O-Zone

37

The year of events was not over. Fizzy was gone and Moura noticed that everyone had returned to live quietly, at half-speed, renewing themselves on a routine. It was like load-shedding, a pause from the strain of having lived so fiercely for so long. But Moura was still alert — dissatisfied.

Then one day at the end of that same year Hooper called her to say that he had not forgotten the agreement he had made months before, and she had wondered What agreement? The earlier part of the year had been like another age, and most of it was buried and forgotten until certain words were mentioned, always the ambiguous ones that stirred her, like alien or Owner or perimeter or clinic or O-Zone. They had all acquired different meanings this year.

She was alone. Hardy was on an Asfalt project somewhere in Africa, but when had he ever mattered to her?

"We're back in business," Hooper said, explaining that he had just returned from California. He was flying everywhere these days, and not only to the south and west, where he had warehouses, but to Europe, and his factories in Mexico and India. He was energetic but still narrow and secretive — still in love, very frisky.

He had said to Moura, "Once you get used to having showers with someone else, it isn't the same when you've got to take one alone. It's like sleeping alone. It doesn't work."

It astonished Moura that he could say such a thing to her, but she knew that it was love that had made him insensitive. You could not be offended by his mushy logic.

He traveled for Bligh's sake, and they were always together. He was crowing Look! See! He took her by the hand and showed her the extent of what he owned — See how big! See how lovely! See how valuable! He showed her the world; and he had never been happier, for Hooper, who had never had a child because he had never had a wife he had trusted, now had both — and more. Bligh was a wife, a daughter, a companion, a friend.

Hooper had the boring habit of telling you how old she was — to Moura's annoyance there was never a polite reply to this old news. You just had to pretend that it was somehow a tremendous virtue to be fifteen years old; and really you wanted to laugh at the buffoon showing the space between his teeth and telling you how healthy this child was. Bligh, to her credit, found those moments awkward; and then Hooper seemed like the child, and she the adult. And Moura thought that in all such relationships that must be the case.

In other respects, Bligh must have satisfied a craving in Hooper for a child he could fondle and fuss over and blame— and rely on, too. "I've got to get back and give her a bath," he told Moura one evening, and she didn't know whether to regard that as very sweet or very perverted — but in any case she had always found Hooper both. And often it seemed that it was not even that one was an adult and the other a child, but rather that one was a child and the other a doll.

Yet it touched Moura to see this billionaire trying to impress the alien. It had a grotesque poignancy, like poor confused Fizzy long ago quacking, "Bremstrahlung!" to a room full of party guests. Hooper's love affair would work as long as he supervised everything and kept his own secrets. He was in charge, and so far Bligh was still a comparative stranger. While she remained a stranger she was dependent on him, and he was happy. Hooper's power lay in dazzling her.

Moura saw them fairly often, though she could never effectively separate them. It was always "we" now, and Moura was never able to have a private talk with the girl. It was as though Hooper wanted to prevent Moura from knowing too much, or saying too much — as if Hooper did not want Moura to influence her. But it was so silly of him. Moura knew nearly everything; and Bligh must have been very shrewd and hungry or else she would not have lasted this long with Hooper.

Everyone now knew that Bligh was an alien on a false ID.

Moura felt that it was what most men wanted: a simple soul to manipulate — a doll to play with. Owners captured them and screwed them and killed them. There was a story going around that Bligh was diseased. Moura knew it was not so. It was said because she was an alien. It wasn't true anymore to say that all aliens had diseases. Everyone had diseases. The difference was that Owners had doctors. As lovers and workers, aliens were in demand. Moura sometimes had the heretical thought that it was perhaps the aliens and not the Owners who would determine the fate of the world; but though the heresy gave her life — nothing lifted her spirits like the thought of rebellion these days — she also wondered: Am I thinking that because Fizzy is among them?

Some of them weren't so simple! And Hooper was also grateful to Bligh. She was his project — even he used that patronizing word — but she was also sensible and she was clearly able to make him happy. Moura guessed that underlying everything was a powerful sexual connection, as mysterious and unknowable as in any pair of people. It was a hot animating secret, and it energized them. In the sloppy and lavish ways that couples made themselves happy they were triumphant, and Moura admitted to herself that she envied them that happiness.

Hooper had such a large capacity for it. He was lordly with the girl, but he was also a boy, a husband, a father: Bligh brought out all these sides of him, and for whatever reason— her ingenuity, her peculiar beauty, her youth, the fact that she was illegal — there was no room, no time, for anyone else in Hooper's life. So they lived exclusively in each other's company. It might have destroyed another relationship. It strengthened theirs. Hooper was busy and interested, and who knew what this concentrated intimacy did for their sex life? Moura knew Hooper to be an avid photographer. His wife and girlfriends had always called him "the cameraman." You saw the gap between his front teeth and somehow you knew he was taking your picture. Moura did not want to know more than that. She had seen the strobe lights flashing at his windows in Coldharbor, and heard Hardy: "He's at it again."

There might have been another stimulus, every Owner's worry about his alien lover — that the alien was illegal and temporary and would never really belong to him, and it was because Hooper feared losing her that he behaved well toward her even though he monopolized her.

Nonetheless, Hooper was happy, and after this frightful year Moura wanted something for herself.

"I want happiness," she said.

"Why not ecstasy? It's the best drug." That was the new Hooper talking.

Now he was back from California, saying, "I'm a man of my word — I'm keeping my part of the bargain," and Moura had no idea what he meant.

She was smiling because he was — her smile an empty reflection of his huge illuminated grin.

"You've forgotten!" he yelled at her. All this energy in him made her tired. He was so pleased with himself. Did he still say that he had everything that he had ever wanted? That he was the luckiest man in the world?

Just his broad face was a boast, and the set of his teeth in his gaping mouth defeated her and made her feel weak. Hooper did not need to crow. He was somewhere and settled, that was obvious; she was nowhere, and for her it had been a year of losses and disappearances — Fizzy, Hardy, Hooper; and deaths too — stupid Willis Murdick up in smoke — and that had changed Holly.

Moura said, "Is it something about Fizzy?"

"No, the other man in your life."

She was not thinking: Hardy. Her mind was guiltily on Barry Eubank, who had stopped in to see Hardy; and she had detained him, simply asked for it by saying God, I'm horny or something equally awful. An hour of that, and now the word "man" confused her as much as any of the ambiguous code words. It was so easy to sleep with the husbands of her friends: her women friends always seemed to be pimping without being aware of it.

"Why are you blushing?"

She said, "Don't tease me, Hoop."

"That guy you were looking for in the New York area— remember 'Boy'?" Hooper said. "I think we found him."

At once she remembered more than she had ever dared, and he saw the eager questions in her eyes.

"In California, A week ago. Landslip. We had a network of warehouse facilities out there, before it cracked, and I'd been neglecting them—"

Get to the point, she thought. She was impatient now that she knew the subject. He was talking about Allbright's warehouses, his work, his travel, where "we" had gone — he wanted to be given credit for taking trouble. He was making Moura pay for the information by making her listen to the details of how he had discovered it.

"— those warehouses are scattered all over southern California, in the most godawful places. You should see the zone."

He talked about the crack itself, how it opened, how you could see it from the air, the fault that had tipped the cities over and brought ruin and divided the state and given the name to the precarious new zone of Landslip.

She said, "Where is he?"

"I'm coming to that," he said. He looked pleased by her impatience, because it proved that she was really listening,

"I know about the crack," she said. "Everyone does."

"But do you know what it did to communications? They were without power for over a year — some areas still don't have juice. They've got dead lines, no phones except yelling out the window, not that they have windows. The computers went down, just died or strangled, and some dropped completely out of the system. I'm talking about security. Some are still out and are linking up slowly. The crack not only split up houses and roads, but also—"

Lives, relationships, businesses, families — she knew what was coming, but Hooper went on at his own speed, keeping her swinging, making her work for what she wanted to find out.

"And security systems," he finally said. "They lost files! It was like being bombed! No records! No files, no wires, no information — the simplest data, like names and addresses. It's like O-Zone. It's unplugged."

All this while Moura thought how much easier Hooper had been when he was gloomy and womanless; and he had started to worry when he had stopped wanting anything — his imagination collapsed. It had been terrible for him. But he had been so simple then; so quiet. Now with this girl up in his tower he was so manic and spirited, ingenious and boring with his tiresome teasing. What an effort he was when things were going his way — so full of talk!

She could not separate his energetic good humor from his boasting. It seemed like the same thing.

She thought: I have no one.

He was still describing how parts of Landslip were not plugged in! She said, "But you plugged them in."

"Don't hurry me. I used my head, I know they're reconnecting the lines out there, so I kept hunting. I put out a query and let it float. Know what that means?"

"I can guess."

But he insisted on explaining.

She tuned out until he said, "I had this idea that if his name wasn't in any system, and the lines were down in Landslip, that's where he might be. His name just came up."

