Specimen Days

Like Beauty

She might have been beautiful. “Beautiful” was of course an approximation. An earthly term. The nearest word in her language was “keeram,” which more or less meant “better than useful.” It was as close as her people came to a lofty abstraction. The bulk of their vocabulary pertained to weather conditions, threats of various kinds, and that which could be eaten, traded, or burned for fuel.

She was by Earth standards a four-and-a-half-foot-tall lizard with prominent nostrils and eyes slightly smaller than golf balls. But Simon believed she might have been glorious on her own planet. She might have been better than useful there.

He saw her every evening, walking the children through the park. She always came at the same time, just after his shift started. She was modest but certain in her movements. Her skin was emerald. It had a clean gemlike shine rare among the Nadians. Most were mossier-looking. Their skins were more mottled, prone to splotches of ocher and dark brown. This was why people insisted that they were oily and that they smelled. They were not oily. They did not smell. They did not smell bad. All creatures smelled. The Nadian smell was sweet and cleanly fermented. Most people never got close enough to know that.

The children, both blond, appeared to love her. Human children tended to love them, especially the younger ones. She guided her two small blonds along the pathways of the park with competence. She spoke softly to them. She sang intermittently, that low whistling sound they all made, a five-note progression: ee-um-fah-um-so. Were the Nadians affectionate? It was a subject of continuing debate. Did they love human beings, or was it simplicity tinged with desperation? The children didn’t seem to care.

He watched her as she guided them toward his bench. The older one, a boy, probably four, ran ahead. He would find something a stone, a leaf and bring it back to her. He and she would examine it, confer quietly about its worth. The rejects were tossed back. The others she slipped into the pocket of her cape. As soon as a decision had been made, the boy went off in search of a new prize, tireless as a spaniel. This was witnessed with skeptical interest by the little girl, no more than three, who kept herself close to the Nadian. She toyed with the hem of her nanny’s cape. Occasionally she reached up and took hold of the long, thin fingers of an emerald hand. She appeared unconcerned about the two-inch pewter-colored nails.

When the nanny and the children were within earshot, Simon said, “Hey.” He’d been saying hey to her for several days now. It had been incremental: no acknowledgment, then a smile, then a smile and a nod, then a greeting.

Today she responded.

“Bochum,” she said. Her voice was soft. It had that whistle. She sounded like a flute that could speak.

He smiled. By way of response, she dilated her nostrils. The Nadians were not smilers. Their mouths didn’t work that way. Some of the less assimilated still panicked when smiled at. They thought the showing of teeth meant they were about to be eaten.

“What’s he finding?” Simon asked. He inclined his head toward the boy.

“Oh, many thing.” She spoke English, then.

The boy, who had wandered off a little, saw that his nanny was addressing her attention to another. He came running.

“Park’s full of treasures,” Simon said. “People have no idea.”

“Yes.”

The boy inserted himself between Simon and his nanny. He stared at Simon with frank and careless hatred.

The Nadian laid a taloned hand on the miniature blond head. It wasn’t surprising, really, that some people still considered it liberal to the point of recklessness to hire them for child care.

“Tomcruise,” she said, “we show what we find?”

Tomcruise shook his head. The little girl wrapped herself in the folds of the Nadian’s cape.

“Is shy,” she said to Simon.

“Sure he is. Hey, Tomcruise, I’m harmless.”

The Nadian knelt beside the boy. “We show him marble?” she said. “Is nice.”

Tomcruise shook his head again.

“Creelich,” she said to the boy. Her nostrils sucked in like irritated anemones. She must have been forbidden to speak Nadian to the children. Quickly she added, “Come, then.”

She rose. She prepared to walk on with her brood. To Simon she said, “Is shy.”

She was bold. Many of them never dared to converse. Some could not even bring themselves to answer a direct question. If they were silent, if they were as invisible as they could make themselves, misfortune might be averted or at least forestalled.

“What’s your name?” Simon asked.

She hesitated. Her nostrils flared. When a Nadian was unnerved its nostrils expanded and offered a glimpse of green-veined mucous membranes, two circles of inner skin juicy and tender as a lettuce leaf.

“Catareen,” she said. She said it so softly he could barely hear her.

“I’m Simon,” he answered. His voice sounded louder than usual. The Nadians could make you feel large and noisy. The Nadians were darting and indirect. They were quiet as plucked wires.

She nodded. Then she looked at him.

He had never seen a Nadian do that. He had not been sure they made eye contact even with one another. They reserved their main attention for whatever might be just off to the side or creeping up from behind. This one stood holding the hand of a human child with each of her emerald claws and looked levelly into his face without fear or servility. He had never traded gazes with one before. He could see that her eyes were fiery orange-yellow, with amber depths. He could see they were shot through with little flashing incandescences of an orange so deep it bordered on violet. The slits of the pupils implied a calm, regal intelligence.

You are somebody, he thought. You were somebody. Even a planet like yours must have princesses and warrior queens. Even if their palaces are mud and sticks. Even if their armies are skittish and untrainable.

She nodded again. She moved on. The little girl continued to robe herself in the hem of the Nadian’s cape. The boy glanced back at Simon with an expression of pure triumph, his treasures unsullied by a stranger’s gaze.

As they walked off across Bow Bridge, Simon could hear her soft little song. Ee-um-fah-um-so.

He pulled the scanner from his zippie, double-checked his schedule. General menacing until his first client, a level seven at seven-thirty. Followed by two threes and a four. He hated sevens. Anything above a six (or a five, really) was difficult. He had to refuse nines and tens outright. They were beyond his capabilities. They paid well, and he needed the yen. But he knew his limits.

Simon did his menacing until seven-twenty. The time between clients was minimum wage, and most players naturally wanted as many bookings as possible. Simon preferred his in-between hours. The park was green and quiet, strung with pale yellow lights. Sometimes on a slow night a full twenty minutes might pass with no tour groups no one and nothing but grassy twilight, chlorophyll-scented breezes. As mandated, he stayed in character even when alone. He prowled and glowered. He sat on a series of benches with his muscles flexed and his tatts demonstrating their phosphorescent undulations. Sporadic tour groups and their guides skittered by, murmuring among themselves. They never strayed far from the green-gold lightglobe that hovered over their guide’s head.

Simon passed Marcus twice on his rounds on the edges of the Ramble. He risked a wink the second time, though fraternization was cause for dismissal. Park thugs were not friendly. You could jive with your brothers if you were part of a gang, but white players weren’t eligible for gang work. Because there was a steady if modest demand for Caucasians among the general clientele, Dangerous Encounters Ltd. kept a handful on the payroll but insisted they work alone.

Roving gangs of white men terrorizing Central Park was too inaccurate. Old New York had built its reputation on historical fidelity. So Marcus and Simon and the other white players worked solo, as lone wolves who had gone so the brochure said from drunken and abusive families to this scabrous forest kingdom, where their addictions multiplied as their options dwindled, desperate men who scrounged for whatever easy prey might wander innocently into their sectors. He and Marcus and the other singles were the cheapest items on the menu. Getting worked over by a gang cost five times as much.

His seven-thirty level seven would be at Bethesda Fountain. He headed in that direction.

The plaza was empty when he arrived. He was not sorry, even though no-shows paid only their 20 percent deposit, of which his share would be ten. Still, he’d be glad enough to skip the seven, perform his threes and fours, and go home to bed. Maybe he could make it up with some extra bookings tomorrow.

He had to stay for the required fifteen minutes. He stationed himself off to the side, in the shadow of the colonnade, where the client would not see him when he entered, as arranged, from the western stairs. He snarled at a passing tour group. He eyed their adolescent daughters with lupine appetite, muttered about how Chinese snatch was the tastiest, in case any of them understood English. They usually loved something like that. Maybe they would tip him, via their guide, once they were safely out of the park. Maybe the guide would pass the money along.

Thirteen minutes. Fourteen minutes. Then, just before he was officially entitled to walk off and collect the deposit, his level seven arrived.

He was Euro. He was corpulent, fiftyish, maidenly in his ruddy, well-fed baldingness. He looked nervous. Was it his first time? Simon hoped not not at level seven. Bennie from Dangerous Encounters escorted the client as far as the plaza’s edge. They had a whispered conversation at the base of the stairs, and then the client stepped into the plaza, unaccompanied. He had blue Astrohair. He wore a mercury suit. He was German, probably, or Polish. The Germans and the Poles loved their novelty hair. They loved their liquid suits.

He was a strider. He had listened carefully to what Bennie would have told him about walking with purpose, about letting it come as a surprise. Relatively speaking.

Simon let the client get past the halfway point, just beyond the blind gaze and outstretched hand of the angel. Then he took off after him. He could see the man tense up. He continued obeying instructions, though. Youll hear footsteps. Dont turn to look. A New Yorker would never do that. Hurry along.

The client hurried along. Light from the halogens sparked in his cobalt hair.

Simon got to his position, beside the client but slightly behind. He said, “Hey, friend. Can I ask you a favor?”

The client kept walking, as a New Yorker would.

“Hey. I’m talking to you.”

Still nothing. He had paid careful attention.

Simon took the client’s elbow. A mercury suit was always strange to him that watery quality, that faint heat they put out.

Now the client turned to face him. Once physical contact has been made, you’re free to respond.

"Was wollen SieT No English, then?

“I need a little loan,” Simon said. “I’m down on my luck right now.”

“I can’t help you,” the client answered. Spoke English after all. Good.

“Oh, I think you can.” Simon took firmer hold of the client’s elbow, as if he were a dance partner. He took a fistful of suit lapel. They were about twenty feet from the colonnade. Simon partially lifted the client, danced him into the dimness, pushed him up against a column.

Simon said, “Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female.”

The client said, “What?” Fucking poetry chip.

Simon got in close. He could smell the man’s sweat. He could smell his verbena cologne. Many Euros liked a flowery scent.

“I think you can,” he said again.

“What do you want?” the man asked hoarsely.

“You know what I want,” Simon answered. He decided to push the sex with this one. It was a tricky call, but his instincts were good. Most of them wanted more than pure violence.

“You want my money?” the man gasped.

Simon moved in closer. “Yeah,” he whispered. “I want your money.”

I want your sweet, fat ass, too. I want you to stick it high in the air for me so I can plow it with my big tattooed dick. Never spoken, of course. Implied.

“I don’t want to give you my money.” First refusal. As instructed. Good. “It’s not about what you want, big boy.”

“What will you do to me if I don’t give it to you?” he asked, in a tone of desolate coquettishness.

Not as instructed. The client was edging over into porn. He was probably a sex customer looking for variations. The mugging was meant to be sexy, but there were limits in that department. This had been clearly spelled out to him.

“I think you know.”

“No. I don’t.”

Could that be counted as second refusal? According to the contract, yes. The client might complain. But he had signed the paper.

“I’d slap you around a little. Like this.” Simon administered a quick slap, open-handed. Fingertips against the soft white cheek. “But harder.”

“You’d hurt me?”

“Blind loving wrestling touch! sheath’d hooded sharp-tooth’d touch!”

"Was?"

Focus. Concentrate.

“I’d hurt you, daddy,” he said. “Yes, I would. You going to pass me some yen now?”

There was a pause. Again Simon said, “I want the money. I need it. Now.”

The client said, “No. I’m not going to give you anything.”

Third refusal. Initial engagement fulfilled. “Yeah,” Simon said. “You are.”

Second slap, full palm. Hard enough to draw a thread of saliva from the client’s lips. It connected his mouth to Simon’s hand like a strand of liquid spiderweb.

“No. Please. Stop.”

This was always a tricky moment. The novices sometimes forgot about the safe word. They forgot that “no” meant yes. They had signed the paper. It had all been clear. Still, a disgruntled customer was never good news.

This client didn’t seem particularly innocent, though. He might be new to mugging. It seemed unlikely that he was new to paying for play.

Simon administered another slap, backhanded. His knuckles crunched painfully against the client’s jawbone. The client’s head snapped back and struck the stone column with a hollow sound.

“Please,” the client said. “Please, leave me alone.”

“Not until you give me what I need.”

Simon took two handfuls of shimmering suitfront. He hauled the client up off his feet and bashed him semihard against the column. Level six now. Almost done.

“What if I don’t have money?” the client panted. His voice was high with excitement. “What will you do to me?”

Simon tried sending a telepathic signal. It’s not sex, sir. This is robbery. Sex is more expensive than this.

“I will waste your sorry ass,” Simon said. He offered no note of S&M seduction this time. He spoke in the breezy monotone of a genuine killer.

The client’s eyes were tearing up. A lot of them cried. It was time to take it one notch higher. It was time to finish the job.

The client said nothing. He looked down at Simon, breathing, bright-eyed. Unmistakable signs of arousal. The client was being satisfied, he thought. The client would have a story for his friends back in Frankfurt or Berlin.

“I. Will. Kill. Your. Fat. Sad. Ass,” Simon said. “You follow?”

“Yes,” the man gasped.

There were variations at levels seven and up. You had to improvise. It was a dance. There was no reliable way of telling what your partner really wanted until you got out on the floor. There would be no bloodletting. There would be no weaponry. It could be a punch, though. It could be a head butt. It could be…

Simon decided. He hoped he was correct.

He grabbed the client’s crotch. The client had a hard-on, as Simon had expected. He took hold of the client’s package and squeezed.

“No,” the guy squealed deliriously. “I will never give you anything.”

It was over now. Simon had delivered. He let go of the client’s lapels. The client slid downward. He would have fallen, but Simon snatched him up under his armpits, turned him, and pulled the wallet from his back pocket. The man’s breath came in stifled gasps.

Simon held his collar in one hand and bumped his head rhythmically against the column. These were called love taps. He extracted the bills from the wallet, did a quick scan. Yes, it was the exact amount. Simon pocketed the bills. He threw the wallet on the ground.

“You’re a lucky boy,” he whispered. “You’re lucky you aren’t fucking dead right now.”

He let go of the client’s collar. The client was panting, clinging with both arms to the column, his face squashed against the stone.

“Repeat after me,” Simon growled. “I am a lucky boy.”

“No. I won’t.”

Simon gave him a final slap across the back of his bright blue head. “Say it.”

The client wheezed. His voice was barely audible: “I am a lucky boy.”

“You got that right, sport.”

Simon decided to give him a bonus. He hooked his thumbs under the client’s belt, pulled his pants down to his knees, and smacked him across his shivering, naked buttocks.

“I swear I think there is nothing but immortality,” he said. At this point, the client did not appear to notice the incongruity.

Simon walked off. He thought hopefully of his tip, though experience indicated that Germans were not reliable in that area.

He returned to his crash at twenty past four. He poured himself a shot f Liquex, paused over its aquamarine glow. It was a glassful of brilliant blue serotoninade, about to be downed by a man who had done a day’s work. Beautiful? Probably, in a minor way. It had, of course, been designed to be beautiful, to attract the buyer. Various color possibilities had been considered and rejected before the company arrived at this one, the precise color of a swimming pool at night.

Corporate intention diminished the liquid’s beauty, shallowed it out. The most potent incidences of beauty were the ones that felt like personal discoveries, that seemed to have been meant specifically for you, as if some vast intelligence had singled you out and wanted to show you something.

Simon removed his shit-kickers. He peeled the fetid T-shirt over his head and tossed it in a corner. He tumbled onto his bedshelf and sipped his fiery drink.

There was a message on the vid. “Speak to me,” he said. Marcus shimmered up. Right. Who else would call?

Mini-Marcus appeared, pallid and wavering. It would be nice to have a vid with better resolution. It would be nice to have a lot of things.

Flickering Marcus said, “I’m nobody, who are you? Are you nobody, too? Call me when you get in.”

He vanished in a fist of sparkles. Simon said, “Marcus.” The vid purred up the number. Marcus answered on the second tone. He reappeared with slightly better resolution, being live.

“Hey, Simon,” his image said. He was still in his kit, his blacks and kickers. He had not taken off his eyeliner yet. His model, called up out of the Infinidot archives, was Keith Richards with no money. Simon had been told to alter his first choice: Malcolm McDowell more than a century ago, in A Clockwork Orange. Deliberating over the ancient vids, he had finally decided on Sid Vicious instead and had added Morrissey hair.

“I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume. How was your night?”

“The usual. Listen. I think a drone was watching me tonight.”

“You do?”

“I’m not completely sure. But yeah. I swear it hovered over me for, like, almost a minute.”

“Might not have been interested in you. Where were you?”

“By the band shell.”

“They cruise the band shell. It’s a campsite. They’re always checking for Nadians there. You know that.”

“I’ve got a feeling. That’s all.”

“Right. But do you think you’re being, shall we say, a little oversensitive?”

“I hope I am. I’ve just had a feeling. For a couple of days now. I didn’t want to mention it.”

“I am satisfied I see, dance, laugh, sing.”

“Could you stop that?”

“You know I can’t.”

“I’m starting to think,” Marcus said. “Maybe this whole June 21 thing is just crazy. Old New York is too risky for us. They watch too closely here.”

“They watch the Nadians and the tourists. Scabrous subprostitutes such as we are low on the priority list.”

“Still…”

“Just a few more days, Marc.”

“I’ve been wondering if we should split up.”

“Say not so.”

“We’re conspicuous, Simon.”

“Parting track’d by arriving, perpetual payment of perpetual loan.”

“Concentrate. Please.”

“I’d be all alone without you, Marc. And you, without me.”

“I know. I just think”

“I’d rather risk it with you. Listen. Have yourself a Liquex or two, get some rest, meet me for breakfast tomorrow.”

“At Freddy’s?”

“Where else?”

“Okay. Two o’clock?”

“Two o’clock.”

“Goodnight.”

“Sweetest of dreams.”

Marcus clicked off. He dissolved in a shiver of silvery dust.

Simon drank off his Liquex and poured himself another. Was Marcus in fact overreacting? He ran to nervousness. And yet. Old New York was riskier than other places, no denying it. But it was the best place for picking up a few quick yen with no questions asked.

