed himself to hope for something different. A second star, small and dim, joined the sun in the sky, making its appearance over the rope bridge which spanned the empty river. Taki crossed the bridge in a hurry to get inside before the hottest part of the day began.

Something flashed briefly in the dust at his feet and he stooped to pick it up. It was one of Hesper’s poems, half finished, left out all night. Taki had stopped reading Hesper’s poetry. It reflected nothing, not a whisper of her life here with him, but was filled with longing for things and people behind her. Taki pocketed the poem on his way to the house, stood outside the door, and removed what dust he could with the stiff brush which hung at the entrance. He keyed his admittance; the door made a slight sucking sound as it resealed behind him.

Hesper had set out an iced glass of ade for him. Taki drank it at a gulp, superimposing his own dusty fingerprints over hers sketched lightly in the condensation on the glass. The drink was heavily sugared and only made him thirstier.

A cloth curtain separated one room from another, a blue sheet, Hesper’s innovation since the dwelling was designed as a single, multifunctional space. Through the curtain Taki heard a voice and knew Hesper was listening again to her mother’s letter—earth weather, the romances of her younger cousins. The letter had arrived weeks ago, but Taki was careful not to remind Hesper how old its news really was. If she chose to imagine the lives of her family moving along the same timeline as her own, then this must be a fantasy she needed. She knew the truth. In the time it had taken her to travel here with Taki, her mother had grown old and died. Her cousins had settled into marriages happy or unhappy or had faced life alone. The letters which continued to arrive with some regularity were an illusion. A lifetime later Hesper would answer them.

Taki ducked through the curtain to join her. “Hot,” he told her as if this were news. She lay on their mat stomach down, legs bent at the knees, feet crossed in the air. Her hair, the color of dried grasses, hung over her face. Taki stared for a moment at the back of her head. “Here,” he said. He pulled her poem from his pocket and laid it by her hand. “I found this out front.”

Hesper switched off the letter and rolled onto her back away from the poem. She was careful not to look at Taki. Her cheeks were stained with irregular red patches so that Taki knew she had been crying again. The observation caused him a familiar mixture of sympathy and impatience. His feelings for Hesper always came in these uncomfortable combinations; it tired him.

“ ‘Out front,’ ” Hesper repeated, and her voice held a practiced tone of uninterested nastiness. “And how did you determine that one part of this featureless landscape was the ‘front’?”

“Because of the door. We have only the one door so it’s the front door.”

“No,” said Hesper. “If we had two doors then one might arguably be the front door and the other the back door, but with only one it’s just the door.” Her gaze went straight upward. “You use words so carelessly. Words from another world. They mean nothing here.” Her eyelids fluttered briefly, the lashes darkened with tears. “It’s not just an annoyance to me, you know,” she said. “It can’t help but damage your work.”

“My work is the study of the mene,” Taki answered. “Not the creation of a new language,” and Hesper’s eyes closed.

“I really don’t see the difference,” she told him. She lay a moment longer without moving, then opened her eyes and looked at Taki directly. “I don’t want to have this conversation. I don’t know why I started it. Let’s rewind, run it again. I’ll be the wife this time. You come in and say, ‘Honey, I’m home!’ and I’ll ask you how your morning was.”

Taki began to suggest that this was a scene from another world and would mean nothing here. He had not yet framed the sentence when he heard the door seal release and saw Hesper’s face go hard and white. She reached for her poem and slid it under the scarf at her waist. Before she could get to her feet the first of the mene had joined them in the bedroom. Taki ducked through the curtain to fasten the door before the temperature inside the house rose. The outer room was filled with dust and the hands which reached out to him as he went past left dusty streaks on his clothes and his skin. He counted eight of the mene, fluttering about him like large moths, moths the size of human children, but with furry vestigial wings, hourglass abdomens, sticklike limbs. They danced about him in the open spaces, looked through the cupboards, pulled the tapes from his desk. When they had their backs to him he could see the symmetrical arrangement of dark spots which marked their wings in a pattern resembling a human face. A very sad face, very distinct. Masculine, Taki had always thought, but Hesper disagreed.

The party which had made initial contact under the leadership of Hans Mene so many years ago had wisely found the faces too whimsical for mention in their report. Instead they had included pictures and allowed them to speak for themselves. Perhaps the original explorers had been asking the same question Hesper posed the first time Taki showed her the pictures. Was the face really there? Or was this only evidence of the ability of humans to see their own faces in everything? Hesper had a poem entitled “The Kitchen God,” which recounted the true story of a woman about a century ago who had found the image of Christ in the burn-marks on a tortilla. “Do they see it, too?” she had asked Taki, but there was as yet no way to ask this of the mene, no way to know if they had reacted with shock and recognition to the faces of the first humans they had seen, though studies of the mene eye suggested a finer depth perception which might significantly distort the flat image.

Taki thought that Hesper’s own face had changed since the day, only six months ago calculated as Traveltime, when she had said she would come here with him and he thought it was because she loved him. They had sorted through all the information which had been collected to date on the mene and her face had been all sympathy then. “What would it be like,” she asked him, “to be able to fly and then to lose this ability? To outgrow it? What would a loss like that do to the racial consciousness of a species?”

“It happened so long ago, I doubt it’s even noticed as a loss,” Taki had answered. “Legends, myths not really believed perhaps. Probably not even that. In the racial memory not even a whisper.”

Hesper had ignored him. “What a shame they don’t write poetry,” she had said. She was finding them less romantic now as she joined Taki in the outer room, her face stoic. The mene surrounded her, ran their string-fingered hands all over her body, inside her clothing. One mene attempted to insert a finger into her mouth, but Hesper tightened her lips together resolutely, dust on her chin. Her eyes were fastened on Taki. Accusingly? Beseechingly? Taki was no good at reading people’s eyes. He looked away.

Eventually the mene grew bored. They left in groups, a few lingering behind to poke among the boxes in the bedroom, then following the others until Hesper and Taki were left alone. Hesper went to wash herself as thoroughly as their limited water supply allowed; Taki swept up the loose dust. Before he finished, Hesper returned, showing him her empty jewelry box without a word. The jewelry had all belonged to her mother.

“I’ll get them when it cools,” Taki told her.

“Thank you.”

It was always Hesper’s things that the mene took. The more they disgusted her, pawing over her, rummaging through her things, no way to key the door against clever mene fingers even if Taki had agreed to lock them out, which he had not, the more fascinating they seemed to find her. They touched her twice as often as they touched Taki and much more insistently. They took her jewelry, her poems, her letters, all the things she treasured most, and Taki believed, although it was far too early in his studies really to speculate with any assurance, that the mene read something off the objects. The initial explorers had concluded that mene communication was entirely telepathic, and if this was accurate, then Taki’s speculation was not such a leap. Certainly the mene didn’t value the objects for themselves. Taki always found them discarded in the dust on this side of the rope bridge.

The fact that everything would be easily recovered did nothing to soften Hesper’s sense of invasion. She mixed herself a drink, stirring it with the metal straw which poked through the dust-proof lid. “You shouldn’t allow it,” she said at last, and Taki knew from the time that had elapsed that she had tried not to begin this familiar conversation. He appreciated her effort as much as he was annoyed by her failure.

“It’s part of my job,” he reminded her. “We have to be accessible to them. I study them. They study us. There’s no way to differentiate the two activities and certainly no way to establish communication except simultaneously.”

“You’re letting them study us, but you’re giving them a false picture. You’re allowing them to believe that humans intrude on each other in this way. Does it occur to you that they may be involved in similar charades? If so, what can either of us learn?”

Taki took a deep breath. “The need for privacy may not be as intrinsically human as you imagine. I could point to many societies which afforded very little of this. As for any deliberate misrepresentations on their part—well, isn’t that the whole rationale for not sending a study team? Wouldn’t I be farther along if I were working with environmentalists, physiologists, linguists? But the risk of contamination increases exponentially with each additional human. We would be too much of a presence. Of course, I will be very careful. I am far from the stage in my study where I can begin to draw conclusions. When I visit them . . .”

“Reinforcing the notion that such visits are ordinary human behavior . . .” Hesper was looking at Taki with great coolness.

“When I visit them I am much more circumspect,” Taki finished. “I conduct my study as unobtrusively as possible.”

“And what do you imagine you are studying?” Hesper asked. She closed her lips tightly over the straw and drank. Taki regarded her steadily and with exasperation.

“Is this a trick question?” he asked. “I imagine I am studying the mene. What do you imagine I am studying?”

“What humans always study,” said Hesper. “Humans.”

YOU NEVER SAW one of the mene alone. Not ever. One never wandered off to watch the sun set or took its food to a solitary hole to eat without sharing. They did everything in groups and although Taki had been observing them for weeks now and was able to identify individuals and had compiled charts of the groupings he had seen, trying to isolate families or friendships or work-castes, still the results were inconclusive.

His attempts at communication were similarly discouraging. He had tried verbalizations, but had not expected a response to them; he had no idea how they processed audio information although they could hear. He had tried clapping and gestures, simple hand signals for the names of common objects. He had no sense that these efforts were noticed. They were so unfocused when he dealt with them, fluttering here, fluttering there. Taki’s ESP quotient had never been measurable, yet he tried that route, too. He tried to send a simple command. He would trap a mene hand and hold it against his own cheek, trying to form in his mind the picture which corresponded to the action. When he released the hand, sticky mene fingers might linger for a moment or they might slip away immediately, tangle in his hair instead, or tap his teeth. Mene teeth were tiny and pointed like wires. Taki saw them only when the mene ate. At other times they were hidden inside the folds of skin which almost hid their eyes as well. Taki speculated that the skin flaps protected their mouths and eyes from the dust. Taki found mene faces less expressive than their backs. Head-on they appeared petaled and blind as flowers. When he wanted to differentiate one mene from another, Taki looked at their wings.

Hesper had warned him there would be no art and he had asked her how she could be so sure. “Because their communication system is perfect,” she said. “Out of one brain and into the next with no loss of meaning, no need for abstraction. Art arises from the inability to communicate. Art is the imperfect symbol. Isn’t it?” But Taki, watching the mene carry water up from their underground deposits, asked himself where the line between tools and art objects should be drawn. For no functional reason that he could see, the water containers curved in the centers like the shapes of the mene’s own abdomens.

Taki followed the mene below ground, down some shallow, rough-cut stairs into the darkness. The mene themselves were slightly luminescent when there was no other light; at times and seasons some were spectacularly so and Taki’s best guess was that this was sexual. Even with the dimmer members, Taki could see well enough. He moved through a long tunnel with a low ceiling which made him stoop. He could hear water at the other end of it, not the water itself, but a special quality to the silence which told him water was near. The lake was clearly artificial, collected during the rainy season which no human had seen yet. The tunnel narrowed sharply. Taki could have gone forward, but felt suddenly claustrophobic and backed out instead. What did the mene think, he wondered, of the fact that he came here without Hesper. Did they notice this at all? Did it teach them anything about humans that they were capable of understanding?

“Their lives together are perfect,” Hesper said. “Except for those useless wings. If they are ever able to talk with us at all it will be because of those wings.”

Of course Hesper was a poet. The world was all language as far as she was concerned.

When Taki first met Hesper, at a party given by a colleague of his, he had asked her what she did. “I name things,” she had said. “I try to find the right names for things.” In retrospect Taki thought it was bullshit. He couldn’t remember why he had been so impressed with it at the time, a deliberate miscommunication, when a simple answer, “I write poetry,” would have been so clear and easy to understand. He felt the same way about her poetry itself, needlessly obscure, slightly evocative, but it left the reader feeling that he had fallen short somehow, that it had been a test and he had flunked it. It was unkind poetry and Taki had worked so hard to read it then.

“Am I right?” he would ask her anxiously when he finished. “Is that what you’re saying?” but she would answer that the poem spoke for itself.

“Once it’s on the page, I’ve lost control over it. Then the reader determines what it says or how it works.” Hesper’s eyes were gray, the irises so large and intense within their dark rings, that they made Taki dizzy. “So you’re always right. By definition. Even if it’s not remotely close to what I intended.”

What Taki really wanted was to find himself in Hesper’s poems. He would read them anxiously for some symbol which could be construed as him, some clue as to his impact on her life. But he was never there.

IT WAS AGAINST policy to send anyone into the field alone. There were pros and cons, of course, but ultimately the isolation of a single professional was seen as too cruel. For shorter projects there were advantages in sending a threesome, but during a longer study the group dynamics in a trio often became difficult. Two were considered ideal and Taki knew that Rawji and Heyen had applied for this post, a husband and wife team in which both members were trained for this type of study. He had never stopped being surprised that the post had been offered to him instead. He could not have even been considered if Hesper had not convinced the members of the committee of her willingness to accompany him, but she must have done much more. She must have impressed someone very much for them to decide that one trained xenologist and one poet might be more valuable than two trained xenologists. The committee had made some noises about “contamination” occurring between the two trained professionals, but Taki found this argument specious. “What did you say to them?” he asked her after her interview and she shrugged.

“You know,” she said. “Words.”

Taki had hidden things from the committee during his own interview. Things about Hesper. Her moods, her deep attachment to her mother, her unreliable attachment to him. He must have known it would never work out, but he walked about in those days with the stunned expression of a man who has been given everything. Could he be blamed for accepting it? Could he be blamed for believing in Hesper’s unexpected willingness to accompany him? It made a sort of equation for Taki. If Hesper was willing to give up everything and come with Taki, then Hesper loved Taki. An ordinary marriage commitment was reviewable every five years; this was something much greater. No other explanation made any sense.

The equation still held a sort of inevitability for Taki. Then Hesper loved Taki, if Hesper were willing to come with him. So somehow, sometime, Taki had done something which lost him Hesper’s love. If he could figure out what, perhaps he could make her love him again. “Do you love me?” he had asked Hesper, only once; he had too much pride for these thinly disguised pleadings. “Love is such a difficult word,” she had answered, but her voice had been filled with a rare softness and had not hurt Taki as much as it might.

The daystar was appearing again when Taki returned home. Hesper had made a meal which suggested she was coping well today. It included a sort of pudding made of a local fruit they found themselves able to tolerate. Hesper called the pudding “boxty.” It was apparently a private joke. Taki was grateful for the food and the joke, even if he didn’t understand it. He tried to keep the conversation lighthearted, talking to Hesper about the mene water jars. Taki’s position was that when the form of a practical object was less utilitarian than it might be, then it was art. Hesper laughed. She ran through a list of human artifacts and made him classify them.

“A paper clip,” she said.

“The shape hasn’t changed in centuries,” he told her. “Not art.”

“A safety pin.”

Taki hesitated. How essential was the coil at the bottom of the pin? Very. “Not art,” he decided.

“A hair brush.”

“Boar bristle?”

“Wood handle.”

“Art. Definitely.”

She smiled at him. “You’re confusing ornamentation with art. But why not? It’s as good a definition as any,” she told him. “Eat your boxty.”

They spent the whole afternoon alone, uninterrupted. Taki transcribed the morning’s notes into his files, reviewed his tapes. Hesper recorded a letter whose recipient would never hear it and sang softly to herself.

That night he reached for her, his hand along the curve at her waist. She stiffened slightly, but responded by putting her hand on his face. He kissed her and her mouth did not move. His movements became less gentle. It might have been passion; it might have been anger. She told him to stop, but he didn’t. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t. “Stop,” she said again and he heard she was crying. “They’re here. Please stop. They’re watching us.”

“Studying us,” Taki said. “Let them,” but he rolled away and released her. They were alone in the room. He would have seen the mene easily in the dark. “Hesper,” he said. “There’s no one here.”

She lay rigid on her side of their bed. He saw the stitching of her backbone disappearing into her neck and had a sudden feeling that he could see everything about her, how she was made, how she was held together. It made him no less angry.

“I’m sorry,” Hesper told him, but he didn’t believe her. Even so, he was asleep before she was. He made his own breakfast the next morning without leaving anything out for her. He was gone before she had gotten out of bed.

The mene were gathering food, dried husks thick enough to protect the liquid fruit during the two-star dry season. They punctured the husks with their needle-thin teeth. Several crowded about him, greeting him with their fingers, checking his pockets, removing his recorder and passing it about until one of them dropped it in the dust. When they returned to work, Taki retrieved it, wiped it as clean as he could. He sat down to watch them, logged everything he observed. He noted in particular how often they touched each other and wondered what each touch meant. Affection? Communication? Some sort of chain of command?

Later he went underground again, choosing another tunnel, looking for one which wouldn’t narrow so as to exclude him, but finding himself beside the same lake with the same narrow access ahead. He went deeper this time until it gradually became too close for his shoulders. Before him he could see a luminescence; he smelled the dusty odor of the mene and could just make out a sound, too, a sort of movement, a grass-rubbing-together sound. He stooped and strained his eyes to see something in the faint light. It was like looking into the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. The tunnel narrowed and narrowed. Beyond it must be the mene homes and he could never get into them. He contrasted this with the easy access they had to his home. At the end of his vision he thought he could just see something move, but he wasn’t sure. A light touch on the back of his neck and another behind his knee startled him. He twisted around to see a group of the mene crowded into the tunnel behind him. It gave him a feeling of being trapped and he had to force himself to be very gentle as he pushed his way back and let the mene go through. The dark pattern of their wings stood in high relief against the luminescent bodies. The human faces grew smaller and smaller until they disappeared.

“LEAVE ME ALONE,” Hesper told him. It took Taki completely by surprise. He had done nothing but enter the bedroom; he had not even spoken yet. “Just leave me alone.”

Taki saw no signs that Hesper had ever gotten up. She lay against the pillow and her cheek was still creased from the wrinkles in the sheets. She had not been crying. There was something worse in her face, something which alarmed Taki.

“Hesper?” he asked. “Hesper? Did you eat anything? Let me get you something to eat.”

It took Hesper a moment to answer. When she did, she looked ordinary again. “Thank you,” she said. “I am hungry.” She joined him in the outer room, wrapped in their blanket, her hair tangled around her face. She got a drink for herself, dropping the empty glass once, stooping to retrieve it. Taki had the strange impression that the glass fell slowly. When they had first arrived, the gravitational pull had been light, just perceptibly lighter than Earth’s. Without quite noticing, this had registered on him in a sort of lightheartedness. But Hesper had complained of feelings of dislocation, disconnection. Taki put together a cold breakfast, which Hesper ate slowly, watching her own hands as if they fascinated her. Taki looked away. “Fork,” she said. He looked back. She was smiling at him.

“What?”

“Fork.”

He understood. “Not art.”

“Four tines?”

He didn’t answer.

“Roses carved on the handle.”

“Well then, art. Because of the handle. Not because of the tines.” He was greatly reassured.

The mene came while he was telling her about the tunnel. They put their dusty fingers in her food, pulled it apart. Hesper set her fork down and pushed the plate away. When they reached for her she pushed them away, too. They came back. Hesper shoved harder.

“Hesper,” said Taki.

“I just want to be left alone. They never leave me alone.” Hesper stood up, towering above the mene. The blanket fell to the floor. “We flew here,” Hesper said to the mene. “Did you see the ship? Didn’t you see the pod? Doesn’t that interest you? Flying?” She laughed and flapped her arms until they froze, horizontal at her sides. The mene reached for her again and she brought her arms in to protect her breasts, pushing the mene away repeatedly, harder and harder, until they tired of approaching her and went into the bedroom, reappearing with her poems in their hands. The door sealed behind them.

“I’ll get them back for you,” Taki promised, but Hesper told him not to bother.

“I haven’t written in weeks,” she said. “In case you hadn’t noticed. I haven’t finished a poem since I came here. I’ve lost that. Along with everything else.” She brushed at her hair rather frantically with one hand. “It doesn’t matter,” she added. “My poems? Not art.”

“Are you the best person to judge that?” Taki asked.

“Don’t patronize me.” Hesper returned to the table, looked again at the plate which held her unfinished breakfast, dusty from handling. “My critical faculties are still intact. It’s just the poetry that’s gone.” She took the dish to clean it, scraped the food away. “I was never any good,” she said. “Why do you think I came here? I had no poetry of my own so I thought I’d write the mene’s. I came to a world without words. I hoped it would be clarifying. I knew there was a risk.” Her hands moved very fast. “I want you to know I don’t blame you.”

“Come and sit down a moment, Hesper,” Taki said, but she shook her head. She looked down at her body and moved her hands over it.

“They feel sorry for us. Did you know that? They feel sorry about our bodies.”

“How do you know that?” Taki asked.

“Logic. We have these completely functional bodies. No useless wings. Not art.” Hesper picked up the blanket and headed for the bedroom. At the cloth curtain she paused a moment. “They love our loneliness, though. They’ve taken all mine. They never leave me alone now.” She thrust her right arm suddenly out into the air. It made the curtain ripple. “Go away,” she said, ducking behind the sheet.

Taki followed her. He was very frightened. “No one is here but us, Hesper,” he told her. He tried to put his arms around her but she pushed him back and began to dress.

“Don’t touch me all the time,” she said. He sank onto the bed and watched her. She sat on the floor to fasten her boots.

“Are you going out, Hesper?” he asked and she laughed.

“Hesper is out,” she said. “Hesper is out of place, out of time, out of luck, and out of her mind. Hesper has vanished completely. Hesper was broken into and taken.”

Taki fastened his hands tightly together. “Please don’t do this to me, Hesper,” he pleaded. “It’s really so unfair. When did I ask so much of you? I took what you offered me; I never took anything else. Please don’t do this.”

Hesper had found the brush and was pulling it roughly through her hair. He rose and went to her, grabbing her by the arms, trying to turn her to face him. “Please, Hesper!”

She shook loose from him without really appearing to notice his hands, continued to work through the worst of her tangles. When she did turn around, her face was familiar, but somehow not Hesper’s face. It was a face which startled him.

“Hesper is gone,” it said. “We have her. You’ve lost her. We are ready to talk to you. Even though you will never, never, never understand.” She reached out to touch him, laying her open palm against his cheek and leaving it there.

C. J. CHERRYH Pots

C. J. Cherryh is the creator of the encompassing Union-Alliance future-history series, which chronicles the interplay of intergalactic commerce and politics several millennia hence. It includes, among other works, the Hugo Award–winning novels Downbelow Station and Cyteen, memorable for its study of human nature through the creation of clones with programmed memories. Praised for its inventive extrapolations of clinical and social science and deft blends of technology and human interest, the series enfolds a number of celebrated subseries, including her Faded Sun trilogy (Kesrith, Shon’jir, Kutath). Her Chanur cycle (The Pride of Chanur, Chanur’s Venture, The Kif Strikes Back, Chanur’s Homecoming, Chanur’s Legacy), also part of the series, tells of a race of sentient leonine creatures and is notable for its alien viewpoint and illuminating perspectives on the human race rendered from outside it. Much of Cherryh’s fiction is concerned with the impact of environment—family, politics, culture—on the values and ideologies of the individual. In Cuckoo’s Egg she rings a variation on the Tarzan theme, imaging a human child raised to maturity by a race of intelligent felines. Heavy Time contrasts the personalities of its two protagonists, one raised in a nurturing human environment, the other stunted socially by an upbringing deformed by manipulative corporate interests. Her recent quartet of novels formed by Foreigner, Invader, Inheritor, and Precursor has been praised for its sensitive documentation of the cultural and racial differences a human colony must overcome in forming a fragile alliance with the planet’s alien inhabitants. The Gene Wars is a blend of epic quest fantasy and hard science fiction, set in a future when nanotechnology is used as a weapon. Cherryh has also authored the four-volume Morgaine heroic fantasy series and the epic Galisien sword-and-sorcery trilogy, which includes Fortress in the Eye of Time, Fortress of Eagles, and Fortress of Owls. She is the creator of the Merovingian Nights shared-world series and cocreator of the multivolume Heroes in Hell shared-world compilations.

IT WAS A most bitter trip, the shuttle-descent to the windy surface. Suited, encumbered by lifesupport, Desan stepped off the platform and waddled onward into the world, waving off the attentions of small spidery service robots: “Citizen, this way, this way, citizen, have a care—do watch your step; a suit tear is hazardous.”

Low-level servitors. Desan detested them. The chief of operations had plainly sent these creatures accompanied only by an AI eight-wheel transport, which inconveniently chose to park itself a good five hundred paces beyond the shuttle blast zone, an uncomfortably long walk across the dusty pan in the crinkling, pack-encumbered oxy-suit. Desan turned, casting a forlorn glance at the shuttle waiting there on its landing gear, silver, dip-nosed wedge under a gunmetal sky, at rest on an ocher and rust landscape. He shivered in the sky-view, surrendered himself and his meager luggage to the irritating ministries of the service robots, and waddled on his slow way down to the waiting AI transport.

“Good day,” the vehicle said inanely, opening a door. “My passenger compartment is not safe atmosphere; do you understand, Lord Desan?”

“Yes, yes.” Desan climbed in and settled himself in the front seat, a slight give of the transport’s suspensors. The robots fussed about in insectile hesitance, delicately setting his luggage case just so, adjusting, adjusting until it conformed with their robotic, template-compared notion of their job. Maddening. Typical robotic efficiency. Desan slapped the pressure-sensitive seating. “Come, let’s get this moving, shall we?”

The AI talked to its duller cousins, a single squeal that sent them scuttling. “Attention to the door, citizen.” It lowered and locked. The AI started its noisy drive motor. “Will you want the windows dimmed, citizen?”

“No. I want to see this place.”

“A pleasure, Lord Desan.”

Doubtless for the AI, it was.

THE STATION WAS situated a long drive across the pan, across increasingly softer dust that rolled up to obscure the rearview—softer, looser dust, occasionally a wind-scooped hollow that made the transport flex—(“Do forgive me, citizen. Are you comfortable?”)

“Quite, quite, you’re very good.”

“Thank you, citizen.”

And finally—finally!—something other than flat appeared, the merest humps of hills, and one anomalous mountain, a massive, long bar that began as a haze and became solid; became a smooth regularity before the gentle brown folding of hills hardly worthy of the name.

Mountain. The eye indeed took it for a volcanic or sedimentary formation at distance, some anomalous and stubborn outcrop in this barren reach, where all else had declined to entropy; absolute, featureless, flat. But when the AI passed along its side this mountain had joints and seams, had the marks of making on it; and even knowing in advance what it was, driving along within view of the jointing, this work of Ancient hands—chilled Desan’s well-traveled soul. The station itself came into view against the weathered hills, a collection of shocking green domes on a brown lifeless world. But such domes Desan had seen. With only the AI for witness, Desan turned in his seat, pressed the flexible bubble of the helmet to the double-seal window, and stared and stared at the stonework until it passed to the rear and the dust obscured it.

“Here, Lord,” said the AI, eternally cheerful. “We are almost at the station—a little climb. I do it very smoothly.”

Flex and lean; sway and turn. The domes lurched closer in the forward window and the motor whined. “I’ve very much enjoyed serving you.”

“Thank you,” Desan murmured, seeing another walk before him, ascent of a plastic grid to an airlock and no sight of a welcoming committee.

More service robots, scuttling toward them as the transport stopped and adjusted itself with a pneumatic wheeze.

“Thank you, Lord Desan, do watch your helmet, watch your lifesupport connections, watch your footing please. The dust is slick. . . .”

“Thank you.” With an AI one had no recourse.

“Thank you, my lord.” The door came up; Desan extricated himself from the seat and stepped to the dusty ground, carefully shielding the oxy-pack from the doorframe and panting with the unaccustomed weight of it in such gravity. The service robots moved to take his luggage while Desan waddled doggedly on, up the plastic gridwork path to the glaringly lime-green domes. Plastics. Plastics that could not even originate in this desolation, but which came from their ships’ spare biomass. Here all was dead, frighteningly void: Even the signal that guided him to the lakebed was robotic, like the advertisement that a transport would meet him.

The airlock door shot open ahead; and living, suited personnel appeared, three of them, at last, at long last, flesh-and-blood personnel came walking toward him to offer proper courtesy. But before that mountain of stone, before these glaring green structures and the robotic paraphernalia of research that made all the reports real—Desan still felt the deathliness of the place. He trudged ahead, touched the offered, gloved hands, acknowledged the expected salutations, and proceeded up the jointed-plastic walk to the open airlock. His marrow refused to be warmed. The place refused to come into clear focus, like some bad dream with familiar elements hideously distorted.

A hundred years of voyage since he had last seen this world and then only from orbit, receiving reports thirdhand. A hundred years of work on this planet preceded this small trip from port to research center, under that threatening sky, in this place by a mountain that had once been a dam on a lake that no longer existed.

There had been the findings of the moon, of course. A few artifacts. A cloth of symbols. Primitive, unthinkably primitive. First omen of the findings of this sere, rust brown world.

He accompanied the welcoming committee into the airlock of the main dome, waited through the cycle, and breathed a sigh of relief as the indicator lights went from white to orange and the inner door admitted them to the interior. He walked forward, removed the helmet and drew a deep breath of air unexpectedly and unpleasantly tainted. The foyer of this centermost dome was businesslike—plastic walls, visible ducting. A few plants struggled for life in a planter in the center of the floor. Before it, a black pillar and a common enough emblem: a plaque with two naked alien figures, the diagrams of a star system—reproduced even to its scars and pitting. In some places it might be mundane, unnoticed.

It belonged here, belonged here, and it could never be mundane, this message of the Ancients.

“Lord Desan,” a female voice said, and he turned, awkward in the suit.