"He's in California?"

Hooper smiled, but it was not a smile — it was an expression she knew from the faces of all her wealthy friends, who hated to be hurried, or interrupted, or given advice. The rich went at their own speed and held to the view that they were always in charge.

"Landslip?" she said.

He shook his head to imply that she was being too impatient.

"Hooper, this is serious!"

He did not flinch at her cry. He stared at her and sized her up and made her feel weak again, and then he gave in.

"Just outside Landslip, apparently. A place called Forestdale."

"He's definitely there?"

"The fact sheet gave it as his last known address."

"He might have moved!"

"It was recent — he could be there," Hooper said, becoming stern under Moura's questioning. "He's not in regular touch."

"He's an Owner!"

Hooper relaxed, seeing that she was wrong. "That's the funny part," he said. "He's not down as an Owner. He's listed as unclassified."

"He must have lost his classification," Moura said, and remembered the ruined houses and towers around New York where she had searched for him. "I wonder how."

"There's only two ways: tax fraud, nonpayment, or criminality, and the Feds snatch it — or else you hand it over. He didn't have any convictions — a few noncriminal offenses, ID violations. I mean, he doesn't have a card."

"You're saying that he declassified himself! No one's that stupid!"

She knew at once she had said too much.

"It's been known to happen," Hooper said. His eyes were empty.

Like her, he must have been thinking of Fizzy. But she was grateful to him for not mentioning the boy's name. She did not want to be reminded of how completely he had gone. He had been untraceable from the day he had left, and she had thought: What freedom these aliens have! They could move, they could travel, they could adopt any identity they liked. But an Owner was fixed and measured — and an Owner was so easy to find. Yet the Owner was always safe, because he was always monitored. The alien was always in danger, because he had no legal existence. Fizzy had chosen that: he had vanished.

"Moura, I'm sure your man's there."

She remembered which man.

"A smile, at last," Hooper said.

This was the news she needed: that Fizzy's father had been found. It was not merely that he would help her understand Fizzy and give her access to his mind. She needed it more because over this past year she had accepted the passion she had felt when, in their masks, they had made love at the contact clinic. More than accepted it — valued it, counted on it, been vitalized by it, and wanted more. The mention of that name Boy aroused her as it had when Dr. Sanford had said it.

"You'll need this," Hooper said, and gave her a printout with the coded information. "Though there's not much here."

As if accounting for the few lines on the strip of paper, she said, "But he's still young,"

"Forty-two!" Hooper said, still so frisky.

Could he be that old? The number startled her. She was on the verge of denying it and then realized that she would sound ridiculous. Yet she couldn't picture him at that age, or any age except twenty-six. Anyway, he was not like other men — not like any other man she had known. Fizzy was the proof of his uniqueness.

She glanced at the paper printout: "WM UNC PAR 2 REF O

CLASS SUBJ B NYC FED REF REAR ED REF PLUS"--inde-

cipherable.

"Standard data code," Hooper said. "You won't have any trouble checking the references for detail, or finding prose equivalents. The important reference is circled."

The circle contained "CA-FO ZONE" and some numbers.

"Forestdale. Last sighting. And those are the coordinates."

Forestdale was one of those California names that described its opposite. There certainly wouldn't be any trees there.

"I appreciate this, Hoop."

He was looking into her face, beneath her expression, beneath skin and bones.

"It's usually a mistake to find what you're looking for," he said. "It's much better to find what you're not looking for."

In his voice was a kind of listening caution, as if he were testing this thought by saying it out loud. And she could tell from his tone that he wanted to get away now. He had delivered his message and lost some of his bounce. He didn't want her frustration to disturb him.

Hooper had become one of those happy people who went around repelling unhappiness like evil — not wanting to be tainted by anyone's bad luck. They frisked along, protecting themselves with self-congratulation, with boasts, with anything to repel low spirits. They could go very quiet and vanish, too, when they saw clouds blimping up — problems, whines, complaints, envious questions, urgencies. Happy people learned how to be great selfish preservers of their happiness, like strangers walking carefully in the dark — they feared holes and gouging corners and sudden shouts. Hooper wanted to be back with his snug leggy fifteen-year-old.

Moura considered what he had just said, and thought: What am I looking for?

Hooper was rising and bristling and beginning to flee.

"I'm glad you're happy," Moura said, putting it as unselfishly as she could and not asking why it was. His happiness was so unpredictable, so hard to comprehend or contain — and so full of secrets and evasions, like a child's hidden life, with its mingled pleasures and fears.

He said, "We're doing all right."

He's alive, she thought, and envied him. Why was she so jealous of this young girl? All their warmth made her feel very cold.

He said, "I was lucky."

He meant it as an attempt at humility, as if he wanted his ghosts to overhear that he was grateful; and yet even that sounded to her like a boast. Because he was so happy, everything he said sounded like a boast.

"I don't have a lot of time. I don't want to waste it."

I do nothing but waste it, Moura thought. She said, "This must seem so strange to her."

"No — this is very easy," he said. "She sits by the pool and paints her toenails and eats chocolates."

"And what do you do?"

"Buy the chocolates," he said. "She likes it here. New York is safe. But out there — that's hard. We're the ones on the fringe. We always thought O-Zone and those places were dead. But that's where most of the life is. It's a struggle!"

"Holly wants to talk to me about another party this year."

Hooper looked doubtful, and determined to go — more than that, looked as though he wanted to burst through the wall. The last party in O-Zone had been the start of everything for him. Trying to repeat it, he might lose his luck; he might lose everything. That fear was on his face.

"We'll see about that," he said, and made it sound like No.

After Hooper had gone, Moura grew excited. She had not wanted him to know how this man mattered to her. But from the moment she had heard the name she had begun to hope. She envisioned him and thought: I exist. And as she revived she realized how discouraged she had felt — how deep she had dropped. In all the losses, all the vanishing confusion in the inexplicable past, she saw a crumbling pattern in which one element was unchanging: this man, and her feeling for him — and it gave her hope for something more.

The alteration in her was sudden because her vision of him was so clear — not just his bold boyish figure as he approached and hovered over her; but the vivid sense — vibrant as a pulse — of his body humming in the darkness. And his special smell — not flowers, not perfume, but a ripe male smell that soaked him and reminded her of blood. And the smoothness of his skin, his feet, his hands — long gentle fingers, and his slender legs. The memory of particular postures, of his movement and his heat, excited her.

I never saw his face, she thought. But she remembered the beaky mask and she had always felt she knew the face behind it. She had decided on specific features — nose, ears, teeth, chin — and had seen her guesses confirmed as Fizzy had filled out and grown; as his face developed. Fizzy was special and terrible in bis way, but he was handsome.

As for Fizzy's father — Boy — she had seen him so many times: glimpsed him in crowds, seen him on the street and in restaurants, and not only in New York but everywhere she went. Now she stopped seeing him; now she knew where he was.

The masks had made it perfect. Their meetings and their lovemaking in the clinic, and his whispers, had always inspired her the more because of their mystery — because of what she had not seen, never known, what she had guessed at and imagined. Over those two years of going to the clinic she had wanted him — woken up and desired him — and immediately afterward wanted him again.

It was so long ago, but the feeling was fresh in her. The loneliness, the longing: they were physical — she felt that longing in her belly, in her legs, on her face, in all her muscles. Desire was not a thought — it was a desperate thirsting of the flesh. It could hurt. She still wanted him, and now realized helplessly but with a surge of pride that she loved him.

38

And I'm also going simply to verify it — to see him and prove that he exists, and that it was not an illusion, Maura thought. That I lived once.

She was urged by her pride, and made excuses, but she knew that the risk was that if she were wrong she was left with nothing. Yet if she were right she had everything to gain. It was pathetic to say, "Even if I'm finished now, I had that— I had him," because she wasn't finished. But she was powerfully curious, and felt it in every muscle: it made her weak and eager — like the worst hunger.

It was a way of reminiscing, too — going cross-country, getting out of Coldharbor, away from these New York towers.

After — waveringly — the decision was made, she felt courageous.

Until now she had avoided Holly, but with the prospect of finding her old lover she called her friend and they arranged to meet at Holly's new house.

"No one has a house in New York!"

"They're building them again — it's a town house, in Upper West, facing all that junk on the Jersey heights."

Moura kept herself from saying, Near the clinic.

"I've got a car, too — imagine! The permit cost a fortune, but I figured what the hell. Someday they won't even be selling permits for private cars. And it's nice to snuggle up with someone in the back seat,"

Inevitably, Holly's talk turned to sex. But Moura shrugged. She could meet her without feeling like a failure or a sneak. It was not a question of telling Holly, but merely enjoying the thought that she had someone and that she had joined the two loose ends of her life with this one man.

But if she began to talk about it, she knew, it would seem a paltry story-mostly memory and not enough of it. She did not have the answers to her own crucial questions, so she knew she would not be able to answer Holly's sharper ones. Moura decided to say nothing about her lover, Fizzy's father. But it was not only caution: she was thrilled by her silence and that secret.