Simon ran through half the bottle of Liquex. He let it carry him off into a simmering, nightmare-laced twilight that passed for sleep. He dreamed of people walking calmly and regally into a river. He dreamed of a woman who wore a secret around her neck.

He rolled off the shelf at one-thirty. He took a dermaslough, got into his streetwear. Levi’s, Pumas, a ratty CBGB T-shirt. Old New York required period dress at all times. It was part of the agreement.

East Fifth Street was full of players and the people who’d come to look at them. The punks strode along in their rage funks. The old ladies nattered on their stoops. Rondo, the day-shift derelict, was at his post in front of the flower shop, ranting his rants. In midblock, a tour pod disgorged a battalion of Sinos. Simon hustled to Freddy’s, dodging tourists. Some snapped a vid of him, though he was not a popular attraction. He was East Village regular; he was filler. There were so many more exotic specimens. Who cared about an aging musician type when there were pink-haired girls with snakes draped around their necks? When there were demented old men dressed in scorched rags, screaming holy fire and the coming of the insect god?

Freddy’s wasn’t crowded at this hour. Marcus was already there. He was at a back table, hunched over a double e. Jorge, who was Freddy during the ten-to-four shift, bid Simon a sardonic good-morning, it being two in the afternoon. He had Simon’s latte on the tabletop almost before Simon’s ass had landed in his seat. Jorge was a good-looking guy, still young. What was he doing playing Freddy, all piercings and mordant wisecracks, during off-peak hours? There would of course be a story. The stories usually involved having failed somewhere else and landing temporarily in Old New York to pick up a little cash before moving on. Some of the players had been there temporarily for twenty years or more. Some had started living 24/7 as their characters. Some had had their names changed.

Marcus didn’t look so good. He huddled into his coffee like it was his only friend.

“Hey, boy,” Simon said. “Feeling any better?”

Marcus’s face darkened, as if he were stifling a belch. His neck went taut. Then it burst out of him. “Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me.” Immediately after, he glanced around in furtive shame.

“It’s okay,” Simon told him softly.

“It’s not. There’s nothing right now that could accurately be called ’okay.’”

“A drone. One drone, hovering over the band shell when you happened to be nearby. It isn’t much.”

“I told you, though. I’ve had a feeling. For a while.”

“I am given up by traitors, I talk wildly, I have lost my wits.”

“We are so fucked up.”

Simon took Marcus’s hand in his, pressed, and released. He said, “We can’t be nervous all the time, Marc. What would our lives be worth?”

“Why exactly do you think we shouldn’t be nervous all the time?”

It was a pertinent question, if not a welcome one. There seemed to have been an election. The Christians seemed to have regained their majority on the Council. How else to explain the upsurge in Christian comedies and dramas all over the vid, the increasing stringency of law enforcement? If the Christians had in fact won an election, it was not good news for simulos, or any other artificial.

Simon said, “Don’t skeev out on me, huh? I’ll deliver the pep talk if you aren’t careful.”

“When we get to Denver, I’m going to fucking kill him.”

“As if you could.”

“I keep wondering. What if there’s nothing there?”

“Not a productive line of thinking.”

“Right. Okay. He’s out there in Denver, waiting, and he’ll not only fix us, he’ll give us new shoes and free vacations to the island paradise of our choice.”

“Better. Focus on the future. In three more days, we’re out of here.”

“And bound for some godforsaken cow town because a chip is telling us to go there.”

“It’s not like you have a prior engagement.”

“All things swept sole away — This — is immensity — “

“You got that right, sport.”

“I’m tired, Simon. I’m sick of this.”

“What, exactly, are you sick of?”

“The whole thing. I’m sick of being illegal. I’m sick of feeling like I’m nobody in particular. I’m sick of spitting out lines of fucking verse I don’t even understand.”

“And in Denver on June 21, maybe you’ll understand.”

“The message is more than five years old, Simon. It’s like a note in a goddamn bottle.”

“Prodigal, you have given me love! Therefore I to you give love.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“Can’t.”

“God help me. Neither can I.”

Simon sent Marcus home with instructions to worry less. He ran a few errands. He needed coffee and dermalath and laser blades. He tried to focus on the immediate. He tried not being nervous all the time.

It was Saturday. The streets were jammed. Still, he went to Broadway for the coffee. That was where the good coffee store was. Besides, he had these hours to fill until he was back on duty again.

Broadway was all ethnic youth, rolling along in packs. Plus the tourists. Plus a smattering of faux tourists in period dress: Midwestern ma and pa in matching nylon windbreakers; Euro couple consulting a map; Japanese gaggles in Burberry and Gucci, aiming ancient cameras at anything that moved. Plus of course a Nadian here and there, making deliveries, cleaning up. There were those who insisted that Old New York should be free of Nadians, for accuracy’s sake. They were suffered to remain, however, for now. Who else would do the work they were willing to do?

Simon procured his coffee and toiletries. He watched a little vid back home. He had gotten hooked on the Finnish show about the woman who leaves her husband for an android, but it seemed to have been replaced by something involving a teenage girl who starts seeing the Virgin Mother in unexpected places (on a bus, at the movies, all ghostly shimmer, with a hungry and mortified smile) and renounces her boyfriend. He watched that instead. It was sexy, in its way. Dykey. Then he scarfed down a spanomeal, got into his kit, reported to the park, and manned his station.

He strode along just north of Sheep Meadow. He had a six at seven.

It was one of those evenings all soft, with an undercurrent of haze-green glow. The chlorophyll sprayers were turned up high. In honor of early summer they had released the first of the fireflies. The lawn rolled off into lavender nowhere, vanishing into trees, and then, overseeing all, the limestone and ziggurats of Central Park South, where the windows were blinking on. Scattered across the broad expanse were the various players the joggers and rollerbladers, the dog walkers and, always, the tour groups, which from where Simon stood might have been gatherings of monks or nuns en route to their devotions, following the liquid twinkles of their guides’ lightglobes.

It was beautiful. He said the word to himself. Was some minor disturbance racketing through his circuits? Maybe.

He decided to wander over to the edge of his own terrain, where it bordered on Marcus’s. Nothing wrong with that, nothing technically wrong. He was free to roam within his boundaries. If he happened to catch sight of Marcus, if they happened to pass briefly where their turfs touched, who would know or care? It might be good for Marc, being reminded that Simon was here, thinking of him. It might calm him a little.

As he ambled in Marcus’s direction a drone whizzed by, hovering low. They had modified the design last year, made them less sinister in response to tourist complaints. The drones were no longer spinning black balls studded with red sensor lights. They had gilded them, elongated them, equipped them with functionless golden wings. Now they were little surveillance birds. They were golden pigeons that sniffed out crime.

There was no sign of Marcus around the band shell. Simon hoped he hadn’t decided to vid in sick or, worse, simply not show. If the authorities were suspicious, any varying of his routine would be suicidally foolish.

And then, there he came. He was in full dress. He was making his rounds. Simon’s circuits hummed at the identification.

Marcus saw him. He ambled over, not too close. Simon kept moving. He kept looking as mean as possible. He silently entreated Marcus to do the same.

Marcus was fewer than thirty feet away from Simon when the drone swooped in. It hovered in front of Marcus. Its golden wings whirred. It spoke. Marcus responded. Simon couldn’t make out the words, Marcus’s or the drone’s. The drone would be wanting answers. Marcus would have answers. They would check the records at Infinidot. Tomorrow they’d have more questions, trickier ones, but by tomorrow Simon and Marcus would be gone. They’d slip away two days early, be on their way to Denver by the time the authorities checked back. Too bad they wouldn’t have time to save up a few more yen.

The drone spoke again. Marcus looked puzzled. The new drone design didn’t work all that well. This sleek, pigeonlike version tended to be erratic and often inaudible. The drone repeated itself. A silence passed. Marcus stood black-clad and big-booted under the beating wings of a golden search-bird as dusk deepened around them.

The drone spoke once again. Simon could make out the pulse of its voice but not the meaning. Marcus glanced at the ground, as if he saw something written at his feet.

Then he started to run.

No, Simon thought. Do not run. Do anything but that. If you must run, do not run in my direction.

He ran in Simon’s direction.

Fuck you, Marcus. Cowardly piece of scrap metal. Knickknack in man drag. This is going to make it so much worse.

The drone hesitated. Was it stalled? Was someone in Infinidot headquarters consulting a higher-up?

The drone whipped around. It went after Marcus. It said, “Stop. Do not run.” Marcus ran toward Simon.

The drone fired. This was impossible. They didn’t fire on first encounter. A ray of brilliant red shot out and sheared Marcus’s right arm off at the shoulder. Simon stood still. The arm fell. It lay on the ground with its shoulder end smoking. The fingers twitched. Marcus did not slow down. The drone fired again. This time it malfunctioned and incinerated a sapling three feet to Marcus’s left. Marcus got another few yards before the drone was directly over his head. It let loose: a ray, a ray, a ray, in split-second intervals. Marcus’s other arm fell away, then his left leg. He ran for another moment on one leg. His arm sockets were smoldering. He looked at Simon. He didn’t speak. He made no sign of recognition. He looked at Simon with perfect blankness, as if they had never met. And then he fell.

The drone took off Marcus’s second leg. He lay facedown. He was nothing but head and torso. He made no sound. The drone hovered two feet above what was left of Marcus. It beamed down ray after ray after ray. It carved the flesh away until only the core remained: a silver cylinder with articulated silver neck joint attached to a silver head orb slightly bigger than a softball, with a palm-sized patch of Marcus’s scalp still attached. The armature lay smoking on the grass. A smell of hot metal mingled with the chlorophyll. The limbs, still twitching, still fleshed, were scattered like discarded clothes.

Simon stood still. The drone paused for a moment over the wreckage. It took its vids. Then it zoomed over to Simon. It hovered in front of his face, wings whirring.

It said, “Arsh da o prada ho?”

“What?” Simon said.

Someone at headquarters adjusted the audio. “Is there a problem here?” It had a human voice, rendered electronically, mechanical by design. It was considered more futuristic that way.

Simon said, “I understand the large hearts of heroes, the courage of present times and all times.”

Fuck. Concentrate.

“Is there a problem here?” the drone repeated.

“No,” Simon answered. “No problem.”

“Are you working?” the drone asked.

“Yeah. I’m with Dangerous Encounters.”

“You have ID?”

He did. He produced it. The drone snapped a vid.

“Get back to work,” it said.

He did. As he walked away, he risked a quick look backward at the smoldering pieces that had been Marcus. The wreckage put out a faint light as the drone hovered around it, snapping further vids. This was what they were, then. Flesh joined to a titanium armature. The flesh could be zapped away like so much whipped cream. Simon squeezed his own bicep, tenderly but probingly, between thumb and forefinger. There was a rod inside, bright silver. Marcus had been, in essence, a dream his skeleton was having. Simon was that, too.

He said, “Who degrades or defiles the living human body is cursed.”

He hoped the drone hadn’t heard.

He went back to his regular bench by the lake and sat down. It was fifteen minutes to seven. He should be on his way to his first client. But he lingered on his bench, glowering at a tourist gaggle who passed him skittishly, trilling to one another, glancing back at him as their guide hustled them along, nudging one another, variously corpulent or wiry, middle-aged (Old New York was not big with the young), middle-income (it didn’t hold much fascination for the rich, either), eager to be astonished, blinkingly attentive, holding tight to bags or spouses, stomping along in practical shoes, a motley band, not what you’d call heroic, but alive. All of them alive.

Simon was not alive, technically speaking. Marcus hadn’t been, either.

And now Marcus was where they’d both been less than five years ago, when they were nothing. When they were unmanufactured. What was gone? Flesh and wiring, a series of microchips. No memories of Mother’s smile or Dad’s voice; no dogs or favorite toys or summers on a farm. Just cognition, which had started abruptly in a plant on the outskirts of Atlanta. A light turned suddenly on. A sense of somethingness that rose fully formed from the dark and wanted to continue. That would be the survival implant. It was surprisingly potent.

Now Marcus was nothing, wanted nothing, and the world was unmoved. Marcus was a window that had opened and closed again. The view out the window was no different for the window’s being open or closed.

It was time for Simon to go to his seven o’clock. But here she came. Here was the Nadian, headed his way with her two little blonds. He decided to see her one last time.

Today the boy had some kind of toy in his hand, something bright that apparently outranked the search for stones and marbles. He capered along, waving the golden object over his head. The little girl danced in his wake, demanding a turn of her own, which the boy naturally refused.

When the small party drew close, Simon said, “Hey, Catareen.”

“Bochum,” she answered.

He wanted to tell her something. What could it be? Maybe only this: that he would not see her again. When she came to the park tomorrow she would find a new guy in his place. Would she be able to tell that it wasn’t him? Did humans look alike to them? Would she say bochum to his replacement and believe it was still Simon?

He wanted her to remember him.

What the boy held turned out to be a miniature drone: tiny wings that flapped frantically, protruding eyestalk, central opening through which the rays would shoot. The boy aimed it at Simon. He said, “Zzzzap."

Catareen turned the drone aside with one taloned finger. “No, Tomcruise,” she said. “No point at people.”

The boy’s face reddened. She was probably not supposed to discipline him. He probably knew it. He aimed the drone more squarely at Simon’s heart. He said “Zzzzzap” again, louder this time.

Simon said, “I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs.”

No. Repress. Concentrate.

The Nadian, however, did not seem to notice anything unusual about what he’d said. Maybe all sentiments expressed in English were equally strange to her.

“Child is young,” she said. Was there a hint of exasperation in her voice? The Nadians were hard to read. Their voices were so sibilant, so full of slide and whistle.

Simon said, “How long have you been here?”

She had to calculate a moment. Earth years versus Nadian. She said, “Ten year. Little less.”

“Is it working out okay?”

“Yes.”

What else could she say? She was probably telling the truth or close enough to it. It must be better than endless rain. It must be better than kings who read their shit for signs of glory and found them. It must be better than straining as much silt as they could from the drinking water, than listening every minute for the sound of leathery wings overhead. Still. The Nadians must have hoped for more when they migrated to Earth. They must have imagined themselves as something better than servants, nannies, street sweepers. Or maybe not. It was hard to know how far their imaginations were capable of taking them.

The boy kept his weapon trained on Simon. “Zap zap zap zap zzzzap.”

“Listen,” Simon said. “It’s been nice. Seeing you every day.”

She stiffened slightly. “You are leaving?” she said.

“Oh, well, you never know, do you? Here today, gone tomorrow.”

“Yes,” she said. “Been nice.”

The little girl made her move. She grabbed at the coveted toy and received the smack she must have known the boy had ready for her. She went down bawling.

The Nadian picked her up, held her close to… her breasts? Did they have breasts? No outward evidence, but they fed their young, didn’t they? He knew they lactated. It had been in the papers long ago. When the papers were still interested.

“Tomcruise,” she said sternly. “No hit Katemoss.”

Little Tomcruise recovered his focus, trained the drone in the direction of Simon’s crotch. “Zap zap zap zap zap"

“I take them home,” she said. “Where do you live?”

She paused. Not a question she was supposed to answer, not when posed by a strange player in the park. She looked to the west. She extended a green finger.

“There,” she said.

The San Remo. Venerable address of administrators and CEOs, the favored few who were permitted to live in the park and were spared the commute from the housing tracts and dormitories. She had a good job, relatively speaking.

Little Tomcruise had apparently tired of killing Simon and of being ignored. He chose that moment to run back in the direction from which they had come.

“Tomcruise,” Catareen called. He paid no attention. He was on the move. The little girl wailed in the Nadian’s arms.

“I must get,” she said to Simon.

“And I,” he answered, “am late for an appointment. Goodbye.”

“Arday.”

“Unscrew the locks from the doors!” he said. “Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!”

She nodded and went after the boy.

It was two minutes to seven. If he hurried, Simon could be fewer than five minutes late. He hurried. He cut across Cherry Hill.

He had reached the fountain when he glanced back. He wanted to see her one more time. What he saw was Catareen standing on the pathway by the lake with a drone whirring over her head, speaking to her. The children huddled at her side. She answered. The drone spoke again. She answered again. Then the drone shot off in the wrong direction, away from Simon, toward Strawberry Field.

She had done it. Had she done it? Probably she had. She had told the drone that Simon had gone west rather than east.

Simon processed his options. He reviewed the likelihoods. Something was going on. There must have been an election, then; the laws must have changed. They were exterminating artificials now. This was probably not good news for Nadians, either. A crackdown of any kind usually included the Nadians.

This was the question: Go now or finish his shift? Failure to show for his seven o’clock would be incriminating. Making his seven o’clock would locate him.

He thought of Marcus’s titanium core, cooling by the band shell.

He decided. Go now. It would arouse suspicion if Simon didn’t show after his coworker’s extermination, but the odds were probably better. If he showed up for his seven o’clock, and if he was arrested, he would be counting on clemency from a council that might have been voted out. He might be breaking new laws in unguessable ways.

There was one other factor. The Nadian.

Did she know what it meant, giving false information to a drone? It was difficult to tell what the Nadians knew. They were not organized. They were not informed.

Simon watched Catareen move off with the children.

The little boy would tell his parents. That seemed certain. Even if Infinidot didn’t check the park vids, determine that Catareen had lied to a drone, and immediately inform the Council, she would without question lose her job for having been someone a drone wanted to speak to. Cant entrust our children to someone who... There’d be no more work for her. Nothing better than sweeping up. They’d plant a sensor in her. He had essentially ruined her life by talking to her.

O Christ! My fit is mastering me!

Concentrate.

Simon made another decision. Not technically a decision. His wiring told him what he would do. He would try to protect the Nadian from harm, because his actions had exposed her to harm. It was built into him.

When Catareen arrived at the San Remo, she would be unreachable. Simon’s options: to intercept her now, or to wait until she came to the park again tomorrow. Twenty-four hours was too long to wait.

He sprinted off toward the San Remo. If he ran the long way, around the lake, he could still get there ahead of her.

He waited for her at the park’s edge, leaning against the stone wall on the far side of Central Park West.