It was Dr. Gothon herself, unmistakable aged woman in science blues. The rare honor dazed him, and wiped away all failure of hospitality thus far. She held out her hand. Startled, he reacted in kind, remembered the glove, and hastily drew back his hand to strip the glove. Her gesture was gracious and he felt the very fool and very much off his stride, his hand touching—no, firmly grasped by the callused, aged hand of the legendary intellect. Age-soft and hard-surfaced at once. Age and vigor. His tongue quite failed him, and he felt, recalling his purpose, utterly daunted.

“Come in, let them rid you of that suit, Lord Desan. Will you rest after your trip, a nap, a cup of tea, perhaps. The robots are taking your luggage to your room. Accommodations here aren’t luxurious, but I think you’ll find them comfortable.”

Deeper and deeper into courtesies. One could lose all sense of direction in such surroundings, letting oneself be disarmed by gentleness, by pleasantness—by embarrassed reluctance to resist.

“I want to see what I came to see, doctor.” Desan unfastened more seams and shed the suit into waiting hands, smoothed his coveralls. Was that too brusque, too unforgivably hasty? “I don’t think I could rest, Dr. Gothon. I attended my comfort aboard the shuttle. I’d like to get my bearings here at least, if one of your staff would be so kind to take me in hand—”

“Of course, of course. I rather expected as much—do come, please, let me show you about. I’ll explain as much as I can. Perhaps I can convince you as I go.”

He was overwhelmed from the start; he had expected some high official, the director of operations most likely, not Gothon. He walked slightly after the doctor, the stoop-shouldered presence that passed like a benison among the students and lesser staff—I saw the Doctor, the young ones had been wont to say in hushed tones, aboard the ship, when Gothon strayed absently down a corridor in her rare intervals of waking. I saw the Doctor.

In that voice one might claim a theophany.

They had rarely waked her, lesser researchers being sufficient for most worlds; while he was the fifth lord-navigator, the fourth born on the journey, a time-dilated trifle, fifty-two waking years of age and a mere two thousand years of voyage against—aeons of Gothon’s slumberous life.

And Desan’s marrow ached now at such gentle grace in this bowed, mottle-skinned old scholar, this sleuth patiently deciphering the greatest mystery of the universe. Pity occurred to him. He suffered personally in this place; but not as Gothon would have suffered here, in that inward quiet where Gothon carried on thoughts the ship crews were sternly admonished never to disturb.

Students rushed now to open doors for them, pressed themselves to the walls and allowed their passage into deeper and deeper halls within the maze of the domes. Passing hands brushed Desan’s sleeves, welcome offered the current lord-navigator; he reciprocated with as much attention as he could devote to courtesy in his distress. His heart labored in the unaccustomed gravity, his nostrils accepted not only the effluvium of dome plastics and the recyclers and so many bodies dwelling together; but a flinty, bitter air, like electricity or dry dust. He imagined some hazardous leakage of the atmosphere into the dome: unsettling thought. The hazards of the place came home to him, and he wished already to be away.

Gothon had endured here, during his further voyages—seven years more of her diminishing life; waked four times, and this was the fourth, continually active now for five years, her longest stint yet in any waking. She had found data finally worth the consumption of her life, and she burned it without stint. She believed. She believed enough to die pursuing it.

He shuddered up and down and followed Gothon through a sealdoor toward yet another dome, and his gut tightened in dismay; for there were shelves on either hand, and those shelves were lined with yellow skulls, endless rows of staring dark sockets and grinning jaws. Some were long-nosed; some were short. Some small, virtually noseless skulls had fangs which gave them a wise and intelligent look—Like miniature people, like babies with grown-up features, must be the initial reaction to anyone seeing them in the holos or viewing the specimens brought up to the orbiting labs. But cranial capacity in these was much too small. The real sapient occupied further shelves, row upon row of eyeless, generously domed skulls, grinning in their flat-toothed way, in permanent horror—provoking profoundest horror in those who discovered them here, in this desolation.

Here Gothon paused, selected one of the small sapient skulls, much reconstructed: Desan had at least the skill to recognize the true bone from the plassbone bonded to it. This skull was far more delicate than the others, jaw smaller. The front two teeth were restructs. So was one of the side.

“It was a child,” Gothon said. “We call her Missy. The first we found at this site, up in the hills, in a streambank. Most of Missy’s feet were gone, but she’s otherwise intact. Missy was all alone except for a little animal all tucked up in her arms. We keep them together—never mind the cataloging.” She lifted an anomalous and much-reconstructed skull from the shelf among the sapients; fanged and delicate. “Even archaeologists have sentiment.”

“I—see—” Helpless, caught in courtesy, Desan extended an unwilling finger and touched the skull.

“Back to sleep.” Gothon set both skulls tenderly back on the shelf, and dusted her hands and walked farther, Desan following, beyond a simple door and into a busy room of workbenches piled high with a clutter of artifacts.

Staff began to rise from their dusty work in a sudden startlement. “No, no, go on,” Gothon said quietly. “We’re only passing through; ignore us. —Here, do you see, Lord Desan?” Gothon reached carefully past a researcher’s shoulder and lifted from the counter an elongate ribbed bottle with the opalescent patina of long burial. “We find a great many of these. Mass production. Industry. Not only on this continent. This same bottle exists in sites all over the world, in the uppermost strata. Same design. Near the time of the calamity. We trace global alliances and trade by such small things.” She set it down and gathered up a virtually complete vase, much patched. “It always comes to pots, Lord Desan. By pots and bottles we track them through the ages. Many layers. They had a long and complex past.”

Desan reached out and touched the corroded brown surface of the vase, discovering a single bright remnant of the blue glaze along with the gray encrustations of long burial. “How long—how long does it take to reduce a thing to this?”

“It depends on the soil—on moisture, on acidity. This came from hereabouts.” Gothon tenderly set it back on a shelf, walked on, frail, hunch-shouldered figure among the aisles of the past. “But very long, very long to obliterate so much—almost all the artifacts are gone. Metals oxidize; plastics rot; cloth goes very quickly; paper and wood last quite long in a desert climate, but they go, finally. Moisture dissolves the details of sculpture. Only the noble metals survive intact. Soil creep warps even stone; crushes metal. We find even the best pots in a matrix of pieces, a puzzle-toss. Fragile as they are, they outlast monuments, they last as long as the earth that holds them, drylands, wetlands, even beneath the sea—where no marine life exists to trouble them. That bottle and that pot are as venerable as that great dam. The makers wouldn’t have thought that, would they?”

“But—” Desan’s mind reeled at the remembrance of the great plain, the silt and the deep buried secrets.

“But?”

“You surely might miss important detail. A world to search. You might walk right over something and misinterpret everything.”

“Oh, yes, it can happen. But finding things where we expect them is an important clue, Lord Desan, a confirmation—One only has to suspect where to look. We locate our best hope first—a sunken, a raised place in those photographs we trouble the orbiters to take; but one gets a feeling about the lay of the land—more than the mechanical probes, Lord Desan.” Gothon’s dark eyes crinkled in the passage of thoughts unguessed, and Desan stood lost in Gothon’s unthinkable mentality. What did a mind do in such age? Wander? Could the great doctor lapse into mysticism? To report such a thing—would solve one difficulty. But to have that regrettable duty—

“It’s a feeling for living creatures, Lord Desan. It’s reaching out to the land and saying—if this were long ago, if I thought to build, if I thought to trade—where would I go? Where would my neighbors live?”

Desan coughed delicately, wishing to draw things back to hard fact. “And the robot probes, of course, do assist.”

“Probes, Lord Desan, are heartless things. A robot can be very skilled, but a researcher directs it only at distance, blind to opportunities and the true sense of the land. But you were born to space. Perhaps it makes no sense.”

“I take your word for it,” Desan said earnestly. He felt the weight of the sky on his back. The leaden, awful sky, leprous and unhealthy cover between them and the star and the single moon. Gothon remembered homeworld. Remembered homeworld. Had been renowned in her field even there. The old scientist claimed to come to such a landscape and locate things by seeing things that robot eyes could not, by thinking thoughts those dusty skulls had held in fleshy matter—

—how long ago?

“We look for mounds,” Gothon said, continuing in her brittle gait down the aisle, past the bowed heads and shy looks of staff and students at their meticulous tasks. The work of tiny electronic needles proceeded about them, the patient ticking away at encrustations to bring ancient surfaces to light. “They built massive structures. Great skyscrapers. Some of them must have lasted, oh, thousands of years intact; but when they went unstable, they fell, and their fall made rubble; and the wind came and the rivers shifted their courses around the ruin, and of course the weight of sediment piled up, wind- and water-driven. From that point, its own weight moved it and warped it and complicated our work.” Gothon paused again beside a farther table, where holo plates stood inactive. She waved her hand and a landscape showed itself, a serpentined row of masonry across a depression. “See the wall there. They didn’t build it that way, all wavering back and forth and up and down. Gravity and soil movement deformed it. It was buried until we unearthed it. Otherwise, wind and rain alone would have destroyed it ages ago. As it will do, now, if time doesn’t rebury it.”

“And this great pile of stone—” Desan waved an arm, indicating the imagined direction of the great dam and realizing himself disoriented. “How old is it?”

“Old as the lake it made.”

“But contemporaneous with the fall?”

“Yes. Do you know, that mass may be standing when the star dies. The few great dams; the pyramids we find here and there around the world—One only guesses at their age. They’ll outlast any other surface feature except the mountains themselves.”

“Without life.”

“Oh, but there is.”

“Declining.”

“No, no. Not declining.” The doctor waved her hand and a puddle appeared over the second holo plate, all green with weed waving feathery tendrils back and forth in the surge. “The moon still keeps this world from entropy. There’s water, not as much as this dam saw—It’s the weed, this little weed that gives one hope for this world. The little life, the things that fly and crawl—the lichens and the life on the flatlands.”

“But nothing they knew.”

“No. Life’s evolved new answers here. Life’s starting over.”

“It certainly hasn’t much to start with, has it?”

“Not very much. It’s a question that interests Dr. Bothogi—whether the life making a start here has the time left, and whether the consumption curve doesn’t add up to defeat—But life doesn’t know that. We’re very concerned about contamination. But we fear it’s inevitable. And who knows, perhaps it will have added something beneficial.” Dr. Gothon lit yet another holo with the wave of her hand. A streamlined six-legged creature scuttled energetically across a surface of dead moss, frantically waving antennae and making no apparent progress.

“The inheritors of the world.” Despair chilled Desan’s marrow.

“But each generation of these little creatures is an unqualified success. The last to perish perishes in profound tragedy, of course, but without consciousness of it. The awareness will have, oh, half a billion years to wait—then, maybe it will appear; if the star doesn’t fail; it’s already far advanced down the sequence.” Another holo, the image of desert, of blowing sand, beside the holo of the surge of weed in a pool. “Life makes life. That weed you see is busy making life. It’s taking in and converting and building a chain of support that will enable things to feed on it, while more of its kind grows. That’s what life does. It’s busy, all unintended, of course, but fortuitously building itself a way off the planet.”

Desan cast her an uncomfortable look askance.

“Oh, indeed. Biomass. Petrochemicals. The storehouse of aeons of energy all waiting the use of consciousness. And that consciousness, if it arrives, dominates the world because awareness is a way of making life more efficiently. But consciousness is a perilous thing, Lord Desan. Consciousness is a computer loose with its own perceptions and performing calculations on its own course, in the service of that little weed; billions of such computers all running and calculating faster and faster, adjusting themselves and their ecological environment, and what if there were the smallest, the most insignificant software error at the outset?”

“You don’t believe such a thing. You don’t reduce us to that.” Desan’s faith was shaken; this good woman had not gone unstable, this great intellect had had her faith shaken, that was what—the great and gentle doctor had, in her unthinkable age, acquired cynicism, and he fought back with his fifty-two meager years. “Surely, but surely this isn’t the proof, doctor, this could have been a natural calamity.”

“Oh, yes, the meteor strike.” The doctor waved past a series of holos on a fourth plate, and a vast crater showed in aerial view, a crater so vast the picture showed planetary curvature. It was one of the planet’s main features, shockingly visible from space. “But this solar system shows scar after scar of such events. A many-planeted system like this, a star well-attended by debris in its course through the galaxy—Look at the airless bodies, the moons, consider the number of meteor strikes that crater them. Tell me, space-farer: am I not right in that?”

Desan drew in a breath, relieved to be questioned in his own element. “Of course, the system is prone to that kind of accident. But that crater is ample cause—”

“If it came when there was still sapience here. But that hammerblow fell on a dead world.”

He gazed on the eroded crater, the sandswept crustal melting, eloquent of age. “You have proof.”

“Strata. Pots. Ironic, they must have feared such an event very greatly. One thinks they must have had a sense of doom about them, perhaps on the evidence of their moon; or understanding the mechanics of their solar system; or perhaps primitive times witnessed such falls and they remembered. One catches a glimpse of the mind that reached out from here . . . what impelled it, what it sought.”

“How can we know that? We overlay our mind on their expectations—” Desan silenced himself, abashed, terrified. It was next to heresy. In a moment more he would have committed irremediable indiscretion; and the lords-magistrate on the orbiting station would hear it by suppertime, to his eternal detriment.

“We stand in their landscape, handle their bones, we hold their skulls in our fleshly hands and try to think in their world. Here we stand beneath a threatening heaven. What will we do?”

“Try to escape. Try to get off this world. They did get off. The celestial artifacts—”

“Archaelogy is ever so much easier in space. A million years, two, and a thing still shines. Records still can be read. A color can blaze out undimmed after aeons, when first a light falls on it. One surface chewed away by microdust, and the opposing face pristine as the day it had its maker’s hand on it. You keep asking me about the age of these ruins. But we know that, don’t we truly suspect it, in the marrow of our bones—at what age they fell silent?”

“It can’t have happened then!”

“Come with me, Lord Desan.” Gothon waved a hand, extinguishing all the holos, and, walking on, opened the door into yet another hallway. “So much to catalog. That’s much of the work in that room. They’re students, mostly. Restoring what they can; numbering, listing. A librarian’s job, just to know where things are filed. In five hundred years more of intensive cataloging and restoring, we may know them well enough to know something of their minds, though we may never find more of their written language than that of those artifacts on the moon. A place of wonders. A place of ongoing wonders, in Dr. Bothogi’s work. A little algae beginning the work all over again. Perhaps not for the first time—interesting thought.”

“You mean—” Desan overtook the aged doctor in the narrow, sterile hall, a series of ringing steps. “You mean—before the sapients evolved—there were other calamities, other re-beginnings.”

“Oh, well before. It sends chills up one’s back, doesn’t it, to think how incredibly stubborn life might be here, how persistent in the calamity of the skies—The algae and then the creeping things and the slow, slow climb to dominance—”

“Previous sapients?”

“Interesting question in itself. But a thing need not be sapient to dominate a world, Lord Desan. Only tough. Only efficient. Haven’t the worlds proven that? High sapience is a rare jewel. So many successes are dead ends. Flippers and not hands; lack of vocal apparatus—unless you believe in telepathy, which I assuredly don’t. No. Vocalizing is necessary. Some sort of long-distance communication. Light-flashes; sound; something. Else your individuals stray apart in solitary discovery and rediscovery and duplication of effort. Oh, even with awareness—even granted that rare attribute—how many species lack something essential, or have some handicap that will stop them before civilization; before technology—”

“—before they leave the planet. But they did that, they were the one in a thousand—Without them—”

“Without them. Yes.” Gothon turned her wonderful soft eyes on him at close range and for a moment he felt a great and terrible stillness like the stillness of a grave. “Childhood ends here. One way or the other, it ends.”

He was struck speechless. He stood there, paralyzed a moment, his mind tumbling freefall; then blinked and followed the doctor like a child, helpless to do otherwise.

Let me rest, he thought then, let us forget this beginning and this day, let me go somewhere and sit down and have a warm drink to get the chill from my marrow and let us begin again. Perhaps we can begin with facts and not fancies—

But he would not rest. He feared that there was no rest to be had in this place, that once the body stopped moving, the weight of the sky would come down, the deadly sky that had boded destruction for all the history of this lost species, and the age of the land would seep into their bones and haunt his dreams as the far greater scale of stars did not.

All the years I’ve voyaged, Dr. Gothon, all the years of my life searching from star to star. Relativity has made orphans of us. The world will have sainted you. Me it never knew. In a quarter of a million years—they’ll have forgotten; o doctor, you know more than I how a world ages. A quarter of a million years you’ve seen—and we’re both orphans. Me endlessly cloned. You in your long sleep, your several clones held aeons waiting in theirs—o doctor, we’ll recreate you. And not truly you, ever again. No more than I’m a Desanprime. I’m only the fifth lord-navigator.

In a quarter of a million years, has not our species evolved beyond us, might they not, may they not, find some faster transport and find us, their aeons-lost precursors; and we will not know each other, Dr. Gothon—how could we know each other—if they had, but they have not; we have become the wavefront of a quest that never overtakes, never surpasses us.

In a quarter of a million years, might some calamity have befallen us and our world be like this world, ocher and deadly rust?

While we are clones and children of clones, genetic fossils, anomalies of our kind?

What are they to us and we to them? We seek the Ancients, the makers of the probe.

Desan’s mind reeled; adept as he was at time-relativity calculations, accustomed as he was to stellar immensities, his mind tottered and he fought to regain the corridor in which they walked, he and the doctor. He widened his stride yet again, overtaking Gothon at the next door.

“Doctor.” He put out his hand, preventing her, and then feared his own question, his own skirting of heresy and tempting of hers. “Are you beyond doubt? You can’t be beyond doubt. They could have simply abandoned this world in its calamity.”

Again the impact of those gentle eyes, devastating. “Tell me, tell me, Lord Desan. In all your travels, in all the several near stars you’ve visited in a century of effort, have you found traces?”

“No. But they could have gone—”

“—leaving no traces, except on their moon?”

“There may be others. The team in search on the fourth planet—”

“Finds nothing.”

“You yourself say that you have to stand in that landscape, you have to think with their mind—Maybe Dr. Ashodt hasn’t come to the right hill, the right plain—”

“If there are artifacts there they only are a few. I’ll tell you why I know so. Come, come with me.” Gothon waved a hand and the door gaped on yet another laboratory.

Desan walked. He would rather have walked out to the deadly surface than through this simple door, to the answer Gothon promised him . . . but habit impelled him; habit, duty—necessity. He had no other purpose for his life but this. He had been left none, lord-navigator, fifth incarnation of Desan Das. They had launched his original with none, his second incarnation had had less, and time and successive incarnations had stripped everything else away. So he went, into a place at once too mundane and too strange to be quite sane—mundane because it was sterile as any lab, a well-lit place of littered tables and a few researchers; and strange because hundreds and hundreds of skulls and bones were piled on shelves in heaps on one wall, silent witnesses. An articulated skeleton hung in its frame; the skeleton of a small animal scampered in macabre rigidity on a tabletop.

He stopped. He stared about him, lost for the moment in the stare of all those eyeless sockets of weathered bone.

“Let me present my colleagues,” Gothon was saying; Desan focused on the words late, and blinked helplessly as Gothon rattled off names. Bothogi the zoologist was one, younger than most, seventeenth incarnation, burning himself out in profligate use of his years: so with all the incarnations of Bothogi Nan. The rest of the names slid past his ears ungathered—true strangers, the truly-born, sons and daughters of the voyage. He was lost in their stares like the stares of the skulls, eyes behind which shadows and dust were truth, gazes full of secrets and heresies.

They knew him and he did not know them, not even Lord Bothogi. He felt his solitude, the helplessness of his convictions all lost in the dust and the silences.

“Kagodte,” said Gothon, to a white-eared, hunched individual. “Kagodte—the Lord Desan has come to see your model.”

“Ah.” The aged eyes flicked, nervously.

“Show him, pray, Dr. Kagodte.”

The hunched man walked over to the table, spread his hands. A hole flared and Desan blinked, having expected some dreadful image, some confrontation with a reconstruction. Instead, columns of words rippled in the air, green and blue. Numbers ticked and multiplied. In his startlement he lost the beginning and failed to follow them. “I don’t see—”

“We speak statistics here,” Gothon said. “We speak data; we couch our heresies in mathematical formulae.”

Desan turned and stared at Gothon in fright. “Heresies I have nothing to do with, doctor. I deal with facts. I come here to find facts.”

“Sit down,” the gentle doctor said. “Sit down, Lord Desan. There, move the bones over, do; the owners won’t mind, there, that’s right.”

Desan collapsed onto a stool facing a white worktable. Looked up reflexively, eye drawn by a wall-mounted stone that bore the blurred image of a face, eroded, time-dulled—

The juxtaposition of image and bones overwhelmed him. The two whole bodies portrayed on the plaque. The sculpture. The rows of fleshless skulls.

Dead. World hammered by meteors, life struggling in its most rudimentary forms. Dead.

“Ah,” Gothon said. Desan looked around and saw Gothon looking up at the wall in his turn. “Yes. That. We find very few sculptures. A few—a precious few. Occasionally the fall of stone will protect a surface. Confirmation. Indeed. But the skulls tell us as much. With our measurements and our holos we can flesh them. We can make them—even more vivid. Do you want to see?”

Desan’s mouth worked. “No.” A small word. A coward word. “Later. So this was one place—You still don’t convince me of your thesis, doctor, I’m sorry.”

“The place. The world of origin. A many-layered world. The last layers are rich with artifacts of one period, one global culture. Then silence. Species extinguished. Stratum upon stratum of desolation. Millions of years of geological record—”

Gothon came round the end of the table and sat down in the opposing chair, elbows on the table, a scatter of bone between them. Gothon’s green eyes shone watery in the brilliant light, her mouth was wrinkled about the jowls and trembled in minute cracks, like aged clay. “The statistics, Lord Desan, the dry statistics tell us. They tell us centers of production of artifacts, such as we have; they tell us compositions, processes the Ancients knew—and there was no progress into advanced materials. None of the materials we take for granted, metals that would have lasted—”

“And perhaps they went to some new process, materials that degraded completely. Perhaps their information storage was on increasingly perishable materials. Perhaps they developed these materials in space.”

“Technology has steps. The dry numbers, the dusty dry numbers, the incidences and concentration of items, the numbers and the pots—always the pots, Lord Desan; and the imperishable stones; and the very fact of the meteors—the undeniable fact of the meteor strikes. Could we not avert such a calamity for our own world? Could we not have done it—oh, a half a century before we left?”

“I’m sure you remember, Dr. Gothon. I’m sure you have the advantage of me. But—”

“You see the evidence. You want to cling to your hopes. But there is only one question—no, two. Is this the species that launched the probe?—Yes. Or evolution and coincidence have cooperated mightily. Is this the only world they inhabited? Beyond all doubt. If there are artifacts on the fourth planet they are scoured by its storms, busied, lost.”

“But they may be there.”

“There is no abundance of them. There is no progression, Lord Desan. That is the key thing. There is nothing beyond these substances, these materials. This was not a star-faring civilization. They launched their slow, unmanned probes, with their cameras, their robot eyes—not for us. We always knew that. We were the recipients of flotsam. Mere wreckage on the beach.”

“It was purposeful!” Desan hissed, trembling, surrounded by them all, a lone credent among the quiet heresy in this room. “Dr. Gothon, your unique position—is a position of trust, of profound trust; I beg you to consider the effect you have—”

“Do you threaten me, Lord Desan? Are you here for that, to silence me?”

Desan looked desperately about him, at the sudden hush in the room. The minute tickings of probes and picks had stopped. Eyes stared. “Please.” He looked back. “I came here to gather data; I expected a simple meeting, a few staff meetings—to consider things at leisure—”

“I have distressed you. You wonder how it would be if the lords-magistrate fell at odds with me. I am aware of myself as an institution, Lord Desan. I remember Desan Das. I remember launch, the original five ships. I have waked to all but one of your incarnations. Not to mention the numerous incarnations of the lords-magistrate.”

“You cannot discount them! Even you—Let me plead with you, Dr. Gothon, be patient with us.”

“You do not need to teach me patience, Desan-Five.”

He shivered convulsively. Even when Gothon smiled that gentle, disarming smile. “You have to give me facts, doctor, not mystical communing with the landscape. The lords-magistrate accept that this is the world of origin. I assure you they never would have devoted so much time to creating a base here if that were not the case.”

“Come, lord, those power systems on the probe, so long dead—What was it truly for, but to probe something very close at hand? Even orthodoxy admits that. And what is close at hand but their own solar system? Come, I’ve seen the original artifact and the original tablet. Touched it with my hands. This was a primitive venture, designed to cross their own solar system—which they had not the capability to do.”

Desan blinked. “But the purpose—”

“Ah. The purpose.”

“You say that you stand in a landscape and you think in their mind. Well, doctor, use this skill you claim. What did the Ancients intend? Why did they send it out with a message?”

The old eyes flickered, deep and calm and pained. “An oracular message, Lord Desan. A message into the dark of their own future, unaimed, unfocused. Without answer. Without hope of answer. We know its voyage time. Eight million years. They spoke to the universe at large. This probe went out, and they fell silent shortly afterward—the depth of this dry lake of dust, Lord Desan, is eight and a quarter million years.”

“I will not believe that.”

“Eight and a quarter million years ago, Lord Desan. Calamity fell on them, calamity global and complete within a century, perhaps within a decade of the launch of that probe. Perhaps calamity fell from the skies; but demonstrably it was atomics and their own doing. They were at that precarious stage. And the destruction in the great centers is catastrophic and of one level. Destruction centered in places of heavy population. Trace elements. That is what those statistics say. Atomics, Lord Desan.”

“I cannot accept this!”

“Tell me, space-farer—do you understand the workings of weather? What those meteor strikes could do, the dust raised by atomics could do with equal efficiency. Never mind the radiation that alone would have killed millions—never mind the destruction of centers of government: We speak of global calamity, the dimming of the sun in dust, the living oceans and lakes choking in dying photosynthetes in a sunless winter, killing the food chain from the bottom up—”

“You have no proof!”

“The universality, the ruin of the population-centers. Arguably, they had the capacity to prevent meteor-impact. That may be a matter of debate. But beyond a doubt in my own mind, simultaneous destruction of the population centers indicates atomics. The statistics, the pots and the dry numbers, Lord Desan, doom us to that answer. The question is answered. There were no descendants, there was no escape from the world. They destroyed themselves before that meteor hit them.”

Desan rested his mouth against his joined hands. Stared helplessly at the doctor. “A lie. Is that what you’re saying? We pursued a lie?”

“Is it their fault that we needed them so much?”

Desan pushed himself to his feet and stood there by mortal effort. Gothon sat staring up at him with those terrible dark eyes.

“What will you do, lord-navigator? Silence me? The old woman’s grown difficult at last: wake my clone after, tell it—what the lords-magistrate select for it to be told?” Gothon waved a hand about the room, indicating the staff, the dozen sets of living eyes among the dead. “Bothogi too, those of us who have clones—But what of the rest of the staff? How much will it take to silence all of us?”

Desan stared about him, trembling. “Dr. Gothon—” He leaned his hands on the table to look at Gothon. “You mistake me. You utterly mistake me—The lords-magistrate may have the station, but I have the ships, I, I and my staff. I propose no such thing. I’ve come home—” The unaccustomed word caught in his throat; he considered it, weighed it, accepted it, at least in the emotional sense. “—home, Dr. Gothon, after a hundred years of search, to discover this argument and this dissension.”

“Charges of heresy—”

“They dare not make them against you.” A bitter laugh welled up. “Against you they have no argument and you well know it, Dr. Gothon.”

“Against their violence, lord-navigator, I have no defense.”

“But she has,” said Dr. Bothogi.

Desan turned, flicked a glance from the hardness in Bothogi’s green eyes to the even harder substance of the stone in Bothogi’s hand. He flung himself about again, hands on the table, abandoning the defense of his back. “Dr. Gothon! I appeal to you! I am your friend!”

“For myself,” said Dr. Gothon, “I would make no defense at all. But, as you say—they have no argument against me. So it must be a general catastrophe—the lords-magistrate have to silence everyone, don’t they? Nothing can be left on this base. Perhaps they’ve quietly dislodged an asteroid or two and put them on course. In the guise of mining, perhaps they will silence this poor old world forever—myself and the rest of the relics. Lost relics and the distant dead are always safer to venerate, aren’t they?”

“That’s absurd!”

“Or perhaps they’ve become more hasty now that your ships are here and their judgment is in question. They have atomics within their capability, lord-navigator. They can disable your shuttle with beam-fire. They can simply welcome you to the list of casualties—a charge of heresy. A thing taken out of context, who knows? After all—all lords are immediately duplicatable, the captains accustomed to obey the lords-magistrate—what few of them are awake—am I not right? If an institution like myself can be threatened—where is the fifth lord-navigator in their plans? And of a sudden those plans will be moving in haste.”

Desan blinked. “Dr. Gothon—I assure you—”

“If you are my friend, lord-navigator, I hope for your survival. The robots are theirs, do you understand? Their powerpacks are sufficient for transmission of information to the base AIs; and from the communications center it goes to satellites; and from satellites to the station and the lords-magistrate. This room is safe from their monitoring. We have seen to that. They cannot hear you.”

“I cannot believe these charges, I cannot accept it—”

“Is murder so new?”

“Then come with me! Come with me to the shuttle, we’ll confront them—”

“The transportation to the port is theirs. It would not permit. The transport AI would resist. The planes have AI components. And we might never reach the airfield.”

“My luggage. Dr. Gothon, my luggage—my com unit!” And Desan’s heart sank, remembering the service-robots. “They have it.”