Holly sent the car for her. It was a kind of bragging and so Moura did not feel she had to be abjectly grateful. The house was less than a year old. A tower had been pulled down to make room for a development of tall narrow houses, like slender bottles in a row, their curved glass side facing west and the river.

Living so close to the ground was noisy — nothing like a tower and hardly anything like the cloudland of Coldharbor. But it was obviously such an expensive house, and Holly was so pleased, that Moura vowed to herself that she would not mention the noise — traffic, rotors, even voices and horns.

"We're at a very low altitude," Holly said, making a joke of her explanation, because she had had to stop talking when a rotor went overhead. "I used to hate looking at the ground."

She had been saying, "Who does your face?"

The admiration in her voice was undisguised, but Moura knew that Holly would never understand how her quiet life had kept her youthful.

"If you're taking something I'd like to know what it is," Holly said. "I need all the help I can get."

As if capsules explained everything. Moura exercised and ate well, and she felt rueful when she looked in the mirror and saw an attractive woman. She thought What for? and sensed her petals trembling and about to drop.

"You look great, Holly."

"I'm feeling piggy."

It was so exact Moura laughed out loud and saw a fat snout on Holly's face. The secret image a woman had of herself was often unexpectedly true — it came from studying the mirror and comparing other women and becoming obsessive about a single defect- Moura had sometimes thought: My ears — and had worried about making Fizzy bat-eared. "Pig" was perfect for Holly; not the huge oafish thing but a little selfish squealing creature with a piggy appetite.

Lust made people gleam like meat, and Holly had a lusty roasted look, which at its piggiest was like a kind of pork sausage. The year had left her fleshier and squinty, as if she'd had too much sun. Her lines marked expressions on her face — all her expressions, all at once — and it confused Moura to see amusement, pain, joy, and disgust scribbled one over the other in wrinkles, as though her face was a used bag of old emotions.

She looked lazier and smugger — probably the Godseye pension: somehow there was a Federal supplement in their insurance plan. Moura knew the government sweetened the so-called militias' funds — it certainly wasn't private money. And Moura had heard that Murdick Elevator Supplies had been sold.

"You could live here in the Colony and keep me company," Holly said. She wore a one-piece with windows and it crackled as she rolled over on the sofa and stuffed another cushion under her stomach.

"Is that what they call it, the Colony?"

"Yeah, that's why I sent the car. If you had come on your own they would have put you through the wringer. Live behind a high fence — that's what Willis always said."

Moura was thinking: The Colony—

"He believed in perimeters," Holly said.

She had never been faithful to Willis, but she had lost him in a good cause; and now that the nuisance had been murdered, and she was rid of him, she could safely think of him as a hero. She talked about him in a lying widowy way, as if she was proud of him. But Holly was also the sort of friend who could win back Moura's affection by saying something like: Of course, I'm not a hypocrite — the whole point of sentimentality is that it has to be insincere!

"And how's Hardy?" Holly said.

Moura was annoyed, because it sounded as if Holly wanted to compare husbands. Moura could not match that simple chummy tone. It was all right for Holly to ramble on about Willis — he was dead, after all, and safe. But Moura was uneasy saying anything about her husband. Apart from the fact that whatever she said would probably be wrong, it was also, she felt, a little dangerous. It was the live people who came back and haunted you, not the dead ones.

"Hardy's in Africa," Moura said. "He's got a big project there. Some sort of surfacing thing. Hooper told me about it — Hardy's so secretive. Apparently, it's to make up for that O-Zone fiasco."

"I love the islands in Africa," Holly said.

"There are no islands in Africa," Moura said. "You mean countries."

"No, islands. Like Earthworks. Those perimeter places with hotels. God, the guys out there were great stuff, weren't they?"

"I thought you had someone on board," Moura said.

"Can we talk about this next New Year's party?"

"That Woody-something you introduced me to."

They all had someone on board — Hooper, Rinka, Fizzy too probably, and Holly and her dumb muscleman. She imagined this man showing off in the pool of this housing complex in Upper West — the Colony pool, whatever it was called — in one of those little shiny bathing suits, strutting 'around showing his pouch, and Holly gleaming like a piglet. Undoubtedly Hardy had someone on board in Africa — the place was impossible without another friendly face. He was welcome to whoever — she could only do him good.

Holly said, "Woody's still around," and giggled and added, "I was going crazy, dating these guys. I think sex is part of my insecurity. I have to prove myself, like a kid. But it wasn't working. That's why I needed Woody."

"I'm glad things have worked out between you two."

"You don't understand. I needed him so that I could be unfaithful to him. Now I really am humping away. I've given up that stupid clinic."

"The routine," Moura said — lying, to keep her secret. She had not felt that way at all, but only a sadness when she became pregnant and could not justify going anymore. It had seemed worse than the end of a love affair. But at least I have his child, she had thought. Yet it had turned out to be Fizzy, and he had been like a death for her.

"No," Holly was saying. Her face had changed — more lines, conspiratorial, sharing a scandal; disgusted and glad. "A scare went around the place. Some fungus or another. Maybe a virus. At first I thought: This is supposed to be a clinic? Then I found out that this great so-called clinic lost its license a few years ago—"

"Holly, it wouldn't be the same party."

The suddenness of the interruption registered on Holly's face, and she blinked and squeezed her cheeks at Moura.

"Everything's different now," Moura said. Holly was pouting at her like a fat little baby. "Hardy's away. The Eubanks are in Florida. Fizzy's gone. Hooper's got that young girl— he'd never go. And Willis—"

"Is dead but that's not a problem," Holly said briskly. "You and I are here, and why shouldn't we do what we want?"

"We're a pretty small party, darling. And we'd never get there without Fizzy."

"I hate it when things change like this," Holly said, looking more brattish than ever. "It's awful when people tell you time's up, and you can't go back. I don't want it to stop!"

Moura made a sympathetic noise, but thought: I am going back, and not to the scene in O-Zone of that desperate party — it had been a failure as a party, it had overwhelmed them, it had changed everything. But no, she was returning to the deeper, the happier past and that lost love. The past wasn't a riddle: it was only illegible at this distance. Who had said that the past was a mystery, but the future was familiar?

"Fizzy's gone," Holly said, echoing what Moura had just said. "Don't you ever worry about him?"

Moura could not think of a way of telling Holly the truth— that she thought much more about Fizzy's father.

"He's so young to be with those aliens. What is he, fifteen?"

"Just turned sixteen," Moura said.

"You must wonder what he*s doing."

No: her inability to imagine what the strange boy might be doing kept her from worrying. He was like a different species — like an alien himself.

She said, "I just hope he's happy."

"How could he be! Those people are animals! Look what they did to Willis!"

The official story was that the aliens had burned the Godseye gunship and that Hooper had been unable to rescue the crew. But Hooper had told Moura another story; and Hardy confirmed it — how they destroyed the attacking gunship and let the aliens vanish.

"Don't you want to save him?"

"If he wants to be found, he'll be found," Moura said. And she thought: We are the ones who are lost. "I'd only like to know what sort of person he is."

A loud pair of rotors went overhead, chugging and making the windows shake, and Holly's squint of incredulity — what sort of person? — was tightened by the squint the noise gave her.

Moura said, "I never really knew him. He lived his own life."

"But he's in O-Zone!"

"O-Zone might be the perfect place for him."

"O-Zone is nowhere."

"You want to have a party there," Moura said, but it was more a mocking reminder than a statement of defiance.

Holly made a mask of her face — she was thinking hard— and then she said, "Like a lot of really far-out places — like that Earthworks place in Africa, and some deserts and wildernesses and city-stains — the only thing it's good for is a party."

She smiled, thinking of the party in O-Zone.

"Willis would have wanted us to," she said.

She so enjoyed herself now. She had become an extravagant boasting widow. You couldn't dispute or deny anything she said or else she'd turn on you and cry, My husband was killed! And though it made no sense at all to Moura, Holly was happy, because as she said, she had Woody to be unfaithful to.

It seemed strange that this woman had once been her close friend. But now they had their own secrets, and Moura wanted to leave. And she had felt throughout the hopeless conversation that Holly wanted to be elsewhere — her blood was up, she knew she didn't have much time, she was dressed to meet a man. Moura lingered because she knew she would probably never see Holly again — a former friend could be so dangerous: there was no worse enemy. She never wanted to see her again, so she gave her another minute.

Why should I be sorry that Fizzy is gone? she thought. He had seldom been happy in Coldharbor, and never in New York. It was just possible that he was happy now, among aliens. And it was not that the year had taken so much away — those losses and disappearances — but rather that so much had become apparent. She had seen who these people were — who she was.

Holly seemed on the verge of speaking. She was holding her breath, wondering whether she should risk it. Moura stared at her and refused to be undermined by how obvious a sneak Holly was, how her trickery was always apparent on her face, and how her real emotions never were — only the creased surface of that bag in which they were jumbled.