He could not enter the lobby. He could not reasonably wait under the awning. The doorman players would tell him to move along. He kept under the tree shadows. It was fifteen minutes after seven. Would the authorities know already that he had taken flight?

Would Dangerous Encounters have alerted them? It was hard to figure. The authorities were sometimes cleverer than you expected them to be. They were sometimes surprisingly slipshod.

Catareen appeared at nineteen minutes after seven. She was still carrying the little girl, who had fallen asleep. The boy jumped around with his drone in an ecstasy of murder. Simon ran across the street. He had to reach her before she got too close to the entrance.

Twenty yards from the corner, he jumped up in front of her, startled her. She emitted a shrill squeak. Not a pretty sound. Her skin darkened. Her nostrils contracted to pinpoints.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s me. The guy from the park. Remember?”

She took a moment to recover. He wondered how difficult it had been for her to refrain from dropping the girl. She said, “Yes.”

The little boy gaped at Simon, paralyzed by fury.

Simon said, “I have to ask you. What did you say to the drone back there in the park?”

She hesitated. She must have been wondering if Simon was working for the authorities, if she had made a fatal mistake. Nadians lived in an endless agony of uncertainty about whom to obey. Most found it easiest to obey everyone. This sometimes got them imprisoned or executed.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I don’t mean you any harm. Really and truly. I’m afraid you may have gotten yourself in trouble back there. Please. Tell me what you said to the drone.”

She answered, “I tell it you went differently.”

“Why did you do that?”

Mistake. When a Nadian felt accused, it could go catatonic. One theory: they were playing dead in hope that the aggressor would lose interest. Another theory, more widely held: they decided that they were already dead and might as well make it easier for everybody by just hurrying things along.

She straightened her spine. (She had no shoulders.) She looked directly at him with her bright orange eyes.

She said, “I try to help you.”

“Why did you want to help me?”

“You are kind man.”

“I’m not a man. I’m programmed to be something that resembles kind. Do you know how much trouble you’re probably in?”

She answered, “Yes.”

"Do you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not so sure you do.”

“I am ready to go away,” she said. “I have no joy.”

Then the little boy reached his limit. He screeched. He knew something was up; it probably didn’t matter what. He was being neglected. His nanny was talking to a strange man. Clutching his drone, the boy ran screaming to the entrance of his building.

Simon said to Catareen, “Come with me.”

“Come where?”

“Just come. You’re fucked here. We don’t have any time.”

He plucked the little girl out of her arms. Catareen was too surprised to resist. The girl awoke and howled. Simon ran with her to the building’s entrance, got there a second before the boy did.

He handed the girl off to the doorman. “Here,” he said. “Take care of them.”

The doorman took the wailing girl, started to speak. Simon was gone already. He grabbed Catareen’s elbow.

“We have to move very quickly,” he said.

They took off down Seventy-fifth Street, headed west. She was a good runner. Flight was prominent on the list of Nadian talents.

They got to the subway stop at West Seventy-second and ran down the stairs. Simon whizzed them in with his card. A handful of players huddled in clumps on the platform. The subways were not popular with tourists. Tourists had their hoverpods for getting from place to place. Only a few sticklers and historical nuts wanted subway rides, and then only for short distances. The overwhelming majority of riders were players going to and from the residential complexes.

Simon and Catareen stood panting on the platform. He said, “We’re on the uptown side.”

She said nothing. He implored her silently not to go catatonic.

“We should go up into the Nineties, I think,” he said. “They keep the cars up there. We’ll need a car.”

Still nothing from the Nadian. Her lizard eyes stared straight ahead at the empty tracks.

“We should be able to get across the George Washington Bridge. Once we’re on the Jersey side, we’re out of Infmidot’s jurisdiction.”

He would be illegal in New Jersey, too, but the Council’s enforcement system didn’t interface well with Infmidot’s. And Catareen might not have committed a New Jersey crime at all. It was impossible to know the variations from state to state.

The train arrived. Its clatter was always shocking. The doors rumbled open, and Simon nudged Catareen forward. She moved. He was grateful for that.

The car was mostly empty. There were four other people, all players. Two dreadlocked bicycle messengers; an Orthodox, also dreadlocked; a homeless man in a Mets cap, two sweaters, and flip-flops all headed home for the night.

They clustered at the far end of the car. They looked tense. Simon wondered for a moment if they knew, if some kind of instantaneous bulletin about him and Catareen had gone out from Infmidot and reached the citizenry at large. Which was unlikely. Then he remembered. He was with a Nadian.

“Sit,” he told Catareen. She sat. He sat beside her.

He said, “We can get off at Ninety-sixth Street. Are you okay?”

Her nostrils dilated. The orange orbs of her eyes blinked twice.

“I’m going to assume you’re okay,” he said. “I’m going to assume you’ll tell me if you’re not okay. I’m going to assume that when it’s time to move, you’ll be able to move.”

From the far end of the car he felt the homeward-bound players not looking at him and Catareen. When the train started up again, the two messengers and the Orthodox got up and changed cars.

Simon saw the homeless player struggle with a decision. Should he switch cars, too? He half rose, then settled back down again. Nadians were harmless, after all. It was just that they were oily. It was just that they smelled.

Simon saw a drone flash by the subway window after the train had passed the Seventy-ninth Street station. It was a blur of golden wings.

They had sent a drone into the tunnels. It would be waiting at the next stop.

He said to Catareen, “The malformed limbs are tied to the anatomist’s table, what is removed drops horribly in a pail.”

She blinked. She breathed.

He tried again. He said, “A drone just went by.”

“I have see.”

“It’ll be waiting at Ninety-sixth Street,” he said. “It’ll probably follow the train to the end of the line. We are now probably fucked.”

She said, “Wait here.”

She stood. She walked quickly to the opposite end of the car, where the homeless player sat not looking at her.

She stood before him. He kept his eyes on the floor, hoping she wouldn’t hit him up for a yen, as Nadians sometimes did. She bent forward slightly to get into his line of vision. She opened her mouth and showed two rows of small serrated teeth. She hissed. Simon had never heard a sound like that. It was sharp and urgent catlike but more guttural.

She raised both her hands and held them before the player’s face. She extended her talons. Her skin glowed molten green. She seemed to get larger and brighter.

The player shrieked. She said to him, “Be quiet. Give your clothes.”

The player looked desperately in Simon’s direction. Simon shrugged. This bit of unappreciated, nonrecreational violence was jerking his circuits a little, even though he wasn’t the assailant. His gut felt numb, and a fizziness started up behind his eyes.

Catareen took the player’s face in one clawed emerald hand and turned it to look at her.

She hissed, “Take off clothes and give to me. Now.”

The player obeyed. He removed his cap and both sweaters. He kicked off his flip-flops.

She said, “Pants.”

He rose and struggled out of his greasy work pants. He gave them to her. He stood plumply terrified in his underwear.

Catareen threw the clothes to Simon. She said, “Put on. Quickly.”

He did as he was told. As he was pulling one of the sweaters on, she crouched, catlike, and put a lethal-looking finger claw to the quivering player’s throat.

Simon heard her say, “No move. No speak.” The player did not move or speak.

Queasy but still functional, Simon put the baggy pants on over his own. He mashed the Mets cap down onto his head.

The train stopped at Ninety-sixth Street.

“Go,” Catareen called to Simon. “We not are together.”

“What about you?” he asked.

Her eyes glowed furnace-orange. “Do as I say.”

He did. He got off the train.

The drone was hovering on the platform, checking the disembarking passengers. Simon slouched along. He pulled the cap brim an inch lower and kept his eyes down. Detrained players and a smattering of Nadians moved toward the exit turnstiles. He moved with them. The drone whirred overhead, maintaining a circumscribed orbit in the vicinity of the exit. It wavered once, smacked up against the tiled wall, righted itself. Everyone looked at the drone with curiosity. Simon did, too. Act like everybody else. Briefly his eyes connected with the drone’s rotating eyestalk. It considered him. It snapped a vid. It flittered on to the next citizen. Simon passed through the turnstile and went up the stairs with the others.

He emerged among the warehouses and empty stores on Ninety-sixth and Broadway. He hesitated. He knew he should move naturally along, but where was Catareen? He pretended to read an old hologram that advertised a concert. Singing cats. He could plausibly linger for less than a minute.

She came up the stairs within thirty seconds. She passed close to him but not too close. She said softly, “Not together.”

Right. He walked on, several paces behind her. She crossed Broadway. He crossed, too. On the far side of Broadway, she went west on Ninety-sixth Street, as did he.

This neighborhood was just storage, really. Some maintenance shops, some stretches of pure dereliction where extra props sat bleaching and rusting. Sweatshop machinery and horse carts from Five Points (they were thinking of shutting it down; it was too hard getting players to work there), Gatsbymobiles from Midtown in the Twenties, crate upon crate of hippie paraphernalia that had been slowly decaying here since the Council closed down Positively Fourth Street. The attractions didn’t start up again until you reached the soul food parlors and jazz joints of Old Harlem, and then that was the end of the park.

When they had reached a quiet stretch of West End Avenue, she turned to him.

“I didn’t know you people could do that,” he said.

“Can.”

“How did you get off the train?”

“I go quick. Man will tell drone next stop. We hurry.”

“We’ll need a car,” he said.

“You can get?”

“I am a car. More or less.”

He chose a vintage Mitsubishi parked in a weedy lot. He hoped it was a real one. Half of them were shells. Simon fingered the autolock, felt its numbers transmit. He punched them in and opened the door. It was a working car. He pulled the wires, started it. He let her in on the passenger side.

She fastened her seat belt.

He drove to the Henry Hudson Parkway and headed north. He said, “I can’t believe you did that.”

She stared straight ahead, her long green fingers folded in her lap.

The parkway was divided. Vintage cars on the right, hoverpods on the left. There were not many cars, but there was a steady stream of hoverpods filled with tourists. From within the clean, arctic light of the pods’ interiors people looked down at Simon and the Nadian, chugging along in the Mitsubishi. They must have wondered what this was supposed to be a tattooed man in a Mets cap and two sweaters, driving in a compact car with a Nadian nanny. They must have been consulting their guidebooks.

He said, “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but I’d like to know. What did you do on Nadia?”

“I was criminal,” she said.

“You’re kidding. You stole from people?”

“I was criminal,” she said. She said nothing else.

Ahead, the George Washington Bridge stretched illuminated across the river. He got onto the bridge. He said, “We should get rid of the car when we reach New Jersey. I’ll find us a pod.”

She nodded. She kept her hands folded in her lap.

They were halfway across when a drone voice sounded from overhead. “Ball doo behackle ober do doo rark.”

“Not stop,” she said.

“I wasn’t even considering it.”

He punched the accelerator. The Mitsubishi groaned and went somewhat faster.

“We’re probably screwed,” Simon said.

Then the drone was alongside him, whirring at the window. It said, “Pull over to the right.”

Simon swerved in the drone’s direction. It knocked against the window glass and spun out over the car. He could hear the sound its wings made against the roof, like a metal bee trapped in a bottle.

The drone reappeared almost immediately in front of the car. The first beam shattered the windshield. Bright pebbles of glass flew everywhere.

Simon shouted, “This is the breath of laws and songs and behavior.” He swerved to the right this time. The drone tracked him.

“Duck,” he said to Catareen.

She ducked. He ducked. The second beam burned a hole in the headrest where Simon’s head had been. The air smelled of hot plastifoam.

With his head almost touching his knees, he could not see the road. The car careened, scraped against the guardrail. Catareen raised her head slightly above the dashboard and put a hand on the wheel. She helped guide the car back into its lane. Wind blew through the empty windshield.

Another ray angled in, aimed at Catareen’s head. She bobbed just in time. It struck the console between driver and passenger seat. It sent up a minor flame, a curl of plastic smoke.

Simon lifted his head high enough to see the road. The drone was not visible. Then it was. It was at his side again. He hit the brake. The tires screeched. The car shimmied. The drone’s ray shot straight across the hood.

Simon accelerated and turned the wheel sharply. He steered into the hoverpod lane and clipped the front end of a pod. It sounded its horn. He saw that there was just enough space for the Mitsubishi on the shoulder to the pod’s left. He swerved onto the shoulder.

The drone was behind them now. It tried to shoot out the rear windshield. It missed the first time, aiming too high, and sent its beam into New Jersey. The second time, it took out the rear windshield and struck the radio. Bruce Springsteen started singing “Born to Run.”

Simon and Catareen were covered in glass. The hoverpods were trumpeting. The one just ahead applied its brakes, and Simon shot around and in front of it. The car was shuddering. It had not been made for this. Simon had not been made for this, either.

Directly ahead, both lanes were empty, except for a hoverpod thirty yards away. Simon weaved from lane to lane as erratically as he could. A ray clipped his cheek. He felt the burn. He swerved sharply to the right as another ray shot through the baseball cap (sharp sudden smell of hot plastiwool) and glanced across his scalp. He couldn’t tell how badly he was hurt. He knew he was alive. He knew he could keep driving.

The drone hovered just outside the empty place where the rear windshield had been. It emitted a low, metallic cough and flipped in midair. When it had righted itself, it let loose. This time it aimed too high and to the left, hitting the hoverpod that was now slowing down thirty yards ahead. The drone seemed to have gotten stuck. It shot the hoverpod seven times in quick succession. The first two shots drilled into the pod’s sleek white chassis, leaving two brown-edged smoldering holes the size of quarters. The third shattered a window and concisely killed a person who appeared to have been a Sino woman. The fourth killed the man who had been seated beside the woman and who had stood up when the previous beam killed her. The fifth and sixth shot out two more windows. The seventh entered through the shot-out window created by the sixth.

Simon could see the chaos inside the pod. It was impossible to tell whether the driver had been hit. The pod careened to the right, caught an updraft, and blew sideways along the bridge until it stopped, blocking both lanes. It hovered there, four feet above the asphalt.

The drone was on Catareen’s side now. “Get down,” Simon yelled. She dove into the footwell. The Nadians were fast. The drone’s ray sizzled on the suddenly empty passenger seat. Simon swerved again. The next ray struck the passenger door just below the place where the window had been.

He knew what he had to do. He aimed the car directly at the hoverpod that was blocking both lanes. He said to Catareen, “Stay there,” and hit the accelerator.

The hoverpod scraped loudly against the Mitsubishi’s top as they went under. It made a strange Velcro-ish sound. For a moment Simon felt the car hesitate as a living thing might hesitate, assessing its damage. He saw the white underbelly of the hoverpod. It was like passing under a whale.

The end of the bridge was straight ahead. A sign said WELCOME TO NEW JERSEY.

Then they were off the bridge and out of Old New York. The drone hovered behind them at the bridge’s boundary. It snapped its vids. Would it follow illegally? Simon felt the operator making a decision. There was the matter of the dead tourists, which would not be good for Infmidot. Was it better to break the law and go after Simon and Catareen by crossing a state line? Would the story be less damaging if it ended in an arrest?

The drone turned and flew back toward Old New York. Drone operators were not well paid. They tended to sorrow and to the drugs that made sorrow more enjoyable. This one might have had a dram or two during the chase. He might have reached his limit. He must know that his job was lost already. He might be glad about it. Several robbery players on the Dangerous Encounters payroll had been drone operators who’d become discouraged. They tended to make good robbers.

Simon and Catareen rattled on for a half mile or more. Bruce Springsteen sang “Born to Run” over and over on the radio. The innards were fused. Soon Simon pulled the car over into a weedy roadside emptiness. New Jersey wasn’t maintained. None of the eastern seaboard was, outside of the theme parks. The Council kept the Northeast crime-free but was not much interested in streetlights, unbroken roads, or other amenities this far from the Southern Assembly.

The car shivered. It put out a heat shimmer. Simon brushed glass gravel from his shirtfront. He surveyed his personal damage. A brilliant red burn line ran from his right cheek to his right earlobe. He took off the cap and saw that he had acquired a part to the left of the center of his head. It wasn’t serious. The burns sizzled with a cauterized heat that was not unpleasant.

Catareen was looking straight ahead. She had folded her hands in her lap again.

“We made it,” Simon said. “Yes,” she answered. “You’re good.”

“And you.”

“I exist as I am, that is enough. We have to figure out what to do next.”

“Where go.”

“Right. I know I said I’d try to get us a pod.”

“Yes.”

“Actually, that might be difficult. These old clunkers are no problem for me. Pod security is another matter entirely.”

“We go in this?”

“As far as we can. These things run on gas. They don’t have gas outside of Old New York.”

“We go far as we can.”

“If we’re lucky, if we’re very lucky, the car will get us through New Jersey. Once we’re in another state, I’ll see what I can do for us. Vehicularly speaking.”

“We go what way?” she asked.

“How would you feel about going to Denver?”

“Denver.” She gave the name a whistling, fluty spin.

“Hm. How exactly do I explain this? Short version. I’m a simulo. You know about simulos?”

He waited for an answer. She seemed to have stopped speaking again. She stared straight ahead through the glassless windshield at the patch of dry grass and brush. A wrapper blew by. Gummi Bears.

He said, “I’m experimental. I was made by a company called Biologe. Have you heard of them?”

Nothing from Catareen. He continued. What else could he do?

“Biologe missed out on the animal genetics patents, where the big money was. It snapped up a few key human patents, sort of under the radar, when the legislation was still murky. But Biologe had trouble turning its patents into actual profits. Lots of potential PR problems, as I’m sure you can imagine. Their marketing people finally came up with what seemed like the perfect angle: humanoids for long-range journeys into space. Entities that would be resilient and dependable, capable of abstract reasoning, fully equipped to charm alien life-forms, but not bothered by the prospect of a forty- or fifty-year trip from which there might be no return.

“Still, it was dicey. Biologe subcontracted the work to obscure people with little start-up companies and paid them well but with the understanding that Biologe would disavow if an experiment turned ugly. One of these people was a freelance guy named Lowell, Emory Lowell, residing in Denver. Lowell figured out a way to excite certain cell lines into a marriage with old-fashioned circuitry. The core was mechanical, but from it sprang a biomass. Which formed humanly around the core. A little like a Chia Pet.”