Gothon smiled, a small, amused smile. “O space-farer. So many scientists clustered here, and could we not improvise so simple a thing? We have a receiver-transmitter. Here. In this room. We broke one. We broke another. They’re on the registry as broken. What’s another bit of rubbish—on this poor planet? We meant to contact the ships, to call you, lord-navigator, when you came back. But you saved us the trouble. You came down to us like a thunderbolt. Like the birds you never saw, my spaceborn lord, swooping down on prey. The conferences, the haste you must have inspired up there on the station—if the lords-magistrate planned what I most suspect! I congratulate you. But knowing we have a transmitter—with your shuttle sitting on this world vulnerable as this building—what will you do, lord-navigator, since they control the satellite relay?”

Desan sank down on his chair. Stared at Gothon. “You never meant to kill me. All this—you schemed to enlist me.”

“I entertained that hope, yes. I knew your predecessors. I also know your personal reputation—a man who burns his years one after the other as if there were no end of them. Unlike his predecessors. What are you, lord-navigator? Zealot? A man with an obsession? Where do you stand in this?”

“To what—” His voice came hoarse and strange. “To what are you trying to convert me, Dr. Gothon?”

“To our rescue from the lords-magistrate. To the rescue of truth.”

“Truth!” Desan waved a desperate gesture. “I don’t believe you, I cannot believe you, and you tell me about plots as fantastical as your research and try to involve me in your politics. I’m trying to find the trail the Ancients took—one clue, one artifact to direct us—”

“A new tablet?”

“You make light of me. Anything. Any indication where they went. And they did go, doctor. You will not convince me with your statistics. The unforeseen and the unpredicted aren’t in your statistics.”

“So you’ll go on looking—for what you’ll never find. You’ll serve the lords-magistrate. They’ll surely cooperate with you. They’ll approve your search and leave this world . . . after the great catastrophe. After the catastrophe that obliterates us and all the records. An asteroid. Who but the robots chart their course? Who knows how close it is at this moment?”

“People would know a murder! They could never hide it!”

“I tell you, Lord Desan, you stand in a place and you look around you and you say—what would be natural to this place? In this cratered, devastated world, in this chaotic, debris-ridden solar system—could not an input error by an asteroid miner be more credible an accident than atomics? I tell you when your shuttle descended, we thought you might be acting for the lords-magistrate. That you might have a weapon in your baggage that their robots would deliberately fail to detect. But I believe you, lord-navigator. You’re as trapped as we. With only the transmitter and a satellite relay system they control. What will you do? Persuade the lords-magistrate that you support them? Persuade them to support you on this further voyage—in return for your backing them? Perhaps they’ll listen to you and let you leave.”

“But they will,” Desan said. He drew in a deep breath and looked from Gothon to the others and back again. “My shuttle is my own. My robotics, Dr. Gothon. From my ship and linked to it. And what I need is that transmitter. Appeal to me for protection if you think it so urgent. Trust me. Or trust nothing and we will all wait here and see what truth is.”

Gothon reached into a pocket, held up an odd metal object. Smiled. Her eyes crinkled round the edges. “An old-fashioned thing, lord-navigator. We say key nowadays and mean something quite different, but I’m a relic myself, remember. Baffles hell out of the robots. Bothogi. Link up that antenna and unlock the closet and let’s see what the lord-navigator and his shuttle can do.”

“DID IT HEAR you?” Bothogi asked, a boy’s honest worry on his unlined face. He still had the rock, as if he had forgotten it. Or feared robots. Or intended to use it if he detected treachery. “Is it moving?”

“I assure you it’s moving,” Desan said, and shut the transmitter down. He drew a great breath, shut his eyes and saw the shuttle lift, a silver wedge spreading wings for home. Deadly if attacked. They will not attack it, they must not attack it, they will query us when they know the shuttle is launched and we will discover yet that this is all a ridiculous error of understanding. And looking at nowhere: “Relays have gone; nothing stops it and its defenses are considerable. The lords-navigator have not been fools, citizens: We probe worlds with our shuttles, and we plan to get them back.” He turned and faced Gothon and the other staff. “The message is out. And because I am a prudent man—are there suits enough for your staff? I advise we get to them. In the case of an accident.”

“The alarm,” said Gothon at once. “Neoth, sound the alarm.” And as a senior staffer moved: “The dome pressure alert,” Gothon said. “That will confound the robots. All personnel to pressure suits; all robots to seek damage. I agree about the suits. Get them.”

The alarm went, a staccato shriek from overhead. Desan glanced instinctively at an uncommunicative white ceiling—

—darkness, darkness above, where the shuttle reached the thin blue edge of space. The station now knew that things had gone greatly amiss. It should inquire, there should be inquiry immediate to the planet—

Staffers had unlocked a second closet. They pulled out suits, not the expected one or two for emergency exit from this pressure-sealable room; but a tightly jammed lot of them. The lab seemed a mine of defenses, a stealthily equipped stronghold that smelled of conspiracy all over the base, throughout the staff—everyone in on it—

He blinked at the offering of a suit, ears assailed by the siren. He looked into the eyes of Bothogi who had handed it to him. There would be no call, no inquiry from the lords-magistrate. He began to know that, in the earnest, clear-eyed way these people behaved—not lunatics, not schemers. Truth. They had told their truth as they believed it, as the whole base believed it. And the lords-magistrate named it heresy.

His heart beat steadily again. Things made sense again. His hands found familiar motions, putting on the suit, making the closures.

“There’s that AI in the controller’s office,” said a senior staffer. “I have a key.”

“What will they do?” a younger staffer asked, panic-edged. “Will the station’s weapons reach here?”

“It’s quite distant for sudden actions,” said Desan. “Too far, for beams and missiles are slow.” His heartbeat steadied further. The suit was about him; familiar feeling; hostile worlds and weapons: more familiar ground. He smiled, not a pleasant kind of smile, a parting of lips on strong, long teeth. “And one more thing, young citizen, the ships they have are transports. Miners. Mine are hunters. I regret to say we’ve carried weapons for the last two hundred thousand years, and my crews know their business. If the lords-magistrate attack that shuttle it will be their mistake. Help Dr. Gothon.”

“I’ve got it, quite, young lord.” Gothon made the collar closure. “I’ve been handling these things longer than—”

Explosion thumped somewhere away. Gothon looked up. All motion stopped. And the air-rush died in the ducts.

“The oxygen system—” Bothogi exclaimed. “O damn them—!”

“We have,” said Desan coldly. He made no haste. Each final fitting of the suit he made with care. Suit-drill; example to the young: The lord-navigator, youngsters, demonstrates his skill. Pay attention. “And we’ve just had our answer from the lords-magistrate. We need to get to that AI and shut it down. Let’s have no panic here. Assume that my shuttle has cleared atmosphere—”

—well above the gray clouds, the horror of the surface. Silver needle aimed at the heart of the lords-magistrate.

Alert, alert, it would shriek, alert, alert, alert—With its transmission relying on no satellites, with its message shoved out in one high-powered bow-wave. Crew on the world is in danger. And, code that no lord-navigator had ever hoped to transmit, a series of numbers in syntaxical link: Treachery; the lords-magistrate are traitors; aid and rescue—Alert, alert, alert—

—anguished scream from a world of dust; a place of skulls; the grave of the search.

Treachery, alert, alert, alert!

Desan was not a violent man; he had never thought of himself as violent. He was a searcher, a man with a quest.

He knew nothing of certainty. He believed a woman a quarter of a million years old, because—because Gothon was Gothon. He cried traitor and let loose havoc all the while knowing that here might be the traitor, this gentle-eyed woman, this collector of skulls.

O Gothon, he would ask if he dared, which of you is false? To force the lords-magistrate to strike with violence enough to damn them—Is that what you wish? Against a quarter million years of unabated life—what are my five incarnations: mere genetic congruency, without memory. I am helpless to know your perspectives.

Have you planned this a thousand years, ten thousand?

Do you stand in this place and think in the mind of creatures dead longer even than you have lived? Do you hold their skulls and think their thoughts?

Was it purpose eight million years ago?

Was it, is it—horror upon horror—a mistake on both sides?

“Lord Desan,” said Bothogi, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Lord Desan, we have a master key. We have weapons. We’re waiting, Lord Desan.”

Above them the holocaust.

IT WAS ONLY a service robot. It had never known its termination. Not like the base AI, in the director’s office, which had fought them with locked doors and release of atmosphere, to the misfortune of the director—

“Tragedy, tragedy,” said Bothogi, standing by the small dented corpse, there on the ocher sand before the buildings. Smoke rolled up from a sabotaged lifesupport plant to the right of the domes—the world’s air had rolled outward and inward and mingled with the breaching of the central dome—the AI transport’s initial act of sabotage, ramming the plastic walls. “Microorganisms let loose on this world—the fools, the arrogant fools!”

It was not the microorganisms Desan feared. It was the AI eight-wheeled transport, maneuvering itself for another attack on the cold-sleep facilities. Prudent to have set themselves inside a locked room with the rest of the scientists and hope for rescue from offworld; but the AI would batter itself against the plastic walls, and living targets kept it distracted from the sleeping, helpless clones—Gothon’s juniormost; Bothogi’s; those of a dozen senior staffers.

And keeping it distracted became more and more difficult.

Hour upon hour they had evaded its rushes, clumsy attacks and retreats in their encumbering suits. They had done it damage where they could while staff struggled to come up with something that might slow it . . . it limped along now with a great lot of metal wire wrapped around its rearmost right wheel.

“Damn!” cried a young biologist as it maneuvered for her position. It was the agile young who played this game; and one aging lord-navigator who was the only fighter in the lot.

Dodge, dodge and dodge. “It’s going to catch you against the oxy-plant, youngster! This way!” Desan’s heart thudded as the young woman thumped along in the cumbersome suit in a losing race with the transport. “Oh, damn, it’s got it figured! Bothogi!”

Desan grasped his probe-spear and jogged on—“Divert it!” he yelled. Diverting it was all they could hope for.

It turned their way, a whine of the motor, a serpentine flex of its metal body and a flurry of sand from its eight-wheeled drive. “Run, lord!” Bothogi gasped beside him; and it was still turning—it aimed for them now, and at another tangent a white-suited figure hurled a rock, to distract it yet again.

It kept coming at them. AI. An eight-wheeled, flex-bodied intelligence that had suddenly decided its behavior was not working and altered the program, refusing distraction. A pressure-windowed juggernaut tracking every turn they made.

Closer and closer. “Sensors!” Desan cried, turning on the slick dust—his footing failed him and he caught himself, gripped the probe and aimed it straight at the sensor array clustered beneath the front window.

Thum-p! The dusty sky went blue and he was on his back, skidding in the sand with the great ballon tires churning sand on either side of him.

The suit, he thought with a spaceman’s horror of the abrading, while it dawned on him at the same time he was being dragged beneath the AI, and that every joint and nerve center was throbbing with the high voltage shock of the probe.

Things became very peaceful then, a cessation of commotion. He lay dazed, staring up at a rusty blue sky, and seeing it laced with a silver thread.

They’re coming, he thought, and thought of his eldest clone, sleeping at a well-educated twenty years of age. Handsome lad. He talked to the boy from time to time.

Poor lad, the lordship is yours. Your predecessor was a fool—

A shadow passed above his face. It was another suited face peering down into his. A weight rested on his chest.

“Get off,” he said.

“He’s alive!” Bothogi’s voice cried. “Dr. Gothon, he’s still alive!”

THE WORLD SHOWED no more scars than it had at the beginning—red and ocher where clouds failed. The algae continued its struggle in sea and tidal pools and lakes and rivers—with whatever microscopic addenda the breached dome had let loose in the world. The insects and the worms continued their blind ascent to space, dominant life on this poor, cratered globe. The research station was in function again, repairs complete.

Desan gazed on the world from his ship: It hung as a sphere in the holotank by his command station. A wave of his hand might show him the darkness of space; the floodlit shapes of ten hunting ships, lately returned from the deep and about to seek it again in continuation of the Mission, sleek fish rising and sinking again in a figurative black sea. A good many suns had shone on their hulls, but this one sun had seen them more often than any since their launching.

Home.

The space station was returning to function. Corpses were consigned to the sun the Mission had sought for so long. And power over the Mission rested solely at present in the hands of the lord-navigator, in the unprecedented circumstance of the demise of all five lords-magistrate simultaneously. Their clones were not yet activated to begin their years of majority—“Later will be time to wake the new lords-magistrate,” Desan decreed, “at some further world of the search. Let them hear this event as history.”

When I can manage them personally, he thought. He looked aside at twenty-year-old Desan Six and the youth looked gravely back with the face Desan had seen in the mirror thirty-two waking years ago.

“Lord-navigator?”

“You’ll wake your brother after we’re away, Six. Directly after. I’ll be staying awake much of this trip.”

“Awake, sir?”

“Quite. There are things I want you to think about. I’ll be talking to you and Seven both.”

“About the lords-magistrate, sir?”

Desan lifted brows at this presumption. “You and I are already quite well attuned, Six. You’ll succeed young. Are you sorry you missed this time?”

“No, lord-navigator! I assure you not!”

“Good brain. I ought to know. Go to your post, Six. Be grateful you don’t have to cope with a new lordship and five new lords-magistrate and a recent schism.”

Desan leaned back in his chair as the youth crossed the bridge and settled at a crew-post, beside the captain. The lord-navigator was more than a figurehead to rule the seventy ships of the Mission, with their captains and their crews. Let the boy try his skill on this plotting. Desan intended to check it. He leaned aside with a wince—the electric shock that had blown him flat between the AI’s tires had saved him from worse than a broken arm and leg; and the medical staff had seen to that: The arm and the leg were all but healed, with only a light wrap to protect them. The ribs were tightly wrapped too; and they cost him more pain than all the rest.

A scan had indeed located three errant asteroids, three courses the station’s computers had not accurately recorded as inbound for the planet—until personnel from the ships began to run their own observation. Those were redirected.

Casualties. Destruction. Fighting within the Mission. The guilt of the lords-magistrate was profound and beyond dispute.

“Lord-navigator,” the communications officer said. “Dr. Gothon returning your call.”

Goodbye, he had told Gothon. I don’t accept your judgment, but I shall devote my energy to pursuit of mine, and let any who want to join you—reside on the station. There are some volunteers; I don’t profess to understand them. But you may trust them. You may trust the lords-magistrate to have learned a lesson. I will teach it. No member of this mission will be restrained in any opinion while my influence lasts. And I shall see to that. Sleep again and we may see each other once more in our lives.

“I’ll receive it,” Desan said, pleased and anxious at once that Gothon deigned reply; he activated the com-control. Ship-electronics touched his ear, implanted for comfort. He heard the usual blip and chatter of com’s mechanical protocols, then Gothon’s quiet voice. “Lord-navigator.”

“I’m hearing you, doctor.”

“Thank you for your sentiment. I wish you well, too. I wish you very well.”

The tablet was mounted before him, above the console. Millions of years ago a tiny probe had set out from this world, bearing the original. Two aliens standing naked, one with hand uplifted. A series of diagrams which, partially obliterated, had still served to guide the Mission across the centuries. A probe bearing a greeting. Ages-dead cameras and simple instruments.

Greetings, stranger. We come from this place, this star system.

See, the hand, the appendage of a builder—This we will have in common.

The diagrams: We speak knowledge; we have no fear of you, strangers who read this, whoever you be.

Wise fools.

There had been a time, long ago, when fools had set out to seek them . . . In a vast desert of stars. Fools who had desperately needed proof, once upon a quarter million years ago, that they were not alone. One dust-covered alien artifact they found, so long ago, on a lonely drifting course.

Hello, it said.

The makers, the peaceful Ancients, became a legend. They became purpose, inspiration.

The overriding, obsessive Why that saved a species, pulled it back from war, gave it the stars.

“I’m very serious—I do hope you rest, doctor—save a few years for the unborn.”

“My eldest’s awake. I’ve lost my illusions of immortality, lord-navigator. She hopes to meet you.”

“You might still abandon this world and come with us, doctor.”

“To search for a myth?”

“Not a myth. We’re bound to disagree. Doctor, doctor, what good can your presence there do? What if you’re right? It’s a dead end. What if I’m wrong? I’ll never stop looking. I’ll never know.”

“But we know their descendants, lord-navigator. We. We are. We’ve spread their legend from star to star—they’ve become a fable. The Ancients. The Pathfinders. A hundred civilizations have taken up that myth. A hundred civilizations have lived out their years in that belief and begotten others to tell their story. What if you should find them? Would you know them—or where evolution had taken them? Perhaps we’ve already met them, somewhere along the worlds we’ve visited, and we failed to know them.”

It was irony. Gentle humor. “Perhaps, then,” Desan said in turn, “we’ll find the track leads home again. Perhaps we are their children—eight and a quarter million years removed.”

“O ye makers of myths. Do your work, space-farer. Tangle the skein with legends. Teach fables to the races you meet. Brighten the universe with them. I put my faith in you. Don’t you know—this world is all I came to find, but you—child of the voyage, you have to have more. For you the voyage is the Mission. Goodbye to you. Fare well. Nothing is complete calamity. The equation here is different, by a multitude of microorganisms let free—Bothogi has stopped grieving and begun to have quite different thoughts on the matter. His algae-pools may turn out a different breed this time—the shift of a protein here and there in the genetic chain—who knows what it will breed? Different software this time, perhaps. Good voyage to you, lord-navigator. Look for your Ancients under other suns. We’re waiting for their offspring here, under this one.”

JOHN CROWLEY Snow

John Crowley’s writing has earned comparisons to the epic fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien and the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez. He is generally regarded as a writer of mythic fantasy who has freely mixed elements of science fiction into his allusive and richly symbolic fiction. His first three novels all develop fantasy plots in nominally science fictional settings. The Deep tells of a medieval power struggle convulsing two feudal households on a planet geographically distinct but historically similar to Earth. Beasts is set in a balkanized near-future America where proponents of totalitarian centralized government struggle to stamp out a war of independence spearheaded by genetically manipulated human/animal hybrids. Engine Summer unfolds a primitive rite-of-passage tale against the backdrop of a postapocalyptic America descended into a new dark age. Crowley’s World-Fantasy Award–winning Little, Big marked his departure from science fiction–accented explorations of the human social structures for modern treatments of traditional high fantasy. Redolent with echoes of classic romantic literature, the tale chronicles an eccentric multigeneration family alive in a reality-skewed modern world who enjoy a rapport with the world of faerie that is eventually threatened by the rise of a president with antipathy to the faerie kind. Considered a landmark of modern fantasy, this inventive novel sets the pattern for Crowley’s subsequent work with its playful depiction of ordinary lives touched by the strange and magical. Aegypt, Love and Sleep, and Daemonomania are the first three in a projected quartet of novels intended to interlock as a single all-encompassing philosophical romance that blends historical fact, imaginary world fantasy, occult mystery, Renaissance metaphysics, alternate history, quest legend, and classic mythology. Crowley’s collection Novelty features four visionary novellas concerned with artistic creation. His fiction has also been collected in Antiquities.

I DON’T THINK Georgie would ever have got one for herself: She was at once unsentimental and a little in awe of death. No, it was her first husband—an immensely rich and (from Georgie’s description) a strangely weepy guy, who had got it for her. Or for himself, actually, of course. He was to be the beneficiary. Only he died himself shortly after it was installed. If installed is the right word. After he died, Georgie got rid of most of what she’d inherited from him, liquidated it. It was cash that she had liked best about that marriage anyway; but the Wasp couldn’t really be got rid of. Georgie ignored it.

In fact the thing really was about the size of a wasp of the largest kind, and it had the same lazy and mindless fight. And of course it really was a bug, not of the insect kind but of the surveillance kind. And so its name fit all around: one of those bits of accidental poetry the world generates without thinking. O Death, where is thy sting?

Georgie ignored it, but it was hard to avoid; you had to be a little careful around it; it followed Georgie at a variable distance, depending on her motions and the numbers of other people around her, the level of light, and the tone of her voice. And there was always the danger you might shut it in a door or knock it down with a tennis racket.

It cost a fortune (if you count the access and the perpetual care contract, all prepaid), and though it wasn’t really fragile, it made you nervous.

It wasn’t recording all the time. There had to be a certain amount of light, though not much. Darkness shut it off. And then sometimes it would get lost. Once when we hadn’t seen it hovering around for a time, I opened a closet door, and it flew out, unchanged. It went off looking for her, humming softly. It must have been shut in there for days.

Eventually it ran out, or down. A lot could go wrong, I suppose, with circuits that small, controlling that many functions. It ended up spending a lot of time bumping gently against the bedroom ceiling, over and over, like a winter fly. Then one day the maids swept it out from under the bureau, a husk. By that time it had transmitted at least eight thousand hours (eight thousand was the minimum guarantee) of Georgie: of her days and hours, her comings in and her goings out, her speech and motion, her living self—all on file, taking up next to no room, at The Park. And then, when the time came, you could go there, to The Park, say on a Sunday afternoon; and in quiet landscaped surroundings (as The Park described it) you would find her personal resting chamber, and there, in privacy, through the miracle of modern information storage and retrieval systems, you could access her, her alive, her as she was in every way, never changing or growing any older, fresher (as The Park’s brochure said) than in memory ever green.

I MARRIED GEORGIE for her money, the same reason she married her first, the one who took out The Park’s contract for her. She married me, I think, for my looks; she always had a taste for looks in men. I wanted to write. I made a calculation that more women than men make, and decided that to be supported and paid for by a rich wife would give me freedom to do so, to “develop.” The calculation worked out no better for me than it does for most women who make it. I carried a typewriter and a case of miscellaneous paper from Ibiza to Gstaad to Bial to London, and typed on beaches, and learned to ski. Georgie liked me in ski clothes.

Now that those looks are all but gone, I can look back on myself as a young hunk and see that I was in a way a rarity, a type that you run into often among women, far less among men, the beauty unaware of his beauty, aware that he affects women profoundly and more or less instantly but doesn’t know why; thinks he is being listened to and understood, that his soul is being seen, when all that’s being seen is long-lashed eyes and a strong, square, tanned wrist turning in a lovely gesture, stubbing out a cigarette. Confusing. By the time I figured out why I had for so long been indulged and cared for and listened to, why I was interesting, I wasn’t as interesting as I had been. At about the same time I realized I wasn’t a writer at all. Georgie’s investment stopped looking as good to her, and my calculation had ceased to add up; only by that time I had come, pretty unexpectedly, to love Georgie a lot, and she just as unexpectedly had come to love and need me too, as much as she needed anybody. We never really parted, even though when she died I hadn’t seen her for years. Phone calls, at dawn or four A.M. because she never, for all her travel, really grasped that the world turns and cocktail hour travels around with it. She was a crazy, wasteful, happy woman, without a trace of malice or permanence or ambition in her—easily pleased and easily bored and strangely serene despite the hectic pace she kept up. She cherished things and lost them and forgot them: things, days, people. She had fun, though, and I had fun with her; that was her talent and her destiny, not always an easy one. Once, hung over in a New York hotel, watching a sudden snowfall out the immense window, she said to me, “Charlie, I’m going to die of fun.”

And she did. Snow-foiling in Austria, she was among the first to get one of those snow leopards, silent beasts as fast as speedboats. Alfredo called me in California to tell me, but with the distance and his accent and his eagerness to tell me he wasn’t to blame, I never grasped the details. I was still her husband, her closest relative, heir to the little she still had, and beneficiary, too, of The Park’s access concept. Fortunately, The Park’s services included collecting her from the morgue in Gstaad and installing her in her chamber at The Park’s California unit. Beyond signing papers and taking delivery when Georgie arrived by freight airship at Van Nuys, there was nothing for me to do. The Park’s representative was solicitous and made sure I understood how to go about accessing Georgie, but I wasn’t listening. I am only a child of my time, I suppose. Everything about death, the fact of it, the fate of the remains, and the situation of the living faced with it, seems grotesque to me, embarrassing, useless: And everything done about it only makes it more grotesque, more useless: Someone I loved is dead; let me therefore dress in clown’s clothes, talk backwards, and buy expensive machinery to make up for it. I went back to L.A.

A year or more later, the contents of some safe-deposit boxes of Georgie’s arrived from the lawyer’s: some bonds and such stuff and a small steel case, velvet lined, that contained a key, a key deeply notched on both sides and headed with smooth plastic, like the key to an expensive car.

WHY DID I go to The Park that first time? Mostly because I had forgotten about it: Getting that key in the mail was like coming across a pile of old snapshots you hadn’t cared to look at when they were new but which after they have aged come to contain the past, as they did not contain the present. I was curious.

I understood very well that The Park and its access concept were very probably only another cruel joke on the rich, preserving the illusion that they can buy what can’t be bought, like the cryonics fad of thirty years ago. Once in Ibiza, Georgie and I met a German couple who also had a contract with The Park; their Wasp hovered over them like a Paraclete and made them self-conscious in the extreme—they seemed to be constantly rehearsing the eternal show being stored up for their descendants. Their deaths had taken over their lives, as though they were pharaohs. Did they, Georgie wondered, exclude the Wasp from their bedroom? Or did its presence there stir them to greater efforts, proofs of undying love and admirable vigor for the unborn to see?

No, death wasn’t to be cheated that way, any more than by pyramids, by masses said in perpetuity. It wasn’t Georgie saved from death that I would find. But there were eight thousand hours of her life with me, genuine hours, stored there more carefully than they could be in my porous memory; Georgie hadn’t excluded the Wasp from her bedroom, our bedroom, and she who had never performed for anybody could not have conceived of performing for it. And there would be me, too, undoubtedly, caught unintentionally by the Wasp’s attention: Out of those thousands of hours there would be hundreds of myself, and myself had just then begun to be problematic to me, something that had to be figured out, something about which evidence had to be gathered and weighed. I was thirty-eight years old.

That summer, then, I borrowed a Highway Access Permit (the old HAPpy cards of those days) from a county lawyer I knew and drove the coast highway up to where The Park was, at the end of a pretty beach road, all alone above the sea. It looked from the outside like the best, most peaceful kind of Italian country cemetery, a low stucco wall topped with urns, amid cypresses, an arched gate in the center. A small brass plaque on the gate: PLEASE USE YOUR KEY. The gate opened, not to a square of shaded tombstones but onto a ramped corridor going down: The cemetery wall was an illusion, the works were underground. Silence, or nameless Muzak-like silence: solitude—whether the necessary technicians were discreetly hidden or none were needed. Certainly the access concept turned out to be simplicity itself, in operation anyway. Even I, who am an idiot about information technology, could tell that. The Wasp was genuine state-of-the-art stuff, but what we mourners got was as ordinary as home movies, as old letters tied up in ribbon.

A display screen near the entrance told me down which corridor to find Georgie, and my key let me into a small screening room where there was a moderate-size TV monitor, two comfortable chairs, and dark walls of chocolate-brown carpeting. The sweet-sad Muzak. Georgie herself was evidently somewhere in the vicinity, in the wall or under the floor, they weren’t specific about the charnel-house aspect of the place. In the control panel before the TV were a keyhole for my key and two bars: ACCESS and RESET.

I sat, feeling foolish and a little afraid, too, made more uncomfortable by being so deliberately soothed by neutral furnishings and sober tools. I imagined, around me, down other corridors, in other chambers, others communed with their dead as I was about to do, that the dead were murmuring to them beneath the stream of Muzak; that they wept to see and hear, as I might, but I could hear nothing. I turned my key in its slot, and the screen lit up. The dim lights dimmed further, and the Muzak ceased. I pushed ACCESS, obviously the next step. No doubt all these procedures had been explained to me long ago at the dock when Georgie in her aluminum box was being off-loaded, and I hadn’t listened. And on the screen she turned to look at me—only not at me, though I started and drew breath—at the Wasp that watched her. She was in mid-sentence, mid-gesture. Where? When? Or put it on the same card with the others, she said, turning away. Someone said something, Georgie answered, and stood up, the Wasp panning and moving erratically with her, like an amateur with a home-video camera. A white room, sunlight, wicker. Ibiza. Georgie wore a cotton blouse, open; from a table she picked up lotion, poured some on her hand, and rubbed it across her freckled breastbone. The meaningless conversation about putting something on a card went on, ceased. I watched the room, wondering what year, what season I had stumbled into. Georgie pulled off her shirt—her small round breasts tipped with large, childlike nipples, child’s breasts she still had at forty, shook delicately. And she went out onto the balcony, the Wasp following, blinded by sun, adjusting. If you want to do it that way, someone said. The someone crossed the screen, a brown blur, naked. It was me. Georgie said: Oh, look, hummingbirds.

She watched them, rapt, and the Wasp crept close to her cropped blond head, rapt too, and I watched her watch. She turned away, rested her elbows on the balustrade. I couldn’t remember this day. How should I? One of hundreds, of thousands. . . . She looked out to the bright sea, wearing her sleepwalking face, mouth partly open, and absently stroked her breast with her oiled hand. An iridescent glitter among the flowers was the hummingbird.

Without really knowing what I did—I felt hungry, suddenly, hungry for pastness, for more—I touched the RESET bar. The balcony in Ibiza vanished, the screen glowed emptily. I touched ACCESS.

At first there was darkness, a murmur; then a dark back moved away from the Wasp’s eye, and a dim scene of people resolved itself. Jump. Other people, or the same people, a party? Jump. Apparently the Wasp was turning itself on and off according to the changes in light levels here, wherever here was. Georgie in a dark dress having her cigarette lit: brief flare of the lighter. She said, Thanks. Jump. A foyer or hotel lounge. Paris? The Wasp jerkily sought for her among people coming and going; it couldn’t make a movie, establishing shots, cutaways—it could only doggedly follow Georgie, like a jealous husband, seeing nothing else. This was frustrating. I pushed RESET. ACCESS. Georgie brushed her teeth, somewhere, somewhen.