"Say it." And Moura got up to leave this woman for good.

"You should really find someone for yourself," Holly said.

39

Moura wanted to rent a light plane and fly cross-country on her own, but at the last minute her impatience overtook her, the matter became urgent: she hopped by rotor from Coldharbor to the airport and went on the fastest flight she could find to Los Angeles, arriving at dawn, three hours before the time she had set out.

The speed frightened her, she imagined the crash, and her fear was so acute that she knew she would remember it as though the crash had happened, as though she had died. She had died that vivid death so many times before — suffocated in panic and noise.

In the sealed and windowless plane, flying at an altitude of thirty-two clicks, Moura could not see the country below. Yet strapped in and with her eyes shut, she had the impression that things had changed — the entire country, everything, everyone, all they overflew. But that was absurd: she knew it was her mood. She was ashamed that Holly had seen her loneliness. Sex was always possible, it was a fever that came and went; but how pathetic she felt, flying alone and blaming her odd solitary feeling on a world she had imagined was completely changed. She thought: the world is the same. The misery is mine. I need a friend.

But then on the low daybreak approach to Los Angeles the large ground-screen was switched on in front of her and she saw that the city had changed. It was almost unrecognizable. And it was not just the effect of the yellow smog, though she could see how much dustier it was. The smog lay thicker than any cloud, bulked between the mountains and the sea, and where there were holes in it Moura saw devastation, which was the severest difference.

To the southeast, bordering the area that everyone called Landslip, the fault line was distinct. It was a crack, a wrinkle, a seam — depending on the depth of the rupture. In places it looked as solid and upstanding as a curbstone. It had risen and cast a shadow against the powdery light. It was patchy and blistered, and in some places it was a physical feature, a rounded lump, like a bad vein bulging in an elderly leg; in other places it was a stain — the result of the way people had resettled an area, or stayed away. It gave the city a look of division.

The shadow at the southeast side of the seam was Landslip, distinct and depopulated, with the same kind of city-stains she had seen in O-Zone. There were some live or reactivated settlements here. It was not officially a designated zone of any kind, though everyone regarded it as a zone. The point was — and this was obvious — most people preferred not to live there.

That isolated area had dried out; the streets and freeways were broken, there were many shattered roofs, and everywhere the scars and sluicemarks from flash floods and burst pipes and mudslides. The memory of water was hacked into the land.

And even the rest — the whole of Los Angeles — looked so temporary to her; it was built so close to the ground. It was a large lopsided city, with a crack down one corner. Silvery and spiky with towers on its western side, it was mottled with bungalows and low houses everywhere else. The outer towns had shrunken and, ring within ring, had contracted to the small dark circle that had always been the crossroads or the central mall. But there were stranger settlements, too— Moura saw them in a glimpse as the plane sped by on its approach. They were the ragged huts and camps of desperate people, probably aliens, who had moved out of Landslip after the quake.

Los Angeles had always seemed to Moura a mixture of grandeur and ruin, with a look of seedy magnificence. Now it was divided, the crack of the fault line was like a wall, fifty clicks to the southeast, and on the far side a look that had become familiar to her. It was the look of O-Zone.

As soon as she was on the ground, Moura began looking for Boy, and seeing him — so often that she knew she had to be mistaken. But that illusion strengthened her and gave her hope. Frequently, in New York, she saw someone she thought she knew on the street, then realized she was wrong. But afterward and often on the next street she saw the very person she had imagined the moment before. There was a certain amount of clairvoyance in her imagination — probably in everyone's — and she began to understand what that person had meant a year ago by saying that the future is familiar.

"I want to rent a chopper."

She was inside the agency and yet still had to raise her voice, because the things were climbing and revolving around the building. All that yakking was like slow gunfire, and the drafts from the rotor blades made gusts of grit flicker at the windows.

"You licensed?"

Moura was insulted by the question, and when she gasped in impatience the agent looked rebuked.

"How many hours have you logged?" And now he began keying in the information.

"Four-K, plus."

"You must own one."

"We've got a Welly — the Thruster Three."

"A jet-rotor," he said. "People like you make me feel like a have-not."

"That's your problem, I think." She handed him her ID.

"Thank you."

Now, looking at her ID, the man was so attentive she could hear him breathe, and Moura pitied him for his sudden politeness. Then she was deafened again by a descending chopper.

"You flying alone today, Mrs. Allbright?"

She blinked, meaning yes and hurry up.

"We've got a lovely Hornet for you," the agent said, trying hard. "VFR today — great conditions—"

"Please make it snappy," she said, cutting him short. The fact that she was looking for one particular man made her intolerant of all other men.

The rebuke took away his false politeness and made him a robot. He stopped smiling his strained smile, and asked questions in a monotonous voice, and keyed in Moura's answers.

"Destination?" he began.

When he was done, and she had the keys and her clearance, the agent escorted her to the loading concourse and said, "Been there recently? The reason I ask is, you don't have to go to Pasadena Airport. There's a rotorport in Forestdale itself."

"Good. Tell them to be watching for me."

At the controls, Moura rose and tipped the Hornet and headed east, but stayed low for the pleasure of seeing the changes on the ground. Some hills had been wholly cleared— all the bungalows bulldozed and buried. In other places, the profusion of huts and faded houses lay in the flat geometry between the freeways, and some of the freeways had been closed off, or pinched, or barricaded.

It was the sight of the barriers on the coastal zone and the heavily policed access points that had determined her on renting a rotor. She would never travel on the ground — not here. She wondered who did. It was well-known that the main freeways stayed open, but beneath them and between them large areas were inhabited by people who had claimed the streets and sealed them. What the Owners had done in the coastal zone, in Santa Monica and Malibu, the permit-people and the poor had done downtown and in places like Anaheim. The fortified subcity called Mexico was famous, but there were other, odder settlements, and she imagined them populated by Koreans and Hindus and recent aliens who, in time, would be gathered up and flown offshore and dropped out of planes.

Moura had always felt free in a rotor. Never, even on the most secure road, had she felt safe in a car. Beneath her in the dense yellow air of the trafficky city the cars went grinding along the freeways, passing from checkpoint to checkpoint. She could see that the narrow roads were closed to traffic. It made the poorer neighborhoods on her flight path look like a parody of New York and all its walls.

Dropping to a lower altitude, into the murk, she used the ground-screen and looked for people. There were not many on the streets, but those who were out wore masks. Los Angeles was the place where the fashion had begun. It was a necessity in this sinister air (visibility was usually less than two clicks), and mask-wearing was a useful, practical fashion. Of course, the California models were better than the New York masks — they all had human faces and were beautifully molded, and she supposed they had better radios and transmitters.

She had never seen this many people in New York wearing masks — perhaps because it was so easy to duck indoors. It was healthy here to be masked, and while some people wore simple breathing masks and filters — pretty faces — others carried tanks and tubes, their own air supply.

What if he is wearing a mask? she thought.

If he had a mask and a suit, she might never recognize him; and so it would end dumbly, anonymously, with her stumbling, and him a mask among all the other masks.

But I have never seen his face, she thought. So his face is a mask. And all faces are masks.

She followed the flight path to Forestdale and put down in the rotorport, which was near his last known address — the coordinates Hooper had given her. It was a low-level tower; not old, but cracked, probably in the last quake. Landslip was not far.

A mask at his address — a guard? a landlord? a cop? it was impossible to tell these gun-freaks apart — spoke to her on a screen. Moura told him her name, and then the name and number of the man she was looking for.

"That a Federal rotor?" He raised his head. Moura guessed he was on the roof.

"No," she said. "It's rented. Don't worry. I'm not with the IRS, or the Feds, or any security. This guy's an old friend of mine."

The only friend, she thought.

"Too bad he slipped out then," the mask said.

The mask covered the man's face: it hooded his head and protected his neck with a bulletproof collar. But his body gave him away. Even on the small screen she could see that he wore a badly rubbed suit, with rips at the knees, and he was very skinny. The short, cracked tower had the same masked look — not very well-disguised poverty. It was dusty brick and faded paint on a street of dead still-standing palm trees — just bare poles.

Moura knew he was suspicious of her because she was expensively dressed and had her own rotor. He had probably seen her land: there was very little traffic here in Forestdale. Her goggles were stylish, but she was not wearing a mask. He asked her about that.

"I'm not going to be here long enough to need one," she said.

That stung the man, she could tell — not the words but her tone of voice. Fear and uneasiness had forced her to sound tough.

"What does 'slip out' mean?"

"Sold his ID and flew. He's an Owner, you know — from back east. Supposed to be very smart. My wife liked him. He probably tipped one into her."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I didn't like him," the masked man said. "He was arrogant. I'm glad he's gone. I got sick of hearing about him."

It was all abuse but it excited her because it made him seem real. If it had been praise it would have made Boy seem like an illusion.