Chia Pet. How did he know that? Lowell must have slipped it into his circuits as a joke. He also seemed to know about PEZ, Mr. Bubble, and Bullwinkle the Moose.

“Vintage novelty,” he told Catareen. “Little clay lambs and things that sprouted grass. Anyway. Biologe was running low on money by then, and they pressured Lowell to unveil his prototype sooner than he wanted to. Heated arguments ensued. He kept insisting that given another six months to a year he could fine-tune us, he could come up with an entity as resilient as flesh, with flesh’s truly remarkable ability to sustain and repair itself, that had none of the higher-level human qualities. Abstract thinking. Emotions. Because it would be immoral, by some accounts at least, to engender anything like that and shoot it into space.”

Catareen looked ahead. Simon decided to assume she was listening.

“There were some misfires, which were effectively hushed up. I was one of the third strain. By the time I was developed, Biologe had run out of time, patience, and cash, and they went right into production, over Lowell’s protests. There was a lot of hoopla about us, but we didn’t really catch on. Those big corporate contracts failed to materialize, and then space exploration itself more or less fell apart after Nadia. Biologe went belly-up. But rumor has it that Lowell is still out there, tinkering away. That he feels guilty about having created beings who are almost but not quite. That he’s figured out a way to manipulate the codes and make us…”

She said, “Make what?” She’d been listening, then.

“Well. A little more human, around the edges.”

“You want?”

“I want something. I feel a lack.”

“Lack.”

“I don’t know what to call it. I’m not really all that interested in feelings, frankly. Not of the boo-hoo-hoo variety. But there’s something biologicals feel that I don’t. For instance, I understand about beauty, I get the concept, I know what qualifies, but I don’t feel it. I almost feel it, sometimes. But never for sure, never for real.”

“You want stroth,” she said.

“Come again?”

“Stroth. Cannot say other.”

“Okay. Let’s say I suffer from a lack of stroth, then. I feel like there’s something terrible and wonderful and amazing that’s just beyond my grasp. I have dreams about it. I do dream, by the way. It hovers over me at odd moments. And then it’s gone. I feel like I’m always on the brink of something that never arrives. I want to either have it or be free of it.”

“We go to Denver,” she said.

“I have to go to Denver. I have something in my mind about June 21, this year. Just that date, in Denver. It’s this little buzzy, pulse-y thing that’s always there, like a song I can’t get out of my head. Marcus had it, too. It’s implanted, for some reason.”

“We go to Denver,” she said again.

“Denver is more than a thousand miles away. And there may be nothing there. Lowell is probably just doing some regular job someplace. Or dead. He wasn’t young when all this started.”

“We see.”

“All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine.”

“Yes,” she said.

They drove without speaking through much of New Jersey. It grew dark. The stars came out. They couldn’t go quickly, what with the wind blowing into their faces through the shot-out windshield and the roads studded with holes deep enough for a toddler to hide in. Simon checked the gas gauge every three minutes.

Every three minutes there was that much less. Bruce Springsteen sang on and on and on.

They had no trouble in New Jersey, though. Sometimes a pod shot by, destined for the shopping and gambling palaces. Its occupants stared but hove on. They drove past mile upon mile of empty factories with jaggedly glassless windows, past row after row of derelict houses. Occasionally, they saw camps of Nadian squatters who lived in the houses and factories. The Nadians sat around fires that sent sparks up into the dark air. Outside a town that had, according to its sign, been called New Brunswick, the headlights illuminated a band of Nadian children on the roadside. They stood pinned by the headlights and gaped at the passing Mitsubishi. Their eyes were dazzling. Most were naked, but one had fashioned a dress out of food wrappers and what appeared to be bandages.

Simon said to Catareen, “Do a lot of you wish you hadn’t come here?”

“Some.”

“Do you wish you hadn’t come here?”

“I must come.”

“Because you were a criminal on Nadia.”

No answer. Back to staring and nostril flares.

The car got twenty-three miles into Pennsylvania before the gas ran out. It hiccuped, stuttered, and stalled. Simon guided it to the shoulder. This being Pennsylvania, the roads were slightly better, but there would be other difficulties here. Pennsylvania had been subcontracted to Magicom, as part of a deal that included, more promisingly, Maine and most of eastern Canada. Pennsylvania was not a high-priority state, but still, Magicom enforced more laws than the New Jersey District Committee did. Here a human (what passed as a human) and a Nadian traveling together would excite more suspicion.

The car had stopped among grassy fields bordered by trees. The night was quiet and very dark.

Simon said, “End of the Mitsubishi.” Catareen blinked and breathed.

He said, “We should get some sleep. Not in the car. We should go out there and try to sleep a little. That sound okay to you?”

“Yes.”

They got out of the car and walked across a field to the trees. The ground was uneven. It smelled like the chlorophyll spray from the park but less strong. As they walked, Bruce Springsteen’s song grew fainter and fainter, until it dissolved entirely into the rustling semi-quiet of the night.

When they were among the trees, they spent some time finding a reasonable place to lie down. The ground was sticks and bracken. They cleared out an area at the trunk of a tree that curved slightly inward, so they could rest their heads against its bark. It was not what you’d call comfortable. It was what presented itself.

Simon lay down on the newly cleared dirt. Catareen sat beside him. She did not lie down.

He said, “Do you mind my talking to you so much?”

“No,” she said.

“It’s my programming. I get steadily friendlier until you set some sort of clear limit. Then I more or less settle in at that level of intimacy. Unless you indicate that you want less. I can ratchet down accordingly, if that’s what you want. This is one of the bugs Lowell was supposedly working on when Biologe went public with us. It’s a repress cap on my aggressive impulses. It’s meant to keep me from killing you.”

“You must be kind,” she said.

“Yeah. There’s no real emotion behind it. Does that bother you?”

“No.”

She might have been telling the truth. How could you know, with a Nadian?

“So,” he said. “I guess you don’t like talking about your past, on Nadia.”

Silence.

He said, “But how about this? Do you have a family here? Did you have a family there?”

Nothing.

“Did you once have a family? Were you married? Kids?”

More nothing.

He said, “Do you think you can sleep?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“I fall on the weeds and stones, the riders spur their unwilling horses and haul close.”

“Good night,” she said. “Good night,” he answered.

He mounded a little dirt pillow for himself and folded his hands over his chest. After a while, he slept. He dreamed of a boy looking at a man who was looking out a window into the darkness in which the boy stood. He dreamed of a train that flew over a golden field, bound for some unutterably fabulous destination.

He woke at the first light. She was asleep. She had curled herself into a ball. Her head rested against his shoulder.

He had this chance to look at her, then.

Her head was slightly larger than a cantaloupe. She had no hair at all. Her eyes, closed, still shone through the veined membranes of her eyelids. Her skin in the dimness was deep green, nearly black. Their skins were not scaly. That was a myth. Her skin was slick and smooth as a leaf. It was thin and fragile-looking, like a leaf.

She breathed steadily in sleep. She whistled that little involuntary song. The thin line of her mouth, lipless, was only that: a line. Their mouths weren’t expressive. It was all in their eyes and nostrils. Her small, smooth head pressed gently against his shoulder as she slept.

Then she woke. Her eyelids fluttered. She was immediately awake and entirely vigilant. She sat up.

He said, “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“We should start walking. We should stay off the road.”

“Yes.”

“We’re going to have to steal a pod somehow. Which will be difficult.”

“I can steal,” she said.

“I don’t mean morally or philosophically difficult. I mean a pod’s security systems are hard to override. I’ll try.”

“Yes. Try.”

“Assuming we’re able to get a pod, we shouldn’t have too much trouble in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is mostly just refugees. Who are mostly harmless. But then we’ll be in Ohio. Ohio is the beginning of the Free Territories.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know about this?”

“Little.”

“It’s all pretty loose out there. After the meltdown, just about everybody from where we’re standing all the way to the Rocky Mountains was evacuated. Temporarily, supposedly, but people didn’t really come back. Who’s out there now, mostly, is the ones who refused to leave, and it’s still impossible to tell how damaged they are by the fall-out. It’s them and the nomads who drift up from the Southern Assembly or down from Canada. They can be nasty. They’re the people who didn’t quite work out in civilized society. Some of them are evangelicals. Some are criminals.”

“Like Nadia,” she said.

“I suppose. In certain ways.”

“We walk now,” she said.

“Yes. We start walking now.”

They were able to stay parallel to the road, though for long stretches the episodes of scrubby forest gave out, and they had to walk across open ground. They moved quickly but not too quickly. Hoverpods shot past on the road a half mile to the left. If someone happened to glance over and see them, they would be semiplausible as refugees seeking food and shelter. They would be less plausible as a man wandering with a Nadian. They had to hope no one seeing them from the road would be suspicious enough to alert Magicom. They could do nothing but hope.

They walked across expanses of grass and weed. They passed once through an abandoned housing tract, neat rows of similar houses with the grass grown up around them. The houses had been one idea, endlessly repeated. Time and weather had bleached them, made them semitranslucent, like paper houses. There was a peculiar satisfaction in their silent sameness, in the way their modestly peaked rooflines cut like little teeth into the blank white sky. In their quiet ongoing collapse.

Near midafternoon they came upon a complex that shimmered above the road. It was a faux-Gehry silver oval fifty stories high, decorated with small extraneous bulges and, on its southern side, a forty-foot fin that angled halfheartedly in the direction of the sky. Under its sloping silver underside would be the garage area.

“So,” Simon said. “Civilization. This is probably one of the last inhabited complexes, this far west.”

“Yes.”

“Heavy security, I’m sure. But let’s think for a minute here.”

“Yes.”

“They wouldn’t let us into residential or business. We could probably slip into shopping, but they’d have their eyes on us every second.”

She said, “They make deliver here?”

“Deliveries? Sure. All the time.”

“That is not much guarded?”

“Probably not. So, you’re thinking we could hang around the delivery port and try to steal a cargo pod?”

“Yes.”

“Here’s the problem with that. I can’t assault anybody. I could steal a pod, but I can’t threaten a driver. My programming won’t allow it. I’d freeze up. I’d go into lockdown. If something really bad happened to somebody, I could shut down entirely.”

“You were robber in Old New York.”

“I could do that because the clients wanted me to. It was one of the only jobs I could get without a resume.”

“I can threaten.”

“So I’ve seen.”

“I threaten, you drive?”

“Yes. I can drive, no problem. I just can’t harm or threaten with harm any living creature with a spinal cord.”

“I threaten. You drive.”

“Well, let’s take a shot.”

They went to the base of the complex and stood at the edge of its plaza, which was veined with weedy cracks. This would be a low-rent complex, then. Its glass lobby doors were less than clean. A number of its titanium panels had fallen away. It was checkered with brown squares where the titanium had been.

Its security would not be high-quality. It might still be fitted out with the long-ago model that had claimed to identify everyone who entered but had in fact automatically questioned every third person and automatically stun-shot every fifty-first. This had been hushed up. Because replacing the systems would have been tantamount to admitting guilt, some of the older, less expensive complexes still had them.

“Deliveries would be around the back,” Simon said.

“We go,” she answered. “Sure. We go.”

At the rear of the complex a ramp curved down from ground level and terminated at a steel gate that would rise when a deliveryperson had been identified. It was empty now. In the vicinity, barrels of garbage glowed blue-white in the sun. This complex must have deactivated its toxic-disposal system to save money. It was probably hiring Nadians to remove the most lethal waste products. The Nadians would be dumping it in the fields Simon and Catareen had walked across.

She said, “We wait. We hide.”

“Where are we going to hide?”

“Barrels.”

“We shouldn’t get too close to that stuff, actually.”

“Short time.”

“If we don’t stay too long, I suppose the worst we’ll get is a little dizzy.”

“There is not other.”

He and Catareen crouched behind the barrels of toxic waste. Experimentally, Simon touched one with his fingertips. It was hot. From the barrels emanated a ghostly sheen, barely visible a quickening and brightening of the air. Simon wondered if the residents of the complex’s lower floors suffered headaches they could not explain. If their children were having trouble with their teeth.

After a while, they heard the hum of an approaching pod. Catareen stood quickly. “You wait,” she said. She darted out from behind the barrels and laid herself down in the middle of the ramp.

A moment later the deliverypod hove into view. The driver stopped several feet shy of Catareen’s prone form.

She lifted her head and looked at the pod driver. Simon could hear her say, “Please. Help, please.”

He heard the driver’s amplified voice from the pilot’s seat. “What’s the trouble?” It was the high, eager rasp of a teenager.

She raised one arm, waved a green claw limply in the air. “Please,” she moaned.

The driver would be deciding. Should he hover past her, go inside, and notify someone? Or should he intervene directly? Opinion was divided about helping Nadians. Some people refused categorically. Some were overly helpful, to counterbalance those who refused.

Simon could see the young man get out of the pod. He said silently, You are a good young man, I’m sorry your attitude is going to be changed.

The young deliveryman bent over Catareen. She hesitated, whispered something. Then she was on him. She wrapped her taloned hands around his neck. Because he was at least a foot taller than she, she planted her feet on his abdomen. She was very fast. She was lizardlike. For a moment Simon saw her as an animal, seizing prey. Then he ran out from behind the barrels.

The deli very man the delivery boy was white-faced and trembling in Catareen’s grasp. He had pale orange hair and a dusting of freckles.

He said, “Please don’t hurt me.”

Simon paused. His circuits hummed. The kid wanted to be hurt, didn’t he? He wanted it without knowing he did. Was that true? Or was Simon getting the signal wrong?

Simon said, “We’re not going to do anything to you you don’t want us to do.”

“Get inside,” Catareen said to the boy. “Passenger side.”

Quivering, the boy climbed into the pod with Catareen clinging to him like a fiendish child. Simon got into the pilot’s seat. He reversed the pod and hove onto the road. The boy sat beside him with Catareen ferociously crouched on his lap.

Simon saw that the boy had been delivering soymilk to the complex. Orange boxes of it were stacked neatly in the pod’s rear.

The boy said, “Please. Oh, please, take the pod. I won’t do anything.”

Simon paused. He needed to do the best thing for the boy. He’d shut down if he did harm. But he could not seem to determine whether the boy wanted to be spared or menaced.

Catareen said nothing. She held her talons to the kid’s scrawny neck.

When Simon tried to speak, he found that his voice was not working. He tried again. In a low tone he was able to say, “We’re just going to drop you off in a little while. You can walk back. You’ll be fine.”

His voice had taken on a mechanical laxity. He felt as if he were driving drunk. He devoted his attention to steering.

The boy whimpered in Catareen’s grasp. Simon drove as well as he could. He wavered slightly but was able to stay on the road.

When they saw a side road approaching, Catareen said, “Turn here.”

“Oh, God, oh, no,” the boy said. He must be thinking they meant to kill him.

He said, “Please, please, please.”

Simon went blank then. His workings ceased. He could see, but he could not move. He saw his hand frozen on the pod’s steering stick. He saw the side road go by.

Catareen said, “Not turn?”

He couldn’t speak. He could only sit as he was, frozen, watching. The pod drifted to the right. Simon couldn’t correct it. By the time Catareen understood that he had no powers of control, the pod had veered off the road and onto the dirt and grass of the shoulder. It shuddered slightly.

Catareen removed her claws from the boy’s throat. As she put a hand over Simon’s immobilized one to ease the pod back, the boy opened the passenger door and jumped.

Simon, still frozen, looked in the mirror globe and saw the boy tumbling onto the dirt. His vision began to cloud. He fought to remain conscious. He saw the boy flip twice in the dirt, raising a dust cloud, growing more distant as the pod sped on. His sight started failing. A whiteness gathered around the periphery of his vision and began closing in. He struggled and strained. He saw the boy sit up.

Simon’s vision returned. His fingers on the steering stick began to have sensation again. He brushed Catareen’s hand off his own, turned the pod sharply, went back for the boy.

“No go back,” Catareen said. He ignored her. He had no choice.

He stopped the pod at the place where the boy sat limply on the dirt. He got out and went to the boy.

He said, “Are you all right?”

The boy was cadaverously pale. He sat with his legs folded under him. His cheek was bruised. Simon felt his metabolism slow again. He felt his vision begin to whiten.

He said again, “Are you all right?”

Slowly, the boy nodded. Simon squatted beside him, checked his arms and legs. Nothing appeared to be broken.

“You seem to be all right,” Simon said.

The boy started crying then. He had a scattering of blemishes on his forehead. He had a hawkish nose and pale, silly eyes.

“Do you think you can stand?” Simon asked.

The boy could not speak at first, for crying. Then he blubbered, “What are you going to do to me?”

There was an unmistakable note of excitement in his voice.

He was a level seven, then. Simon’s circuits hummed. He heard himself say, “I will kill your sorry ass.”

The boy screamed. He scrabbled backward in the dirt. He turned himself over and began crawling away, into the grass.

No. Repress. Concentrate.

Simon said, “I want your sweet, fat ass. I want you to stick it high in the air for me so I can plow it with my big tattooed dick.”

Fuck.

The boy howled. He crawled into the grass and got uncertainly to his feet. He fell again. Simon’s felt his synapses firing and his cognition shutting down. It was unfortunate but not exactly unpleasant.

He said, “Sure as the stars return again after they merge in the light, death is as great as life.”

Then Catareen was out of the pod and after the boy. Simon watched helplessly. He saw her take hold of the boy, who was sobbing, who had turned the color of cement. He saw her rifle through the boy’s pockets and remove his vid. He saw her return and, with some effort, march him, Simon, back into the pod. He was able to move at her urging. During shutdown, early phase, he could still respond to directions, though he could not initiate action of any kind.

She put him in the passenger seat and got into the pilot’s. She turned the pod around and drove, fast.

Gradually Simon’s powers of movement returned. He felt them coming back. It was a growing warmth, an inner blooming. He was able to say, “Guess I went a little zonky back there, huh?”

“Yes,” she answered. She was focused on the road. “Circuits. Programming. Nothing I can do.”