I understood, after one or two more of these terrible leaps. Access was random. There was no way to dial up a year, a day, a scene. The Park had supplied no program, none; the eight thousand hours weren’t filed at all, they were a jumble, like a lunatic’s memory, like a deck of shuffled cards. I had supposed, without thinking about it, that they would begin at the beginning and go on till they reached the end. Why didn’t they?

I also understood something else. If access was truly random, if I truly had no control, then I had lost as good as forever those scenes I had seen. Odds were on the order of eight thousand to one (more? far more? probabilities are opaque to me) that I would never light on them again by pressing this bar. I felt a pang of loss for that afternoon in Ibiza. It was doubly gone now. I sat before the empty screen, afraid to touch ACCESS again, afraid of what I would lose.

I shut down the machine (the light level in the room rose, the Muzak poured softly back in) and went out into the halls, back to the display screen in the entranceway. The list of names slowly, greenly, rolled over like the list of departing flights at an airport: Code numbers were missing from beside many, indicating perhaps that they weren’t yet in residence, only awaited. In the Ds, three names, and DIRECTOR—hidden among them as though he were only another of the dead. A chamber number. I went to find it and went in. The director looked more like a janitor or a night watchman, the semiretired type you often see caretaking little-visited places. He wore a brown smock like a monk’s robe and was making coffee in a corner of his small office, out of which little business seemed to be done. He looked up startled, caught out, when I entered.

“Sorry,” I said, “but I don’t think I understand this system right.”

“A problem?” he said. “Shouldn’t be a problem.” He looked at me a little wide-eyed and shy, hoping not to be called on for anything difficult. “Equipment’s all working?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t seem that it could be.” I described what I thought I had learned about The Park’s access concept. “That can’t be right, can it?” I said. “That access is totally random . . .”

He was nodding, still wide-eyed, paying close attention.

“Is it?” I asked.

“Is it what?”

“Random.”

“Oh, yes. Yes, sure. If everything’s in working order.”

I could think of nothing to say for a moment, watching him nod reassuringly. Then, “Why?” I asked. “I mean why is there no way at all to, to organize, to have some kind of organized access to the material?” I had begun to feel that sense of grotesque foolishness in the presence of death, as though I were haggling over Georgie’s effects. “That seems stupid, if you’ll pardon me.”

“Oh no, oh no,” he said. “You’ve read your literature? You’ve read all your literature?”

“Well, to tell the truth . . .”

“It’s all just as described,” the director said. “I can promise you that. If there’s any problem at all. . . .”

“Do you mind,” I said, “if I sit down?” I smiled. He seemed so afraid of me and my complaint, of me as mourner, possibly grief crazed and unable to grasp the simple limits of his responsibilities to me, that he needed soothing himself. “I’m sure everything’s fine,” I said. “I just don’t think I understand. I’m kind of dumb about these things.”

“Sure. Sure. Sure.” He regretfully put away his coffee makings and sat behind his desk, lacing his fingers together like a consultant. “People get a lot of satisfaction out of the access here,” he said, “a lot of comfort, if they take in the right spirit.” He tried a smile. I wondered what qualifications he had had to show to get this job. “The random part. Now, it’s all in the literature. There’s the legal aspect—you’re not a lawyer are you, no, no, sure, no offense. You see, the material here isn’t for anything, except, well, except for communing. But suppose the stuff were programmed, searchable. Suppose there was a problem about taxes or inheritance or so on. There could be subpoenas, lawyers all over the place, destroying the memorial concept completely.”

I really hadn’t thought of that. Built-in randomness saved past lives from being searched in any systematic way. And no doubt saved The Park from being in the records business and at the wrong end of a lot of suits. “You’d have to watch the whole eight thousand hours,” I said, “and even if you found what you were looking for there’d be no way to replay it. It would have gone by.” It would slide into the random past even as you watched it, like that afternoon in Ibiza, that party in Paris. Lost. He smiled and nodded. I smiled and nodded.

“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “They didn’t predict that. The randomness. It was a side effect, an effect of the storage process. Just luck.” His grin turned down, his brows knitted seriously. “See, we’re storing here at the molecular level. We have to go that small, for space problems. I mean your eight-thousand-hour guarantee. If we had gone tape or conventional, how much room would it take up? If the access concept caught on. A lot of room. So we went vapor trap and endless tracking. Size of my thumbnail. It’s all in the literature.” He looked at me strangely. I had a sudden intense sensation that I was being fooled, tricked, that the man before me in his smock was no expert, no technician; he was a charlatan, or maybe a madman impersonating a director and not belonging here at all. It raised the hair on my neck and passed. “So the randomness,” he was saying. “It was an effect of going molecular. Brownian movement. All you do is lift the endless tracking for a microsecond and you get a rearrangement at the molecular level. We don’t randomize. The molecules do it for us.”

I remembered Brownian movement, just barely, from physics class. The random movement of molecules, the teacher said; it has a mathematical description. It’s like the movement of dust motes you see swimming in a shaft of sunlight, like the swirl of snowflakes in a glass paperweight that shows a cottage being snowed on. “I see,” I said. “I guess I see.”

“Is there,” he said, “any other problem?” He said it as though there might be some other problem and that he knew what it might be and that he hoped I didn’t have it. “You understand the system, key lock, two bars, ACCESS, RESET. . . .”

“I understand,” I said. “I understand now.”

“Communing,” he said, standing, relieved, sure I would be gone soon. “I understand. It takes a while to relax into the communing concept.”

“Yes,” I said. “It does.”

I wouldn’t learn what I had come to learn, whatever that was. The Wasp had not been good at storage after all, no, no better than my young soul had been. Days and weeks had been missed by its tiny eye. It hadn’t seen well, and in what it had seen it had been no more able to distinguish the just-as-well-forgotten from the unforgettable than my own eye had been. No better and no worse—the same.

And yet, and yet—she stood up in Ibiza and dressed her breasts with lotion, and spoke to me: Oh, look, hummingbirds. I had forgotten, and the Wasp had not; and I owned once again what I hadn’t known I had lost, hadn’t known was precious to me.

The sun was setting when I left The Park, the satin sea foaming softly, randomly around the rocks.

I had spent my life waiting for something, not knowing what, not even knowing I waited. Killing time. I was still waiting. But what I had been waiting for had already occurred and was past.

It was two years, nearly, since Georgie had died; two years until, for the first and last time, I wept for her—for her and for myself.

OF COURSE I went back. After a lot of work and correctly placed dollars, I netted a HAPpy card of my own. I had time to spare, like a lot of people then, and often on empty afternoons (never on Sunday) I would get out onto the unpatched and weed-grown freeway and glide up the coast. The Park was always open. I relaxed into the communing concept.

Now, after some hundreds of hours spent there underground, now, when I have long ceased to go through those doors (I have lost my key, I think; anyway I don’t know where to look for it), I know that the solitude I felt myself to be in was real. The watchers around me, the listeners I sensed in other chambers, were mostly my imagination. There was rarely anyone there.

These tombs were as neglected as any tombs anywhere usually are. Either the living did not care to attend much on the dead—when have they ever?—or the hopeful buyers of the contracts had come to discover the flaw in the access concept—as I discovered it, in the end.

ACCESS, and she takes dresses one by one from her closet, and holds them against her body, and studies the effect in a tall mirror, and puts them back again. She had a funny face, which she never made except when looking at herself in the mirror, a face made for no one but herself, that was actually quite unlike her. The mirror Georgie.

RESET.

ACCESS. By a bizarre coincidence here she is looking in another mirror. I think the Wasp could be confused by mirrors. She turns away, the Wasp adjusts; there is someone asleep, tangled in bedclothes on a big hotel bed, morning, a room-service cart. Oh, the Algonquin: myself. Winter. Snow is falling outside the tall window. She searches her handbag, takes out a small vial, swallows a pill with coffee, holding the cup by its body and not its handle. I stir, show a tousled head of hair. Conversation—unintelligible. Gray room, whitish snow light, color degraded. Would I now (I thought, watching us) reach out for her? Would I in the next hour take her, or she me, push aside the bedclothes, open her pale pajamas? She goes into the john, shuts the door. The Wasp watches stupidly, excluded, transmitting the door.

RESET, finally.

But what (I would wonder) if I had been patient, what if I had watched and waited?

Time, it turns out, takes an unconscionable time. The waste, the footless waste—it’s no spectator sport. Whatever fun there is in sitting idly looking at nothing and tasting your own being for a whole afternoon, there is no fun in replaying it. The waiting is excruciating. How often, in five years, in eight thousand hours of daylight or lamplight, might we have coupled, how much time expended in lovemaking? A hundred hours, two hundred? Odds were not high of my coming on such a scene; darkness swallowed most of them, and the others were lost in the interstices of endless hours spent shopping, reading, on planes and in cars, asleep, apart. Hopeless.

ACCESS. She has turned on a bedside lamp. Alone. She hunts amid the Kleenex and magazines on the bedside table, finds a watch, looks at it dully, turns it right side up, looks again, and puts it down. Cold. She burrows in the blankets, yawning, staring, then puts out a hand for the phone but only rests her hand on it, thinking. Thinking at four A.M. She withdraws her hand, shivers a child’s deep, sleepy shiver, and shuts off the light. A bad dream. In an instant it’s morning, dawn; the Wasp slept, too. She sleeps soundly, unmoving, only the top of her blond head showing out of the quilt—and will no doubt sleep so for hours, watched over more attentively, more fixedly, than any peeping Tom could ever have watched over her.

RESET.

ACCESS.

“I can’t hear as well as I did at first,” I told the director. “And the definition is getting softer.”

“Oh sure,” the director said. “That’s really in the literature. We have to explain that carefully. That this might be a problem.”

“It isn’t just my monitor?” I asked. “I thought it was probably only the monitor.”

“No, no, not really, no,” he said. He gave me coffee. We’d gotten to be friendly over the months. I think, as well as being afraid of me he was glad I came around now and then; at least one of the living came here, one at least was using the services. “There’s a slight degeneration that does occur.”

“Everything seems to be getting gray.”

His face had shifted into intense concern, no belittling this problem. “Mm-hm, mm-hm, see, at the molecular level where we’re at, there is degeneration. It’s just in the physics. It randomizes a little over time. So you lose—you don’t lose a minute of what you’ve got, but you lose a little definition. A little color. But it levels off.”

“It does?”

“We think it does. Sure it does, we promise it does. We predict that it will.”

“But you don’t know.”

“Well, well you see we’ve only been in this business a short while. This concept is new. There were things we couldn’t know.” He still looked at me, but seemed at the same time to have forgotten me. Tired. He seemed to have grown colorless himself lately, old, losing definition. “You might start getting some snow,” he said softly.

ACCESS RESET ACCESS.

A gray plaza of herringbone-laid stones, gray, clicking palms. She turns up the collar of her sweater, narrowing her eyes in a stern wind. Buys magazines at a kiosk: Vogue, Harper’s, La Mode. Cold, she says to the kiosk girl. Frio. The young man I was takes her arm: they walk back along the beach, which is deserted and strung with cast seaweed, washed by a dirty sea. Winter in Ibiza. We talk, but the Wasp can’t hear, the sea’s sound confuses it; it seems bored by its duties and lags behind us.

RESET.

ACCESS. The Algonquin, terribly familiar morning, winter. She turns away from the snow window. I am in bed, and for a moment watching this I felt suspended between two mirrors, reflected endlessly. I had seen this before; I had lived it once and remembered it once, and remembered the memory, and here it was again, or could it be nothing but another morning, a similar morning. There were far more than one like this, in this place. But no; she turns from the window, she gets out her vial of pills, picks up the coffee cup by its body: I had seen this moment before, not months before, weeks before, here in this chamber. I had come upon the same scene twice.

What are the odds of it, I wondered, what are the odds of coming upon the same minutes again, these minutes.

I stir within the bedclothes.

I leaned forward to hear, this time, what I would say; it was something like but fun anyway, or something.

Fun, she says, laughing, harrowed, the degraded sound a ghost’s twittering. Charlie, someday I’m going to die of fun.

She takes her pill. The Wasp follows her to the john and is shut out.

Why am I here? I thought, and my heart was beating hard and slow. What am I here for? What?

RESET.

ACCESS.

Silvered icy streets, New York, Fifth Avenue. She is climbing, shouting from a cab’s dark interior. Just don’t shout at me, she shouts at someone; her mother I never met, a dragon. She is out and hurrying away down the sleety street with her bundles, the Wasp at her shoulder. I could reach out and touch her shoulder and make her turn and follow me out. Walking away, lost in the colorless press of traffic and people, impossible to discern within the softened snowy image.

SOMETHING WAS VERY wrong.

Georgie hated winter, she escaped it most of the time we were together, about the first of the year beginning to long for the sun that had gone elsewhere; Austria was all right for a few weeks, the toy villages and sugar snow and bright, sleek skiers were not really the winter she feared, though even in fire-warmed chalets it was hard to get her naked without gooseflesh and shudders from some draft only she could feel. We were chaste in winter. So Georgie escaped it: Antigua and Bali and two months in Ibiza when the almonds blossomed. It was continual false, flavorless spring all winter long.

How often could snow have fallen when the Wasp was watching her?

Not often; countable times, times I could count up myself if I could remember as the Wasp could. Not often. Not always.

“There’s a problem,” I said to the director.

“It’s peaked out, has it?” he said. “That definition problem?”

“Actually,” I said, “it’s gotten worse.”

He was sitting behind his desk, arms spread wide across his chair’s back, and a false, pinkish flush to his cheeks like undertaker’s makeup. Drinking.

“Hasn’t peaked out, huh?” he said.

“That’s not the problem,” I said. “The problem is the access. It’s not random like you said.”

“Molecular level,” he said. “It’s in the physics.”

“You don’t understand. It’s not getting more random. It’s getting less random. It’s getting selective. It’s freezing up.”

“No, no, no,” he said dreamily. “Access is random. Life isn’t all summer and fun, you know. Into each life some rain must fall.”

I sputtered, trying to explain. “But but . . .”

“You know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking of getting out of access.” He pulled open a drawer in the desk before him; it made an empty sound. He stared within it dully for a moment and shut it. “The Park’s been good for me, but I’m just not used to this. Used to be you thought you could render a service, you know? Well, hell, you know, you’ve had fun, what do you care?”

He was mad. For an instant I heard the dead around me; I tasted on my tongue the stale air of underground.

“I remember,” he said, tilting back in his chair and looking elsewhere, “many years ago, I got into access. Only we didn’t call it that then. What I did was, I worked for a stock-footage house. It was going out of business, like they all did, like this place here is going to do, shouldn’t say that, but you didn’t hear it. Anyway, it was a big warehouse with steel shelves for miles, filled with film cans, film cans filled with old plastic film, you know? Film of every kind. And movie people, if they wanted old scenes of past time in their movies, would call up and ask for what they wanted, find me this, find me that. And we had everything, every kind of scene, but you know what the hardest thing to find was? Just ordinary scenes of daily life. I mean people just doing things and living their lives. You know what we did have? Speeches. People giving speeches. Like presidents. You could have hours of speeches, but not just people, whatchacallit, oh, washing clothes, sitting in a park . . .”

“It might just be the reception,” I said. “Somehow.”

He looked at me for a long moment as though I had just arrived. “Anyway,” he said at last, turning away again, “I was there awhile learning the ropes. And producers called and said, ‘Get me this, get me that.’ And one producer was making a film, some film of the past, and he wanted old scenes, old, of people long ago, in the summer; having fun; eating ice cream; swimming in bathing suits; riding in convertibles. Fifty years ago. Eighty years ago.”

He opened his empty drawer again, found a toothpick, and began to use it.

“So I accessed the earliest stuff. Speeches. More speeches. But I found a scene here and there—people in the street, fur coats, window-shopping, traffic. Old people, I mean they were young then, but people of the past; they have these pinched kind of faces, you get to know them. Sad, a little. On city streets, hurrying, holding their hats. Cities were sort of black then, in film; black cars in the streets, black derby hats. Stone. Well, it wasn’t what they wanted. I found summer for them, color summer, but new. They wanted old. I kept looking back. I kept looking. I did. The further back I went, the more I saw these pinched faces, black cars, black streets of stone. Snow. There isn’t any summer there.”

With slow gravity he rose and found a brown bottle and two coffee cups. He poured sloppily. “So it’s not your reception,” he said. “Film takes longer, I guess, but it’s the physics. All in the physics. A word to the wise is sufficient.”

The liquor was harsh, a cold distillate of past sunlight. I wanted to go, get out, not look back. I would not stay watching until there was only snow.

“So I’m getting out of access,” the director said. “Let the dead bury the dead, right? Let the dead bury the dead.”

I DIDN’T GO back. I never went back, though the highways opened again and The Park isn’t far from the town I’ve settled in. Settled; the right word. It restores your balance, in the end, even in a funny way your cheerfulness, when you come to know, without regrets, that the best thing that’s going to happen in your life has already happened. And I still have some summer left to me.

I think there are two different kinds of memory, and only one kind gets worse as I get older: the kind where, by an effort of will, you can reconstruct your first car or your serial number or the name and figure of your high school physics teacher—a Mr. Holm, in a gray suit, a bearded guy, skinny, about thirty. The other kind doesn’t worsen; if anything it grows more intense. The sleepwalking kind, the kind you stumble into as into rooms with secret doors and suddenly find yourself sitting not on your front porch but in a classroom. You can’t at first think where or when, and a bearded, smiling man is turning in his hand a glass paperweight, inside which a little cottage stands in a swirl of snow.

There is no access to Georgie, except that now and then, unpredictably, when I’m sitting on the porch or pushing a grocery cart or standing at the sink, a memory of that kind will visit me, vivid and startling, like a hypnotist’s snap of fingers.

Or like that funny experience you sometimes have, on the point of sleep, of hearing your name called softly and distinctly by someone who is not there.

JAMES PATRICK KELLY Rat

James Patrick Kelly began contributing to magazines and anthologies in the late 1970s and quickly established a reputation as a writer of well-crafted stories that take a variety of approaches to an eclectic mix of themes. Much of his fiction is firmly grounded in social commentary. “Death Therapy” envisions a future justice system where simulated death is used to rehabilitate criminals. “Still Time” and “Crow” present opposing viewpoints on typical human behavior in the shadow of nuclear war. “Pogrom” presents the generation gap in terms of future civil war. “Big Guy” explores the breakdown of personal relationships and interactions coincident with the rise of rapid telecommunications and virtual reality. Kelly’s best short fiction has been collected in Think Like a Dinosaur and Other Stories. His work as a novelist includes the diptych Planet of Whispers and Look into the Sun, concerned with life on the planet Aseneshesh, where political and religious strife replicates problems that cripple third world countries on Earth. His novel Wildlife explores the conflict between parent and offspring in the context of biogenetic engineering, with its tale of a young woman who rebels against the personality and destiny her father has engineered for her. He has also collaborated with John Kessel on Freedom Beach.

RAT HAD STASHED the dust in four plastic capsules and then swallowed them. From the stinging at the base of his ribs, he guessed they were now squeezing into his duodenum. Still plenty of time. The bullet train had been shooting through the vacuum of the TransAtlantic tunnel for almost two hours now; they would arrive at Port Authority/Koch soon. Customs had already been fixed, according to the maréchal. All Rat had to do was to get back to his nest, lock the smart door behind him, and put the word out on his protected nets. He had enough Algerian Yellow to dust at least half the cerebrums on the East Side. If he could turn this deal, he would be rich enough to bathe in Dom Perignon and dry himself with Gromaire tapestries. Another pang shot down his left flank. Instinctively his hind leg came off the seat and scratched at air.

There was only one problem; Rat had decided to cut the maréchal out. That meant he had to lose the old man’s spook before he got home.

The spook had attached herself to him at Marseilles. She braided her blonde hair in pigtails. She had freckles, wore braces on her teeth. Tiny breasts nudged a modest silk turtleneck. She looked to be between twelve and fourteen. Cute. She had probably looked that way for twenty years, would stay the same another twenty if she did not stop a slug first or get cut in half by some automated security laser that tracked only heat and could not read—or be troubled by—cuteness. Their passports said they were Mr. Sterling Jaynes and daughter Jessalynn, of Forest Hills, New York. She was typing in her notebook, chubby fingers curled over the keys. Homework? A letter to a boyfriend? More likely she was operating on some corporate database with scalpel code of her own devising.

“Ne fais pas semblant d’étudier, ma petite,” Rat said, “Que fais-tu?”

“Oh, Daddy,” she said, pouting, “can’t we go back to plain old English? After all, we’re almost home.” She tilted her notebook so that he could see the display. It read: “Two rows back, second seat from aisle. Fed. If he knew you were carrying, he’d cut the dust out of you and wipe his ass with your pelt.” She tapped the Return key, and the message disappeared.

“All right, dear.” He arched his back, fighting a surge of adrenaline that made his incisors click. “You know, all of a sudden I feel hungry. Should we do something here on the train or wait until we get to New York?” Only the spook saw him gesture back toward the fed.

“Why don’t we wait for the station? More choice there.”

“As you wish, dear.” He wanted her to take the fed out now, but there was nothing more he dared say. He licked his hands nervously and groomed the fur behind his short, thick ears to pass the time.

The International Arrivals Hall at Koch Terminal was unusually quiet for a Thursday night. It smelled to Rat like a setup. The passengers from the bullet shuffled through the echoing marble vastness toward the row of customs stations. Rat was unarmed; if they were going to put up a fight, the spook would have to provide the firepower. But Rat was not a fighter, he was a runner. Their instructions were to pass through Station Number Four. As they waited in line, Rat spotted the federally appointed vigilante behind them. The classic invisible man: neither handsome nor ugly, five-ten, about one-seventy, brown hair, dark suit, white shirt. He looked bored.

“Do you have anything to declare?” The customs agent looked bored, too. Everybody looked bored except Rat, who had two million new dollars’ worth of illegal drugs in his gut and a fed ready to carve them out of him.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” said Rat, “that all men are created equal.” He managed a feeble grin—as if this were a witticism and not the password.

“Daddy, please!” The spook feigned embarrassment. “I’m sorry, ma’am; it’s his idea of a joke. It’s the Declaration of Independence, you know.”

The customs agent smiled as she tousled the spook’s hair. “I know that, dear. Please put your luggage on the conveyor.” She gave a perfunctory glance at her monitor as their suitcases passed through the scanner, and then nodded at Rat. “Thank you, sir, and have a pleasant . . .” The insincere thought died on her lips as she noticed the fed pushing through the line toward them. Rat saw her spin toward the exit at the same moment that the spook thrust her notebook computer into the scanner. The notebook stretched a blue finger of point discharge toward the magnetic lens just before the overhead lights novaed and went dark. The emergency backup failed as well. Rat’s snout filled with the acrid smell of electrical fire. Through the darkness came shouts and screams, thumps and cracks—the crazed pounding of a stampede gathering momentum.

He dropped to all fours and skittered across the floor. Koch Terminal was his territory. He had crisscrossed its many levels with scent trails. Even in total darkness he could find his way. But in his haste he cracked his head against a pair of stockinged knees, and a squawking weight fell across him, crushing the breath from his lungs. He felt an icy stab on his hindquarters and scrabbled at it with his hind leg. His toes came away wet and he squealed. There was an answering scream, and the point of a shoe drove into him, propelling him across the floor. He rolled left and came up running. Up a dead escalator, down a carpeted hall. He stood upright and stretched to his full twenty-six inches, hands scratching until they found the emergency bar across the fire door. He hurled himself at it, a siren shrieked, and with a whoosh the door opened, dumping him into an alley. He lay there for a moment, gasping, half in and half out of Koch Terminal. With the certain knowledge that he was bleeding to death, he touched the coldness on his back. A sticky purple substance; he sniffed, then tasted it. Ice cream. Rat threw back his head and laughed. The high squeaky sound echoed in the deserted alley.

But there was no time to waste. He could already hear the buzz of police hovers swooping down from the night sky. The blackout might keep them busy for a while; Rat was more worried about the fed. And the spook. They would be out soon enough, looking for him. Rat scurried down the alley toward the street. He glanced quickly at the terminal, now a black hole in the galaxy of bright holographic sleaze that was Forty-second Street. A few cops with flashlights were trying to fight against the flow of panicky travelers pouring from its open doors. Rat smoothed his ruffled fur and turned away from the disaster, walking crosstown. His instincts said to run, but Rat forced himself to dawdle like a hick shopping for big-city excitement. He grinned at the pimps and windowshopped the hardware stores. He paused in front of a pair of mirror-image sex stops—GIRLS! LIVE! GIRLS! and LIVE! GIRLS! LIVE!—to sniff the pheromone-scented sweat pouring off an androgynous robot shill that was working the sidewalk. The robot obligingly put its hand to Rat’s crotch, but he pushed it away with a hiss and continued on. At last, sure that he was not being followed, he powered up his wallet and tapped into the transnet to summon a hovercab. The wallet informed him that the city had cordoned off midtown airspace to facilitate rescue operations at Koch Terminal. It advised trying the subway or a taxi. Since he had no intention of sticking an ID chip—even a false one!—into a subway turnstyle, he stepped to the curb and began watching the traffic.

The rebuilt Checker that rattled to a stop beside him was a patchwork of orange ABS and stainless-steel armor. “No we leave Manhattan,” said a speaker on the roof light. “No we north of a hundred and ten.” Rat nodded and the door locks popped. The passenger compartment smelled of chlorobenzylmalononitrile and urine.

“First Avenue Bunker,” said Rat, sniffing. “Christ, it stinks back here. Who was your last fare—the circus?”

“Troubleman.” The speaker connections were loose, giving a scratchy edge to the cabbie’s voice. The locks reengaged as the Checker pulled away from the curb. “Hahas get a fullsnoot of tear gas in this hack.”

Rat had already spotted the pressure vents in the floor. He peered through the gloom at the registration. A slogan had been lased in over it—probably by one of the new Mitsubishi penlights. “Free the dead.” Rat smiled: the dead were his customers. People who had chosen the dust road. Twelve to eighteen months of glorious addiction: synthetic orgasms, recursive hallucinations leading to a total sensory overload and an ecstatic death experience. One dose was all it took to start down the dust road. The feds were trying to cut off the supply—with dire consequences for the dead. They could live a few months longer without dust, but their joyride down the dusty road was transformed into a grueling marathon of withdrawal pangs and madness. Either way, they were dead. Rat settled back onto the seat. The penlight graffito was a good omen. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a leather strip that had been soaked with a private blend of fat-soluble amphetamines and began to gnaw at it.

From time to time he could hear the cabbie monitoring NYPD net for flameouts or wildcat tolls set up by street gangs. They had to detour to heavily guarded Park Avenue all the way uptown to Fifty-ninth before doubling back toward the bunker. Originally built to protect U.N. diplomats from terrorists, the bunker had gone condo after the dissolution of the United Nations. Its hype was that it was the “safest address in the city.” Rat knew better, which is why he had had a state-of-the-art smart door installed. Its rep was that most of the owners’ association were candidates either for a mindwipe or an extended vacation on a fed punkfarm.

“Hey, Fare,” said the cabbie, “net says the dead be rioting front of your door. Crash through or roll away?”

The fur along Rat’s backbone went erect. “Cops?”

“Letting them play for now.”

“You’ve got armor for a crash?”

“Shit, yes. Park this hack to ground zero for the right fare.” The cabbie’s laugh was static. “Don’t worry, bunkerman. Give those deadboys a shot of old CS gas and they be too busy scratching they eyes out to bother us much.”

Rat tried to smooth his fur. He could crash the riot and get stuck. But if he waited, either the spook or the fed would be stepping on his tail before long. Rat had no doubt that both had managed to plant locator bugs on him.

“ ’Course, riot crashing don’t come cheap,” said the cabbie.

“Triple the meter.” The fare was already over two hundred dollars for the fifteen-minute ride. “Shoot for Bay Two—the one with the yellow door.” He pulled out his wallet and started tapping its luminescent keys. “I’m sending recognition code now.”

He heard the cabbie notify the cops that they were coming through. Rat could feel the Checker accelerate as they passed the cordon, and he had a glimpse of strobing lights, cops in blue body armor, a tank studded with water cannons. Suddenly the cabbie braked, and Rat pitched forward against his shoulder harness. The Checker’s solid rubber tires squealed, and there was the thump of something bouncing off the hood. They had slowed to a crawl, and the dead closed around them.

Rat could not see out the front because the cabbie was protected from his passengers by steel plate. But the side windows filled with faces streaming with sweat and tears and blood. Twisted faces, screaming faces, faces etched by the agonies of withdrawal. The soundproofing muffled their howls. Fear and exhilaration filled Rat as he watched them pass. If only they knew how close they were to dust, he thought. He imagined the dead faces gnawing through the cab’s armor in a frenzy, pausing only to spit out broken teeth. It was wonderful. The riot was proof that the dust market was still white-hot. The dead must be desperate to attack the bunker like this looking for a flash. He decided to bump the price of his dust another ten percent.

Rat heard a clatter on the roof; then someone began to jump up and down. It was like being inside a kettledrum. Rat sank claws into the seat and arched his back. “What are you waiting for? Gas them, damn it!”

“Hey, Fare. Stuff ain’t cheap. We be fine—almost there.”