"I hope they catch him," the man was saying. "I think it's sickening, misusing your citizenship like that. Ever hear of anyone deregistering before?"

Instead of answering his question, Moura said, "Where is he?"

"Where most of them are."

His anger made him seem bored, and he kept going out of focus on the screen. She had to prod him with questions.

"Landslip," he finally said.

"What doing?"

"They don't do much there. They live under bridges. They sneak over the perimeter and steal food and fuel. Half of them just wander around the zone in their bare feet."

"Where's the nearest rotorport?"

"La Plata's probably your best bet. It's not a big place. They might even know him."

"La Plata the resort?"

Now the mask moved forward into focus, and beyond, growing larger and fuzzier on the screen.

"That's a good one. La Plata the resort. That's very funny. I like that." The mask was twitching — the face beneath it was in motion. "La Plata the resort!"

40

His parting shot had been something about the mudslides, how they had buried some roads and severed others and covered up half the landmarks on her chart and made new canyons.

To shut him up Moura said she'd use her computer copilot, but once she was airborne and out of Forestdale she flew the rotor manually — slowly, marveling at the mudslides and the townships drowned in dust. The seam below her in the hills became a wrinkle, and beyond where it had risen was Landslip in clearer air.

The flood that had caused these recent mudslides had come and gone very quickly. There was no water gleaming anywhere, and instead of the familiar silver-blue peels were rough-textured scoops and snakes, which had once been lakes or watercourses. Great cataracts of dried mud had been left — and sliced-off hills, and screws and casts of bright dirt and sand.

The quake had brought the buildings down, and the floods had washed them away. But it was so dry here now! The broken bungalows had withered without decaying, simply become papery husks or splintered sections of prefab plastic. There was no smog — a few ringlets of smoke, no more; and a film of dust over everything, every roof, every road, even the leaves were coated gray. There were few clusters of green, almost nothing; but in that respect Landslip was like Los Angeles itself, famous for its water shortage.

Moura flew on, between more hills, into dry desert brightness. There were cars on some roads, but here it did not mean traffic: nothing moved, the cars had no wheels — she guessed they were probably lived in by aliens. In another area she first took to be a vast parking lot, she saw that all the cars were definitely inhabited. Among the cars were cooking fires, and clotheslines, and canvas flaps outstretched for shade. The village of junked cars was especially odd, because farther on was a hillside of uninhabited houses — probably a quarantine order, or a subzone in the making. She flew over a wrecked trailer park, a small city-stain, and an elongated fire zone — a whole district burning and smoking, with a few fire trucks on the fringes spraying chemicals along a perimeter road to keep it open and to prevent the fire from leaving the zone.

That fire was just inside Landslip. Moura had been traveling parallel to the fault line, southeast. La Plata Valley led her deeper into Landslip and to La Plata itself.

She had remembered it as a resort town — Hardy had taken her, they had spent a week here, traveling in a ground vehicle in the shady valley between the high white hills. It had seemed to her a lovely place, small and sunny, with good water and secure hotels — green lawns, and tennis courts, and pools filled by waterfalls and elaborate fountains. The valley had been full of birds and wildflowers. Some people had complained: it seemed artificial, they said — the grass so green, the roses so red, the roads so tidy, and not a blemish anywhere. Something unreal about that, they said.

No more: now it had the same gray decomposing look of the dead half of Los Angeles, and it was not old enough or big enough to have become an interesting ruin. In any case, out here the ruins didn't last long. La Plata lay at the foot of a bright blistered hill forty clicks inside Landslip, and it seemed to Moura typical of what she had seen of that zone — rather tumbledown and unprotected, and close-up deranged. Probably it had lost most of its water — Moura was flying low now and looking for green lawns and swimming pools and trees. She saw a golf course gone to seed — but its sand traps were vivid scars; and broken roads, and abandoned houses, and people walking.

That seemed the chief characteristic of these ruined places — the people were more obvious; fewer vehicles. There were people on the streets, foraging, scavenging, peering up at her Hornet. People were always more visible in these dangerous outer districts. Trolls, Hooper called them, Roaches, Diggers; and remembering this, Moura wondered what Bligh had been — what sort of alien.

After the mission to find Fizzy, Hardy had said, "Ohio, Illinois, Indiana — even Pennsylvania. There are towns in those states that haven't changed a bit."

He had described a wedding reception and a baseball game and the way they washed their cars and cut the grass. He was surprised and relieved — he urged her to believe him. He was round-eyed and pious, like a simple-lifer.

She said it didn't matter whether she believed it, but she had not known why until now.

This was where she wanted to be, and this had changed: time and shortages and a drought.and an earthquake and aliens had altered it. Sixty clicks to the northwest people in Los Angeles hardly cared that this zone existed. They had received the same tremor but they had rebuilt and crept back from the brink. Here it had been almost a death blow. Like O-Zone it was an island; it had become like a foreign country, where aliens were the only real natives.

With her New Yorker's eyes, she had seen Los Angeles as a city of folly and free-for-all. It was another city on its back. It had seemed terrifying-looking but in some of its towns what Moura had taken to be rubble were houses, and within the county there were sealed settlements and secure zones that were elegant and had water somehow, maybe their own policed pipes and reservoirs. But of course they were surrounded by the scattered districts of handmade houses, where people lived in cars and under the freeways like wolves. It was not the nightmare that easterners claimed, but it was interminable, and that was nearly as bad: it was endless, and all of it lay on the ground, and it was impossible for anyone to leave, except by air; and only Owners had rotors.

The valley of La Plata had that same look: it had risen and fallen, and now it belonged to anyone who dared live there.

It was the look of O-Zone — bright and apparently abandoned, some of it fallen flat and other parts still standing and perhaps inhabited. That look provoked the suspicion that there were more people hiding there. The O-Zone look was the look of some of Los Angeles, and the whole of Landslip. To Moura it was the look of everything outside New York— the look of New Jersey and Florida, Mexico and Africa and poor overrun Europe. It was familiar.

The strangest thing about O-Zone was that it had not seemed very strange. Moura had been fearful, but she had gotten over that. Her greater surprise was that it was not worse. Fifteen years ago the news had broken: "STORM SWEEPS THE MIDWEST-and then "storm" was changed to "accident," and "accident" to "incident"; and finally it was impossible to know, except that the population of half a state was either dead or resettled. And that was where Moura and the others had spent New Year's this year. But where were the poisoned rivers and the fires? Where were the craters and the demons? Where were the monkeymen and the Shitters? It seemed much stranger to her that Hardy should return from his search mission and say, "They play baseball," "They have weddings," "They sell feed." That seemed much weirder and more exotic. They grew corn, they made quilts, some rode horses, and others drove nice old cars that they had learned to fix. That was very strange indeed and yet somehow very familiar.

Now here was La Plata. What was the difference? No water was an old complaint, and it was not odd to see houses down. It too resembled O-Zone. O-Zone was the look— more than a look, it was a certain sound, a kind of low wind-song, a high temperature, a smell of failure; but it was all too turbulent to be a bitter end.

She thought of Holly, planning another party, sitting with her googly tits pressed against the gaping windows of her dress, and saying confidently O-Zone is nowhere. Moura smiled: No. O-Zone was not a wilderness or a riddle — it was a condition and it was probably eternal, and it was everywhere. O-Zone was the world.

So when she received a stern set of warnings on asking for instructions to land, Moura did not hesitate and consider fleeing and spinning back to Los Angeles for a flight home; she maintained her descent and radioed back that she had noted and stored the warnings.

She liked the feeling that she had been here before, not only in the way that the New Year's party had prepared her for everything, but also in the sense that New York, too, was another part of O-Zone. But you had to have seen O-Zone to know that.

She came down among some hills that were textured like oatmeal. There were no live trees standing — it was like everywhere else on the fringes, the trees had been torn down and stolen for fuel. The government did nothing to stop tree theft, and some security agencies actively encouraged it, because with open fields and bald mountains and wide roads it was hard for aliens to hide. They exposed themselves by tearing down the trees.

"Got any weapons on board?"

The rotorport equipment handler was shoving on greasy gloves. Bugbee was stitched on a name badge over the breast pocket of his stained suit.

"No weapons," Moura said. "No offensive systems."

Bugbee dragged a heavy chain through the body grommet on the rotor's shaft.

"We've had thefts," he said, panting.

She wondered whether he was explaining the chain or the question about weapons.

"You must be on your way somewhere."

Moura did not say.

"Because no one comes here to stay," Bugbee said.

That made it sound perfect to her in her present frame of mind. She had started to walk toward the terminal building. It said "LA PLATA TERMINAL- but it was only the bones of one.

"Santa Barbara's real nice."

Now Moura turned and stared at this old man.

"What's wrong with staying here?"

Bugbee, to avoid her stare, was clamping a lock into the chain that held Moura's rented rotor.