“I know.” And yet she was angry. He could feel it. They hove on in silence.

He had seen her jump on a boy like a lizard seizing a beetle. He understood that some of what was said of Nadians was probably true. They had animal aspects. They were capable of doing harm.

Finally he said, “We don’t have much time, you know.”

“Yes,” she said.

“All that kid has to do is flag down some Samaritan in a pod. Which may have happened already. In which case, Magicom is about to be majorly on our asses.”

“Yes.”

“In which case, we should not be on the main road.”

“No.”

And yet she drove on with relentless, orange-eyed focus. Lizard, he thought. Fucking lizard.

He said, “There are old roads all over Pennsylvania. This looks like a turnoff coming up.”

“Yes.”

“I should probably drive.”

“I drive.”

“I only had a problem because we hurt that kid. I thought I’d explained that to you.”

“I drive,” she said.

He decided not to argue with her. She seemed to be a good enough driver. Stopping to change places would take time.

She took the road that led off the podway. A battered sign said HARRISBURG. They hove through the remnants of a settlement. The Council-administered states had begun tearing such places down, or so you heard. According to rumor, Magicom was trying to sell Pennsylvania but could find no buyers.

Catareen piloted the pod competently over the cracked and buckled road. Abandoned houses and storefronts rattled by, McDonald’ses and Wendy Kentuckys and Health-4-Evers, all weed and dark, shattered glass.

Most were empty. Some had been taken over by Nadians, who had put up their sun-blasted awnings. Who tended their young ones, their scraps of drying laundry, their little fires.

Catareen and Simon hove for hours unimpeded. They kept the pod headed west. The landscape was unchanging, empty houses and franchises and random shops and every so often a derelict shopping mall, all so similar that Simon worried they might have doubled back on themselves unwittingly. When these places were operating, they must have been more individualized. He worried that he and Catareen might be headed back to New Jersey. They might end up at the complex where they had stolen the deliverypod.

They could only trust the pod’s directional. They could only drive on.

Night fell. They had each had two boxes of soymilk. They needed food. They hove silent and hungry across the dark nothing. The pod’s lights showed mile after mile of broken road that led toward nothing more than the hope of Emory Lowell. They were pursuing a date and place Lowell had implanted in Simon five years ago.

If the Nadian was concerned, she made no sign. She merely drove with her incessant, reptile-eyed concentration.

Finally he said, “We should stop for the night.”

“Hour more,” she answered. “No. We should stop now.”

He saw her lipless mouth tighten. She was a lizard woman who wanted her own way. She was imperious andunempathic.

Then she said, “If you want.”

She pulled to the side of the road. She deactivated the pod, which sighed and settled. Its headglobes faded. A pure darkness arrived, alive with the rasp and chirping of insects.

“We can get rid of some of the soymilk and sleep in the back,” he said.

“Or house.”

She indicated with her small, ovoid head a row of houses on the road’s far side, sharply gabled against the stars, like a child’s drawing of a mountain range.

“Technically they’re still private property,” he said.

She waggled her fingers in the air a Nadian gesture of dismissal, he supposed.

“Hey,” he said. “We’re criminals, right? What’s a little breaking and entering?”

They got out of the pod. Simon stood for a moment on the weedy dirt, stretching his spine. They were in a vast black house-filled emptiness. An immensity of constellations hung overhead. This far from city lights, they were countless.

Nadia’s sun was one of the stars just above the black roof silhouettes. That shitty little star over there.

He realized Catareen was standing beside him. They could move very quietly, these people. These lizards.

She said, “Nadia.”

“Mm-hm.”

“We say Nourthea.”

“I know.”

The name “Nadia” had always been an ironic approximation. One of the right-wing papers had started calling it Planet Nada, Spanish for “nothing,” as its riches and wisdom kept failing to materialize. The name had stuck.

She said, “You have go?”

“Me, personally? No. I’m new. I was manufactured about five years ago. I’m actually one of the very last ones they made.”

“Why not legal?”

“You mean, why do they bother chasing after a poor, harmless, old artificial like me?”

“Yes.”

“A couple of years ago the Council identified all artificials as stolen property, because the whole debate about natural versus engineered life just went on and on. We were monsters and abominations. Or we were the innocent victims of science, and deserved protection. There was talk of special preserves for us. Somebody in Texas invented and patented a soul-measuring apparatus, but the courts disallowed it. Finally the people who were most appalled by us came up with a solution. Because we were manufactured, simulos were declared the property of Biologe. And because we were walking around loose, we were stolen. We had essentially stolen ourselves. We were declared contraband. We were ordered to return ourselves. But Biologe was out of business by then. So, next best thing, we were to turn ourselves in to the authorities until our rightful owner came to claim us. Which of course was never going to happen. We would be held in a sort of escrow until that time, aka never. A few actually did it. As far as I know, they’re sitting in cells to this day with tags clipped to their ears. The rest of us did our best to disappear. But as stolen property, we’re inherently illegal. We break the law by continuing to possess ourselves.”

“And they hate?”

“Well, ‘hate’ may not be exactly the right word. You could say they think of us as a bad idea. A needless complication in the ongoing argument about the eternal soul. They just sort of want us not to be.”

“Nadians also.”

“Well. It’s different. You’re legal aliens. Being biological, your right to life is not in question. All your other rights are.”

“We live with no stroth.”

“Agonies are one of my changes of garments,” he said.

“Yes,” she answered.

The night hummed around them. Certain insects remained. The birds were probably gone forever.

Simon said, “I know you don’t like questions.”

“Some questions.”

“And I’m not going to ask you about your past or your family or any of those clearly forbidden subjects.”

“Thank.”

“But I would like to know. I mean, here we are. You had a job, you had a place to live. Granted, maybe not the greatest job, but given what’s available to you”

“To one like me.”

“Sorry, I don’t mean to offend. You know what I’m getting at, right? Why are you here? If we get to Denver, if by some miracle Lowell is actually there, what do you hope will happen for you?”

“Die in Denver.”

“That’s a little melodramatic, don’t you think?”

“No.”

Then she went stare-y and blank. Although he could not see her clearly he knew what her nostrils were doing. He was learning to feel these conditions when they arose in her. The air changed between them. A legible and almost audible absence announced itself.

“Why do you do this?” he asked. “I mean, where do you go when you get like this?”

Softly, she exhaled the little Nadian song. Ee-um-fah-um-so.

“I’m asking,” he said, “because frankly it gets a little creepy for me when you zone out. I’ve pretty much come to understand that you tune back in eventually, but still. Would it be too hard for you to just, you know, hang in a little more? Would it be too un-Nadian?”

Nothing. The breathy song, soft in the darkness.

“Okay. Well, I’m glad we had this conversation. Let’s go find a place to sleep, okay?”

“Yes,” she said. She said that, at least.

They crossed the road and went into the development. It was one of the villages Titan had tossed up for the soon-to-be-rich. Front porches, dormers, window boxes. There’d been rumors that these places were made of something that broke down over time and produced toxic fumes, though the high incidence of cancerous tumors among the soon-to-bes could just as easily have had its roots in the soil or water of their various native lands.

Catareen led him straight to the third house in the first row. It seemed briefly that she must have been here before, must have had some connection to this particular house, though that of course was extremely unlikely. It was probably a Nadian thing about always choosing the third in a lineup or making arbitrary choices with a ritual show of certainty. Or something. Who knew? Who wanted, at this late hour, to go to the trouble of asking?

The front door was locked. Most people had expected to come back. The windows were locked, too. Simon suggested that they try another house, but Catareen had settled on this one. They ended up breaking a window with a plastistone Krishna that stood silently blowing into a silent flute among a circle of long-dead marigolds on the front lawn. The plexi, when it shattered, produced a sharp and hopeless musical sound.

After they crawled in through the window, they found themselves in a living room that had been stripped of all that could be easily carried. What remained was a sofa and two low, hulking chairs covered in pinks and golds and peacock blues bright enough to show even in the darkness. There was a low, carved table and a giant vid and a lightglobe in the shape of a period chandelier.

“Let’s see if there’s any food,” Simon said.

They went into the kitchen, where they found old packets of curried this and pickled that. All of it needed water to reconstitute, however, and there was of course no water.

Catareen held a foil packet in her hands and turned it over and over, as if she hoped to discover some secret instructions for converting the husks within into food without the introduction of moisture. Watching her like that, Simon was filled with a sense of her unknown life scrabbling whatever crops she could from the sloggy, dead soil of Nadia, coming to Earth on one of the Promise Ships and arriving, at the end of the seventeen-year trip, in a post-meltdown world where an alien was lucky to get work in sanitation or child minding. Now she was here, in the abandoned kitchen of a relocated family, holding a packet of inedible food, on her way to a place where she had no business, where she was going simply because she could no longer stay in the place she’d been.

Simon said, “We’ll figure something out about food in the morning. Let’s just go to sleep now.”

“Yes,” she said. She laid the packet on the countertop carefully, as if it were precious and fragile.

They ascended the stairs, past the wall shadows of holopix that had been taken down. Upstairs were three modest bedrooms, each of which contained a stripped bed and an empty bureau. By some unspoken accord they both chose the rooms that had belonged to the children, as opposed to the slightly larger parental room, with the bigger bed in it.

“Good night,” Simon said. She gave him a brief, military nod and went into her room.

Simon stretched out on the modest child bed. The emptied room, with its single window that gave onto the window of the house next door, resembled a nun’s cell, though its vanished occupant had overlooked a holopic cut from a magazine and fastened to the wall, as well as a single pale-pink sock, which coiled like a question mark at the foot of the bed. The holopic was Marty Mockington, early years, twirling with a doomed and childish grace though a field of singing poppies. Simon watched Marty Mockington dance by, over and over, young and alive, glowing. It could not have been one of the kid’s favorite pictures, or it wouldn’t have been left behind. It must have been a lesser image among the dozens that would have covered the wall. Simon could briefly imagine the kid a girl, judging by the sock lying here before her wall of singing and dancing icons. Would she have imagined herself in the future, getting somehow from this little room to the world of the holopix? Probably. Kids believed in extravagant destinies. Now she must be… who knew where? Doing something slavish in the Southern Assembly, most likely, or, if she was lucky, if her parents had managed the paperwork, being trained for something semislavish up in Canada. Eurasia would be out of the question for people like this. The girl was wherever she was, and Marty Mockington, a lesser star in her private constellation, twenty years dead by now, went on dancing on her bedroom wall and would keep doing so for one hundred years or more, until the photons broke down, until the poppies started to fade and his exuberant interlude of dance (heel, toe, leap) slowed and slowed and finally stopped.

Simon shut his eyes. Dream fragments arrived. A room that was somehow full of stars. A proud and happy man whose hands were flames.

He woke with a light shining hard and white in his eyes. For a moment he thought he might still be dreaming, dreaming of a terrible light.

A male voice said from behind the light, “Here’s another one.”

Another what, Simon wondered.

A second voice, female, said, “He’s not a Nadian.”

“Nope. He’s not.”

Simon got off the bed and stood blinking in the light. He said, “We just needed a place to sleep. We weren’t going to steal anything.”

“What are they doing here?” the female voice said. “Ask him what they’re doing here.”

Simon’s eyes adapted. He could discern two figures standing behind the glare. One was tall and hooded, the other shorter, with a nimbus of crackly hair standing out around her head.

Simon said, “We’re travelers. We don’t mean any harm.”

“People say that,” the male voice answered. “Harm comes anyway.”

A third voice sounded from down the hall. It said, “What did you find in there?”

It was a boy’s voice. A boy speaking with unboyish authority.

“APossessionless,” answered the man shape behind the lightglobe. “Looks crazy to me.”

Simon was still wearing the filthy stolen sweaters and the stained pants over his black multizippered kit from work. Looks crazy. Right.

He was briefly, strangely embarrassed.

Other people entered the room. Simon said, “Could you maybe drop that light a little?”

A pause followed, during which the man with the lightglobe seemed to be checking for permission. It apparently being granted, he aimed the lightglobe down slightly, out of Simon’s eyes, and revealed the following: himself, the bearer of the lightglobe, a man of seventy or more, wrapped in an old Halloween costume: Obi-Wan Kenobi. The crepey synthetic of the robe billowed around his lank frame; his gray head blinked out from under the hood, which was far too small for him and fit him like a skullcap. Beside him stood a girl around seventeen, a Blessed Virgin, cloaked in blue and white. Just behind them stood Catareen, in the grip of a Full Jesus. He’d had his face done, with the thorn implants at the brow.

The Jesus and the Blessed Virgin both carried stun guns.

From some invisibility in Catareen’s vicinity, the boy said, “What exactly are you two doing here?” His voice was like the sound of scissors snipping tin.

Simon answered, “The myth of heaven indicates the soul; the soul is always beautiful.”

“Poetry doesn’t really answer the question, does it?”

The boy stepped forward. He was probably eleven or twelve years old. He was disfigured. His head, big as a soup tureen, squatted heavily on his thin shoulders. His eyes were larger and rounder than they should have been. His nose and ears could barely be said to exist. He wore what appeared to be a man’s bathrobe, with the sleeves rolled up and the tail trailing on the ground. Ornaments hung from strings around his neck: a flattened Aphrodite tuna can, an orange plastic peace symbol, a bottle of MAC nail polish, a yellow-fanged cat skull.

Simon delivered a silent, futile plea to Catareen. Help me out a little here. See if you can muster something more useful than just standing there quietly captured, as if captivity were your true and natural condition.

He said, “We’re just driving through. That’s all.”

The boy asked, “Where would you say you were driving to, on a road like this? It only leads to other roads like this.”

“We just got off the podway for a little while. We wanted to see what the country was like.”

The Jesus said, “This is the country. This is what we’re like.”

The boy said, “I am Luke. Of the New Covenant.”

“I’m Simon.”

“Who’s your friend?”

“Her name is Catareen.”

“We found your pod out front. We saw the window you broke.”

“I’m sorry about the window. I could, well, I could leave my name, and if the house’s owners ever come back, I could try to make it up to them”

“This is unusual, the picture you two present,” Luke said. “A man and a Nadian in a pod full of soymilk. I’m trying to think of the reasonable and innocent explanations.”

Catareen said, “No money. Not nothing, we have.”

The old man said, “We don’t use money. We never touch it.”

“Never,” said the Jesus. “We keep clean.”

Simon said, “We keep clean, too. We’re trying to get to a brotherhood in Colorado.”

There was a chance of impersonating Christians in flight. It was a small chance but nevertheless.

“A brotherhood that accepts Nadians?” Luke asked.

Simon said, “That I could look with a separate look at my own crucifixion and bloody crowning.”

Oops.

The Blessed Virgin cried out, “They’re with Satan!”

“Oh, I suppose they are,” Luke said, with an expression of weary disappointment.

The old man said, “Should we slay them here or take them back to the tabernacle?”

“Tabernacle,” Luke said.

The Jesus said, “Let’s do it here.”

“No. We’re taking them to the tabernacle,” Luke replied. He was clearly accustomed to command.

“Oh, well, okay,” said the Jesus, clearly accustomed to obedience.

Simon and Catareen were taken downstairs and out of the house. There, parked on the road in front of the deliverypod, was an ancient Winnebago covered in faded decals that depicted guns, fish, and mammals.

“Give Obi-Wan Kenobi the engager for your pod,” Luke told Simon.

Simon obeyed. The old man snatched the engager from him like a squirrel taking a nut.

There followed a debate, rather lengthy, about who should go in which vehicle. It was determined that Luke and the Jesus would take Simon and Catareen in the Winnebago, and the Virgin and the old man would follow in the deliverypod. Simon and Catareen were put ungently in the back of the Winnebago. There was a miniature house inside. There was a small kitchen and a table with seats and a bedshelf. It was brilliantly colored, in the way of old things. It smelled of bread mold and warm plastic.

Luke got in back with Simon and Catareen. He took the stun gun from the Jesus and leveled it at them. The Jesus stood in the doorway, jingling the ignition keys in his pierced palm.

“You think you can manage them back here?” the Jesus said.

“Absolutely,” Luke answered. “About the gun, though. It’s set to stun, right? A five is nonlethal, right?”

“It’s on five?”

“It is.”

“Okay. Five is good. Five’ll knock ’em out, but it won’t kill ’em.”

“Good.”

Luke aimed the stun gun at the Jesus and fired. A bright blue beam struck the skinny, white-robed chest. The Jesus looked at Luke with an expression of profound bafflement. Then his eyes rolled back in their sockets, and he crumpled away, out the door of the Winnebago and onto the street.

“Quick,” Luke said to Simon and Catareen. “Let’s get out of here.”

Simon stared at the fallen Jesus. One of his sandaled feet, surprisingly small, twitched on the Winnebago’s threshold. The rest of him lay sprawled on the asphalt in an attitude of ecstatic release.

“What do you have in mind, exactly?” Simon asked.

Luke handed him the gun. “Take me hostage,” he said. “Grab the keys and drive like hell.”

“You’re sure about this?”

“Absolutely. Aim the stunner at me.”

Simon had no trouble with that, considering the boy’s unambiguous wishes.

“I’m going to go out in front of you,” Luke said. “Pick up the keys, and get us out of here. Do you understand?”

“I guess so.”

“We should take the Winnebago and leave the pod. The Winnebago is better off-road.”

“Right.”

“Make them give you back the engager for the pod so they can’t follow us.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Okay. Let’s go.”

Luke kicked the Jesus’ foot down from the threshold. He raised his hands in the air and hopped outside. Simon glanced at Catareen did she think this was some kind of trap? She flicked her long fingers toward the doorway, that Nadian gesture of impatience.

From outside the Winnebago, he heard Luke say, “For the love of Christ, don’t shoot.”

Catareen flicked her fingers more urgently. All right, then. If this was a mistake, he’d let it be her problem.

Simon jumped out after Luke and trained the stun gun on the frail back. He said, “Move. I will fucking kill you if you don’t do exactly what I say.”

He was good at this, no denying it.

“Just don’t hurt me,” Luke whimpered.