A woman with bloody red hair matted to her head pressed her mouth against the window and screamed. Rat reared up on his hind legs and made biting feints at her. Then he saw the penlight in her hand. At the last moment Rat threw himself backward. The penlight flared, and the passenger compartment filled with the stench of melting plastic. A needle of coherent light singed the fur on Rat’s left flank; he squealed and flopped onto the floor, twitching.

The cabbie opened the external gas vents, and abruptly the faces dropped away from the windows. The cab accelerated, bouncing as it ran over the fallen dead. There was a dazzling transition from the darkness of the violent night to the floodlit calm of Bay Number Two. Rat scrambled back onto the seat and looked out the back window in time to see the hydraulic doors of the outer lock swing shut. Something was caught between them—something that popped and spattered. The inner door rolled down on its track like a curtain coming down on a bloody final act.

Rat was almost home. Two security guards in armor approached. The door locks popped, and Rat climbed out of the cab. One of the guards leveled a burster at his head; the other wordlessly offered him a printreader. He thumbed it, and bunker’s computer verified him immediately.

“Good evening, sir,” said one of the guards. “Little rough out there tonight. Did you have luggage?”

The front door of the cab opened, and Rat heard the low whine of electric motors as a mechanical arm lowered the cabbie’s wheelchair onto the floor of the bay. She was a gray-haired woman with a rheumy stare who looked like she belonged in a rest home in New Jersey. A knitted shawl covered her withered legs. “You said triple.” The cab’s hoist clicked and released the chair; she rolled toward him. “Six hundred and sixty-nine dollars.”

“No luggage, no.” Now that he was safe inside the bunker, Rat regretted his panic-stricken generosity. A credit transfer from one of his own accounts was out of the question. He slipped his last thousand-dollar bubble chip into his wallet’s card reader, dumped $331 from it into a Bahamian laundry loop, and then dropped the chip into her outstretched hand. She accepted it dubiously: for a minute he expected her to bite into it like they did sometimes on fossil TV. Old people made him nervous. Instead she inserted the chip into her own card reader and frowned at him.

“How about a tip?”

Rat sniffed. “Don’t pick up strangers.”

One of the guards guffawed obligingly. The other pointed, but Rat saw the skunk port in the wheelchair a millisecond too late. With a wet plot the chair emitted a gaseous stinkball that bloomed like an evil flower beneath Rat’s whiskers. One guard tried to grab at the rear of the chair, but the old cabbie backed suddenly over his foot. The other guard aimed his burster.

The cabbie smiled like a grandmother from hell. “Under the pollution index. No law against sharing a little scent, boys. And you wouldn’t want to hurt me anyway. The hack monitors my EEG. I go flat and it goes berserk.”

The guard with the bad foot stopped hopping. The guard with the gun shrugged. “It’s up to you, sir.”

Rat batted the side of his head several times and then buried his snout beneath his armpit. All he could smell was rancid burger topped with sulphur sauce. “Forget it. I haven’t got time.”

“You know,” said the cabbie, “I never get out of the hack, but I just wanted to see what kind of person would live in a place like this.” The lifts whined as the arm fitted its fingers into the chair. “And now I know.” She cackled as the arm gathered her back into the cab. “I’ll park it by the door. The cops say they’re ready to sweep the street.”

The guards led Rat to the bank of elevators. He entered the one with the open door, thumbed the printreader, and spoke his access code.

“Good evening, sir,” said the elevator. “Will you be going straight to your rooms?”

“Yes.”

“Very good, sir. Would you like a list of the communal facilities currently open to serve you?”

There was no shutting the sales pitch off, so Rat ignored it and began to lick the stink from his fur.

“The pool is open for lap swimmers only,” said the elevator as the doors closed. “All environments except for the weightless room are currently in use. The sensory deprivation tanks will be occupied until eleven. The surrogatorium is temporarily out of female chassis; we apologize for any inconvenience . . .”

The cab moved down two and a half floors and then stopped just above the subbasement. Rat glanced up and saw a dark gap opening in the array of light diffuser panels. The spook dropped through it.

“ . . . the holo therapist is off-line until eight tomorrow morning, but the interactive sex booths will stay open until midnight. The drug dispensary . . .”

She looked as if she had been water-skiing through the sewer. Her blonde hair was wet and smeared with dirt; she had lost the ribbons from her pigtails. Her jeans were torn at the knees, and there was an ugly scrape on the side of her face. The silk turtleneck clung wetly to her. Yet despite her dishevelment, the hand that held the penlight was as steady as a jewel cutter’s.

“There seems to be a minor problem,” said the elevator in a soothing voice. “There is no cause for alarm. This unit is temporarily nonfunctional. Maintenance has been notified and is now working to correct the problem. In case of emergency, please contact Security. We regret this temporary inconvenience.”

The spook fired a burst of light at the floor selector panel; it spat fire at them and went dark. “Where the hell were you?” said the spook. “You said the McDonald’s in Time Square if we got separated.”

“Where were you?” Rat rose up on his hind legs. “When I got there the place was swarming with cops.”

He froze as the tip of the penlight flared. The spook traced a rough outline of Rat on the stainless-steel door behind him. “Fuck your lies,” she said. The beam came so close that Rat could smell his fur curling away from it. “I want the dust.”

“Trespass alert!” screeched the wounded elevator. A note of urgency had crept into its artificial voice. “Security reports unauthorized persons within the complex. Residents are urged to return immediately to their apartments and engage all personal security devices. Do not be alarmed. We regret this temporary inconvenience.”

The scales on Rat’s tail fluffed. “We have a deal. The maréchal needs my networks to move his product. So let’s get out of here before . . .”

“The dust.”

Rat sprang at her with a squeal of hatred. His claws caught on her turtleneck and he struck repeatedly at her open collar, gashing her neck with his long red incisors. Taken aback by the swiftness and ferocity of his attack, she dropped the penlight and tried to fling him against the wall. He held fast, worrying at her and chittering rabidly. When she stumbled under the open emergency exit in the ceiling, he leaped again. He cleared the suspended ceiling, caught himself on the inductor, and scrabbled up onto the hoist cables. Light was pouring into the shaft from above; armored guards had forced the door open, and were climbing down toward the stalled car. Rat jumped from the cables across five feet of open space to the counterweight and huddled there, trying to use its bulk to shield himself from the spook’s fire. Her stand was short and inglorious. She threw a dazzler out of the hatch, hoping to blind the guards, then tried to pull herself through. Rat could hear the shriek of burster fire. He waited until he could smell the aroma of broiling meat and scorched plastic before he emerged from the shadows and signaled to the security team.

A squad of apologetic guards rode the service elevator with Rat down to the storage subbasement where he lived. When he had first looked at the bunker, the broker had been reluctant to rent him the abandoned rooms, insisting that he live aboveground with the other residents. But all of the suites they showed him were unacceptably open, clean, and uncluttered. Rat much preferred his musty dungeon, where odors lingered in the still air. He liked to fall asleep to the booming of the ventilation system on the level above him, and slept easier knowing that he was as far away from the stink of other people as he could get in the city.

The guards escorted him to the gleaming brass smart door and looked discreetly as he entered his passcode on the keypad. He had ordered it custom-built from Mosler so that it would recognize high-frequency squeals well beyond the range of human hearing. He called to it and then pressed trembling fingers onto the printreader. His bowels had loosened in terror during the firelight, and the capsules had begun to sting terribly. It was all he could do to keep from defecating right there in the hallway. The door sensed the guards and beeped to warn him of their presence. He punched in the override sequence impatiently, and the seals broke with a sigh.

“Have a pleasant evening, sir,” said one of the guards as he scurried inside. “And don’t worry ab—” The door cut him off as it swung shut.

Against all odds, Rat had made it. For a moment he stood, tail switching against the inside of the door, and let the magnificent chaos of his apartment soothe his jangled nerves. He had earned his reward—the dust was all his now. No one could take it away from him. He saw himself in a shard of mirror propped up against an empty THC aerosol and wriggled in self-congratulation. He was the richest rat on the East Side, perhaps in the entire city.

He picked his way through a maze formed by a jumble of overburdened steel shelving left behind years, perhaps decades, ago. The managers of the bunker had offered to remove them and their contents before he moved in; Rat had insisted that they stay. When the fire inspector had come to approve his newly installed sprinkler system, she had been horrified at the clutter on the shelves and had threatened to condemn the place. It had cost him plenty to buy her off, but it had been worth it. Since then Rat’s trove of junk had at least doubled in size. For years no one had seen it but Rat and the occasional cockroach.

Relaxing at last, Rat stopped to pull a mildewed wing tip down from the huge collection of shoes; he loved the bouquet of fine old leather and gnawed and gnawed it whenever he could. Next to the shoes was a heap of books: his private library. One of Rat’s favorite delicacies was the first edition of Leaves of Grass that he had pilfered from the rare book collection at the New York Public Library. To celebrate his safe arrival, he ripped out page 43 for a snack and stuffed it into the wing tip. He dragged the shoe over a pile of broken sheetrock and past shelves filled with scrap electronics: shattered monitors and dead typewriters, microwaves and robot vacuums. He had almost reached his nest when the fed stepped from behind a dirty Hungarian flag that hung from a broken fluorescent light fixture.

Startled, Rat instinctively hurled himself at the crack in the wall where he had built his nest. But the fed was too quick. Rat did not recognize the weapon; all he knew was that when it hissed, Rat lost all feeling in his hindquarters. He landed in a heap but continued to crawl, slowly, painfully.

“You have something I want.” The fed kicked him. Rat skidded across the concrete floor toward the crack, leaving a thin gruel of excrement in his wake. Rat continued to crawl until the fed stepped on his tail, pinning him.

“Where’s the dust?”

“I . . .Idon’t . . .”

The fed stepped again; Rat’s left fibula snapped like cheap plastic. He felt no pain.

“The dust.” The fed’s voice quavered strangely.

“Not here. Too dangerous.”

“Where?” The fed released him. “Where?”

Rat was surprised to see that the fed’s gun hand was shaking. For the first time he looked up at the man’s eyes and recognized the telltale yellow tint. Rat realized then how badly he had misinterpreted the fed’s expression back at Koch. Not bored. Empty. For an instant he could not believe his extraordinary good fortune. Bargain for time, he told himself. There’s still a chance. Even though he was cornered, he knew his instinct to fight was wrong.

“I can get it for you fast if you let me go,” said Rat. “Ten minutes, fifteen. You look like you need it.”

“What are you talking about?” The fed’s bravado started to crumble, and Rat knew he had the man. The fed wanted the dust for himself. He was one of the dead.

“Don’t make it hard on yourself,” said Rat. “There’s a terminal in my nest. By the crack. Ten minutes.” He started to pull himself toward the nest. He knew the fed would not dare stop him; the man was already deep into withdrawal. “Only ten minutes and you can have all the dust you want.” The poor fool could not hope to fight the flood of neuroregulators pumping crazily across his synapses. He might break any minute, let his weapon slip from trembling hands. Rat reached the crack and scrambled through into comforting darkness.

The nest was built around a century-old shopping cart and a stripped subway bench. Rat had filled the gaps in with pieces of synthetic rubber, a hubcap, plastic greeting cards, barbed wire, disk casings, Baggies, a No Parking sign, and an assortment of bones. Rat climbed in and lowered himself onto the soft bed of shredded thousand-dollar bills. The profits of six years of deals and betrayals, a few dozen murders, and several thousand dusty deaths.

The fed sniffled as Rat powered up his terminal to notify Security. “Someone set me up some vicious bastard slipped it to me I don’t know when I think it was Barcelona . . . it would kill Sarah to see . . .” He began to weep. “I wanted to turn myself in . . . they keep working on new treatments you know but it’s not fair damn it! The success rate is less than . . . I made my first buy two weeks only two God it seems . . . killed a man to get some lousy dust . . . but they’re right it’s, it’s, I can’t begin to describe what it’s like . . .”

Rat’s fingers flew over the glowing keyboard, describing his situation, the layout of the rooms, a strategy for the assault. He had overridden the smart door’s recognition sequence. It would be tricky, but Security could take the fed out if they were quick and careful. Better risk a surprise attack than to dicker with an armed and unraveling dead man.

“I really ought to kill myself . . . would be best but it’s not only me . . . I’ve seen ten-year-olds . . . what kind of animal sells dust to kids . . . I should kill myself and you.” Something changed in the fed’s voice as Rat signed off. “And you.” He stooped and reached through the crack.

“It’s coming,” said Rat quickly. “By messenger. Ten doses. By the time you get to the door, it should be here.” He could see the fed’s hand and burrowed into the rotting pile of money. “You wait by the door, you hear? It’s coming any minute.”

“I don’t want it.” The hand was so large it blocked the light. Rat’s fur went erect and he arched his spine. “Keep your fucking dust.”

Rat could hear the guards fighting their way through the clutter. Shelves crashed. So clumsy, these men.

“It’s you I want.” The hand sifted through the shredded bills, searching for Rat. He had no doubt that the fed could crush the life from him—the hand was huge now. In the darkness he could count the lines on the palm, follow the whorls on the fingertips. They seemed to spin in Rat’s brain—he was losing control. He realized then that one of the capsules must have broken, spilling a megadose of first-quality Algerian Yellow dust into his gut. With a hallucinatory clarity, he imagined sparks streaming through his blood, igniting neurons like tinder. Suddenly the guards did not matter. Nothing mattered except that he was cornered. When he could no longer fight the instinct to strike, the fed’s hand closed around him. The man was stronger than Rat could have imagined. As the fed hauled him—clawing and biting—back into the light, Rat’s only thought was of how terrifyingly large a man was. So much larger than a rat.

TERRY BISSON Bears Discover Fire

Science fiction does not always mix well with humor or fantasy, but Terry Bisson has managed fusions of both in his novels and short fiction. His first novel, Wyrldmaker, published in 1981, puts a science fiction spin on a hackneyed theme from sword-and-sorcery fiction. Talking Man works elements of both fantasy and science fiction into a tall tale format. His alternate-history novel Fire on the Mountain wreaks an original and compelling variation on the familiar theme of a future in which the South won the American Civil War: here, a successful slave revolt leads to the creation of Nova Africa, a new republic in the place of what would have been the Confederate States. The humor in Bisson’s stories ranges from slapstick to sly satire and invariably calls attention to the irrationality of increasingly complex worlds that simple humans are ill equipped to deal with. In his screwball adventure novel Voyage to the Red Planet, the first manned trip to Mars is a gimmick staged by a bumbling Hollywood producer banking heedlessly on a blockbuster to boost his sagging fortunes. Pirates of the Universe is a satirical space opera set in a future where Disney-Windows is the controlling corporate conglomerate. The Pickup Artist is a comic dystopia about a future where agents for the Bureau of Arts and Entertainment are charged with destroying artistic creations that the world has run out of room for. Bisson won the Nebula, Hugo, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards for the title tale of Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories. His other books include the short-fiction collection In the Upper Room; a posthumous collaboration with Walter M. Miller Jr., St. Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman; a sequel to the landmark novel A Canticle for Leibowitz; nonfiction books on Nat Turner and Mumia Abu Jamal; and novelizations of the films Galaxy Quest and The Sixth Day.

I WAS DRIVING with my brother, the preacher, and my nephew, the preacher’s son, on I-65 just north of Bowling Green when we got a flat. It was Sunday night and we had been to visit Mother at the Home. We were in my car. The flat caused what you might call knowing groans since, as the old-fashioned one in my family (so they tell me), I fix my own tires, and my brother is always telling me to get radials and quit buying old tires.

But if you know how to mount and fix tires yourself, you can pick them up for almost nothing.

Since it was a left rear tire, I pulled over to the left, onto the median grass. The way my Caddy stumbled to a stop, I figured the tire was ruined. “I guess there’s no need asking if you have any of that FlatFix in the trunk,” said Wallace.

“Here, son, hold the light,” I said to Wallace Jr. He’s old enough to want to help and not old enough (yet) to think he knows it all. If I’d married and had kids, he’s the kind I’d have wanted.

An old Caddy has a big trunk that tends to fill up like a shed. Mine’s a ’56. Wallace was wearing his Sunday shirt, so he didn’t offer to help while I pulled magazines, fishing tackle, a wooden tool box, some old clothes, a comealong wrapped in a grass sack, and a tobacco sprayer out of the way, looking for my jack. The spare looked a little soft.

The light went out. “Shake it, son,” I said.

It went back on. The bumper jack was long gone, but I carry a little quarter-ton hydraulic. I found it under Mother’s old Southern Livings, 1978–1986. I had been meaning to drop them at the dump. If Wallace hadn’t been along, I’d have let Wallace Jr. position the jack under the axle, but I got on my knees and did it myself. There’s nothing wrong with a boy learning to change a tire. Even if you’re not going to fix and mount them, you’re still going to have to change a few in this life. The light went off again before I had the wheel off the ground. I was surprised at how dark the night was already. It was late October and beginning to get cool. “Shake it again, son,” I said.

It went back on but it was weak. Flickery.

“With radials you just don’t have flats,” Wallace explained in that voice he uses when he’s talking to a number of people at once; in this case, Wallace Jr. and myself. “And even when you do, you just squirt them with this stuff called FlatFix and you just drive on. Three ninety-five the can.”

“Uncle Bobby can fix a tire hisself,” said Wallace Jr., out of loyalty, I presume.

“Himself,” I said from halfway under the car. If it was up to Wallace, the boy would talk like what Mother used to call “a helot from the gorges of the mountains.” But drive on radials.

“Shake that light again,” I said. It was about gone. I spun the lugs off into the hubcap and pulled the wheel. The tire had blown out along the sidewall. “Won’t be fixing this one,” I said. Not that I cared. I have a pile as tall as a man out by the barn.

The light went out again, then came back better than ever as I was fitting the spare over the lugs. “Much better,” I said. There was a flood of dim orange flickery light. But when I turned to find the lug nuts, I was surprised to see that the flashlight the boy was holding was dead. The light was coming from two bears at the edge of the trees, holding torches. They were big, three-hundred-pounders, standing about five feet tall. Wallace Jr. and his father had seen them and were standing perfectly still. It’s best not to alarm bears.

I fished the lug nuts out of the hubcap and spun them on. I usually like to put a little oil on them, but this time I let it go. I reached under the car and let the jack down and pulled it out. I was relieved to see that the spare was high enough to drive on. I put the jack and the lug wrench and the flat into the trunk. Instead of replacing the hubcap, I put it in there too. All this time, the bears never made a move. They just held the torches, whether out of curiosity or helpfulness, there was no way of knowing. It looked like there may have been more bears behind them, in the trees.

Opening three doors at once, we got into the car and drove off. Wallace was the first to speak. “Looks like bears have discovered fire,” he said.

WHEN WE FIRST took Mother to the Home almost four years (forty-seven months) ago, she told Wallace and me she was ready to die. “Don’t worry about me, boys,” she whispered, pulling us both down so the nurse wouldn’t hear. “I’ve drove a million miles and I’m ready to pass over to the other shore. I won’t have long to linger here.” She drove a consolidated school bus for thirty-nine years. Later, after Wallace left, she told me about her dream. A bunch of doctors were sitting around in a circle discussing her case. One said, “We’ve done all we can for her, boys, let’s let her go.” They all turned their hands up and smiled. When she didn’t die that fall she seemed disappointed, though as spring came she forgot about it, as old people will.

In addition to taking Wallace and Wallace Jr. to see Mother on Sunday nights, I go myself on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I usually find her sitting in front of the TV, even though she doesn’t watch it. The nurses keep it on all the time. They say the old folks like the flickering. It soothes them down.

“What’s this I hear about bears discovering fire?” she said on Tuesday. “It’s true,” I told her as I combed her long white hair with the shell comb Wallace had brought her from Florida. Monday there had been a story in the Louisville Courier-Journal, and Tuesday one on NBC or CBS Nightly News. People were seeing bears all over the state, and in Virginia as well. They had quit hibernating, and were apparently planning to spend the winter in the medians of the interstates. There have always been bears in the mountains of Virginia, but not here in western Kentucky, not for almost a hundred years. The last one was killed when Mother was a girl. The theory in the Courier-Journal was that they were following 1-65 down from the forests of Michigan and Canada, but one old man from Allen County (interviewed on nationwide TV) said that there had always been a few bears left back in the hills, and they had come out to join the others now that they had discovered fire.

“They don’t hibernate anymore,” I said. “They make a fire and keep it going all winter.”

“I declare,” Mother said. “What’ll they think of next!” The nurse came to take her tobacco away, which is the signal for bedtime.

EVERY OCTOBER, WALLACE Jr. stays with me while his parents go to camp. I realize how backward that sounds, but there it is. My brother is a Minister (House of the Righteous Way, Reformed) but he makes two-thirds of his living in real estate. He and Elizabeth go to a Christian Success Retreat in South Carolina, where people from all over the country practice selling things to one another. I know what it’s like not because they’ve ever bothered to tell me, but because I’ve seen the Revolving Equity Success Plan ads late at night on TV.

The school bus let Wallace Jr. off at my house on Wednesday, the day they left. The boy doesn’t have to pack much of a bag when he stays with me. He has his own room here. As the eldest of our family, I hung on to the old home place near Smiths Grove. It’s getting run-down, but Wallace Jr. and I don’t mind. He has his own room in Bowling Green, too, but since Wallace and Elizabeth move to a different house every three months (part of the Plan), he keeps his .22 and his comics, the stuff that’s important to a boy his age, in his room here at the home place. It’s the room his dad and I used to share.

Wallace Jr. is twelve. I found him sitting on the back porch that overlooks the interstate when I got home from work. I sell crop insurance.

After I changed clothes I showed him how to break the bead on a tire two ways, with a hammer, and by backing a car over it. Like making sorghum, fixing tires by hand is a dying art. The boy caught on fast, though. “Tomorrow I’ll show you how to mount your tire with the hammer and a tire iron,” I said.

“What I wish is I could see the bears,” he said. He was looking across the field to I-65, where the northbound lanes cut off the corner of our field. From the house at night, sometimes the traffic sounds like a waterfall.

“Can’t see their fire in the daytime,” I said. “But wait till tonight.” That night CBS or NBC (I forget which is which) did a special on the bears, which were becoming a story of nationwide interest. They were seen in Kentucky, West Virginia, Missouri, Illinois (southern), and, of course, Virginia. There have always been bears in Virginia. Some characters there were even talking about hunting them. A scientist said they were heading into the states where there is some snow but not too much, and where there is enough timber in the medians for firewood. He had gone in with a video camera, but his shots were just blurry figures sitting around a fire. Another scientist said the bears were attracted by the berries on a new bush that grew only in the medians of the interstates. He claimed this berry was the first new species in recent history, brought about by the mixing of seeds along the highway. He ate one on TV, making a face, and called it a “newberry.” A climatic ecologist said that the warm winters (there was no snow last winter in Nashville, and only one flurry in Louisville) had changed the bears’ hibernation cycle, and now they were able to remember things from year to year. “Bears may have discovered fire centuries ago,” he said, “but forgot it.” Another theory was that they had discovered (or remembered) fire when Yellowstone burned, several years ago.

The TV showed more guys talking about bears than it showed bears, and Wallace Jr. and I lost interest. After the supper dishes were done I took the boy out behind the house and down to our fence. Across the interstate and through the trees, we could see the light of the bears’ fire. Wallace Jr. wanted to go back to the house and get his .22 and go shoot one, and I explained why that would be wrong. “Besides,” I said, “a twenty-two wouldn’t do much more to a bear than make it mad.

“Besides,” I added, “it’s illegal to hunt in the medians.”

THE ONLY TRICK to mounting a tire by hand, once you have beaten or pried it onto the rim, is setting the bead. You do this by setting the tire upright, sitting on it, and bouncing it up and down between your legs while the air goes in. When the bead sets on the rim, it makes a satisfying “pop.” On Thursday, I kept Wallace Jr. home from school and showed him how to do this until he got it right. Then we climbed our fence and crossed the field to get a look at the bears.

In northern Virginia, according to Good Morning America, the bears were keeping their fires going all day long. Here in western Kentucky, though, it was still warm for late October and they only stayed around the fires at night. Where they went and what they did in the daytime, I don’t know. Maybe they were watching from the newberry bushes as Wallace Jr. and I climbed the government fence and crossed the northbound lanes. I carried an axe and Wallace Jr. brought his .22, not because he wanted to kill a bear but because a boy likes to carry some kind of a gun. The median was all tangled with brush and vines under the maples, oaks, and sycamores. Even though we were only a hundred yards from the house, I had never been there, and neither had anyone else that I knew of. It was like a created country. We found a path in the center and followed it down across a slow, short stream that flowed out of one grate and into another. The tracks in the gray mud were the first bear signs we saw. There was a musty, but not really unpleasant smell. In a clearing under a big hollow beech, where the fire had been, we found nothing but ashes. Logs were drawn up in a rough circle and the smell was stronger. I stirred the ashes and found enough coals to start a new flame, so I banked them back the way they had been left.

I cut a little firewood and stacked it to one side, just to be neighborly.

Maybe the bears were watching us from the bushes even then. There’s no way to know. I tasted one of the newberries and spit it out. It was so sweet it was sour, just the sort of thing you would imagine a bear would like.

THAT EVENING AFTER supper I asked Wallace Jr. if he might want to go with me to visit Mother. I wasn’t surprised when he said yes. Kids have more consideration than folks give them credit for. We found her sitting on the concrete front porch of the Home, watching the cars go by on I-65. The nurse said she had been agitated all day. I wasn’t surprised by that, either. Every fall as the leaves change, she gets restless, maybe the word is “hopeful,” again. I brought her into the dayroom and combed her long white hair. “Nothing but bears on TV anymore,” the nurse complained, flipping the channels. Wallace Jr. picked up the remote after the nurse left, and we watched a CBS or NBC Special Report about some hunters in Virginia who had gotten their houses torched. The TV interviewed a hunter and his wife whose $117,500 Shenandoah Valley home had burned. She blamed the bears. He didn’t blame the bears, but he was suing for compensation from the state since he had a valid hunting license. The state hunting commissioner came on and said that possession of a hunting license didn’t prohibit (“enjoin,” I think, was the word he used) the hunted from striking back. I thought that was a pretty liberal view for a state commissioner. Of course, he had a vested interest in not paying off. I’m not a hunter myself.

“Don’t bother coming on Sunday,” Mother told Wallace Jr. with a wink. “I’ve drove a million miles and I’ve got one hand on the gate.” I’m used to her saying stuff like that, especially in the fall, but I was afraid it would upset the boy. In fact, he looked worried after we left and I asked him what was wrong.

“How could she have drove a million miles?” he asked. She had told him forty-eight miles a day for thirty-nine years, and he had worked it out on his calculator to be 336,960 miles.

“Have driven,” I said. “And it’s forty-eight in the morning and forty-eight in the afternoon. Plus there were the football trips. Plus, old folks exaggerate a little.” Mother was the first woman school-bus driver in the state. She did it every day and raised a family, too. Dad just farmed.

I USUALLY GET off the interstate at Smiths Grove, but that night I drove north all the way to Horse Cave and doubled back so Wallace Jr. and I could see the bears’ fires. There were not as many as you would think from the TV—one every six or seven miles, hidden back in a clump of trees or under a rocky ledge. Probably they look for water as well as wood. Wallace Jr. wanted to stop, but it’s against the law to stop on the interstate and I was afraid the state police would run us off.

There was a card from Wallace in the mailbox. He and Elizabeth were doing fine and having a wonderful time. Not a word about Wallace Jr., but the boy didn’t seem to mind. Like most kids his age, he doesn’t really enjoy going places with his parents.

ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON the Home called my office (Burley Belt Drought & Hail) and left word that Mother was gone. I was on the road. I work Saturdays. It’s the only day a lot of part-time farmers are home. My heart literally missed a beat when I called in and got the message, but only a beat. I had long been prepared. “It’s a blessing,” I said when I got the nurse on the phone.

“You don’t understand,” the nurse said. “Not passed away, gone. Ran away, gone. Your mother has escaped.” Mother had gone through the door at the end of the corridor when no one was looking, wedging the door with her comb and taking a bedspread which belonged to the Home. What about her tobacco? I asked. It was gone. That was a sure sign she was planning to stay away. I was in Franklin, and it took me less than an hour to get to the Home on I-65. The nurse told me that Mother had been acting more and more confused lately. Of course they are going to say that. We looked around the grounds, which is only a half acre with no trees between the interstate and a soybean field. Then they had me leave a message at the sheriff’s office. I would have to keep paying for her care until she was officially listed as Missing, which would be Monday.

It was dark by the time I got back to the house, and Wallace Jr. was fixing supper. This just involves opening a few cans, already selected and grouped together with a rubber band. I told him his grandmother had gone, and he nodded, saying, “She told us she would be.” I called Florida and left a message. There was nothing more to be done. I sat down and tried to watch TV, but there was nothing on. Then, I looked out the back door, and saw the firelight twinkling through the trees across the northbound lane of I-65, and realized I just might know where to find her.

IT WAS DEFINITELY getting colder, so I got my jacket. I told the boy to wait by the phone in case the sheriff called, but when I looked back, halfway across the field, there he was behind me. He didn’t have a jacket. I let him catch up. He was carrying his .22 and I made him leave it leaning against our fence. It was harder climbing the government fence in the dark, at my age, than it had been in the daylight. I am sixty-one. The highway was busy with cars heading south and trucks heading north.

Crossing the shoulder, I got my pants cuffs wet on the long grass, already wet with dew. It is actually bluegrass.