"This has been a hole, ever since we lost our water," he said, keeping his head down. "We're just fighting for our lives here."

He was not challenging her — he was sad, he had dropped his voice. He was ashamed and bony, like the place. His chest was caved in and he labored for breath.

"You could go to Santa Barbara — someplace like that," he said. "This is trouble."

She didn't say anything. Bugbee glanced up with a twitch of hope on his face,

"You could go home," he said.

The hotel was bad, but they made no apologies and even implied that she should be grateful. She had a room at short notice, a view of the valley, her own bathroom. "We're the only ones here with real plumbing," the manager said. Moura didn't argue. She did not say that the room was dirty, that the view of the valley and its brown bushes and livid dust oppressed her. They probably wondered: What is this woman looking for? She hated the conspicuousness of being alone, and nothing seemed to her so melancholy as having to return each day to an empty hotel room — one with streaks on the wall and filthy windows. She didn't dare to sit out on the cracked balcony.

She began seeing him again — on the street, in the stores, even in the hotel. It was a glary haunted place — too bright, too empty, the floors stinging with the hot day, and water for specified hours. The men she saw all looked like Boy: that same eager taunting posture, the familiar aura. It did not matter to her that she had never seen his face. She thought: I would know him anywhere.

A second glance at these young men told her she was wrong, but she knew she had come very near, and each time she saw someone like him she felt she was getting closer. She had become a huntress, full of superstitions and hunches.

She spoke to one of these men on her third day. He was tall, rangy, the right build, with an intelligent face and pretty hands; and he had Fizzy's perforating gaze.

She said, "Do I know you?"

His smile told her she had the wrong person. Besides, he was not more than thirty.

"You're a stranger here," he said, and before she could explain he added, "You've got that look."

She faced him to make him doubt himself.

Without malice — with amusement even — he said, "Money."

Moura was the more embarrassed because he was not bitter. The man seemed to relax when he saw she was flustered and didn't have an answer — didn't even deny it.

"We're all burned here," he said.

It was true — literally so. He was darkly tanned, the backs of his hands were pinky brown and blotched. Lines were cut into his face where he squinted, and there was a whitish scaliness on his arms, and a deep tan underneath. He had swollen peeling lips.

"Everyone wears uniforms around here," Moura said.

His was green — a shirt, a metal patch, a visored helmet, sturdy buckled boots, a weapon she had never seen before.

"Most of us are security, most of us are private. I'm a state trooper. We've got a post here."

She was staring at him, wondering whether she had chosen him for his resemblance to Fizzy.

He said, "We're holding them back."

"Aliens?"

"I don't use that word," he said. "They're illegals. I think of them as throwaways."

"Throwaway" described how she felt herself and she liked the man for giving her the word.

"How do you manage to hold them back?"

"You really are a stranger, if you don't know."

When Moura told him that she was an Owner, from New York, and showed him her ID, he said, "Allbright's — like the mail-order cable sales?" and invited her to his post. He was very proud of the fenced-in compound. He said, "They claim we don't do anything," and showed Moura his data base and his display units. He talked about his storage capacity and his data-gathering.

He did look like Fizzy, and he had Fizzy's enthusiasm for technology.

"We've got a satellite feed for an hour, twice a day," he said. "We go on rotor patrol every night and make tapes and analyze them on this machine" — he had seated himself at the console. "This is really elegant. This is so sophisticated we don't have to fight."

She could hear Fizzy saying that.

"We're not gunslingers like these other squads and militias. Ever hear of the Black Cars? It's a local squad that goes around blasting people. Sometimes they drop poison and wipe out whole settlements. They use screamers on anyone who looks suspicious."

"In New York there's a squad called Godseye."

"They love giving themselves names."

She thought: Having the right name is like wearing a mask. She said, "Don't you have a name?"

"Officer Pratchett. Unit Forty. State security." He was looking up at a monitor — two ragged women towing a tin sled heaped with wood. It was somewhere in the hills.

"If they want to live like prehistoric people, they're welcome to it. As long as they stay out of here, I leave them alone. I'm not like some cops. I don't go hunting."

Moura was looking at another monitor. A man had come into view.

"We know who's out there," Pratchett said. He was watching Moura now, the way she was held by the screen.

"Their movements?" she said tentatively.

"Mrs. Allbright," he said — Fizzy again, expansive among the complex monitoring equipment—"we know who they are and where they are and where they go. We know their ages, their sexes, their sizes, and what racial group they are. We know when they're born and when they die. There's no such thing as an unknown alien. We know the color of their eyes. We can hear them chew their food."

He was smiling at her as though he knew how keenly she was listening to what he said.

"In most cases, we know their names."

She said, "I have a name for you."

"Sure you do."

She said nothing.

"I knew you were looking over the wire," he said. "Into the Zone."

41

That man Protchett warned her, and the hotel manager warned her, and unchaining the rotor, Bugbee warned her too.

They were so often cowardly or fearful, the people who issued warnings and said Don't.

She told Bugbee, "I'm trying to find someone," and remembered Hooper's saying, It's usually a mistake to find what you're looking for.

"You'd find someone in Santa Barbara.'*

Moura was climbing into her rotor.

"Especially if you don't have a whole lot of time."

She could never tell when old men were mocking her.

"Where's your program?" He was fussing, he was afraid— fear made him bossy. "Don't tell me you're flying without one."

"It's VFR again today," Moura said. She had hoped to avoid another argument by not telling him that she was flying manually, but he knew and he hated knowing.

She had to wait for permission to take off — La Plata was a busy rotorport, probably because the roads here were so dangerous. Then she continued on her way southeast, using the coordinates Pratchett had given her.

He's living rough near a place called Ida, Pratchett had said, and didn't ask her to explain what she wanted; though she realized that out of gratitude she might have told him anything. She had needed help. It had never been a matter of following clues, but only of persisting and being lucky. There were no clues. There were only facts you had to be told. If you didn't know the facts you were lost. She resented her life spent having to be shown the way. He hasn't been there all that long.

Did that matter?

The longer they stay, the worse they get.

Down below she saw brown bumpy hills and swatches of weed. There were town-stains and there were smears where smaller settlements had been. There were blobs where cars had sunk into the sand and showed their rusty roofs. She saw no people. Whoever lived here, lived hidden. It was another hot day. The stark sun had burned all the colors away. The rocks were split and white like broken skulls, and where it was thickest the weed was black. The old high-banked road into La Plata, the favorite of the weekend travelers before the quake, she mistook for an empty riverbed. It was strewn with stones.

Hardy would have laughed if he had known how much trouble she had taken to get here. But that was another reason she was here.

Gusts and downdrafts shouldered the rotor: it was the high temperatures in these valleys and the canyons farther on with their sheer walls. The rotor was punching along and she had begun to enjoy working it by hand. She was now used to the occasional hesitation in the wind, the tiltings and leaps.

She wondered: Was this lonely journey strengthening her, so that at the end of it she would not need the man she had searched for?

Her wondering stopped when, a moment later, switching fuel tanks, she saw the fuel indicator stutter back to zero and sensed the rotor losing power. It was first a rapping that was immeasurable, and then a stall for seconds that unconsciously she counted — two, three, four — and then a discharge and a hollering in the pipes as she restarted: cones of black exhaust fumes seemed to prop the rotor up. This happened three times. The bursts of energy seemed to weaken the engine, and she lost altitude each time the engine cut out. The fuel line was blocked or air-locked: the panel light flashed.

Then she was swaying like a basket on a line; and restarting aligned the rotor but did not keep it from dropping to the ground. The undercarriage tilted — probably broke — and a side piece shattered. Moura climbed out quickly, congratulating herself that she was alive. But her knees were tremulous and hardly supported her.

She decided not to use her radio, yet despised herself for testing it and for verifying that she had fuel and emergency rations — that ridiculous junk that Murdick had peddled. She turned her back on the leaning rotor.

This is where I wanted to be. I'll track him on foot — and laughed at the brave, wilderness word, because what did she know about tracking?

There was not much water, and she was wearing soft-soled flying boots.

I don't belong here. And then: Does anyone?

They attack you, they rape you, they take your machines, they kidnap your children, they steal your food, they rob you, they strip you, they bite you, they piss and shit on you, and at last when you're dead they insult your corpse by using your bones — that was what everyone said.

Besides the radio, Moura had a bleeper. If she called security they would come thundering down, the Black Cars streaking out of La Plata and plucking her back to Los Angeles, where she could sit by a swimming pool and drink mango juice, trying to forget the number of aliens they would shoot as a lesson. And if they didn't reprimand her, Pratchett would. They'd say: You knew it was forbidden and What sort of a woman wants anything to do with people like that?

She sat down to demonstrate to herself that she was going to wait calmly. She had not crashed, she hadn't even ditched, she hadn't been off course. She had stalled and somehow come to rest on her claws. There had been no explosion, no one had seen her. It was as good as a landing.