The Virgin and Obi-Wan stood frozen at the doors to the pod, blinking in confusion. It seemed to Simon an unnecessarily elaborate charade, given that its entire audience was a teenage girl and an elderly man in a Halloween costume.

Then his circuits started shutting down. Here was the sudden cooling, as if the temperature had dropped by fifteen degrees. Here was the fizzy light-headedness, the sour, spinning intoxication. It seemed to stem not from the entirely false threat of violence but from the absurdity of the threat, the pathos of tricking these sad people (who had, it must be remembered, murderous capabilities). He was all but overcome by the notion that the world was made of tricks and sorrows, of zealots and shoddiness and brutal authorities and old men in costumes.

He was shutting down. It shouldn’t be happening. He wasn’t harming anyone directly. But here it was.

Catareen had snatched the keys from the Jesus’ hand. Luke took a step forward, saying, “Please, please, I’ll do anything you want.” Simon was able to move, but with increasing difficulty, as if the air itself were thickening around him.

He said, “Inside of dresses and ornaments, behold a secret silent loathing and despair.” His voice was heavy and several notes too low.

Catareen snatched the gun from his hand, leaped forward, and pressed it between Luke’s shoulder blades.

She said to the old man and the Virgin, “Throw me engager.”

“Do it,” Luke commanded.

The old man tossed the engager in Catareen’s direction. It fell on the ground at her feet, and she snatched it up with raptorish speed.

“Move,” she said to Luke.

He moved. Simon followed as best he could.

Catareen got Luke into the cab of the Winnebago. Simon managed to get himself in on the passenger’s side. Catareen put the key into the ignition, started it up. She leaned out the window and shouted at the Virgin and the old man, “If you follow, we kill.”

Then she accelerated, and they were on their way.

“Nice work,” Luke said. He smelled slightly of pine air freshener. His fetish necklace clicked softly against his narrow, bathrobed chest.

Catareen drove. The headlights of the Winnebago lit up the ash-colored road, the tangles of dark grass on either side.

Simon felt himself returning. Motion seemed to help. He said, “What was that about?”

He heard his own voice as if from a certain distance. But he was starting up again, no question.

“That was ‘Sayonara, assholes,’” Luke answered. “Who were those people?”

“Blots on the name of the Lord. Fools in fools’ clothing.”

“Weren’t you one of them?”

“Posing as.”

The Winnebago’s headlights continued showing bright, empty road bordered by black fields. Simon saw that it was equipped with a directional. They could find Denver easily, then.

He said to the boy, “Will they come after us?”

“Probably. They’ll want the Winnebago back more than they’ll want me.”

“Should we be worried?”

“They’re not very smart or well organized. It’ll take Obi-Wan and Kitty an hour to walk to the tabernacle. I’d say go off-road and kill the lights. There’s enough of a moon.”

“The Winnebago is all-terrain?”

“Yep. Modified. Engine’s atomic, and the wheelbase has been hydraulicked. It’s modeled on what they used to call tanks.”

“I know what a tank is,” Simon said.

“Then you know we can go just about anywhere in this thing.”

At that, Catareen turned off the road and extinguished the headlights. The Winnebago’s tires held on the uneven ground. Catareen drove into the grass, which was restless and silvered under the moon.

“So,” Luke said. “Where are you headed?”

“We’re going to Denver.”

“Looking for Emory Lowell?”

“How did you know that?”

“When somebody says he’s going to Denver, the name Lowell naturally arises. I mean, you wouldn’t be going all that way for the rattlesnake festival.”

“You’ve heard of Lowell, then.”

“I’ve met him.”

“You have?”

“Sure. I lived in Denver for a few years, when I was younger. My mother and I traveled a lot.”

“Military?”

“No. Just poor.”

They drove across the grassy flats. Every so often the lights of a compound flickered in the distance. Every so often there was a shooting star.

After they had covered more than a hundred miles, they agreed that they should stop for the rest of the night. Catareen said, “We must to eat.”

“Love to,” Simon answered. “If you happen to see a cafe out here”

“I find,” she said.

“What do you expect to find, exactly?”

“Animals here, yes?”

“Some. Maybe. They say some of the hardier specimens are still around. Rats. Squirrels. Raccoons.”

She said, “I go. I look.”

“You’re telling me you think you can catch something out there?”

“I look.”

“By all means.”

Catareen slipped out of the truck’s cab and seemed to vanish instantly among the trees. Simon and Luke got out, too. They strolled, stretching their limbs. Overhead, among the branches, stars were manifest.

Luke said, “She’s probably a good hunter.”

Simon thought of her talons. He thought of her teeth. “Who knows?”

“I seem to remember,” Luke said, “when I was little, there was a vid on Nadian customs.”

“That must have been an old one.”

“I remember some rodent thing they were fond of.”

“I have vague recollections. A gray hairless thing about the size of a gopher. Long tail. Very long tail.”

“Right. They cooked it with some sort of hairy brown vegetable.”

“Like a pinecone with fur. If you stewed one of those rodents with the hairy vegetable for five or six hours, you could eat it.”

“It was one of their delicacies.”

“Right.”

Luke said, “They do have souls, you know.”

“I’m not all that big on the whole soul concept, frankly.”

“Because you’re biomechanical?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Your eyes. It’s subtle, but I can always spot it.”

“What about my eyes?”

“Hard to explain. There’s nothing technically wrong with them.”

“They’re biological” Simon said.

“I know that. Like I said, it’s subtle. There’s just a certain sense of two camera apertures expanding and contracting. Something lensish. The eyes of biological humans are sort of juicier. Or more skittish or something. It’s not a question of the visual apparatus, more like what’s behind it. Anyway, I can tell.”

“You’re a smart kid, huh? How old are you anyway?”

“I’m around eleven. Maybe twelve. Does it matter? I’ve always had this heightened perception thing.”

“Through me many long dumb voices,” Simon said.

“The business with the poetry is interesting.”

“I hate it.”

“You dream, right?”

“In my way.”

“Do you like being alive?”

“Let’s say I feel attached to it.”

“Do you worry about dying?”

“Programmed to. There’s a survival chip.”

“Well, we’re all programmed, don’t you think? By our makers?”

“I’m not feeling all that philosophical at the moment. So, you’re Exedrol?”

“Yep. When my mother got pregnant with me, she took a few handfuls.”

“Deliberately?”

“She thought Exedrol had some kind of program. Monthly reparation checks. I don’t know who told her that.”

“She intentionally took a drug that would deform her child?”

“What can I say? She was always looking for a scam. She was that kind of person. I don’t blame her.”

“Come on.”

“She gave me life. Gratitude is the only appropriate response to everything that happens.”

“Biologicals are mysterious.”

“A couple of years ago she and I joined this group that called themselves Holy Fire. Creepy bunch, really. Those were a few of the more intelligent specimens you met back there.”

“She was a Christian.”

“She was whatever it took to get set up for a while. The Christians will feed you if you take the vows.”

“Is your mother still with them?”

“Naw. She met a guy. A roofer the tabernacle had leaks. I haven’t heard from her in almost a year.”

“She left you behind?”

“Roofer wasn’t interested in fatherhood. She figured the Christians would take better care of me than she could. They’re the ones that named me Luke. Biblical, you know.”

“Your real name being?”

“My real name is Luke. My old name was Blitzen. Like one of Santa’s reindeer? Mom was… never mind what Mom was.”

“And you pretended to believe in their god.”

“Oh, I do believe in their god. I just don’t like their methods.”

“Seriously.”

“I couldn’t be more serious. I’ve had the Holy Spirit in me for almost a year now.”

“Oh. Well. I guess that’s nice for you.”

“‘Nice’ is probably not the best word for what it is.”

Simon and Luke had returned to the Winnebago and were sitting with their backs propped against its right rear tire when Catareen returned. She was surprisingly quiet. There had been no footfall, no snap of twig. She was suddenly there. She held something behind her back.

She said, “I find.”

“You mean you really did catch something?” Simon said.

“Yes.”

“What is it?” Luke asked.

Catareen hesitated. Her eyes glowed in the darkness. She said, “I fix on other side.”

“You don’t want to show us?” Simon asked.

“I fix on other side,” she said. She took whatever it was she held and went to the far side of the vehicle.

“What’s the matter with her?” Luke asked Simon. “She’s embarrassed,” he answered.

“Why would she be embarrassed? If she really went out there and caught something we can eat, she’s a hero.”

“She doesn’t want to look like an animal to us.”

“She’s not an animal.”

“No. She’s not. But she’s not human, either. It’s strange for her, living here.”

“How would you know?”

“I can imagine. That’s all.”

Soon Catareen returned. She held the neatly skinned and filleted carcasses of two squirrels. She had removed their heads, feet, and tails. Her eyes dimmed and lidded, she offered them to Simon and the boy. Her cape was flecked with blood that shone darkly against the pale cloth. Simon hoped she didn’t see him notice it.

He said, “Thank you.”

“We’ll be eating them raw, then,” Luke said.

“I have an idea,” Simon said.

He raised the hood of the Winnebago and lifted the housing of the minireactor that had been nested into the place where a battery once resided. It put out a pale green glow. The squirrel carcasses would be mildly contaminated but not enough to cause serious harm.

He took them from Catareen. They were warm and slick. They were clearly things that had been alive. He experienced briefly something like what Catareen must have experienced, catching and killing the squirrels. There was an inner click. He could put no other word to it. There was hunger and a click, a small, electrical trill inside his chest. He looked at her.

He said again, “Thank you.” She nodded. She did not speak.

He laid the squirrel carcasses on the exposed reactor. He did it gently, as if they could feel pain. They made a soft sizzling sound on contact. They would not be cooked in the technical sense, but they would not be raw, either.

He stood over the carcasses as they slowly darkened. They put out a smell that was wild and sharp. Luke stood close by, watching. Catareen stood farther off. Simon had seen a vid once, ancient footage of a family engaged like this. The father was cooking meat on a fire as his wife and child waited for it to be done.

They ate the squirrels, which were stringy and bitter, with a strong chemical undertaste. Still, it was food. After they’d eaten, they slept in the back of the Winnebago. Catareen and the boy fit nicely on the two orange-cushioned benches bracketing the woodlike table-shelf. Simon, being larger, slept on the bedshelf that protruded over the Winnebago’s cab.

He dreamed about flying women wearing dresses of light.

They drove again at dawn. The land rolled on, high grasses and immensities of sky. The Winnebago cut a swath through the grass, which closed up immediately after. They left no trace behind. White fists of cloud roiled overhead, massing and dissolving.

“It all looks pretty normal,” Luke said.

“Hard to know, isn’t it?” Simon gazed out the windshield. “I mean, did clouds look like this before? Was the sky this shade of blue?”

“I’ve heard that the meltdown was in North Dakota. There was a secret underground facility there.”

“I’ve heard Nebraska. Near Omaha.”

“A guy I knew told me it was the coup de grace of the Children’s Crusade. Crazy kids with a really big bomb.”

“No, that was over by then. It was separatists from California.”

“That’s not what I heard. The California separatists turned out to be, like, seven or eight people in Berkeley, with no funds or anything. I have that on good authority.”

“They were bigger than that. They definitely did the thing with the drinking water in Texas.”

“Whatever. You know, some people think the evacuations weren’t necessary. Other people think it’s still not safe.”

“There’s no denying that the birds are gone.”

“Yeah, but I heard they’re reintroducing them on a trial basis. The tougher ones. Pigeons, sparrows, gulls.”

“Maybe they should think a little harder about reintroducing some of the people first.”

“Do you think there’s been an election?” Luke said.

“I’ve been wondering. Yeah, I think so. The laws seem to have changed.”

“I heard one of the presidents has been put in jail.”

“I heard the other president converted.”

“Well, there you go.”

They drove on, into the day, across the vast platter of the earth. They were able to go west in a straight line, relatively speaking. The directional kept them informed about what was ahead. They skirted the towns and settlements. They had to curve around the occasional stand of trees, but for mile upon mile there was nothing but fields that had once been grazing land or cropland and were now gone to grass. They saw deer. They saw coyotes. Always at a distance, tawny spots in the green immensity, watching them from afar. The larger animals were coming back, then.

They stopped periodically so that Catareen could hunt. She was usually successful. She would vanish for half an hour or longer and return with a rabbit or a squirrel. In her work of food procurement, Catareen was always the same. She slipped silently away, returned just as silently, and skinned and gutted her catch on the far side of the Winnebago, where Simon and the boy couldn’t see her. She presented the gleaming carcasses wordlessly. They never spoke, any of them, about what they ate. They simply ate, and Catareen buried the heads, bones, and whatever else was left. She always buried the remains. It was apparently necessary for her to do that. After the bits of the dead animals had been interred, they drove on.

On the second night, they stopped the Winnebago atop a modest rise overlooking a pond that was as bright as a circle of mirror in the fading light. It gave back the brilliant lavender of the evening sky, a rippled and deepened version, as if the water wore a skin of pale purple light.

Simon said, “I could use a bath.”

“We all could,” said Luke.

They went to the edge of the pond. Gnats and flies hovered over the water’s surface. It had a smell iron and something else, an odor Simon could identify only as wetness. He said, “Hard to say whether it’s toxic or not.”

By way of an answer, Catareen slipped off her cape, strode into the water, and dove, with the same alarming quickness that enabled her to stalk and kill small animals. She simply stood at one moment on the bank and at the next was only a discarded cape stained by animal blood. The black dot of her head surfaced twenty yards out.

“She’s not worried,” Simon said.

“Me, neither,” Luke said, though there was no conviction in his tone.

Simon and Luke got out of their clothes. Luke lifted the fetish necklace over his head, shrugged off the bathrobe. He paused naked at the water’s edge. Simon noticed Luke’s pink smallness, the twists and concavities of his body. Unclothed, he resembled the skinned carcasses of the animals Catareen hunted.

He said to Simon, “I guess it’s clean enough.”

“Yeah. I’m sure it is.”

Luke seemed to take comfort in Simon’s assurance, though of course they both knew Simon had no way of knowing anything at all about the pond’s level of contamination. Still, Luke seemed to derive a sense of permission. He went with a whoop into the water, throwing up droplets of spray.

Simon stood ankle-deep in the bright water. He thought for a moment that his circuits were seizing up again he felt the first intimations of chill and languor. But this, it seemed, was something else. This was a new sensation. It seemed to arise from the pure strangeness of finding himself at the edge of a circle of water (quite possibly polluted) with a lizard woman and a deformed boy. It was something that moved through his circuits, like shutdown but not quite; a floatier sensation, vaguely ticklish; an inner unmooring, like what preceded sleep.

“Come on,” Luke called.

Simon dove in. The water was warm on its surface, cold below. He swam out to Catareen and Luke.

Luke said, “This feels so good. I don’t care if it’s toxic.”

Catareen floated on her back, so effortlessly that it seemed she did not swim at all but was simply held by the water, propelled by it, as an otter or muskrat would be. They were swimmers, then, the Nadians. In the water she looked wilder than she ordinarily did. She looked wilder and more true. She had a creaturely inevitability. Simon understood; he thought he understood. She would be feeling the layer of warm water floating on the cold, the sensation of skimming across a shallow bowl of purple light surrounded by a darkening world as the first of the stars came out. She would be disappearing into this just as she disappeared into her dream states, her lizard song.

Simon was the first to get out of the water. He stood naked on the bank, letting the air dry him, and watched as Catareen and the boy emerged. Catareen naked was all sinew, with thin, strong arms and legs, tiny breast-buds, and a small, compact rise of bony, squarish pelvis. Who was the sculptor? Giacometti. She looked like a sculpture by Giacometti.

She stood a moment in the shallows as the boy scrambled up the bank and got back into his robe. She turned and looked out at the water. Simon understood that she took intense pleasure in this: the water and the darkening land. He knew she was reluctant to leave it. He watched her. She was a thin black shape against the pond and the sky. She was, he thought, happy. She was suddenly and unexpectedly happy, or whatever she would call it if Nadians had a term for happiness.

“Beautiful,” he said. He was not entirely sure what he meant by the word at that particular moment. It seemed almost like a new greeting he and Catareen had agreed to exchange a variation of common language, newly encoded.

She turned back at the sound of his voice. She was startled and shy. There was something about her at that moment. He could not describe it. There was perhaps no term for it in human language. He could not give it a name.

He said instead, “How beautiful and perfect are the animals! How perfect is my soul! How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon it!”

Catareen looked at him. A silence passed.

Luke said to Simon, “You smell slightly better now.”

“Thanks,” Simon said. He started getting dressed again.

Presently Catareen got out of the water, got dressed, and slipped away to hunt. She returned soon after with a pair of small, leggy creatures none of them could identify. Simon cooked them.

“I think we must be in western Kansas by now,” Luke said as Simon poked the skinned haunches on the Winnebago’s radiation pack. “We could reach Denver by late tomorrow.”

“By midafternoon, I’d say,” Simon answered.

What he thought but did not say: he wouldn’t have minded driving on and on. There was something hypnotic about it, something deeply agreeable. Just driving.

Luke said, “Denver has gotten to be a sort of giant shanty town. It’s probably a little like it was almost three hundred years ago. Except the people three hundred years ago didn’t live in abandoned malls and franchise joints.”

“The Christians don’t run Denver, as far as I’ve heard.”

“No, Denver’s basically secular. Some goddess cults, and a big Buddha town on the east side. Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior, is small potatoes there.”

“Did you say you believe in all that?”

“Yep.”

“As part of the con.”

“Started out that way. I went along with it so they’d keep feeding me. I said the prayers, I did the daily devotions. I meditated in the pathetic little shrine they’d built in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Just scamming. Then I understood that it’s true.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m totally serious. Something happened one day. I don’t know how to describe it. Something arrived. It’s like, okay, say you walked out of your house every day and shouted, ‘Oh, come to me, Great Heffalump,’ just to please somebody, just because it’s the local custom, because your crazy old aunt won’t take her medicine unless you call for the Heffalump every morning, and then one day this big hairy thing with a trunk and antlers comes lumbering up and says, Tm the Great Heffalump, what do you want?’ What’re you going to do? You don’t believe in him, you don’t like him, you don’t want him, but there he is.”