The first few feet into the trees it was pitch-black and the boy grabbed my hand. Then it got lighter. At first I thought it was the moon, but it was the high beams shining like moonlight into the treetops, allowing Wallace Jr. and me to pick our way through the brush. We soon found the path and its familiar bear smell.

I was wary of approaching the bears at night. If we stayed on the path we might run into one in the dark, but if we went through the bushes we might be seen as intruders. I wondered if maybe we shouldn’t have brought the gun.

We stayed on the path. The light seemed to drip down from the canopy of the woods like rain. The going was easy, especially if we didn’t try to look at the path but let our feet find their own way.

Then through the trees I saw their fire.

THE FIRE WAS mostly of sycamore and beech branches, the kind that puts out very little heat or light and lots of smoke. The bears hadn’t learned the ins and outs of wood yet. They did okay at tending it, though. A large cinnamon-brown northern-looking bear was poking the fire with a stick, adding a branch now and then from a pile at his side. The others sat around in a loose circle on the logs. Most were smaller black or honey bears, one was a mother with cubs. Some were eating berries from a hubcap. Not eating, but just watching the fire, my mother sat among them with the bedspread from the Home around her shoulders.

If the bears noticed us, they didn’t let on. Mother patted a spot right next to her on the log and I sat down. A bear moved over to let Wallace Jr. sit on her other side.

The bear smell is rank but not unpleasant, once you get used to it. It’s not like a barn smell, but wilder. I leaned over to whisper something to Mother and she shook her head. It would be rude to whisper around these creatures that don’t possess the power of speech, she let me know without speaking. Wallace Jr. was silent too. Mother shared the bedspread with us and we sat for what seemed hours, looking into the fire.

The big bear tended the fire, breaking up the dry branches by holding one end and stepping on them, like people do. He was good at keeping it going at the same level. Another bear poked the fire from time to time but the others left it alone. It looked like only a few of the bears knew how to use fire, and were carrying the others along. But isn’t that how it is with everything? Every once in a while, a smaller bear walked into the circle of firelight with an armload of wood and dropped it onto the pile. Median wood has a silvery cast, like driftwood.

Wallace Jr. isn’t fidgety like a lot of kids. I found it pleasant to sit and stare into the fire. I took a little piece of Mother’s Red Man, though I don’t generally chew. It was no different from visiting her at the Home, only more interesting, because of the bears. There were about eight or ten of them. Inside the fire itself, things weren’t so dull, either: little dramas were being played out as fiery chambers were created and then destroyed in a crashing of sparks. My imagination ran wild. I looked around the circle at the bears and wondered what they saw. Some had their eyes closed. Though they were gathered together, their spirits still seemed solitary, as if each bear was sitting alone in front of its own fire.

The hubcap came around and we all took some newberries. I don’t know about Mother, but I just pretended to eat mine. Wallace Jr. made a face and spit his out. When he went to sleep, I wrapped the bedspread around all three of us. It was getting colder and we were not provided, like the bears, with fur. I was ready to go home, but not Mother. She pointed up toward the canopy of trees, where a light was spreading, and then pointed to herself. Did she think it was angels approaching from on high? It was only the high beams of some southbound truck, but she seemed mighty pleased. Holding her hand, I felt it grow colder and colder in mine.

WALLACE JR. WOKE me up by tapping on my knee. It was past dawn, and his grandmother had died sitting on the log between us. The fire was banked up and the bears were gone and someone was crashing straight through the woods, ignoring the path. It was Wallace. Two state troopers were right behind him. He was wearing a white shirt, and I realized it was Sunday morning. Underneath his sadness on learning of Mother’s death, he looked peeved.

The troopers were sniffing the air and nodding. The bear smell was still strong. Wallace and I wrapped Mother in the bedspread and started with her body back out to the highway. The troopers stayed behind and scattered the bears’ fire ashes and flung their firewood away into the bushes. It seemed a petty thing to do. They were like bears themselves, each one solitary in his own uniform.

There was Wallace’s Olds 98 on the median, with its radial tires looking squashed on the grass. In front of it there was a police car with a trooper standing beside it, and behind it a funeral home hearse, also an Olds 98.

“First report we’ve had of them bothering old folks,” the trooper said to Wallace. “That’s not hardly what happened at all,” I said, but nobody asked me to explain. They have their own procedures. Two men in suits got out of the hearse and opened the rear door. That to me was the point at which Mother departed this life. After we put her in, I put my arms around the boy. He was shivering even though it wasn’t that cold. Sometimes death will do that, especially at dawn, with the police around and the grass wet, even when it comes as a friend.

We stood for a minute watching the cars and trucks pass. “It’s a blessing,” Wallace said. It’s surprising how much traffic there is at 6:22 A.M.

THAT AFTERNOON, I went back to the median and cut a little firewood to replace what the troopers had flung away. I could see the fire through the trees that night.

I went back two nights later, after the funeral. The fire was going and it was the same bunch of bears, as far as I could tell. I sat around with them awhile but it seemed to make them nervous, so I went home. I had taken a handful of newberries from the hubcap, and on Sunday I went with the boy and arranged them on Mother’s grave. I tried again, but it’s no use, you can’t eat them.

Unless you’re a bear.

JOHN KESSEL A Clean Escape

John Kessel’s reputation as a writer of sophisticated, literary fantasy and science fiction is predicated on a handful of stories that frequently invade the territory of classic writers and use the lessons in their literature as sounding boards for contemporary values and social mores. The mock essay “Herman Melville: Space Opera Virtuoso” and the Nebula Award–winning riff on Moby Dick, “Another Orphan,” both chart incongruous intersections of the period of Melville and modern times. “The Big Dream” tells of a private detective, on the trail of Raymond Chandler, slowly evolving into a character in a typical Chandler crime story. “The Pure Product” and “Every Angel Is Terrifying” both extend ideas in the southern gothic fiction of Flannery O’Connor. H. G. Wells is himself a character in the Wellsian tale “Buffalo.” These stories, and Kessel’s alternate-history tales “Some Like It Cold,” “The Franchise,” and “Uncle John and the Saviour,” have been collected in his short-fiction compilations Meetings in Infinity and The Pure Product. The creative playfulness implicit in the “what-if” speculations of these stories extends to Kessel’s work as a novelist. Good News from Outer Space sketches a satirical portrait of a dysfunctional America on the eve of the twenty-first century, obsessed with alien invasion and millennial irrationality. Corrupting Dr. Nice is a screwball time-travel story involving a father-daughter team of flimflam artists who traverse timelines and alternate histories in search of victims. Kessel has also written the novel Freedom Beach in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly.

“I’ve been thinking about devils. I mean if there are devils in the world, if there are people in the world who represent evil, is it our duty to exterminate them?”

JOHN CHEEVER,

“The Five-Forty-Eight”

AS SHE SAT in her office, waiting—for exactly what she did not know—Dr. Evans hoped that it wasn’t going to be another bad day. She needed a cigarette and a drink. She swiveled the chair around to face the closed venetian blinds beside her desk, leaned back and laced her hands behind her head. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. The air wafting down from the ventilator in the ceiling smelled of machine oil. It was cold. Her face felt it, but the bulky sweater kept the rest of her warm. Her hair felt greasy. Several minutes passed in which she thought of nothing. There was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” she said absently.

Havelmann entered. He had the large body of an athlete gone slightly soft, thick, gray hair and a lined face. At first glance he didn’t look sixty. His well-tailored blue suit badly needed pressing.

“Doctor?”

Evans stared at him for a moment. She would kill him. She looked down at the desk, rubbed her forehead with her hand. “Sit down,” she said.

She took the pack of cigarettes from the desk drawer. “Would you care to smoke?”

The old man took one. She watched him carefully. His brown eyes were rimmed with red; they looked apologetic.

“I smoke too much,” he said. “But I can’t quit.”

She gave him a light. “More people around here are quitting every day.”

Havelmann exhaled smoothly. “What can I do for you?”

What can I do for you, sir.

“First, I want to play a little game.” Evans took a handkerchief out of a pocket. She moved a brass paperweight, a small model of the Lincoln Memorial, to the center of the desk blotter. “I want you to watch what I’m doing, now.”

Havelmann smiled. “Don’t tell me—you’re going to make it disappear, right?”

She tried to ignore him. She covered the paperweight with the handkerchief. “What’s under this handkerchief?”

“Can we put a little bet on it?”

“Not this time.”

“A paperweight.”

“That’s wonderful.” Evans leaned back with finality. “Now I want you to answer a few questions.”

The old man looked around the office curiously: at the closed blinds, at the computer terminal and keyboard against the wall, at the pad of switches in the corner of the desk. His eyes came to rest on the mirror opposite the window. “That’s a two-way mirror.”

Evans sighed. “No kidding.”

“Are you recording this?”

“Does it matter to you?”

“I’d like to know. Common courtesy.”

“Yes, we’re being videotaped. Now answer the questions.”

Havelmann seemed to shrink in the face of her hostility. “Sure.”

“How do you like it here?”

“It’s O.K. A little boring. A man couldn’t even catch a disease here, from the looks of it, if you know what I mean. I don’t mean any offense, doctor. I haven’t been here long enough to get the feel of the place.”

Evans rocked slowly back and forth. “How do you know I’m a doctor?”

“Aren’t you a doctor? I thought you were. This is a hospital, isn’t it? So I figured when they sent me in to see you you must be a doctor.”

“I am a doctor. My name is Evans.”

“Pleased to meet you, Dr. Evans.”

She would kill him. “How long have you been here?”

The man tugged on his earlobe. “I must have just got here today. I don’t think it was too long ago. A couple of hours. I’ve been talking to the nurses at their station.”

What she wouldn’t give for three fingers of Jack Daniels. She looked at him over the steeple of her fingers. “Such talkative nurses.”

“I’m sure they’re doing their jobs.”

“I’m sure. Tell me what you were doing before you came to this . . . hospital.”

“You mean right before?”

“Yes.”

“I was working.”

“Where do you work?”

“I’ve got my own company—ITG Computer Systems. We design programs for a lot of people. We’re close to getting a big contract with Ma Bell. We swing that and I can retire by the time I’m forty—if Uncle Sam will take his hand out of my pocket long enough for me to count my change.”

Evans made a note on her pad. “Do you have a family?”

Havelmann looked at her steadily. His gaze was that of an earnest young college student, incongruous on a man of his age. He stared at her as if he could not imagine why she would ask him these abrupt questions. She detested his weakness; it raised in her a fury that pushed her to the edge of insanity. It was already a bad day, and it would get worse.

“I don’t understand what you’re after,” Havelmann said, with considerable dignity. “But just so your record shows the facts: I’ve got a wife, Helen, and two kids. Ronnie’s nine and Susan’s five. We have a nice big house and a Lincoln and a Porsche. I follow the Braves and I don’t eat quiche. What else would you like to know?”

“Lots of things. Eventually I’ll find them out.” Evans’ voice was cold. “Is there anything you’d like to ask me? How you came to be here? How long you’re going to have to stay? Who you are?”

His voice went similarly cold. “I know who I am.”

“Who are you, then?”

“My name is Robert Havelmann.”

“That’s right,” Doctor Evans said calmly. “What year is it?”

Havelmann watched her warily, as if he were about to be tricked. “What are you talking about? It’s 1984.”

“What time of year?”

“Spring.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-five.”

“What do I have under this handkerchief?”

Havelmann looked at the handkerchief on the desk as if noticing it for the first time. His shoulders tightened and he looked suspiciously at Evans.

“How should I know?”

HE WAS BACK again that afternoon, just as rumpled, just as innocent. How could a person get old and still be innocent? She could not remember things ever being that easy. “Sit down,” she said.

“Thanks. What can I do for you, doctor?”

“I want to follow up on the argument we had this morning.”

Havelmann smiled. “Argument? This morning?”

“Don’t you remember talking to me this morning?”

“I never saw you before.”

Evans watched him coolly. The old man shifted in his chair.

“How do you know I’m a doctor?”

“Aren’t you a doctor? They told me I should go in to see Dr. Evans in room 10.”

“I see. If you weren’t here this morning, where were you?”

Havelmann hesitated.

“Let’s see—I was at work. I remember telling Helen—the wife—that I’d try to get home early. She’s always ragging me because I stay late. The company’s pretty busy right now: big contract in the works. Susan’s in the school play, and we have to be there by eight. And I want to get home soon enough before then to do some yardwork. It looked like a good day for it.”

Evans made a note: “What season is it?”

Havelmann fidgeted like a child, looked at the window, where the blinds were still closed.

“Spring,” he said. “Sunny, warm—very nice weather. The redbuds are just starting to come out.”

Without a word Evans got out of her chair and went to the window. She opened the blinds, revealing a barren field swept with drifts of snow. Dead grass whipped in the strong wind and the sky roiled with clouds.

“What about this?”

Havelmann stared. His back straightened and he leaned forward. He tugged at his earlobe.

“Isn’t that a bitch. If you don’t like the weather here—wait ten minutes.”

“What about the redbuds?”

“This weather will probably kill them. I hope Helen made the kids wear their jackets.”

Evans looked out the window. Nothing had changed. She slowly drew the blinds and sat down again.

“What year is it?”

Havelmann adjusted himself in his chair, calm again. “What do you mean? It’s 1984.”

“Did you ever read that book?”

“Slow down a minute. What are you talking about?”

Evans wondered what he would do if she got up and ground her thumbs into his eyes. “The book by George Orwell titled 1984.” She forced herself to speak slowly. “Are you familiar with it?”

“Sure. We had to read it in college.” Was there a trace of irritation beneath Havelmann’s innocence? Evans sat as silently and as still as she could.

“I remember it made quite an impression on me,” Havelmann continued.

“What kind of impression?”

“I expected something different from the professor. He was a confessed liberal. I expected some kind of bleeding heart book. It wasn’t like that at all.”

“Did it make you uncomfortable?”

“No. It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know already. It just showed what was wrong with collectivism. You know—Communism represses the individual, destroys initiative. It claims it has the interests of the majority at heart. And it denies all human values. That’s what I got out of 1984, though to hear that professor talk about it, it was all about Nixon and Vietnam.”

Evans kept still. Havelmann went on.

“I’ve seen the same mentality at work in business. The large corporations, they’re just like the government. Big, slow: you could show them a way to save a billion, and they’d squash you like a bug because it’s too much trouble to change.”

“You sound like you’ve got some resentments,” said Evans.

The old man smiled. “I do, don’t I. I admit it. I’ve thought a lot about it. But I have faith in people. Someday I may just run for state assembly and see whether I can do some good.”

Her pencil point snapped. She looked at Havelmann, who looked back at her. After a moment she focused her attention on the notebook. The broken point had left a black scar across her precise handwriting.

“That’s a good idea,” she said quietly, her eyes still lowered. “You still don’t remember arguing with me this morning?”

“I never saw you before I walked in this door. What were we supposed to be fighting about?”

He was insane. Evans almost laughed aloud at the thought—of course he was insane—why else would he be there? The question, she forced herself to consider rationally, was the nature of his insanity. She picked up the paperweight and handed it across to him. “We were arguing about this paperweight,” she said. “I showed it to you, and you said you’d never seen it before.”

Havelmann examined the paperweight. “Looks ordinary to me. I could easily forget something like this. What’s the big deal?”

“You’ll note that it’s a model of the Lincoln Memorial.”

“You probably got it at some gift shop. D.C. is full of junk like that.”

“I haven’t been to Washington in a long time.”

“I live there. Alexandria, anyway. I drive in every morning.”

Evans closed her notebook. “I have a possible diagnosis of your condition,” she said suddenly.

“What condition?”

This time the laughter was harder to repress. Tears almost came to her eyes with the effort. She caught her breath and continued. “You exhibit the symptoms of Korsakov’s syndrome. Have you ever heard of that before?”

Havelmann looked as blank as a whitewashed wall. “No.”

“Korsakov’s syndrome is an unusual form of memory loss. Recorded cases go back to the late 1800s. There was a famous one in the 1970s—famous to doctors, I mean. A Marine sergeant named Arthur Briggs. He was in his fifties, in good health aside from the lingering effects of alcoholism, and had been a career noncom until his discharge in the mid-sixties after twenty years in the service. He’d functioned normally until the early seventies, when he lost his memory of any events which occurred to him after September, 1944. He could remember in vivid detail, as if they had just happened, events up until that time. But of the rest of his life—nothing. Not only that, his continuing memory was affected so that he could remember events that occurred in the present only for a period of minutes, after which he would forget totally.”

“I can remember what happened to me right up until I walked into this room.”

“That’s what Sgt. Briggs told his doctors. To prove it he told them that World War II was going strong, that he was stationed in San Francisco in preparation for being sent to the Philippines, that it looked like the St. Louis Browns might finally win a pennant if they could hold on through September, and that he was twenty years old. He had the outlook and abilities of an intelligent twenty-year-old. He couldn’t remember anything that happened to him longer than forty minutes. The world had gone on, but he was permanently stuck in 1944.”

“That’s horrible.”

“So it seemed to the doctor in charge—at first. Later he speculated that it might not be so bad. The man still had a current emotional life. He could still enjoy the present; it just didn’t stick with him. He could remember his youth, and for him his youth had never ended. He never aged; he never saw his friends grow old and die, he never remembered that he himself had grown up to be a lonely alcoholic. His girlfriend was still waiting for him back in Columbia, Missouri. He was twenty years old forever. He had made a clean escape.”

Evans opened a desk drawer and took out a hand mirror. “How old are you?” she asked.

Havelmann looked frightened. “Look, why are we doing—”

“How old are you?” Evans’ voice was quiet but determined. Inside her a pang of joy threatened to break her heart.

“I’m thirty-five. What the hell—”

Shoving the mirror at him was as satisfying as firing a gun. Havelmann took it, glanced at her, then tentatively, like the most nervous of college freshmen checking the grade on his final exam, looked at his reflection. “Jesus Christ,” he said. He started to tremble.

“What happened? What did you do to me?” He got out of the chair, his expression contorted. “What did you do to me! I’m thirty-five! What happened?”

DR. EVANS STOOD in front of the mirror in her office. She was wearing her uniform. It was quite as rumpled as Havelmann’s suit. She had the tunic unbuttoned and was feeling her left breast. She lay down on the floor and continued the examination. The lump was undeniable. No pain, yet.

She sat up, reached for the pack of cigarettes on the desktop, fished out the last one and lit it. She crumpled the pack and threw it at the wastebasket. Two points. She had been quite a basketball player in college, twenty years before. She lay back down and took a long drag on the cigarette, inhaling deeply, exhaling the smoke with force, with a sigh of exhaustion. She probably could not make it up and down the court a single time any more.

She turned her head to look out the window. The blinds were open, revealing the same barren landscape that showed before. There was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” she said.

Havelmann entered. He saw her lying on the floor, raised an eyebrow, grinned. “You’re Doctor Evans?”

“I am.”

“Can I sit here or should I lie down too?”

“Do whatever you fucking well please.”

He sat in the chair. He had not taken offense. “So what did you want to see me about?”

Evans got up, buttoned her tunic, sat in the swivel chair. She stared at him. Her face was blank, pale, her thin lips steady. It was the expression of a woman terminally ill, so accustomed to her illness, and the necessity of ignoring it, that all that showed of the pain was mild annoyance. I am going to see this through, her face said, and then I’m going to kill myself.

“Have we ever met before?” she asked.

“No. I’m sure I’d remember.”

He was sure he would remember. She would fucking kill him. He would remember that.

She ground out the last inch of cigarette. She felt her jaw muscles tighten; she looked down at the ashtray in regret. “Now I have to quit.”

“I should quit. I smoke too much myself.”

“I want you to listen to me closely now,” she said slowly. “Do not respond until I’m finished.

“My name is Major D. S. Evans and I am a military psychologist. This office is in the infirmary of NECDEC, the National Emergency Center for Defense Communications, located one thousand feet below a hillside in West Virginia. As far as we know we are the only surviving governmental body in the continental United States. The scene you see through this window is being relayed from a surface monitor in central Nebraska; by computer command I can connect us with any of the twelve monitors still functioning on the surface.”

Evans turned to her keyboard and typed in a command; the scene through the window snapped to a shot of broken masonry and twisted steel reinforcement rods. The view was obscured by dust caked on the camera lens and by a heavy snowfall. Evans typed in an additional command and touched one of the switches on her desk. A blast of static, a hiss like frying bacon, came from a speaker.

“That’s Dallas. The sound is a reading of the background radiation registered by detectors at the site of this camera.” She typed in another command and the image on the “window” flashed through a succession of equally desolate scenes, holding ten seconds on each before switching to the next. A desert in twilight, motionless under low clouds; a murky underwater shot in which the remains of a building were just visible; a denuded forest half-buried in snow; a deserted highway overpass. With each change of scene the loudspeaker stopped for a split-second, then the hiss resumed.

Havelmann watched all of this soberly.

“This has been the state of the surface for a year now, ever since the last bombs fell. To our knowledge there are no human beings alive in North America—in the Northern Hemisphere, for that matter. Radio transmissions from South America, New Zealand and Australia have one by one ceased in the last eight months. We have not observed a living creature above the level of an insect through any of our monitors since the beginning of the year. It is the summer of 2010. Although, considering the situation, counting years by the old system seems a little futile to me.”

Doctor Evans slid open a desk drawer and took out an automatic. She placed it in the middle of the desk blotter and leaned back, her right hand touching the edge of the desk, near the gun.

“You are now going to tell me that you never heard of any of this, and that you’ve never seen me before in your life,” she said. “Despite the fact that I have been speaking to you daily for two weeks and that you have had this explanation from me at least three times during that period. You are going to tell me that it is 1984 and that you are thirty-five years old, despite the absurdity of such a claim. You are going to feign amazement and confusion; the more that I insist that you face these facts, the more you are going to become distressed. Eventually you will break down into tears and expect me to sympathize. You can go to hell.”

Evans’ voice had grown angrier as she spoke. She had to stop; it was almost more than she could do. When she resumed she was under control again. “If you persist in this sham, I may kill you. I assure you that no one will care if I do. You may speak now.”

Havelmann stared at the window. His mouth opened and closed stupidly. How old he looked, how feeble. Evans felt a sudden wave of pity and doubt. What if she were wrong? She had an image of herself as she might appear to him: arrogant, bitter, an incomprehensible inquisitor whose motives for tormenting him were a total mystery. She watched him. After a few minutes his mouth closed; the eyes blinked rapidly and were clear.

“Please. Tell me what you’re talking about.”

Evans shuddered. “The gun is loaded. Keep talking.”

“What do you want me to say? I never heard of any of this. Only this morning I saw my wife and kids and everything was all right. Now you give me this story about atomic war and 2010. What, have I been asleep for thirty years?”

“You didn’t act very surprised to be here when you walked in. If you’re so disoriented, how do you explain how you got here?”

The man sat heavily in the chair. “I don’t remember. I guess I thought I came here—to the hospital, I thought—to get a checkup. I didn’t think about it. You must know how I got here.”

“I do. But I think you know too, and you’re just playing a game with me—with all of us. The others are worried, but I’m sick of it. I can see through you, so you may as well quit the act. You were famous for your sincerity, but I always suspected that was an act, too, and I’m not falling for it. You didn’t start this game soon enough for me to be persuaded you’re crazy, despite what the others may think.”

Evans played with the butt of her dead cigarette. “Or this could be a delusional system,” she continued. “You think you’re in a hospital, and your schizophrenia has progressed to the point where you deny all facts that don’t go along with your attempts to evade responsibility. I suppose in some sense such an insanity would absolve you. If that’s the case, I should be more objective. Well, I can’t. I’m failing my profession, I realize. Too bad.” Emotion had gradually drained away from her until, by the end, she felt as if she were speaking from across a continent instead of a desk.

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about. Where are my wife and kids?”

“They’re dead.”

Havelmann sat rigidly. The only sound was the hiss of the radiation detector. “Let me have a cigarette.”

“There are no cigarettes left. I just smoked my last one.” Evans’ voice was distant. “I made two cartons last a year.”

Havelmann’s gaze dropped. “How old my hands are! . . . Helen has lovely hands.”

“Why are you going on with this charade?”

The old man’s face reddened. “God damn you! Tell me what happened!”

“The famous Havelmann rage. Am I supposed to be frightened now?”

The hiss from the loudspeaker seemed to increase. Havelmann lunged for the gun. Evans snatched it and pushed back from the desk. The old man grabbed the paperweight and raised it to strike. She pointed the gun at him.

“Your wife didn’t make the plane in time. She was at the western White House. I don’t know where your damned kids were—probably vaporized with their own families. You, however, had Operation Kneecap to save you, Mr. President. Now sit down and tell me why you’ve been playing games, or I’ll kill you right here and now. Sit down!”

A light seemed to dawn on Havelmann. “You’re insane,” he said quietly.

“Put the paperweight back on the desk.”

He did. He sat.

“But you can’t simply be crazy,” Havelmann continued. “There’s no reason why you should take me away from my home and subject me to this. This is some kind of plot. The government. The CIA.”

“And you’re thirty-five years old?”

Havelmann examined his hands again. “You’ve done something to me.”

“And the camps? Administrative Order 31?”

“If I’m the president, then why are you quizzing me here? Why can’t I remember a thing about it?”

“Stop it. Stop it right now,” Evans said slowly. She heard her voice for the first time. It sounded more like that of an old man than Havelmann’s. “I can’t take any more lies. I swear that I’ll kill you. First it was the commander-in-chief routine, calisthenics, stiff upper lips and discipline. Then the big brother, let’s have a whiskey and talk it over, son. Yessir, Mr. President.” Havelmann stared at her. He was going to make her kill him, and she knew she wouldn’t be strong enough not to.

“Now you can’t remember anything,” she said. “Your boys are confused, they’re fed up. I’m fed up, too.”

“If this is true, you’ve got to help me!”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about helping you!” Evans shouted. “I’m interested in making you tell the truth. Don’t you realize that we’re dead? I don’t care about your feeble sense of what’s right and wrong; just tell me what’s keeping you going. Who do you think you’re going to impress? You think you’ve got an election to win? A place in history to protect? There isn’t going to be any more history! History ended last August!

“So spare me the fantasy about the hospital and the nonexistent nurses’ station. Someone with Korsakov’s wouldn’t make up that story. He would recognize the difference between a window and a projection screen. A dozen other slips. You’re not a good enough actor.”

Her hand trembled. The gun was heavy. Her voice trembled, too, and she despised herself for it. “Sometimes I think the only thing that’s kept me alive is knowing I had half a pack of cigarettes left. That and the desire to make you crawl.”

The old man sat looking at the gun in her hand. “I was the president?”

“No,” said Evans bitterly, “I made it all up.”

His eyes seemed to sink farther back in the network of lines surrounding them.

“I started a war?”

Evans felt her heart race. “Stop lying! You sent the strike force; you ordered the pre-emptive launch.”

“I’m old. How old am I?”

“You know damn well how—” She stopped. She could hardly catch her breath. She felt a sharp pain in her breast. “You’re sixty-one.”

“Jesus, Mary, Joseph.”

“That’s it? That’s all you can say?”

The old man stared hollowly, then slowly, so slowly that at first it was not apparent what he was doing, he lowered his head into his hands and began to cry. His sobs were almost inaudible over the hissing of the radiation detector. Dr. Evans watched him intently. She rested her elbows on the desk, steadying the gun with both hands. Havelmann’s head shook in front of her. Despite his age, his gray hair was thick.

After a moment Evans reached over and switched off the loudspeaker. The hissing stopped.

Eventually Havelmann stopped crying. He raised his head. He looked dazed. His expression became unreadable. He looked at the doctor and the gun.

“My name is Robert Havelmann,” he said. “Why are you pointing that gun at me?”

“Please don’t,” said Evans.

“Don’t what? Who are you?”

Evans watched his face blur. Through her tears he looked like a much younger man. The gun drooped. She tried to lift it, but it was as if she were made of smoke—there was no substance to her, and it was all she could do to keep from dissipating, let alone kill anyone as clean and innocent as Robert Havelmann. He took the gun from her hand. “Are you all right?” he asked.

DR. EVANS SAT in her office, hoping that it wasn’t going to be a bad day. The pain in her breast had not come that day, but she was out of cigarettes. She searched the desk on the odd chance that she might have missed a pack, even a single butt, in the corner of one of the drawers. No luck.

She gave up and turned to face the window. The blinds were open, revealing the snow-covered field. She watched the clouds roll before the wind. It was dark. Winter. Nothing was alive.

“It’s cold outside,” she whispered.

There was a knock at the door. Dear God, leave me alone, she thought. Please leave me alone.

“Come in,” she said.

The door opened and an old man in a rumpled suit entered. “Dr. Evans? I’m Robert Havelmann. What did you want to talk about?”