This could be a picnic! She had a radio, she had water and food — too bulky to carry but enough to last her for ten days.

She methodically made herself a picnic meal and ate it in the shade of the rotor; and afterward, drugged by the heat, she slept, perspiring, her hands clasped at her throat.

The shade slipped from her like a black sheet tugged away, and the sun blazed against her eyelids and gave her a painfully lighted dream. In this dream she met him in a pink room that had walls like flesh. She walked up to him. He smiled— that smile might mean anything, she thought: a smile could be so sinister and so hard to put into words. But he took her hand — his touch said something that reassured her. He was gentler, he took her deeper into this pink room, where she wanted to go, and thought: Imagination is clairvoyance. It was not a room; they were enclosed by the pink flesh of a mouth. He had Fizzy's face, and even in this dream she was conscious of the question, Am I looking for Fizzy?

"Who's there?"

She had woken knowing that someone was watching her. She stood up and listened. Excited by the early-afternoon heat, the insects made a ringing din like continuous sleighbells.

She saw just beyond the rotor a neat bundle of sticks tied with two fiber ropes — a small but obvious symmetry in all this natural disorder. She went over to the bundle and lifted it. It was hardwood — heavier than it looked.

"Please, officer," a small voice said.

A child — a boy of about ten — emerged from behind the rotor. He came out of the shade and she almost lost him, so well did he match the sun-bleached soil and burned rock. His hair was whitish and streaked with pale yellow, his skin tanned cinnamon, and his nose peeling pink and freckled. He wore faded denim shorts and rough sandals that were made of rope and rubber. What was it that Pratchett had said about these people being prehistoric? This boy had an overwashed look, as if he had been soaked and dried too many times— rained on and worn, like a small tired flag. But it was probably the sun.

Moura was cautious. These kids could be like little animals, some were dangerous: they were biters, and their instinct was to attack and run. They had weapons, they hunted in packs. There might be ten others hiding on their stomachs nearby waiting to leap up and jump her.

She had no choice but to stare him down and swallow her fear.

"Is this your wood?"

He nodded and she saw that he might be afraid.

She said, "I'm in trouble."

This bewildered him.

She said, "My rotor's broken."

He looked at the rotor: his lashes, his eyebrows, were bleached white and gave him a look of innocence she found alarming. But now she was sure he was alone.

"Who's going to fix it?"

The boy didn't hesitate.

"The biker," he said.

Moura said, "Where's the biker?"

The boy protected himself with his skinny hands, and she realized that she had come too close.

"If you find him I'll give you something to eat."

Keeping his hands up, the boy moved slightly, his body becoming tense. She wondered if in panic he might spring on her.

"Nice food — and a drink."

He said, "It might be poison."

Sometimes they drop poison and wipe out whole settlements.

"Won't you get the biker for me?"

"If you promise not to hurt me."

She did not hear him until the last moment. She had climbed up the hill to get a better look, but had not reached the top when she heard the clatter of his machine shaking on the stony ground. He was behind her, and when she turned back he was above her, staring down, with the sun crackling next to his head. She crouched below the brow of the hill, unprotected among the dead thorns and dusty cactus.

"That your rotor?"

At once she said to herself that it was not him, and felt fooled, so far away, clinging to this dusty hill in the heat.

He came toward her, kicking stones with his heavy boots, examined her with his face, and kept going past her, down to the rotor. She followed, because there was nothing else she could think of doing.

He was tall and slender, with hard stringy muscles and thinning hair. What distracted her was that so often in the past, and especially lately, she had seen a man and thought It's him. And now she was sure this man was not him— definitely not, and precisely because there was a slight whisper of similarity. She felt she was in danger of being misled by something very small — a hint of Fizzy in his posture, in his physique, in his attitude; but it was too elusive to pin down, and she had been wrong before.

Perhaps that was it, that he looked more like Fizzy than the man she had loved, and she was not looking for Fizzy anymore.

"It's rented," she said. "The rotor."

His eyes were perfect — a person's memory and intelligence and humor always showed in his eyes: all his life was there. His face was not battered but wounded, as if something within him had been hurt. Once he had been harmless and hopeful, and then disappointed or worse; and now he was beyond all that — yet his experience showed faintly on his face. She could see a very young boy in him, but not a young man. He had the sort of sensitive face that registers pain and holds it, so that in a certain light like the glare of this sun, his face was complicated by his history. And it was a memory within it, showing at his eyes; unlike Holly's — Holly was all surfaces.

Moura was disconcerted by this man, who was wrecked and interesting, because she suspected that she might like him more than the man she was looking for. But another of her new superstitions was that a sudden change of mind would be very unlucky for her.

The man said very little, and so she found it hard to study his face. His face took on a meaning only when he was speaking. It seemed to her that he could be wearing a mask — one which distorted his face but in which his face was still familiar. Was it his age — the sun, adversity, lost hope, searching? Anyhow, it was a traveler's face. She thought: Age is a mask.

"I had engine failure.n

He said nothing.

"It's a new Hornet — do you know anything about them?"

It maddened her that he did not reply to her simple question.

"I need it fixed," she said, "so I can get to Ida."

"You don't need it fixed," he said.

He had no smile at all.

"Because this is Ida."

This hill? She did not want to see its rocks, its thorns, its hot sand. She thought: If I don't get help I could die.

"Then I need it fixed so I can get out of here."

"Right," he said, and it sounded like a farewell.

"I think it's the fuel line. When I switched tanks I stalled. The light came on, the readout clicked back to zero. Probably a valve, don't you think?"

He said, "I won't know until I look."

It was just what Fizzy would have said. She was reassured by it — by the man saying it, by the thought that Fizzy might learn to survive by being this strong and self-possessed. She felt a pang for the boy and saw his long white face surrounded by O-Zone. But she knew that the pang was also a sense of her own shame. What had she ever done except secretly sneer at Fizzy crowding his computer, and hope that someone stronger than she would get the better of him? But he was gone — for good, she felt now, and she was vaguely proud of him for going. She was awkward with the lame assertion my son, because he had dared to leave her.

"Probably a valve," the man said in her voice. He was mocking her with her own words. Then he turned — no smile — and took his slender hand out of the engine cavity and showed her his greasy fingers.

He said, "I bet you know a lot about pressure-alert multi-circuited linear hydrostatic valves."

Moura frowned and all her irritation with Fizzy came back. And who was this man who had ridden out of a gulch in the desolate zone of Landslip to mock her for something she didn't know?

He was tall like Fizzy, he had Fizzy's fleshy lips and narrow bones — and even this wilderness had not coarsened his hands. He was slim, he didn't smile, and like Fizzy — one of the oddest of Fizzy's features — he had patches and streaks of prematurely gray hair. It was whiter than the boy's but it was just as strange and stripy.

In contrast to his faded shirt and patched trousers and burst-and-sewn boots his dirt bike was beautiful, with chrome brush guards and highly polished paint — green lacquer — and bright shields protecting the heavy engine. The front fender was like an eyebrow raised high over the wheel. The wheels were its outstanding feature: silver spokes and hubs and rims fitted with bristling tires with treads like toes. The whole underside of the machine was lightly dusted the color of Landslip.

"They don't look after these rented rotors" — he had gone back to work, he was not talking to her, he was thinking out loud. "They just beat the hell out of them and buy new ones. They should be ashamed to use this for rental — it's full of loose connections. It's not even clean."

It seemed such a strange judgment for an alien to make. Talking about dirt and dents and loose connections on a hill of crumbled sand and rocks in Landslip.

But he was supremely confident. He looked out of place but contented here. It gave her hope. He was a severe man, but he was not a brute. It was hard here, she knew. But he was proud — like Fizzy. He had perhaps found greater courage in this wilderness. He would not give up. She suspected that without her ever guessing it, Fizzy had that obstinacy. Each insight into Fizzy taught her something that she needed herself.

"What does someone like you want in Ida?" the man said.

She objected to someone like you, but she was uncomfortably aware of the stylish way she was dressed — her perfect suit, her expensive goggles — and her food, her fuel, her rotor. He had nothing but his bike.

"Have you got something against Owners?" she said.

It made him pause and she was glad. She sensed his brain spinning behind his eyes. And still he had no reply.

"I'm just looking," she said, to fill the moment.

He recovered and said, "We eat people like you. Didn't they tell you that at the security check?"

"How do you know I'm not security?"

"Because you're on the ground."

"Couldn't help it," she said. "I stalled. Equipment failure."

"You would have signaled for help if you were in the squads. You would have bleeped your unit. You would have used the voice alarm." He was still standing under the engine, plucking parts from beneath the manifold. He turned and said, "I'm wondering why you didn't."

"I'm not afraid," she said.

"That's good."

She could see he meant it, and that instant she wanted him. She wondered whether she knew htm. It amazed her to think that she might have had him — if so, she wanted him again.

She was sure that he regarded her as eccentric — a fool who had found her way over the wire because she had money or hunger.