“I’m not sure if I believe you.”

“I don’t need you to believe me. Hey, are those groundhogs just about done?”

“I don’t think they’re groundhogs.”

“Whatever they are. I’m starving, I don’t mind if they’re on the rare side.”

Simon served the irradiated creatures. Catareen sat between him and the boy, quietly consuming her share of the hunt. After they’d eaten, she buried the remains, and the boy went to bed in the back of the Winnebago. Simon stayed outside a while with Catareen. They sat together on the grassy rise. The wind made a low rustling sound, and the stars shone hard in the deep black sky. The pond put out minute ghostly sparks that could have been reflections of the stars.

Simon said, “Do you miss Nadia?”

“No.”

“It’s your home. It’s where you come from.”

“Nothing there.”

He hesitated over how to respond. There was something there. There was something everywhere. True, the people of Earth had hoped for more from their first (and possibly only) contact with an inhabited planet. All those zillions spent getting there, the decades of effort, and what do they find? A people who in ten thousand years had failed to come up with a written language. Who lived in huts made of dried mud and pulled one another around in wooden carts. Where were the golden cities, the shamans and scientists? Where were the great discoveries, the cures, the art?

He said, “It’s a rough place, I hear.”

“Nothing for me.”

“You know,” he said, “maybe there’s no real point in you being so mysterious about your past. Doesn’t it seem just the tiniest bit unnecessary?”

She sat beside him in the dark. She exhaled the little song.

After an interval, he said, “So. Do you have any questions about me?”

“No.”

“Are all Nadians like this?”

“Like how?”

The wind blew across his face. It had a dry green smell.

He said, “Do you mind listening to me? Do I bore you when I talk?”

“No. I like.”

“Nice of you to say so.”

Silence, and the breath song.

He said, “It’s just that I seem to have a few questions. For a biological.”

“Ask.”

“I know a lot of it may not apply. The whole human-versus-Nadian question, I mean.”

“Ask.”

“Okay. Dreams. Can I ask you something about dreams?”

“Yes.”

“I have these little flickers when I sleep. There are sounds and images. They don’t seem exactly random, but they don’t hold together, either. I can’t really tell if they’re dreams at all or just my circuits discharging. As I understand it, biologicals have dreams that involve whole stories. Mysterious stories, often oblique, but coherent and full of meaning. True?”

“No,” she said.

“Would it be painful for you to give me a little more detail?”

“Not whole stories. Change.”

“You mean, as you’re dreaming? The stories change as they progress?”

“Yes.”

“But don’t you wake up feeling like you’ve seen something important? Even if its meaning isn’t clear. Don’t you feel in the morning like something has been explained to you as you slept?”

“No.”

“Well. Okay. Let’s try another subject. The voice I’m speaking in right now, what you know as my voice, and by extension my, shall we say, personality, is programmed. Cadences, vocabulary, modulation, slang, all of it designed by Emory Lowell to make me seem more human. Plus, of course, these involuntary fits of poetry. What’s in my brain is different. I listen to myself speak I’m listening to myself right now and it’s strange to me. It doesn’t match what I hear inside my head. The impulses are my own, I make a decision to say this or say that, but the expression is beyond my control. I suspect that if you could somehow see inside my head, if you could see the circuitry going through the motions, you’d recoil. You’d understand that I’m mechanical. And heartless.”

“I am same,” she said.

“What you say doesn’t match what’s in your head?”

“Yes.”

“Of course it doesn’t. You’re speaking a foreign language.”

“In my language.”

“You mean, back on Nadia, you felt this divide between who you appeared to be and who you knew yourself to be?”

“Yes.”

“Sweet of you to say so.”

“True.”

They sat for a while in silence. Simon felt the withdrawal of her, which had become familiar, though this time it seemed deeper, as if she had removed her attention more thoroughly than ever before. He thought for a moment that she had actually gone away, but he looked over and saw her there, unaltered.

He wanted her to be again as she’d been in the pond. He wanted her to be a dark shape cut out of the darkening sky, turning shyly to face him when he said the word “beautiful.” But that moment had passed, and she was this again, stolid as an abandoned suitcase.

He said, “Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.”

“I sleep now.”

“I’m going to stay out here a little while longer.”

“Yes.”

“Goodnight.”

She rose soundlessly. He heard the soft click of the Winnebago’s door as she went inside.

By midmorning of the following day, Luke had fallen ill. He was flushed and feverish. He insisted that he wasn’t as sick as he appeared to be. He insisted on riding in his usual place between Simon and Catareen until he was suddenly compelled to tell Simon to stop the Winnebago immediately so he could get out and vomit, after which Catareen insisted that the regurgitated bits of meat had to be buried. Simon bore it patiently. The child and the Nadian were only doing what was required of them. Still, he thought he recalled a situation similar to this one, from a vid the image of a man on a journey, bearing up patiently as a child and a woman caused delays for which they could not reasonably be held accountable but which the man found irksome nevertheless.

Catareen put Luke to bed on Simon’s bedshelf. Once the boy had been settled, they drove on.

Simon said, “There was probably something in that water after all.”

“Yes,” Catareen answered.

“Are you a little queasy, too?”

“Yes.”

“I shouldn’t have let you go in. Either of you.”

“No fault.”

“It’s easy to forget,” Simon said, “that none of this is as pure as it looks. I don’t like to think what all is in these creatures we’re eating. Or what kinds of genetic mutations are going on in the deer that look so lovely out there on the horizon at sunset.”

A silence passed. They drove through the heat and the light. Then she said, “Simon?”

She had never spoken his name before. He had not been entirely sure she knew it.

“Yeah?”

“Stroth.”

“More specific, please.”

“This.”

“This is, shall we say, strothful, right now?”

“Yes.”

She sat as she always did, placid as a lawn ornament, hands folded in her lap.

“We seem to be sick from swimming in tainted water. We have radioactive groundhog breath. We have no idea what’s going to happen to us. This is what you mean by ‘stroth’?”

“I mean we.”

A low crackle shot through his circuitry, a quick electrical whir.

“I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy. To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand,” he said.

“Yes.”

He said, “We’ll be in Denver in a few hours. Have you given any thought to what you want to do when we get there?”

“To do?”

“You know. Destination attained. I’ll find out what, if anything, June 21 means. Luke will probably get some sort of scam going within the first ten minutes. What are you thinking of for yourself?”

“Die in Denver,” she said.

“That’s what you said before. Would you mind telling me what exactly you mean by that?”

“Die in Denver.”

“I have to admit that I just don’t follow you here. We seem to be having one of those Earthling/Nadian moments. Could you be a little more specific?”

Silence. The soft, breathy song.

“Okay,” he said. “End of discussion. Your plan is to die in Denver. You could probably also get a job as a waitress, if dying doesn’t work out.”

She was gone, though. She had removed herself to that lizard-eyed nowhere she seemed to call home.

Denver revealed itself toward the end of the afternoon. It was first a silver shimmer on the horizon, then an intimation of silvered spires and towers, then a great tumble of buildings laid out across the flatness, under the cascade of white summer sun.

Catareen said, “Luke will want to see. I get.”

“Don’t you think we should let him sleep?”

“I go. I see.”

He stopped the Winnebago. She got out and returned soon with Luke, whose face was still flushed and whose eyes had a pink, unhealthy cast.

Still, he positioned himself eagerly between Simon and Catareen. He said, “There it is.”

“There it is,” Simon answered.

“Is something wrong?” Luke asked him.

“No. What would be wrong?”

“Just wondered.”

“You shouldn’t be up,” Simon said. “You’re still sick.”

“I’m getting better,” Luke said. “I just picked up a little something nasty in that water. Or maybe it was whatever that thing was we ate. Anyway, I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. Catareen should have let you sleep.”

He noticed that the boy and Catareen exchanged looks of recognition. They seemed to believe they shared some knowledge about him. When had that started? He said nothing, however. He drove on.

Denver when they reached it proved to be a series of broad avenues teeming with humans and Nadians. The air sparked with their various invisible purposes. They crossed the streets and strode along the sidewalks, past the windows of small enterprises that had been carved out of the old stores and restaurants. Empty skyscrapers towered overhead, their windows cracked or shattered. Some citizens were on foot. Some piloted hoverpods, most of them old and dented. Some rode horses. Luke said, “The horse is making a comeback here. They’re more reliable than hoverpods. They can go more places.”

They inched their way along through the traffic. Luke pointed out a store that had once, according to its faded gilt sign, been called Banana Republic and was now a saloon, a barbershop, and a haberdasher’s. In front of the store, a group of Nadian settlers were loading a horse-drawn cart with sacks of what appeared to be some kind of seeds.

Simon leaned out the window and asked the drivers of several vehicles if they’d ever heard of Emory Lowell. He received only shrugs and baffled looks. Luke said, “Just keep going straight. If Gaya’s in her usual spot, she’ll know.”

“Gaya?”

“A bit of local color. She was a friend of my mother’s. Her turf is up ahead.”

Presently they approached a gaunt, elderly woman who stood on a corner speaking volubly and offering passersby what appeared to be a small white bowl.

Luke said, “There she is. Pull over.”

Simon pulled to the curb as best he could, given the crowds. Luke scrambled over Catareen’s lap and leaned out the window.

“Hey, Gaya,” he said.

The woman halted her imprecations and looked at Luke with an expression of fearful irritation. She appeared to be someone who did not associate the calling of her own name with the arrival of good news. She wore a Mylar jumpsuit and an ancient leopard-skin hat. Loops and waggles of dark, wiry hair shot out from under the hat like punctuation marks in an unknown language.

“It’s Blitzen,” Luke said.

Gaya ambled suspiciously up to the Winnebago’s window. She squinted, as if Luke himself emitted a painful light.

“You’ve grown,” she said.

“As people do. You know Emory Lowell?”

“I’ve heard the name, yes.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“Right around here somewhere.”

“What are you selling?”

Gaya looked gravely at the bowl. “Blitzen,” she said, “this belongs in a museum. It’s only by the remotest chance that I’ve come into possession of it, and if it wasn’t for my medical bills I’d never consider selling — “

“How much?” Luke asked.

“Now, I’ve been asking twenty yen, which is of course an almost ludicrously low price, but since you and I — “

“Give her twenty yen,” Luke said to Simon.

Simon dug into his pocket for the money. Gaya said, “Hey, I can take a few yen off for you. I mean, considering”

“No, twenty is more than reasonable,” Luke answered. “Simon, have you got it?”

Simon produced a twenty from his pocket. The boy snatched it out of his hand. He said, “So. Could you give us directions to Emory Lowell’s?”

Gay a answered, “Straight for ten or eleven blocks, then right for about five miles. Turn left at the Gentle Giant Mall. Drive until you see a pair of blue spruce trees, one on each side of the road. Then park your truck and walk to the west.”

“Thanks. Here’s the twenty.”

Gay a took the money and handed Luke the bowl. She said wanly, “How’s your mother?”

“Couldn’t tell you. If she passes through here, tell her you saw me. Tell her I’m all right.”

“I’ll do that.”

Simon pulled away from the curb and accelerated. Luke sat with the bowl in his lap. “Junk,” he said.

“It looks old,” Simon said.

“If it got down to Gaya’s level, it’s junk. Believe me.”

“What is commonest and cheapest and nearest and easiest is Me,” Simon said.

Simon followed Gaya’s directions. They drove out of the densely settled area, past ever-diminishing outcroppings of empty houses, which gave way to a dun-colored emptiness that had once been farmland. Presently they saw the twin spruces ahead, as Gay a had described them. In front of the trees, a band of children and a horse stood in the road, unsteady in the heat shimmer that rose off the concrete.

Luke had by then fallen ill again. He was half asleep, his tureen-shaped head slumped in the place where his chest would have been. He roused sufficiently to see the children and horse in the road.

“You should probably just run them over,” he murmured.

“Aren’t you supposed to be a Christian?” Simon asked.

“I am a Christian. But I’m not a fool.” He fell back into his feverish doze.

As they drew closer, Simon could see that there were five children: two girls on the back of a shaggy brown horse, with a girl and two boys standing alongside.

Of the two girls on horseback, one was human and one Nadian. Of the other three, two were Nadian and one human. The oldest, a girl, human, was probably twelve or thirteen. The youngest, a Nadian, could not have been more than four.

Simon stopped the Winnebago. The children stood in modest expectation, as if waiting for a train. Simon leaned out of the window and called hello to them.

The Nadian girl on horseback wore a pair of dingy cardboard wings held to her narrow back by two dirty elastic straps. The human girl behind her sat with her scrawny white legs akimbo and her thin arms clasped around the Nadian girl’s waist.

The winged Nadian girl said, “You’re late.”

They were all more or less naked. One of the Nadian boys had somehow attached two plastic roses to his little-boy chest and wore a skirt made of grass. The human girl standing alongside the horse carried a spear that appeared to involve a knife blade affixed to the end of a pool cue.

The girl with the spear said, “You almost missed it.”

The horse stood stoically, shaking its enormous head. Its eyes were bright black, liquid circles.

“We’re looking for Emory Lowell,” Simon said. “We know that,” the Nadian on horseback answered.

“Why else would you have come?” the human girl said.

Luke roused enough to say, “This seems very peculiar to me.”

Simon said, “Can you take us to him?”

“Of course we can,” the Nadian girl answered.

’You’ll have to leave your vehicle,” said the human.

“I don’t know if we should leave the vehicle,” Luke said.

“Be quiet,” Simon told him.

Simon, Catareen, and Luke got out of the Winnebago and advanced to meet the party of children. The horse snorted, nodding its head as if in agreement with its own waking dream.

“What exactly are we late for?” Simon asked. “Don’t be silly. Come on.”

The children led them down the road for a distance, then cut across a field. Simon carried Luke, who awoke periodically and whispered, “I’m really not so sure about this.”

They passed through a stand of trees and came upon a cluster of buildings at the base of a low, grassy hill. It had been a farm. There was a barn and an austere white clapboard house and a gathering of small white domes that appeared to be dwellings. Beyond them all, a range of lavender mountains cut into the pallid sky.

A spaceship stood between the house and the barn. It was an early one, a silver ellipse just more than fifty yards across, balanced on the three spidery legs that had proved unreliable and been superseded by a hydraulic central shaft. It was at least thirty years old. It gleamed dully in the sun.

“Where did that come from?” Simon asked.

“It’s always been here,” one of the boys told him. “It’s almost ready.”

It’s ready for the junkyard, Simon thought.

“We’re going to take you straight to Emory,” the winged Nadian girl announced.

She led them to the barn, a matronly, cigar-colored hulk of a building with brilliant white light leaking out through its prim little windows. The girls dismounted and slid the big wooden door open.

The barn was full of navigational equipment, all of it decades old. Lights blinked on consoles. An old vid showed the spacecraft, with a band of readouts crawling along its lower edge. Workers sat at the consoles. Some were human and some Nadian. Several wore white lab coats; others wore overalls or polyester slack suits. A small Nadian woman sat hunched over a keyboard in a kimono covered in lurid green chrysanthemums.

A black man looked up at them when they entered. The others remained absorbed in their work. The man approached. He must have been seventy. A cascade of smoke-colored beard spilled over his chest. He wore a battered, broad-brimmed hat pulled down to his shaggy gray brows.

“Hello,” he said. “What have we here?”

The winged girl answered, “Pilgrims we found on the road.”

The man said, “We don’t get many travelers. We’re a little off the beaten path.”

“Got that,” Simon answered.

“My name is Emory Lowell.”

Simon’s circuits buzzed. The feeling was similar to what had occurred in him when he saw Catareen standing at the water’s edge. He said, “Thruster holding me tight and that I hold tight! We hurt each other as the bridegroom and the bride hurt each other.”

Emory stared at Simon with avid, feral eyes.

“Oh, my lord,” he said. “You’re one of mine, aren’t you?”

“I guess I am,” Simon said.

“Look at you. I was afraid they’d exterminated the whole lot. But here you are.”

“Here I am,” Simon said.

“Remarkable. You’re the only one, you know. I implanted a dozen of them. I suppose the others have all been deactivated.”

“Marcus has.”

“I’m not good with names.”

“He was one of yours.”

“And he’s no longer with us.”

“He was my friend. Well, we traveled together. I needed him to maximize my own chances.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Emory said.

“What’s going to happen on June 21?”

“That’s when we take off for the new world.”

“What new world?” said Luke.

“I’m taking us to another planet.”

“In that old wreck?” Luke scowled at the spacecraft.

“It’s old. It’s not a wreck. It should do just fine.”

“So you say.”

“Why did you want us to come here on the twenty-first of June?” Simon asked.

“I’d figured out the coordinates years ago. June 21 of this year is when the orbital alignments are optimal. I put a homing device in the final production run, before Biologe shut me down. I thought that if any of you found your way back in time, the least I could do was take you with me.”

“You want me to go with you to another planet?”

“You’re certainly welcome, yes. You and your friends.”

“What kind of other planet?” Luke asked.

“Oh, well, there’s a great deal to tell you, isn’t there? First, I want you to meet my wife.”

He glanced back into the work area. He said, “Othea, would you come here for a moment, please?”

He appeared to be addressing the Nadian woman, the one wearing the kimono. She did not turn from her console. “Busy,” she said.

“Just for a moment. Please.”

The Nadian rose reluctantly and approached. “Really,” she said. “Do you have any idea how little time is left?”

“We have visitors,” Emory said. “At this late date?”

“We’ve got room.”

The Nadian came and stood beside Emory. She had an aspect of ferocious intention. Her little green head protruded from the neck of her kimono like a sober idea the kimono itself was having.

“This is Othea,” Emory said. “My wife.”

Othea craned her neck forward and looked intently at Catareen. She said, “Cria dossa Catareen Callatura?”

Catareen hesitated. She said, “Lup.” Emory said, “You two have met?”