LISA GOLDSTEIN Tourists

Lisa Goldstein’s fiction features motifs common to science fiction, including time travel, visits to exotic alien worlds, and future dystopia. In Goldstein’s hands, however, these elements are usually means to literary ends that are more properly categorized as magic realism, mythopoeic fiction, and contemporary fairy tales. She achieved instant recognition in 1982, when her first novel, The Red Magician, an allegorical treatment of the rise of Naziism and the holocaust, won the American Book Award. Her next two novels are her most conventional excursions into science fiction. The Dream Years forges a link between the surrealist art movement of the 1920s and the French countercultural movement in 1968, through the adventures of a time-traveling novelist who finds the two eras more similar than not. A Mask for the General is set in a future America under the rule of a dictatorial soldier and explores ideological and social differences that have shaped different factions in the revolutionary subculture. Tourists, expanded from the novella of the same name, gradually eases its characters into Amaz, an uncharted third world country that serves as the setting for some of Goldstein’s short fiction and runs on its own peculiar rules of logic. Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon presents the historical era just prior to the Enlightenment as one where fantasy and mythology are still accepted and thus regularly permeate daily life. Summer King, Winter Fool, set in a world where gods and mortals interact, is Goldstein’s most overt detour into high fantasy. Walking the Labyrinth, in which a young woman comes into her heritage as the descendant of stage magicians who practiced real magic, and Dark Cities Underground, which deploys the familiar theme of the breakdown between reality and the world of a literary fantasy, are both examples of Goldstein’s talent for conveying a sense of magic potential in the everyday through a slight, often imperceptible twist of ordinary events. Her short fiction has been collected in Daily Voices and Travellers in Magic.

HE AWOKE FEELING cold. He had kicked the blankets off, and the air conditioning was on too high. Debbie—Where was she? It was still dark out.

Confused, he pulled the blankets back and tried to go to sleep. Something was wrong. Debbie was gone, probably in the bathroom or downstairs getting a cup of coffee. And he was—he was on vacation, but where? Fully awake now, he sat up and tried to laugh. It was ridiculous. Imagine paying thousands of dollars for a vacation and then forgetting where you were. Greece? No, Greece was last year.

He got up and opened the curtains. The ocean ten stories below was black as sleep, paling a little to the east—it had to be east—where the sun was coming up. He turned down the air conditioning—the soft hum stopped abruptly—and headed for the bathroom. “Debbie?” he said, tentatively. He was a little annoyed. “Debbie?”

She was still missing after he had showered and shaved and dressed. “All right then,” he said aloud, mostly to hear the sound of his voice. “If you’re not coming I’ll go to breakfast without you.” She was probably out somewhere talking to the natives, laughing when she got a word wrong, though she had told him before they left that she had never studied a foreign language. She was good at languages, then—some people were. He remembered her saying in her soft Southern accent, “For goodness’ sake, Charles, why do you think people will understand you if you just talk to them louder? These people just don’t speak English.” And then she had taken over, pointing and laughing and looking through a phrasebook she had gotten somewhere. And they would get the best room, the choicest steak, the blanket the craftswoman had woven for her own family. Charles’s stock rose when he was with her, and he knew it. He hoped she would show up soon.

Soft Muzak played in the corridor and followed him into the elevator as he went down to the coffee shop. He liked the coffee shop in the hotel, liked the fact that the waiters spoke English and knew what an omelet was. The past few days he had been keeping to the hotel more and more, lying out by the beach and finally just sitting by the hotel pool drinking margaritas. The people back at the office would judge the success of the vacation by what kind of tan he got. Debbie had fretted a little and then had told him she was taking the bus in to see the ruins. She had come back darker than he was, the blond hairs on her arm bleached almost white against her brown skin, full of stories about women on the bus carrying chickens and temples crumbling in the desert. She was wearing a silver bracelet inlaid with blue and green stones.

When he paid the check he realized that he still didn’t know what country he was in. The first bill he took out of his wallet had a 5 on each corner and a picture of some kind of spiky flower. The ten had a view of the ocean, and the one, somewhat disturbingly, showed a fat coiled snake. There was what looked like an official seal on the back of all of them, but no writing. Illiterates, he thought. But he would remember soon enough, or Debbie would come back.

Back in his room, changing into his swim trunks, he thought of his passport. Feeling like a detective who has just cracked the case he got his money belt out from under the mattress and unzipped it. His passport wasn’t there. His passport and his plane ticket were missing. The traveller’s checks were still there, useless to him without the passport as identification. Cold washed over him. He sat on the bed, his heart pounding.

Think, he told himself. They’re somewhere else. They’ve got to be—who would steal the passport and not the traveller’s checks? Unless someone needed the passport to leave the country. But who knew where he had hidden it? No one but Debbie, who had laughed at him for his precautions, and the idea of Debbie stealing the passport was absurd. But where was she?

All right, he thought. I’ve got to find the American consulate, work something out. . . . Luckily I just cashed a traveller’s check yesterday. I’ve been robbed, and Americans get robbed all the time. It’s no big thing. I have time. I’m paid up at the hotel till—till when?

Annoyed, he realized he had forgotten that too. For the first time he wondered if there might be something wrong with him. Overwork, maybe. He would have to see someone about it when he got back to the States.

He lifted the receiver and called downstairs. “Yes, sor?” the man at the desk said.

“This is Room 1012,” Charles said. “I’ve forgotten—I was calling to check—How long is my reservation here?”

There was a silence at the other end, a disapproving silence, Charles felt. Most of the guests had better manners than to forget the length of their stay. He wondered what the man’s reaction would be if he had asked what country he was in and felt something like hysteria rise within him. He fought it down.

The man when he came back was carefully neutral. “You are booked through tonight, sor,” he said. “Do you wish to extend your stay?”

“Uh—no,” Charles said. “Could you tell me—Where is the American consulate?”

“We have no relations with your country, sor,” the man at the desk said.

For a moment Charles did not understand what he meant. Then he asked, “Well, what about—the British consulate?”

The man at the desk laughed and said nothing. Apparently he felt no need to clarify. As Charles tried to think of another question—Australian consulate? Canadian?—the man hung up.

Charles stood up carefully. “All right,” he said to the empty room. “First things first.” He got his two suitcases out of the closet and went through them methodically. Debbie’s carrying case was still there and he went through that too. He checked under both mattresses, in the nightstand, in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Nothing. All right then. Debbie had stolen it, had to have. But why? And why didn’t she take her carrying case with her when she went?

He wondered if she would show up back at the office. She had worked down the hall from him, one of the partners’ secretaries. He had asked her along for companionship, making it clear that there were no strings attached, that he was simply interested in not travelling alone. Sometimes this kind of relationship turned sexual and sometimes it didn’t. Last year, with Katya from accounting, it had. This year it hadn’t.

There was still nothing to worry about, Charles thought, snapping the locks on the suitcases. Things like this probably happened all the time. He would get to the airport, where they would no doubt have records, a listing of his flight, and he would explain everything to them there. He checked his wallet for credit cards and found that they were still there. Good, he thought. Now we get to see if the advertisements are true. Accepted all over the world.

He felt so confident that he decided to stay the extra day at the hotel. After all, he thought, I’ve paid for it. And maybe Debbie will come back. He threw his towel over his shoulder and went downstairs.

The usual people were sitting out by the pool. Millie and Jean, the older women from Miami. The two newlyweds who had kept pretty much to themselves. The hitchhiker who was just passing through and who had been so entertaining that no one had had the heart to report him to the hotel management. Charles nodded to them and ordered his margarita from the bar before sitting down.

Talk flowed around him. “Have you been to Djuzban yet?” Jean was saying to the retired couple who had just joined them at the pool. “We took the hotel tour yesterday. The marketplace is just fabulous. I bought this ring there—see it?” And she flashed silver and stones.

“I hear the ruins are pretty good out in Djuzban,” the retired man said.

“Oh, Harold,” his wife said. “Harold wants to climb every tower in the country.”

“No, man, for ruins you gotta go to Zabla,” the hitchhiker said. “But the buses don’t go there—you gotta rent a car. It’s way the hell out in the desert, unspoiled, untouched. If your car breaks down you’re dead—ain’t nobody passing through that way for days.”

Harold’s wife shuddered in the heat. “I just want to do some shopping before we go home,” she said. “I heard you can pick up bargains in leather in Qarnatl.”

“All we saw in Qarnatl were natives trying to sell us decks of cards,” Jean said. She turned to Millie. “Remember? I don’t know why they thought Americans would be interested in their playing cards. They weren’t even the same as ours.”

Charles sipped his margarita, listening to the exotic names flow around him. What if he told them the names meant nothing to him, nothing at all? But he was too embarrassed. There were appearances to keep up after all, the appearance of being a seasoned traveller, of knowing the ropes. He would find out soon enough, anyway.

The day wore on. Charles had a margarita, then another. When the group around the pool broke up it seemed the most natural thing in the world to follow them into the hotel restaurant and order a steak, medium-rare. He was running low on cash, he noticed—he’d have to cash another traveller’s check in the morning.

But in the morning when he awoke, cold sober, he knew immediately what he’d done. He reached for his wallet on the nightstand, fingers trembling a little. There was only a five with its bleak little picture of a shrub left. Well, he thought, feeling a little shaky. Maybe someone’s going to the airport today. Probably. The guys in the office aren’t going to believe this one.

He packed up his two suitcases, leaving Debbie’s overnight bag for her in case she came back. Downstairs he headed automatically for the coffee shop before he remembered. Abruptly he felt his hunger grow worse. “Excuse me,” he said to the man at the desk. “How much—Do you know how much the taxi to the airport is?”

“No speak English, sor,” the man said. He was small and dark, like most of the natives. His teeth were stained red.

“You don’t—” Charles said, disgusted. “Why in God’s name would they hire someone who doesn’t speak English? How much,” he said slowly. “Taxi. Airport.” He heard his voice grow louder; apparently Debbie was right.

The man shrugged. Another man joined them. Charles turned on him with relief. “How much is the taxi to the airport?”

“Oh, taxi,” the man said, as though the matter were not very important. “Not so much, sor. Eight, nine. Maybe fifteen.”

“Fifteen?” Charles said. He tried to remember the airport, remember how he’d gotten here. “Not five?” He held up five fingers.

The second man laughed. “Oh no, sor,” he said. “Fifteen. Twenty.” He shrugged.

Charles looked around in desperation. Hotel Tours, said the sign behind the front desk. Ruins. Free. “The ruins,” he said, pointing to the sign, wondering if either of the men could read. “Are they near the airport?” He could go to the ruins, maybe get a ride. . . .

“Near?” the second man said. He shrugged again. “Maybe. Yes, I think so.”

“How near?” Charles said.

“Near,” the second man said. “Yes. Near enough.”

Charles picked up the two suitcases and followed the line of tourists to the bus stop. See, he thought. Nothing to worry about, and you’re even getting a free ride to the airport. Those taxi drivers are thieves anyway.

It was awkward maneuvering the suitcases up the stairs of the bus. “I’m going on to the airport,” Charles said to the driver, feeling the need to explain.

“Of course, sor,” the driver said, shrugging as if to say that an American’s suitcases were no business of his. He added a word that Charles didn’t catch. Perhaps it was in another language.

The bus set off down the new two-lane highway fronting the hotels. Soon they left the hotels behind, passed a cluster of run-down shacks and were heading into the desert. The air conditioning hummed loudly. Waves of heat travelled across the sands.

After nearly an hour the bus stopped. “We have one hour,” the driver said in bad English. He opened the door. “These are the temple of Marmaz. Very old. One hour.” The tourists filed out. A few were adjusting cameras or pointing lenses.

Because of the suitcases Charles was the last out. He squinted against the sun. The temple was a solid wall of white marble against the sand. Curious in spite of himself he crossed the parking lot, avoiding the native who was trying to show him something. “Pure silver,” the small man said, calling after him. “Special price just for you.”

In front of the temple was a cracked marble pool, now dry. Who were these people who had carried water into the desert, who had imprisoned the moon in pale marble? But then how much had he known about the other tourist spots he had visited, the Greeks who had built the Parthenon, the Mayans who had built the pyramids? He followed the line of tourists into the temple, feeling the coolness fall over him like a blessing.

He went from room to room, delighted, barely feeling the weight of the suitcases. He saw crumbling mosaics of reds and blues and greens, fragments of tapestries, domes, fountains, towers, a white dining hall that could seat a hundred. In one small room a native was explaining a piece of marble sculpture to a dozen Americans.

“This, he is the god of the sun,” the native said. “And in the next room, the goddess of the moon. Moon, yes? We will go see her after. Once a year, at the end of the year, the two statues—statues, yes?—go outside. The priests take outside. They get married. Her baby is the new year.”

“What nonsense,” a woman standing near Charles said quietly. She was holding a guidebook. “That’s the fourth king. He built the temple. God of the sun.” She laughed scornfully.

“Can I—Can I see that book for a minute?” Charles said. The cover had flipped forward tantalizingly, almost revealing the name of the country.

The woman looked briefly at her watch. “Got to go,” she said. “The bus is leaving in a minute and I’ve got to find my husband. Sorry.”

Charles’s bus was gone by the time he left the temple. It was much cooler now but heat still rose from the desert sands. He was very hungry, nearly tempted to buy a cool drink and a sandwich at the refreshment stand near the parking lot. “Cards?” someone said to him.

Charles turned. The small native said something that sounded like “Tiraz!” It was the same word the bus driver had said to him in the morning. Then, “Cards?” he said again.

“What?” Charles said impatiently, looking for a taxi.

“Ancient playing set,” the native said. “Very holy.” He took out a deck of playing cards from an embroidered bag and spread them for Charles. The colors were very bright. “Souvenir,” the native said. He grinned, showing red-stained teeth. “Souvenir of your trip.”

“No, thank you,” Charles said. All around the parking lot, it seemed, little natives were trying to sell tourists rings and pipes and blouses and, for some reason, packs of playing cards. “Taxi?” he said. “Is there a taxi here?”

The native shrugged and moved on to the next tourist.

It was getting late. Charles went toward the nearest tour bus. The driver was leaning against the bus, smoking a small cigarette wrapped in a brown leaf. “Where can I find a taxi?” Charles asked him.

“No taxis,” the driver said.

“No—Why not?” Charles said. This country was impossible. He couldn’t wait to get out, to be on a plane drinking a margarita and heading back to the good old U.S.A. This was the worst vacation he’d ever had. “Can I make a phone call? I have to get to the airport.”

A woman about to get on the bus heard him and stopped. “The airport?” she said. “The airport’s fifty miles from here. At least. You’ll never find a taxi to take you that far.”

“Fifty miles?” Charles said. “They told me—At the hotel they told me it was fairly close.” For a moment his confidence left him. What do I do now? he thought. He sagged against the suitcases.

“Listen,” the woman said. She turned to the bus driver. “We’ve got room. Can’t we take him back to the city with us? I think we’re the last bus to leave.”

The driver shrugged. “For the tiraz, of course. Anything is possible.”

If Charles hadn’t been so relieved at the ride he would have been annoyed. What did this word tiraz mean? Imbecile? Man with two suitcases? He followed the woman onto the bus.

“I can’t believe you thought this was close to the airport,” the woman said. He sat across the aisle from her. “This is way out in the desert. There’s nothing here. No one would come out here if it wasn’t for the ruins.”

“They told me at the hotel,” Charles said. He didn’t really want to discuss it. He was no longer the seasoned traveller, the man who had regaled the people around the pool with stories of Mexico, Greece, Hawaii. He would have to confess, have to go back to the hotel and tell someone the whole story. Maybe they would bring in the police to find Debbie. A day wasted and he had only gone around in a circle, back to where he started. He felt tired and very hungry.

But when the bus stopped it was not at the brightly lit row of hotels. He strained to see in the oncoming dusk. “I thought you said—” He turned to the woman, hating to sound foolish again. “I thought we were going to the city.”

“This is—” the woman said. Then she nodded in understanding. “You want the new city, the tourist city. That’s up the road about ten miles. Any cab’ll take you there.”

Charles was the last off the bus again, slowed this time not so much by the suitcases as by the new idea. People actually stayed in the same cities that the natives lived. He had heard of it being done but he had thought only young people did it, students and drifters and hitchhikers like the one back at the hotel. This woman was not young and she had been fairly pleasant. He wished he had remembered to thank her.

The first cab driver laughed when Charles showed him the five note and asked to be taken to the new city. The driver was not impressed by the traveller’s checks. The second and third drivers turned him down flat. The city smelled of motor oil and rancid fish. It was getting late, even a little chilly, and Charles began to feel nervous about being out so late. The two suitcases were an obvious target for some thief. And where would he go? What would he do?

The panic that he had suppressed for so long took over now and he began to run. He dove deeper into the twisting maze of the city, not caring where he went so long as he was moving. Everything was closed, and there were few streetlamps. He heard the sounds of his footfalls echo off the shuttered buildings. A cat jumped out of his way, eyes flashing gold.

After a long time of running he began to slow. “Tiraz!” someone whispered to him from an abandoned building. His heart pounded. He did not look back. Ahead was a lit storefront, a store filled with clutter. The door was open. A pawn shop.

He went in with relief. He cleared a space for himself among the old magazines and rusty baking pans and child’s beads. The man behind the counter watched but made no comment. He took out everything from the two suitcases, sorted out what he needed and repacked it and gave the other suitcase to the man behind the counter. The man went to a small desk, unlocked a drawer and took out a steel box. He counted out some money and offered it to Charles. Charles accepted it wordlessly, not even bothering to count it.

The money bought a meal tasting of sawdust and sesame oil, and a sagging bed in an old hotel. The overhead fan turned all night because Charles could not figure out how to turn it off. A cockroach watched impassively from the corner.

The city looked different in daylight. Women in shawls and silver bracelets, men in clothes fashionable fifty years ago walked past the hotel as Charles looked out in the morning. The sun was shining. His heart rose. This was going to be the day he made it to the airport.

He walked along the streets almost jauntily, ignoring the ache in his arms. His beard itched because last night, in a moment of panic, he had thrown his electric razor into the suitcase to be sold. He shrugged. There were still things he could sell. Today he would find a better pawn shop.

He walked, passing run-down houses and outdoor markets, beggars and children, automobile garages and dim restaurants smelling of frying fish. “Excuse me,” he said to a man leaning against a horse-drawn carriage. “Do you know where I can find a pawn shop?”

The man and horse both looked up. “Ride, yes?” the man said enthusiastically. “Famous monuments. Very cheap.”

“No,” Charles said. “A pawn shop. Do you understand?”

The man shrugged, pulled the horse’s mane. “No speak English,” he said finally.

Another man had come up behind Charles. “Pawn shop?” he said.

Charles turned quickly, relieved. “Yes,” he said. “Do you know—”

“Two blocks down,” the man said. “Turn left, go five blocks. Across the hospital.”

“What street is that?” Charles asked.

“Street?” the man said. He frowned. “Two blocks down and turn left.”

“The name,” Charles said. “The name of the street.”

To Charles’s astonishment the man burst out laughing. The carriage driver laughed too, though he could not have possibly known what they were talking about. “Name?” the man said. “You tourists name your streets as though they were little children, yes?” He laughed again, wiping his eyes, and said something to the carriage-driver in another language, speaking rapidly.

“Thank you,” Charles said. He walked the two blocks, turned left and went five blocks more. There was no hospital where the man had said there would be, and no pawn shop. A man who spoke a little English said something about a great fire, but whether it had been last week or several years ago Charles was unable to find out.

He started back toward the man who had given him directions. In a few minutes he was hopelessly lost. The streets became dingier, and once he saw a rat run from a pile of newspapers. The fire had swept through this part of the city leaving buildings charred and water damaged, open to the passersby like museum exhibits. Two dirty children ran toward him, shouting, “Money, please, sor! Money for food!” He turned down a sidestreet to lose them.

Ahead of him were three young men in grease-stained clothes. One of them hissed something at him, the words rushing by like a fork of lightning. Another held a length of chain which he played back and forth, whispering, between his hands. “I don’t speak—” Charles said, but it was too late. They were on him.

One tore the suitcase from his hand, shouting “El amak! El amak!” Another knocked him down with a punch to his stomach that forced the wind out of him. The third was going through his pockets, taking his wallet and the little folder of traveller’s checks. Charles tried feebly to rise, and the second one thrust him back, hitting him once more in the stomach. The first one yelled something and they ran quickly down the street. Charles lay where they left him, gasping for breath.

The two dirty children passed him, and an old woman balancing a basket of clothes on her head. After a few minutes he rolled over and sat up, leaning against a rusty car up on blocks. His pants were torn, he noticed dully, torn and smeared with oil. And his suitcase with the rest of his clothes was gone.

He would go to the police, go and tell them that his suitcase was gone. He knew the word for suitcase because the young thief had shouted it. Amak. El amak. And suddenly he realized something that knocked the breath out of him as surely as a punch to the stomach. Every word in English, every word that he knew, had a corresponding word in this strange foreign language. Everything you could think of—hand, love, table, hot—was conveyed to these natives by another word, a word not English. Debbie had known that, and that was why she was good at languages. He hadn’t. He had expected everyone he met to drop this ridiculous charade and start speaking like normal people.

He stood up gingerly, breathing shallowly to make the pain in his stomach go away. After a while he began walking again, following the maze of the city in deeper. At last he found a small park and sat on a bench to rest.

A native came up to him almost immediately. “Cards?” the native said. “Look.” He opened his embroidered bag.

Charles sighed. He was too tired to walk away. “I don’t want any cards,” he said. “I don’t have any money.”

“Of course not,” the native said. “Look. They are beautiful, no?” He spread the brightly colored cards on the grass. Charles saw a baseball player, a fortune teller, a student, some designs he didn’t recognize. “Look,” the native said again and turned over the next card. “The tourist.”

Charles had to laugh, looking at the card of the man carrying suitcases. These people had been visited by tourists for so long that the tourist had become an archetype, a part of everyone’s reality like kings and jokers. He looked closer at the card. Those suitcases were familiar. And the tourist—He jerked back as though shocked. It was him.

He stood quickly and began to run, ignoring the pain in his stomach. The native did not follow.

He noticed the card sellers on every corner after that. They called to him even if he crossed the street to avoid them. “Tiraz, tiraz!” they called after him. He knew what it meant now. Tourist.

As the sun set he became ravenously hungry. He walked around a beggarwoman squatting in the street and saw, too late, a card seller waiting on the corner. The card seller held out something to him, some kind of pastry, and Charles took it, too hungry to refuse.

The pastry was filled with meat and very good. As though that were the signal, the other card sellers he passed began to give him things—a skin of wine, a piece of fish wrapped in paper. One of them handed him money, far more money than a deck of cards would cost. It was growing dark. He took a room for the night with the money.

A card seller was waiting for him at the corner the next day. “All right,” Charles said to him. Some of the belligerence had been knocked out of him. “I give up. What the hell’s going on around here?”

“Look,” the card seller said. He took his cards out of the embroidered bag. “It is in here.” He squatted on the sidewalk, oblivious to the dirt, the people walking by, the fumes from the street. The street, Charles noticed as he sat next to him, seemed to be paved with bottle caps.

The card seller spread the cards in front of him. “Look,” he said. “It is foretold. The cards are our oracle, our newspaper, our entertainment. All depends on how you read them.” Charles wondered where the man had learned to speak English, but he didn’t want to interrupt. “See,” the man said as he turned over a card. “Here you are. The tourist. It was foretold that you would come to the city.”

“And then what?” Charles asked. “How do I get back?”

“We have to ask the cards,” the man said. Idly he turned over another card, the ruins of Marmaz. “Maybe we wait for the next printing.”

“Next—” Charles said. “You mean the cards don’t stay the same?”

“No,” the man said. “Do your newspapers stay the same?”

“But—Who prints them?”

The man shrugged. “We do not know.” He turned over another card, a young blond woman.

“Debbie!” Charles said, startled.

“Yes,” the man said. “The woman you came with. We had to convince her to go, so that you would fulfill the prophecy and come to the city. And then we took your pieces of paper, the ones that are so important to the tiraz. That is a stupid way to travel, if I may say so. In the city the only papers that are important to us are the cards, and if a man loses his cards he can easily get more.”

“You—you took my passport?” Charles said. He did not feel as angry as he would like. “My passport and my plane tickets? Where are they?”

“Ah,” the man said. “For that you must ask the cards.” He took out another set of cards from his bag and gave them to Charles. Before Charles could answer he stood up and walked away.

By midday Charles had found the small park again. He sat down and spread out the cards, wondering if there was anything to what the card seller had said. Debbie did not appear in his deck. Was his an earlier printing, then, or a later one?

An American couple came up to him as he sat puzzling over the cards. “There are those cards again,” the woman said. “I just can’t get over how quaint they are. How much are you charging for yours?” she asked Charles. “The man down the street said he’d give them to us for ten.”

“Eight,” Charles said without hesitation, gathering them up.

The woman looked at her husband. “All right,” he said. He took a five and three ones from his wallet and gave them to Charles.

“Thank you, sor,” Charles said.

The man grunted. “I thought he spoke English very well,” the woman said as they walked away. “Didn’t you?”

A card seller gave him three more decks of cards and an embroidered bag later that day. By evening he had sold two of the decks. A few nights later, he joined the sellers of cards as they waited in the small park for the new printing of the cards. Somewhere a bell tolled midnight. A woman with beautiful long dark hair and an embroidered shawl came out of the night and silently took out the decks of cards from her bag. Her silver bracelets flashed in the moonlight. She gave Charles twelve decks. The men around him were already tearing the boxes open and spreading the cards, reading the past, or the present, or the future.

After about three years Charles got tired of selling the cards. His teeth had turned red from chewing the nut everyone chewed and he had learned to smoke the cigarettes wrapped in leaves. The other men had always told him that someone who spoke English as well as he did should be a tour guide, and finally he decided that they were right. Now he takes groups of tourists through the ruins of Marmaz, telling them about the god of the sun and the goddess of the moon and whatever else he chooses to make up that day. He has never found out what country he lives in.

GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER One

George Alec Effinger cites the theater of the absurd as a major influence on his writing and refers to his style of multilayered, free-ranging fiction as “surreal fantasy.” He first earned renown as a writer of stylish and challenging short stories in magazines and anthologies in the 1970s. His first novel, What Entropy Means to Me, is actually a quartet of linked stories that begin as a traditional quest fantasy but subtly transforms into a reflexive inquiry into family dynamics, political power struggles, and the act of artistic creation. Subsequent stories show a similar audacity of plotting and narrative structure. A number of his tales, notably “The Pinch-Hitters,” “Naked to the Invisible Eye,” “From Downtown at the Buzzer,” and “Breakaway,” draw on sports and games as their central metaphor. His novels Death in Florence, Those Gentle Voices: A Promethean Romance, and The Wolves of Memory evoke a sense of parallel realities and alternate worlds through their deployment of characters with the same names as those in short stories but with different personalities and motivations. Effinger has explored the intricate possibilities of time travel in his novels The Nick of Time and The Bird of Time and satirized heroic fantasy in Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Sword-person. His trilogy of novels featuring Marîd Audran ( When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss—all set in a future Middle East) is notable for its rendering of traditional Moslem culture receptive to the incursions of cyberpunk technology. Effinger’s numerous stories have been collected in Mixed Feelings, Irrational Numbers, Dirty Tricks, and Idle Pleasures. He has also written a number of film novelizations; a roundrobin novel, The Red Tape War; Nightmare Blue (with Gardner Dozois); and the mainstream novel Felicia.

IT WAS YEAR 30, Day 1, the anniversary of Dr. Leslie Gillette’s leaving Earth. Standing alone at the port, he stared out at the empty expanse of null space. “At eight o’clock, the temperature in the interstellar void is a negative two hundred seventy-three degrees Celsius,” he said. “Even without the wind chill factor, that’s cold. That’s pretty damn cold.”

A readout board had told him that morning that the ship and its lonely passenger would be reaching the vicinity of a star system before bedtime. Gillette didn’t recall the name of the star—it had only been a number in a catalogue. He had long since lost interest in them. In the beginning, in the first few years when Jessica had still been with him, he had eagerly asked the board to show them where in Earth’s night sky each star was located. They had taken a certain amount of pleasure in examining at close hand stars which they recognized as features of major constellations. That had passed. After they had visited a few thousand stars, they grew less interested. After they had discovered yet more planetary bodies, they almost became weary of the search. Almost. The Gillettes still had enough scientific curiosity to keep them going, farther and farther from their starting point.

But now the initial inspiration was gone. Rather than wait by the port until the electronic navigator slipped the ship back into normal space, he turned and left the control room. He didn’t feel like searching for habitable planets. It was getting late, and he could do it the next morning.

He fed his cat instead. He punched up the code and took the cat’s dinner from the galley chute. “Here you go,” said Gillette. “Eat it and be happy with it. I want to read a little before I go to sleep.” As he walked toward his quarters he felt the mild thrumming of the corridor’s floor and walls that meant the ship had passed into real space. The ship didn’t need directions from Gillette; it had already plotted a safe and convenient orbit in which to park, based on the size and characteristics of the star. The planets, if any, would all be there in the morning, waiting for Dr. Gillette to examine them, classify them, name them, and abandon them.

Unless, of course, he found life anywhere.

FINDING LIFE WAS one of the main purposes of the journey. Soon it had become the Gillettes’ purpose in life as well. They had set out as enthusiastic explorers: Dr. Leslie Gillette, thirty-five years old, already an influential writer and lecturer in theoretical exobiology, and his wife, Jessica Reid Gillette, who had been the chairman of the biochemistry department at a large middle-western state university. They had been married for eleven years, and had made the decision to go into field exploration after the death of their only child.

Now they were traveling through space toward the distant limits of the galaxy. Long, long ago the Earth’s sun had disappeared from view. The exobiology about which both Gillettes had thought and written and argued back home remained just what it had been then—mere theory. After visiting hundreds and hundreds of stellar systems, upon thousands of potential life-sustaining planets, they had yet to see or detect any form of life, no matter how primitive. The lab facilities on the landing craft returned the same frustrating answer with soul-deadening frequency: no life. Dead. Sterile. Year after year, the galaxy became to the Gillettes a vast and terrifying immensity of insensible rock and blazing gas.