She said, "Of course, I'll pay you."

He was attending to the engine. She had seen gynecologists put their fingers inside her like that — just as carefully, feeling and listening in just that way. He tricked a length of fuel line out.

"Don't talk to me," he said. It was not rude. It was Fizzy's voice of concentration.

She went silent and regarded him and saw Fizzy again: wonder boy, the genius in the wilderness, rebuilding civilization from its ruins. First the practical items — transport, the superior dirt bike, and then probably weapons and communications. Or did weapons come first? Anyway, later he would be circumscribed by his own inventions — he would be safe.

She now knew that Fizzy would succeed — in O-Zone or wherever he had led those people. Of course he had led them. Wasn't this man a leader?

He had prodded and unscrewed — palpated an object like a chromium acorn from one end of the fuel line.

"It's a valve," he said. "It's gummed up. But there's a design fault in it, too. Ill give you a better one than that."

"You have spares — out here?" But somehow she suspected he had.

He said, "We have whole rotors. Better than this insect. They fall out of the sky."

"Like me."

"No," he said. "Ever heard of the Black Cars? Hunters. Searchers. Commandos."

Again he was looking at her in that suspicious and contemptuous way. But she stared back. She saw there was something sexual in his look.

She knew when a man desired her; and there was a dreadful element in it, a kind of fascinated loathing, because the man wanted her and didn't know her. Was it only surfaces that men saw? She wanted just once to know what the attraction was, because she often felt barren and featureless— often saw nothing in the mirror. But she knew when a man was looking at her in that way. She was aware of sometimes looking at a man that way, too, and she disliked the feeling in herself.

Now she felt this might be worse — not that he desired her and didn't know her, but that he desired her and did not remember her.

"Would you like a drink of something?" she said. "And I've also got some food."

"You'll have to do better than that," he said. "In terms of payment."

His eyes were still on her. She felt naked, as if he could pierce her.

"Fuel," he said. "I want the whole of your auxiliary tank."

But there was a stammer of interruption in his voice, as though he wanted more than he said.

Or had he remembered?

"Otherwise I won't fix it."

"Take whatever you want."

She wanted to remember, she wanted him to remember. She had gone to the contact clinic because she had needed help, and she felt the same need standing near this elusive man.

Even if it was not this man, I might have married someone like him. She could almost picture it, and she mourned the life that she had missed in her imagination. She had lately come to despise herself for liking Hardy's wealth, the Allbright inheritance, and for not taking advantage of it. Her life was far from over, and yet—

The thing was to know how much time you had and not humiliate yourself by wanting more than you could manage. At thirty-seven she still sometimes saw that she had her looks — she was not always insulted by the mirror. She knew she was smarter than she had ever been. She had lasted better than this man, who was weather-beaten. And she had time, years more. She had stopped measuring her life by meaninglessly thinking: I can still have another child.

She remembered with the piercing clarity of this man's eyes everything that had happened at the clinic — every session, how he had looked, what he had whispered, how he had smelled, every detail of what she had seen, his mask. But if it was this man, time had wrecked him and caused him pain. Yet oddly it had also given him more life. He looked a little dangerous and if it were truly him he looked a lot freer and stronger.

The difficulty lay in being certain. She could not quite fit the lovemaking to this man; and yet she desired him.

You turn your back and you think people stop living and freeze just for you. But no, they go on, they live, they are wounded, they are altered by pain and bad news, and you turn again and it's all changed. Only happy people never change. She knew there was no certainty for her. The crushing thought was that she too might be ignorant of the past: Because I have changed.

He had scrambled inside with his tools and got the engine fluting. She could see he loved this, in spite of the fact that he didn't smile or show pleasure. It was how Fizzy would have behaved, probably what he was doing in O-Zone this minute — machine-mad, she thought, and felt tender toward them.

"I'm going to need this," he said, lowering himself to the ground and swinging a fuel tank out on a pulley. She knew it was full and heavy — and she had another tank. But how would he carry it?

He'll leave it, he'll come back for it, he has nothing else to do here but learn how to survive.

He stalked close to her and studied her with his bright eyes.

"It's a good thing I was here," he said.

She said nothing. She could stare back. What was that in his hand — another of those valves, maybe the old one, rolling in his blackened fingers.

"It looks like you may be able to use the full service."

She suspected that she knew what he meant. She wanted him to remember — anything. Whoever he was.

"I'm running all right," she said.

She desired him then most of all, as he was proposing and teasing her, and she was keeping him away. She searched his poor lined face for a flicker, but there was nothing. He still did not know her. Her desire for him was almost overpowering — she would do something ridiculous in a moment, she knew — snap at him, insult him, spurn him; because she felt on the verge of saying Take me.

Then she might know. That wild impulse might reveal everything, for sex was our deepest secret; the mask was tame and civilized, even the beakiest one, but the animal within it contained our identity. And shame was just another way of keeping the secret hidden. She almost reached out for him then.

His boots slipped and rolled on the stony ground as he stepped nearer to her into the sun, and the glare on him made him seem full of fresh wounds — his creased face, and the scratches on the backs of his hands, and the slashes in his shirt, and his boot heels worn flat.

He said, "Well, you know where to find me."

She hated his saying that. I'm wrong, it's a mistake, he's a stranger, he doesn't recognize me — because he is not who I think he is: her thoughts raced and jeered at her for coming all this way for nothing.

He cranked the ladder down, and helped her onto it, touching her for the first time. When he touched her he questioned her with the pressure of his fingers, and instead of being helped by them, the fingers made her hesitate.

She turned to face him, and he let go — embarrassed, a bit flustered, touched with innocence, as if he had given himself away. Was it to disguise it that he looked aside and opened his mouth and yawned? It was a hissing gasping yawn — he brushed it with the back of his hand, bumping it with the small bones of his knuckles.

His whole personality was in that yawn: it exposed and betrayed him. Was it this most human and unalterable gesture that he had passed on to Fizzy? She felt it.was so, even more clearly than the way he had touched her, though that had said a great deal — the way his hand had lingered and the fingers had spoken, the abrupt and self-conscious way he had released her. His yawn had seemed to say the rest. It was loud and automatic, seeming to dismiss her, and his folded hand neither stifled it nor covered it. He had gargled air and snapped his teeth shut.

She felt strongly that Fizzy was safe.

"Yes," she said — and thought: I'm safe too; and paused on the ladder.

The December sun in late afternoon blazed without much heat, and already the land had begun to cool in the lengthened shadows. She saw that this broken-off part of America, Landslip, had a beauty she had never imagined. It was beauty regained after some centuries of civilization; and now it was redeemed by the wilderness that had taken over, empty flats and harsh hills. There was space here again. Why was it so precious? Because it had been wrecked and regained. It was beauty lost and found. That was the beauty of O-Zone, too. The beautiful sort of sexual cracks that splitting seeds make when they burst through fresh earth. And to live you had to match it, like this man and become wilder; as Fizzy had — and Hooper was trying.

"Because I was lost," she said, "looking for someone called Boy, or Boyd."

"You're not lost."

She was startled by the note of loneliness in his voice, and yet strengthened by it, because she was no longer lonely.

It had all been Fizzy's doing. His vanishing had left her free to get out of New York. You should really find someone for yourself, Holly had said. Was there anything more pathetic than searching for someone to save you? And yet her search for a man had shown her that she did not need a man.

Don't throw me a bone, she thought. She had found a father for Fizzy long ago. She did not want a husband — not a man or a motive. She wanted a lover now. Apart from him, she could look after herself. I want more than a bone.

Fizzy had led her here. She saw him in a landscape like this. He was the new breed, an O-Zonian, a sort of indestructible alien — stronger than any Owner. He had been a hostage in Coldharbor; he had freed himself. He wore a dusty helmet and a patched suit — still he never smiled. He led packs of hunched-over aliens through black pine woods. Sometimes at night he walked under the moon. She could see him distinctly, the dull, thick moonlight on his shoulders and on the dome of his helmet. He was big and because he was not naturally brave he was alert to all the risks.

The memory of his voice always brought her down to earth.

You are such a tool, he was telling someone, and he was probably right. He was standing triumphant, talking out loud, mocking the question, because he knew the answer. And if you demanded to know what he was doing he would say, I'm on a mission.

Moura reasoned that he was safe, because she was. And the point was not that she had come so far, but rather that, like her son, she could find her own way back. That was all that mattered. She had discovered what Fizzy had always known. He was not afraid. She was free — still finding out.

All this time the man had been watching her like Fizzy.

No wind, no odor, no sound: in the strangeness of this new valley of bones was a kind of safety — the best kind, for it had the appearance of danger. Yet it was a vast empty room, and they were both children alone in it. Outside it, she knew, the future changed every second.

He touched her again, and took hold, and his grip was single-minded with desire. She was still in suspense and yet joyous — tender sentences teemed in her memory. He brought her gently back to the ground, and she thought: In a moment I will know everything.