“Do you remember,” asked Jessica one day, “what old man Hayden used to tell us?”

Gillette smiled. “I used to love to get that guy into an argument,” he said.

“He told me once that we might find life, but there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of finding intelligent life.”

Gillette recalled that discussion with pleasure. “And you called him a Terran chauvinist. I loved it. You made up a whole new category of bigotry, right on the spot. We thought he was such a conservative old codger. Now it looks like even he was too optimistic.”

Jessica stood behind her husband’s chair, reading what he was writing. “What would Hayden say, do you think, if he knew we haven’t found a goddamn thing?”

Gillette turned around and looked up at her. “I think even he would be disappointed,” he said. “Surprised, too.”

“This isn’t what I anticipated,” she said.

The complete absence of even the simplest of lifeforms was at first irritating, then puzzling, then ominous. Soon even Leslie Gillette, who always labored to keep separate his emotional thoughts and his logical ones, was compelled to realize that his empirical conclusions were shaping up in defiance of all the mathematical predictions man or machine had ever made. In the control room was a framed piece of vellum, on which was copied, in fine italic letters and numerals:

N = R_*f_pn_ef_lf_if_cL

This was a formula devised decades before to determine the approximate number of advanced technological civilizations man might expect to find elsewhere in his galaxy. The variables in the formula are given realistic values, according to the scientific wisdom of the time. N is determined by seven factors:

R_* or the mean rate of star formation in the galaxy (with an assigned value of

ten per year)

f_p or the percentage of stars with planets (close to one hundred percent)

n_e or the average number of planets in each star system with environments suitable for life (with an assigned value of one)

f₁ or the percentage of those planets on which life does, in fact, develop (close to one hundred percent)

f_i or the percentage of those planets on which intelligent life develops (ten percent) f_c or the percentage of those planets on which advanced technical civilization develops (ten percent)

L or the lifetime of the technical civilization (with an estimated value of ten million years).

These figures produced a predictive result stating that N—the number of advanced civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy—equals ten to the sixth power. A million. The Gillettes had cherished that formula through all the early years of disappointment. But they were not looking for an advanced civilization, they were looking for life. Any kind of life. Some six years after leaving Earth, Leslie and Jessica were wandering across the dry, sandy surface of a cool world circling a small, cool sun. “I don’t see any advanced civilizations,” said Jessica, stooping to stir the dust with the heavy gauntlet of her pressure suit.

“Nope,” said her husband, “not a hamburger stand in sight.” The sky was a kind of reddish purple, and he didn’t like looking into it very often. He stared down at the ground, watching Jessica trail her fingers in the lifeless dirt.

“You know,” she said, “that formula says that every system ought to have at least one planet suitable for life.”

Gillette shrugged. “A lot of them do,” he said. “But it also says that every planet that could sustain life, will sustain life, eventually.

“Maybe they were a little too enthusiastic when they picked the values for their variables.”

Jessica laughed. “Maybe.” She dug a shallow hole in the surface. “I keep hoping I’ll run across some ants or a worm or something.”

“Not here, honey,” said Gillette. “Come on, let’s go back.” She sighed and stood. Together they returned to the landing craft.

“What a waste,” said Jessica, as they prepared to lift off. “I’ve given my imagination all this freedom. I’m prepared to see anything down there, the garden variety of life or something more bizarre. You know, dancing crystals or thinking clouds. But I never prepared myself for so much nothing.”

The landing craft shot up through the thin atmosphere, toward the orbiting command ship. “A scientist has to be ready for this kind of thing,” said Gillette wistfully. “But I agree with you. Experience seems to be defying the predictions in a kind of scary way.”

Jessica loosened her safety belt and took a deep breath. “Mathematically unlikely, I’d call it. I’m going to look at the formula tonight and see which of those variables is the one screwing everything up.”

Gillette shook his head. “I’ve done that time and time again,” he said. “It won’t get you very far. Whatever you decided, the result will still be a lot different from what we’ve found.” On the myriad worlds they had visited, they never found anything as simple as algae or protozoans, let alone intelligent life. Their biochemical sensors had never detected anything that even pointed in that direction, like a complex protein. Only rock and dust and empty winds and lifeless pools.

IN THE MORNING, just as he had predicted, the planets were still there. There were five of them, circling a modest star, type G3, not very different from Earth’s Sun. He spoke to the ship’s computer: “I name the star Hannibal. Beginning with the nearest to Hannibal, I name the planets: Huck, Tom, Jim, Becky, and Aunt Polly. We will proceed with the examinations.” The ship’s instruments could take all the necessary readings, but Gillette wouldn’t trust its word on the existence of life. That question was so important that he felt he had to make the final determination himself.

Huck was a Mars-sized ball of nickel and iron, a rusty brown color, pocked with craters, hot and dry and dead. Tom was larger and darker, cooler, but just as damaged by impacts and just as dead. Jim was Earthlike; it had a good-sized atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen, its range of temperatures stayed generally between - 30°C and + 50°C, and there was a great abundance of water on the planet’s surface. But there was no life, none on the rocky, dusty land, none in the mineral-salted water, nothing, not so much as a single cyanobacterium. Jim was the best hope Gillette had in the Hannibal system, but he investigated Becky and Aunt Polly as well. They were the less-dense gas giants of the system, although neither was so large as Uranus or Neptune. There was no life in their soupy atmospheres or on the igneous surfaces of their satellites. Gillette didn’t bother to name the twenty-three moons of the five planets; he thought he’d leave that to the people who came after him. If any ever did.

Next, Gillette had to take care of the second purpose of the mission. He set out an orbiting transmission gate around Jim, the most habitable of the five planets. Now a ship following in his path could cross the scores of light-years instantaneously from the gate Gillette had set out at his previous stop. He couldn’t even remember what that system had been like or what he had named it. After all these years they were all confused in his mind, particularly because they were so identical in appearance, so completely empty of life.

He sat at a screen and looked down on Jim, at the tan, sandy continents, the blue seas, the white clouds and polar caps. Gillette’s cat, a gray Maine coon, his only companion, climbed into his lap. The cat’s name was Benny, great-grandson of Methyl and Ethyl, the two kittens Jessica had brought along. Gillette scratched behind the animal’s ears and under his chin. “Why aren’t there any cats down there?” he asked it. Benny had only a long purr for an answer. After a while Gillette tired of staring down at the silent world. He had made his survey, had put out the gate, and now there was nothing to do but send the information back toward Earth and move on. He gave the instructions to the ship’s computer, and in half an hour the stars had disappeared, and Gillette was traveling again through the darkness of null space.

HE REMEMBERED HOW excited they had been about the mission, some thirty years before. He and Jessica had put in their application, and they had been chosen for reasons Gillette had not fully understood. “My father thinks that anyone who wants to go chasing across the galaxy for the rest of his life must be a little crazy,” said Jessica.

Gillette smiled. “A little unbalanced, maybe, but not crazy.”

They were lying in the grass behind their house, looking up into the night sky, wondering which of the bright diamond stars they would soon visit. The project seemed like a wonderful vacation from their grief, an opportunity to examine their lives and their relationship without the million remembrances that tied them to the past. “I told my father that it was a marvelous opportunity for us,” she said. “I told him that from a scientific point of view, it was the most exciting possibility we could ever hope for.”

“Did he believe you?”

“Look, Leslie, a shooting star. Make a wish. No, I don’t think he believed me. He said the project’s board of governors agreed with him and the only reason we’ve been selected is that we’re crazy or unbalanced or whatever in just the right ways.”

Gillette tickled his wife’s ear with a long blade of grass. “Because we might spend the rest of our lives staring down at stars and worlds.”

“I told him five years at the most, Leslie. Five years. I told him that as soon as we found anything we could definitely identify as living matter, we’d turn around and come home. And if we have any kind of luck, we might see it in one of our first stops. We may be gone only a few months or a year.”

“I hope so,” said Gillette. They looked into the sky, feeling it press down on them with a kind of awesome gravity, as if the infinite distances had been converted to mass and weight. Gillette closed his eyes. “I love you,” he whispered.

“I love you, too, Leslie,” murmured Jessica. “Are you afraid?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” she said. “I might have been afraid to go with you if you weren’t worried, too. But there’s nothing to be afraid of. We’ll have each other, and it’ll be exciting. It will be more fun than spending the next couple of years here, doing the same thing, giving lectures to grad students and drinking sherry with the Nobel crowd.”

Gillette laughed. “I just hope that when we get back, someone remembers who we are. I can just see us spending two years going out and coming back, and nobody even knows what the project was all about.”

Their good-bye to her father was more difficult. Mr. Reid was still not sure why they wanted to leave Earth. “A lot of young people suffer a loss, the way you have,” he said. “But they go on somehow. They don’t just throw their lives away.”

“We’re not throwing anything away,” said Jessica. “Dad, I guess you’d have to be a biologist to understand. There’s more excitement in the chance of discovering life somewhere out there than in anything we might do if we stayed here. And we won’t be gone long. It’s field work, the most challenging kind. Both of us have always preferred that to careers at the blackboards in some university.”

Reid shrugged and kissed his daughter. “If you’re sure,” was all he had to say. He shook hands with Gillette.

Jessica looked up at the massive spacecraft. “I guess we are,” she said. There was nothing more to do or say. They left Earth not many hours later, and they watched the planet dwindle in the ports and on the screens.

The experience of living on the craft was strange at first, but they quickly settled into routines. They learned that while the idea of interstellar flight was exciting, the reality was duller than either could have imagined. The two kittens had no trouble adjusting, and the Gillettes were glad for their company. When the craft was half a million miles from Earth, the computer slipped it into null space, and they were truly isolated for the first time.

It was terrifying. There was no way to communicate with Earth while in null space. The craft became a self-contained little world, and in dangerous moments when Gillette allowed his imagination too much freedom, the silent emptiness around him seemed like a new kind of insanity or death. Jessica’s presence calmed him, but he was still grateful when the ship came back into normal space, at the first of their unexplored stellar systems.

Their first subject was a small, dim, class-M star, the most common type in the galaxy, with only two planetary bodies and a lot of asteroidal debris circling around it. “What are we going to name the star, dear?” asked Jessica. They both looked at it through the port, feeling a kind of parental affection.

Gillette shrugged. “I thought it would be easier if we stuck to the mythological system they’ve been using at home.”

“That’s a good idea, I guess. We’ve got one star with two little planets wobbling around it.”

“Didn’t Apollo have . . . No, I’m wrong. I thought—”

Jessica turned away from the port. “It reminds me of Odin and his two ravens.”

“He had two ravens?”

“Sure,” said Jessica, “Thought and Memory. Hugin and Mugin.”

“Fine. We’ll name the star Odin, and the planets whatever you just said. I’m sure glad I have you. You’re a lot better at this than I am.”

Jessica laughed. She looked forward to exploring the planets. It would be the first break they had in the monotony of the journey. Neither Leslie nor Jessica anticipated finding life on the two desolate worlds, but they were glad to give them a thorough examination. They wandered awe-struck over the bleak, lonely landscapes of Hugin and Mugin, completing their tests, and at last returned to their orbiting craft. They sent their findings back to Earth, set out the first of the transmission gates, and, not yet feeling very disappointed, left the Odin system. They both felt that they were in contact with their home, regardless of the fact that their message would take a long time to reach Earth, and they were moving away too quickly ever to receive any. But they both knew that if they wanted, they could still turn around and head back to Earth.

Their need to know drove them on. The loneliness had not yet become unbearable. The awful fear had not yet begun.

The gates were for the use of the people who followed the Gillettes into the unsettled reaches of the galaxy; they could be used in succession to travel outward, but the travelers couldn’t return through them. They were like ostrich eggs filled with water and left by natives in the African desert; they were there to make the journey safer and more comfortable for others, to enable the others to travel even farther.

Each time the Gillettes left one star system for another, through null space, they put a greater gulf of space and time between themselves and the world of their birth. “Sometimes I feel very strange,” admitted Gillette, after they had been outbound for more than two years. “I feel as if any contact we still have with Earth is an illusion, something we’ve invented just to maintain our sanity. I feel like we’re donating a large part of our lives to something that might never benefit anyone.”

Jessica listened somberly. She had had the same feelings, but she hadn’t wanted to let her husband know. “Sometimes I think that the life in the university classroom is the most desirable thing in the world. Sometimes I damn myself for not seeing that before. But it doesn’t last long. Every time we go down to a new world, I still feel the same hope. It’s only the weeks in null space that get to me. The alienation is so intense.”

Gillette looked at her mournfully. “What does it really matter if we do discover life?” he asked.

She looked at him in shocked silence for a moment. “You don’t really mean that,” she said at last.

Gillette’s scientific curiosity rescued him, as it had more than once in the past. “No,” he said softly, “I don’t. It does matter.” He picked up the three kittens from Ethyl’s litter. “Just let me find something like these waiting on one of these endless planets, and it will all be worthwhile.”

Months passed, and the Gillettes visited more stars and more planets, always with the same result. After three years they were still rocketing away from Earth. The fourth year passed, and the fifth. Their hope began to dwindle.

“It bothers me just a little,” said Gillette as they sat beside a great gray ocean, on a world they had named Carraway. There was a broad beach of pure white sand backed by high dunes. Waves broke endlessly and came to a frothy end at their feet. “I mean, that we never see anybody behind us, or hear anything. I know it’s impossible, but I used to have this crazy dream that somebody was following us through the gates and then jumped ahead of us through null space. Whoever it was waited for us at some star we hadn’t got to yet.”

Jessica made a flat mound of wet sand. “This is just like Earth, Leslie,” she said. “If you don’t notice the chartreuse sky. And if you don’t think about how there isn’t any grass in the dunes and no shells on the beach. Why would somebody follow us like that?”

Gillette lay back on the clean white sand and listened to the pleasant sound of the surf. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe there had been some absurd kind of life on one of those planets we checked out years ago. Maybe we made a mistake and overlooked something, or misread a meter or something. Or maybe all the nations on Earth had wiped themselves out in a war and I was the only living human male and the lonely women of the world were throwing a party for me.”

“You’re crazy, honey,” said Jessica. She flipped some damp sand onto the legs of his pressure suit.

“Maybe Christ had come back and felt the situation just wasn’t complete without us, too. For a while there, every time we bounced back into normal space around a star, I kind of half-hoped to see another ship, waiting.” Gillette sat up again. “It never happened, though.”

“I wish I had a stick,” said Jessica. She piled more wet sand on her mound, looked at it for a few seconds, and then looked up at her husband. “Could there be something happening at home?” she asked.

“Who knows what’s happened in these five years? Think of all we’ve missed, sweetheart. Think of the books and the films, Jessie. Think of the scientific discoveries we haven’t heard about. Maybe there’s peace in the Mideast and a revolutionary new source of power and a black woman in the White House. Maybe the Cubs have won a pennant, Jessie. Who knows?”

“Don’t go overboard, dear,” she said. They stood and brushed off the sand that clung to their suits. Then they started back toward the landing craft.

Onboard the orbiting ship an hour later, Gillette watched the cats. They didn’t care anything about the Mideast; maybe they had the right idea. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said to his wife. “I’ll tell you who does know what’s been happening. The people back home know. They know all about everything. The only thing they don’t know is what’s going on with us, right now. And somehow I have the feeling that they’re living easier with their ignorance than I am with mine.” The kitten that would grow up to be Benny’s mother tucked herself up into a near little bundle and fell asleep.

“You’re feeling cut off,” said Jessica.

“Of course I am,” said Gillette. “Remember what you used to say to me? Before we were married, when I told you I only wanted to go on with my work, and you told me that one human being was no human being? Remember? You were always saying things like that, just so I’d have to ask you what the hell you were talking about. And then you’d smile and deliver some little story you had all planned out. I guess it made you happy. So you said, ‘One human being is no human being, and I said, ‘What does that mean?’ and you went on about how if I were going to live my life all alone, I might as well not live it at all. I can’t remember exactly the way you put it. You have this crazy way of saying things that don’t have the least little bit of logic to them but always make sense. You said I figured I could sit in my ivory tower and look at things under a microscope and jot down my findings and send out little announcements now and then about what I’m doing and how I’m feeling and I shouldn’t be surprised if nobody gives a damn. You said that I had to live among people, that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get away from it. And that I couldn’t climb a tree and decide I was going to start my own new species. But you were wrong, Jessica. You can get away from people. Look at us.”

The sound of his voice was bitter and heavy in the air. “Look at me,” he murmured. He looked at his reflection and it frightened him. He looked old; worse than that, he looked just a little demented. He turned away quickly, his eyes filling with tears.

“We’re not truly cut off,” she said softly. “Not as long as we’re together.”

“Yes,” he said, but he still felt set apart, his humanity diminishing with the passing months. He performed no function that he considered notably human. He read meters and dials and punched buttons; machines could do that, animals could be trained to do the same. He felt discarded, like a bad spot on a potato, cut out and thrown away.

Jessica prevented his depression from deepening into madness. He was far more susceptible to the effects of isolation than she. Their work sustained Jessica, but it only underscored their futility for her husband.

“I HAVE STRANGE thoughts, Jessica,” he admitted to her, one day during their ninth year of exploration. “They just come into my head now and then. At first I didn’t pay any attention at all. Then, after a while, I noticed that I was paying attention, even though when I stopped to analyze them I could see the ideas were still foolish.”

“What kind of thoughts?” she asked. They prepared the landing craft to take them down to a large, ruddy world.

Gillette checked both pressure suits and stowed them aboard the lander. “Sometimes I get the feeling that there aren’t any other people anywhere, that they were all the invention of my imagination. As if we never came from Earth, that home and everything I recall are just delusions and false memories. As if we’ve always been on this ship, forever and ever, and we’re absolutely alone in the whole universe.” As he spoke, he gripped the heavy door of the lander’s airlock until his knuckles turned white. He felt his heart speeding up, he felt his mouth going dry, and he knew that he was about to have another anxiety attack.

“It’s all right, Leslie,” said Jessica soothingly. “Think back to the time we had together at home. That couldn’t be a lie.”

Gillette’s eyes opened wider. For a moment he had difficulty breathing. “Yes,” he whispered, “it could be a lie. You could be a hallucination, too.” He began to weep, seeing exactly where his ailing mind was leading him.

Jessica held him while the attack worsened and then passed away. In a few moments he had regained his usual sensible outlook. “This mission is much tougher than I thought it would be,” he whispered.

Jessica kissed his cheek. “We have to expect some kind of problems after all these years,” she said. “We never planned on it taking this long.”

The system they were in consisted of another class-M star and twelve planets. “A lot of work, Jessica,” he said, brightening a little at the prospect. “It ought to keep us busy for a couple of weeks. That’s better than falling through null space.”

“Yes, dear,” she said. “Have you started thinking of names yet?” That was becoming the most tedious part of the mission—coming up with enough new names for all the stars and their satellites. After eight thousand systems, they had exhausted all the mythological and historical and geographical names they could remember. They now took turns, naming planets after baseball players and authors and film stars.

They were going down to examine a desert world they had named Rick, after the character in Casablanca. Even though it was unlikely that it would be suitable for life, they still needed to examine it firsthand, just on the off-chance, just in case, just for ducks, as Gillette’s mother used to say.

That made him pause, a quiet smile on his lips. He hadn’t thought of that expression in years. That was a critical point in Gillette’s voyage; never again, while Jessica was with him, did he come so close to losing his mental faculties. He clung to her and to his memories as a shield against the cold and destructive forces of the vast emptiness of space.

Once more the years slipped by. The past blurred into an indecipherable haze, and the future did not exist. Living in the present was at once the Gillettes’ salvation and curse. They spent their time among routines and changeless duties that were no more tedious than what they had known on Earth, but no more exciting either.

As their shared venture neared its twentieth year, the great disaster befell Gillette: on an unnamed world hundreds of light-years from Earth, on a rocky hill overlooking a barren sandstone valley, Jessica Gillette died. She bent over to collect a sample of soil; a worn seam in her pressure suit parted; there was a sibilant warning of gases passing through the lining, into the suit. She fell to the stony ground, dead. Her husband watched her die, unable to give her any help, so quickly did the poison kill her. He sat beside her as the planet’s day turned to night, and through the long, cold hours until dawn.

He buried her on that world, which he named Jessica, and left her there forever. He set out a transmission gate in orbit around the world, finished his survey of the rest of the system, and went on to the next star. He was consumed with grief, and for many days he did not leave his bed.

One morning Benny, the kitten, scrabbled up beside Gillette. The kitten had not been fed in almost a week. “Benny,” murmured the lonely man, “I want you to realize something. We can’t get home. If I turned this ship around right this very minute and powered home all the way through null space, it would take twenty years. I’d be in my seventies if I lived long enough to see Earth. I never expected to live that long.” From then on, Gillette performed his duties in a mechanical way, with none of the enthusiasm he had shared with Jessica. There was nothing else to do but go on, and so he did, but the loneliness clung to him like a shadow of death.

He examined his results, and decided to try to make a tentative hypothesis. “It’s unusual data, Benny,” he said. “There has to be some simple explanation. Jessica always argued that there didn’t have to be any explanation at all, but now I’m sure there must be. There has to be some meaning behind all of this, somewhere. Now tell me, why haven’t we found Indication Number One of life on any of these twenty-odd thousand worlds we’ve visited?”

Benny didn’t have much to suggest at this point. He followed Gillette with his big yellow eyes as the man walked around the room. “I’ve gone over this before,” said Gillette, “and the only theories I come up with are extremely hard to live with. Jessica would have thought I was crazy for sure. My friends on Earth would have a really difficult time even listening to them, Benny, let alone seriously considering them. But in an investigation like this, there comes a point when you have to throw out all the predicted results and look deep and long at what has actually occurred. This isn’t what I wanted, you know. It sure isn’t what Jessica and I expected. But it is what happened.”

Gillette sat down at his desk. He thought for a moment about Jessica, and he was brought to the verge of tears. But he thought about how he had dedicated the remainder of his life to her, and to her dream of finding an answer at one of the stellar systems yet to come.

He devoted himself to getting that answer for her. The one blessing in all the years of disappointment was that the statistical data were so easy to comprehend. He didn’t need a computer to help in arranging the information: there was just one long, long string of zeros. “Science is built on theories,” thought Gillette. “Some theories may be untestable in actual practice, but are accepted because of an overwhelming preponderance of empirical data. For instance, there may not actually exist any such thing as gravity; it may be that things have been falling down consistently because of some outrageous statistical quirk. Any moment now things may start to fall up and down at random, like pennies landing heads or tails. And then the Law of Gravity will have to be amended.”

That was the first, and safest, part of his reasoning. Next came the feeling that there was one over-riding possibility that would adequately account for the numbing succession of lifeless planets. “I don’t really want to think about that yet,” he murmured, speaking to Jessica’s spirit. “Next week, maybe. I think we’ll visit a couple more systems first.”

And he did. There were seven planets around an M-class star, and then a G star with eleven, and a K star with fourteen; all the worlds were impact-cratered and pitted and smoothed with lava flow. Gillette held Benny in his lap after inspecting the three systems. “Thirty-two more planets,” he said. “What’s the grand total now?” Benny didn’t know.

Gillette didn’t have anyone with whom to debate the matter. He could not consult scientists on Earth; even Jessica was lost to him. All he had was his patient gray cat, who couldn’t be looked to for many subtle contributions. “Have you noticed,” asked the man, “that the farther we get from Earth, the more homogeneous the universe looks?” If Benny didn’t understand the word homogeneous, he didn’t show it. “The only really unnatural thing we’ve seen in all these years has been Earth itself. Life on Earth is the only truly anomalous factor we’ve witnessed in twenty years of exploration. What does that mean to you?”

At that point, it didn’t mean anything to Benny, but it began to mean something to Gillette. He shrugged. “None of my friends were willing to consider even the possibility that Earth might be alone in the universe, that there might not be anything else alive anywhere in all the infinite reaches of space. Of course, we haven’t looked at much of those infinite reaches, but going zero for twenty-three thousand means that something unusual is happening.” When the Gillettes had left Earth two decades before, prevailing scientific opinion insisted that life had to be out there somewhere, even though there was no proof, either directly or indirectly. There had to be life; it was only a matter of stumbling on it. Gillette looked at the old formula, still hanging where it had been throughout the whole voyage. “If one of those factors is zero,” he thought, “then the whole product is zero. Which factor could it be?” There was no hint of an answer, but that particular question was becoming less important to Gillette all the time.

AND SO IT had come down to this: Year 30 and still outward bound. The end of Gillette’s life was somewhere out there in the black stillness. Earth was a pale memory, less real now than last night’s dreams. Benny was an old cat, and soon he would die as Jessica had died, and Gillette would be absolutely alone. He didn’t like to think about that, but the notion intruded on his consciousness again and again.

Another thought arose just as often. It was an irrational thought, he knew, something he had scoffed at thirty years before. His scientific training led him to examine ideas by the steady, cold light of reason, but this new concept would not hold still for such a mechanical inspection.

He began to think that perhaps Earth was alone in the universe, the only planet among billions to be blessed with life. “I have to admit again that I haven’t searched through a significant fraction of all the worlds in the galaxy,” he said, as if he were defending his feelings to Jessica. “But I’d be a fool if I ignored thirty years of experience. What does it mean, if I say that Earth is the only planet with life? It isn’t a scientific or mathematical notion. Statistics alone demand other worlds with some form of life. But what can overrule such a biological imperative?” He waited for a guess from Benny; none seemed to be forthcoming. “Only an act of faith,” murmured Gillette. He paused, thinking that he might hear a trill of dubious laughter from Jessica’s spirit, but there was only the humming, ticking silence of the spacecraft.

“A single act of creation, on Earth,” said Gillette. “Can you imagine what any of the people at the university would have said to that? I wouldn’t have been able to show my face around there again. They would have revoked every credential I had. My subscription to Science would have been canceled. The local PBS channel would have refused my membership.

“But what else can I think? If any of those people had spent the last thirty years the way we have, they’d have arrived at the same conclusion. I didn’t come to this answer easily, Jessica, you know that. You know how I was. I never had any faith in anything I hadn’t witnessed myself. I didn’t even believe in the existence of George Washington, let alone first principles. But there comes a time when a scientist must accept the most unappealing explanation, if it is the only one left that fits the facts.”

It made no difference to Gillette whether or not he was correct, whether he had investigated a significant number of worlds to substantiate his conclusion. He had had to abandon, one by one, all of his prejudices, and made at last a leap of faith. He knew what seemed to him to be the truth, not through laboratory experiments but by an impulse he had never felt before.

For a few days he felt comfortable with the idea. Life had been created on Earth for whatever reasons, and nowhere else. Each planet devoid of life that Gillette discovered became from then on a confirming instance of this hypothesis. But then, one night, it occurred to him how horribly he had cursed himself. If Earth were the only home of life, why was Gillette hurtling farther and farther from that place, farther from where he too had been made, farther from where he was supposed to be?

What had he done to himself—and to Jessica?

“My impartiality failed me, sweetheart,” he said to her disconsolately. “If I could have stayed cold and objective, at least I would have had peace of mind. I would never have known how I damned both of us. But I couldn’t; the impartiality was a lie, from the very beginning. As soon as we went to measure something, our humanity got in the way. We couldn’t be passive observers of the universe, because we’re alive and we’re people and we think and feel. And so we were doomed to learn the truth eventually, and we were doomed to suffer because of it.” He wished Jessica were still alive, to comfort him as she had so many other times. He had felt isolated before, but it had never been so bad. Now he understood the ultimate meaning of alienation—a separation from his world and the force that had created it. He wasn’t supposed to be here, wherever it was. He belonged on Earth, in the midst of life. He stared out through the port, and the infinite blackness seemed to enter into him, merging with his mind and spirit. He felt the awful coldness in his soul.

For a while Gillette was incapacitated by his emotions. When Jessica died, he had bottled up his grief; he had never really permitted himself the luxury of mourning her. Now, with the added weight of his new convictions, her loss struck him again, harder than ever before. He allowed the machines around him to take complete control of the mission in addition to his well-being. He watched the stars shine in the darkness as the ship fell on through real space. He stroked Benny’s thick gray fur and remembered everything he had so foolishly abandoned.

In the end it was Benny that pulled Gillette through. Between strokes the man’s hand stopped in mid-air; Gillette experienced a flash of insight, what the oriental philosophers call satori, a moment of diamond-like clarity. He knew intuitively that he had made a mistake that had led him into self-pity. If life had been created on Earth, then all living things were a part of that creation, wherever they might be. Benny, the gray-haired cat, was a part of it, even locked into this tin can between the stars. Gillette himself was a part, wherever he traveled. That creation was just as present in the spacecraft as on Earth itself: it had been foolish for Gillette to think that he ever could separate himself from it—which was just what Jessica had always told him.

“Benny!” said Gillette, a tear streaking his wrinkled cheek. The cat observed him benevolently. Gillette felt a pleasant warmth overwhelm him as he was released at last from his loneliness. “It was all just a fear of death,” he whispered. “I was just afraid to die. I wouldn’t have believed it! I thought I was beyond all that. It feels good to be free of it.”

And when he looked out again at the wheeling stars, the galaxy no longer seemed empty and black, but vibrant and thrilling with a creative energy. He knew that what he felt could not be shaken, even if the next world he visited was a lush garden of life—that would not change a thing, because his belief was no longer based on numbers and facts, but on a stronger sense within him.

IT MADE NO difference at all where Gillette was headed, what stars he would visit: wherever he went, he understood at last, he was going home.