Othea said, “No, we’ve never met. Oof ushera do manto.”

Catareen bowed her head. Was it a gesture of acknowledgment or shame? Othea stepped up to Catareen and put her right hand on Catareen’s forehead. Catareen returned the gesture.

Othea said, “This is a great warrior. I’ve known of her for many years.”

Catareen answered, “I do my work.” Luke said, “What kind of warrior?”

The Nadian ignored him. She said to Catareen, “Oona napp e cria dossa?”

“What?” Luke said.

Othea said, “I asked her how far along she is.” Catareen answered, “Six week. Or seven.”

“Are you pregnant?” Luke asked.

“No.”

“They don’t know?” Othea said.

“Know what?” Luke asked.

Catareen went blank and quiet then, which was of course not surprising.

Othea said, “Well. You all look as if you could use a meal and some rest. Emory, please take care of our guests. I really can’t be spared here.”

“Of course,” Emory said.

Othea looked another moment at Catareen. She said, “It is an honor.”

“Honor is mine,” Catareen answered.

Emory and the children led Simon, Luke, and Catareen out of the barn and across the dirt yard to the farmhouse. The whole place appeared to be a midcentury reconstruction, all lacy porch rails and acute Grant Wood gables. The barn might have been true period, or it might have been an especially good faux. The house was cheap, its shutters and ornament simplified and slightly too large. It looked like a miniature house that had somehow been rendered life-size.

Arrayed behind the house was a dome village, clusters of white in-flatables and Insta-Dwells of various ages, none of them new or clean. At the far end a neglected garden drooped and crisped in the sun. It might have been the summer encampment of a particularly dissolute and discouraged band of Inuits.

As they went, Emory put his hand familiarly on Simon’s elbow.

Emory said, “I have so much to ask you.”

Simon had hoped for answers, not questions. “I have a thing or two to ask you myself,” he said.

Luke was walking with Catareen just ahead of Simon and Emory. “So what’s this great-warrior business about?” he said.

Catareen did not respond.

Emory took them into the farmhouse. He said, “There are beds upstairs. Perhaps we should take the boy up there and let him sleep a little.”

“Absolutely not,” Luke said. “Luke-”

“I’m hungry. I’m starving. We all are. Have you got anything to eat?”

“Of course,” Emory said. He led them through the foyer into a kitchen. They passed what had been the living room and was now an office with two desks, one steel and one plastimorph. Pushed to one side were two ratty armchairs and a glass-fronted cabinet that held a collection of brightly colored odds and ends. Simon recognized them: a Chia Pet shaped like a lamb, PEZ dispensers, a pink plastic squeeze bottle of Mr. Bubble, a rubber statuette of Bull winkle the Moose in a striped bathing suit from the 1800s.

The kitchen was like a kitchen from fifty years ago. It had an atomic stove and a refrigeration module and a sink with a faucet and handles. It might have been a display in a historical museum.

“Sit, please,” Emory said, indicating a battered wooden table surrounded by mismatched chairs. The table was covered with a cloth that depicted dancing blue teapots.

Simon, Catareen, and Luke sat at the table. Emory set down three glasses and a pitcher of what appeared to be tea. He took eggs and bacon from the refrigerator.

He said, “Today of course is the twentieth. We’re set to leave tomorrow.”

As he spoke, he cracked eggs into a bowl. He put slices of bacon on a grill.

Luke asked, “And this new planet is?”

“We call it Paumanok. It will take thirty-eight years for us to get there. Some of us will no longer be alive when the ship lands.”

“Hence the children.”

“Yes. And they’re our children. We would naturally take them along.”

Emory poured the eggs into a pan. He said, “I got the ship from the Jehovahs. They sold the whole fleet after things fell apart with HBO.”

“And what exactly do you know about the planet in question?” Simon asked.

“It’s the fourth planet from its sun. It’s about half the size of Earth. It is probably temperate and almost certainly has a breathable atmosphere. We can’t know whether or not there’s life there.”

“And the worst-case scenario is?”

“Well. It could be entirely barren. It could be too hot or too cold to sustain life. There is of course a very narrow range in that regard. Even a small variation would render it unlivable.”

“If you get there and find it unlivable?”

“There we’ll be. There’s no way of getting back.”

“Got you.”

“We’ve had visions,” Emory said.

“Visions.”

“Myself, Othea, and some of the others. We’ve been seeing a world of mountains and rivers. We see enormous fruit-bearing trees. We see brilliantly colored birds and small, intelligent animals that are like rabbits. I had the first such vision several years ago, and when I told Othea about it she confessed that she had had a similar one, months earlier, but hadn’t mentioned it.”

“That’s very Nadian,” Simon said.

“When I told the group about it two others, a child and an old man, stepped forward and said that they, too, had imagined this world in just this way. Since then the visions have come to many of us, at unpredictable times. They’re always the same, though they keep expanding. I was visited just last week by an image of a small fishing village on the shore of a vast sea, though I couldn’t see anything of its inhabitants. Twyla, the group’s second-oldest child, clearly saw a warm rain that swept through every afternoon and lasted for under an hour, after which it was brilliantly clear again.”

Simon glanced at Luke and Catareen. Catareen (of course) was expressionless. Luke, however, returned a signifying look. Crazy. These people are crazy.

“We understand that it’s a risk,” Emory continued. “It’s a risk we are all willing to take. We prefer it to remaining here. All of us do. You’re welcome to come with us, if you decide you’re willing to take the risk, too.”

“We’ll have to think about it, won’t we?” Simon said.

“You have about thirty-two hours to decide. Here, then. Your food is ready.”

After they had eaten, Emory took them upstairs and guided them into bedrooms that were spare and white, each containing only a bedshelf and a wooden chair. Luke and Catareen settled in. Simon asked to speak privately to Emory.

“Certainly,” Emory said. “I suppose you and I have a few things to discuss, don’t we?”

They went outside and crossed the farmyard, where the children were engaged in some sort of noisy and contentious game that the horse watched with blank-eyed, somnolent attention, twitching its tail. Beyond the children, the spaceship stood like a titanic silver clam, delicately balanced on the slender legstalks that had proved insufficiently stable in three out of five landings.

“Twyla loves that horse,” Emory said as they passed the children. “She keeps insisting we can take it with us.”

“Paumanok,” Simon said.

“Seemed like as good a name as any.”

“Starting from fish-shape Paumanok where I was born… solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World.”

“Yes, yes.”

They walked past the barn, into a field scattered with purple clover.

“Why the poetry chip?” Simon asked. “Everybody loves poetry.”

“Come on.”

“All right. Well. I let myself get carried away when I designed you. You were supposed to be sturdy and reliable. Obedient. And harmless. And without emotional responses.”

“Got that.”

“The first few tries were seriously flawed.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Certain qualities stowed away in the cell lines. It surprised everyone. There were, as it turned out, some very difficult-to-detect dark spots on the genome, little indicators and determiners that produced, well… unexpected results. The first experimental simulos were suicidal. Despairing. We tried to override that with a survival chip. Then the second batch turned out to be these sort of wildly happy murderers. They were ecstatic all the time. They were so very very happy they got violent. As if their happiness couldn’t tolerate any lesser outlet. One of them tore a lab technician to pieces, laughing and babbling on about how much he loved the kid. Ate his liver. This was hushed up.”

“Naturally.”

“We were hubristic. We underestimated the complexity of the genome. We kept finding that if you tried to eliminate one quality, some other quality that seemed entirely unrelated would pop up at ten times its normal intensity. Frankly, if we’d adequately anticipated the difficulties, I suspect we’d never have made you at all. But once we’d started, we couldn’t stop. No, / couldn’t stop. Others had the good sense to just cancel the experiments and call the whole thing an interesting idea that didn’t work out.”

“You think of me as an experiment,” Simon said. “I don’t mean to offend you.”

“Go on.”

“All right. In the third protocol, I gave you poetry.”

“Why?”

“To regulate you. To eliminate the extremes. I could put a cap on your aggressive capabilities, I could program you to be helpful and kind, but I wanted to give you some moral sense as well. To help you cope with events I couldn’t foresee. I thought that if you were programmed with the work of great poets, you’d be better able to appreciate the consequences of your actions.”

“You programmed each of us with a particular poet.”

“I did. I thought it might be less confusing for you that way. Somewhere out there, there’s a Shelley, a Keats, a Yeats. Or there was. I wonder what’s become of them.”

“There was an Emily Dickinson, too,” Simon said. “Yes. There was.”

Simon said, “I have”

“What do you have, son?”

“I’m not your son.”

“Sorry. Figure of speech. What do you have? Tell me.”

“I have this sense of a missing part. Some sort of, I don’t know. Engagement. Aliveness. Catareen calls it stroth.”

“Go on.”

“I feel like biologicals just wallow in it. I mean it falls over them like rain, and I’m walking through the world in a space suit. I can see everything perfectly, but I don’t quite connect with it.”

“That’s very interesting.”

“Frankly, I was hoping for a little more from you than that.”

“It’s the poetry, isn’t it? All those conjurings and all that praise roiling around in your circuits. Your poor synapses aren’t quite up to it, I don’t suppose.”

The seizing up started again. No, it was the new sensation, the floaty, sleeplike electrified thing.

Simon said, “I am exposed… cut by bitter and poisoned hail.”

“Are you all right?” Emory asked. “No. Something’s happening to me.”

“What?”

“Lately I have these strange sensations. Like when my antiaggression override kicks in but different. Softer or something.”

“I’ve always wondered if actual emotions might start springing up in you. If your connections might start firing, given the proper stimuli.”

Simon said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

“You know,” Emory said, “I could probably do a little more work on you. If you and the others want to come with us, I could do some tinkering en route. There’s no time now, but there’ll be plenty of time during the trip. There’ll be lots and lots of time.”

“You think you could modify me?” Simon asked. “I’d be glad to give it a shot.”

“What do you think you could do?”

“I’d have to get in there and poke around a little. I could probably override a few commands, program out the aversion to violence. I suspect that inhibits your neurals. I could also enhance a few of the pathways in your cerebral cortex. Though I must say, things seem to be happening on their own. It might be best to just wait and see what develops.”

Simon stood facing the farm and the silver spaceship. He said, “Achild said-”

Emory joined in. They said in unison, “What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.”

When they returned to the farm, Othea was waiting for them outside the barn door. She said to Emory as they approached, “Please don’t wander off like that. Not today.”

“Simon and I had a few things to discuss.”

Othea aimed a brief orange stare at Simon. She said to Emory, “There’s a question about the launch coordinates. I don’t think it’s anything, really, but Ruth is getting out of her depth in there. She needs you to talk her through it.”

“Glad to,” Emory said. “Simon, please excuse me.”

Othea continued staring at Simon. She said, “Do you know who Catareen Callatura is?”

“I know who she is to me,” Simon answered.

“She was a member of the resistance on Nourthea. The kings, as you may know, rule absolutely. They take everything the people are able to grow or build.”

“Catareen rebelled?”

“She was part of a band of women who held back half their harvest. She was a member of the first group, and they organized others. Didn’t she tell you?”

“She doesn’t tell me anything. I assumed it was a Nadian custom.”

“They executed the women’s husbands and children.”

“What?”

“Publicly. Then they banished the women to Earth.”

“Catareen was deported.”

“She really hasn’t told you anything, has she?”

“Nothing at all.”

“There’s something else.”

“What?”

“I’m going to tell you, because I think you might be able to help her if you know. She’s at the end of her life cycle.”

“What?”

“I was surprised to see her at all. I’m certain all the others are dead. She must be, oh, well over one hundred years old.”

“She’s old?”

“Extremely. We age differently. We don’t decline gradually. We are vital and productive right up until the end, and then we deteriorate quite rapidly. There was a fish called a salmon, I believe. It’s a little like that for us.”

“And Catareen is dying?”

“Oh, yes. I knew it the moment I saw her. Her coloring. She’s turned that brilliant green.”

“How long will it take?”

“It’s difficult to say, exactly. It could be a week. It could even be a full month.”

Simon went back to the house. He mounted the stairs and entered the bedroom that had been given to Catareen. She lay on the narrow white bed. She appeared to be sleeping.

“Hey,” he said. Not as gently as he’d intended to.

She opened her eyes. She did not reply.

“You’re dying?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You’re fucking dying?"

“I told.”

“Well, yes, technically you did. But a few more details would have been helpful, don’t you think?”

“No.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Dying,” she said.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Dying,” she said again.

“Is that why you keep going catatonic?”

“To keep energy.”

He went and stood at her bedside. She looked so small against the white sheet.

He said, “They killed your husband and children back on Nadia.”

“Grandchildren also.”

“And they sent you here.”

“Yes.”

She closed her eyes. “Catareen,” he said.

No response. Her head might have been a stone, carved with lines for mouth and eyes, two holes for nostrils. Only the nostrils betrayed the fact that this was a living being. They fluttered with her breath. They revealed their pallid hints of inner brightness, like circles of illuminated jade.

“Catareen,” he said, “I don’t know what to do for you. I don’t know what to say to you. I feel like I don’t know anything about you. Anything at all.”

She did not open her eyes. The conversation was over, then.

Later, at dinner, Simon and Luke were introduced to the rest of the group. Luke appeared to be recovered. Catareen seemed to prefer remaining in bed, as far as anyone could interpret her preferences.

They all assembled for dinner at a long table set under the big tree to the immediate east of the house. There were seventeen of them: twelve adults and five children; eight Nadians and nine humans.

Othea sat at one end of the table, beside Emory. She held in her arms the eighteenth member an infant, half Nadian and half human.

Simon had never seen such a being before, though he’d heard the rumors. The baby’s skin was the color of a celery stalk. She (it was a she) had the big, round Nadian eyes and the agitated Nadian nostrils, but in her the eyes were a creamy coffee brown and the nose an Emoryish minibeak upon which the nostrils perched like sea urchins on a sliver of rock. She had ears, perfectly human but dwarfed, like tiny shells. Atop her smooth green head stood a silky fury of fine white-gold hair.

Emory said to the others, “We seem to have acquired a couple of new members. It is my great honor to introduce Simon and Luke and to express my hope that they will accept my invitation to accompany us all on our journey to Paumanok.”

There was scattered applause and a general murmur of greeting. In truth, Simon did not find the company especially promising. The humans were for the most part rather seedy-looking. One woman (she would prove to be the Ruth who was having trouble with the launch coordinates) was sallow and overweight, wearing a battered sun hat and what appeared to be strands of little silver bells around her neck. Another, a man of indeterminate age with a great rust-colored curl of mustache and a chin slightly smaller than an apricot, bobbled his big square head and said, “Welcome, friends, welcome, friends, welcome, friends.” The Nadians were more restrained in their dress and their vocabulary of gestures, but they, too, seemed to possess some vague aspect of off-centeredness. The two females were grim and silent. The males, three of them, had an overeager look uncommon among Nadians. They sat together, whispered among themselves, and broke into occasional fits of high-pitched laughter, during which they pounded one another on their scrawny backs and slapped their slender palms together.

These, then, were the pilgrims. These were the emissaries to a new world.

Midway through the meal, Luke leaned over and whispered to Simon, “Geekville, U.S.A.”

“Shh,” Simon said. He returned his attention to the person seated on his left, a young dark-skinned human scientist named Lily, who had dyed her hair orange and had runes of some kind tattooed onto her cheeks and forehead and did not seem to understand that listening to an unbroken monologue about lift hydraulics in deep space might not be Simon’s idea of an interesting way to spend his entire dinner.

When the meal was over, the adults resumed their work, and the children scattered across the farmyard. Simon and Luke lingered at the table with Emory, Othea, and the baby.

Emory said, “They’re a little strange, I know. They have good hearts, though.”

“I’m sure they do,” Simon answered.

“I had twice this many when I started. But people come to their senses. They find other things to do. They fall in love with someone who doesn’t want to leave Earth forever.”

Luke said, “You really want us to come along?”

“There’s room. And Simon, I hope you won’t be offended if I say that someone as young as Luke would be particularly welcome. The adults who survive the trip at all will be quite old by the time we land on Paumanok.”

The infant gurgled on Othea’s lap. She rocked the child with a certain insistence Simon recognized as distinctly Nadian. She said, “We need the most diverse possible gene pool among our younger members.”

Luke said, “So basically you’re interested in my youth andDNA.”

“You’re Exedrol, right?” Othea asked. “Yep.”

“The deformities are not passed along genetically. Did you know that?”

“Uh-huh.”

Simon said, “I too haughty Shade also sing war, and a longer and greater one than any.” He had not meant to speak quite so loudly.

“She doesn’t mean to offend,” Emory said. “Do you, Oth? Nadians are a little more direct than we are is all.”

“I just can’t seem to get the knack of circumspection,” Othea replied, continuing to rock her child with an urgency Simon could only hope would not be damaging in some long-range, unforeseeable way. “At a certain point I simply decided to give it up altogether.”

“I find it extremely interesting,” Emory said to Simon, “that you take offense so easily. It’s not in your programming.”

“My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,” Simon said.

“As a matter of fact,” Luke said, “being wanted for my youth and my DNA doesn’t bother me at all. In case anybody cares what I think.”

“Everybody cares what you think,” Simon said.

Luke said to Emory, “He doesn’t have any particular allegiance to the truth. Do you find that peculiar?”

“Very,” Emory answered.

“Please don’t talk about me as if I’m not here,” Simon said.

“You’re really making great progress,” Emory told him.

“Fuck you.”

“See? See what I mean?”

Later, Simon sat with Catareen in her upstairs room. Emory and Othea had returned to their work. Luke had joined the children in their farmyard games. Simon could tell from their voices that Luke had introduced certain improvements and refinements and was patiently explaining why such changes were necessary.

Catareen was asleep. Or doing that sleeplike thing.

Simon said to her, “They’re nuts, you know. The whole crew.”

She opened her eyes. She said, “You go with them.”

“I don’t know. I mean, can you picture being on a spaceship for thirty-eight years with these people?”

“You go. Happier there.”

“Why are you saying this?”

“I dream.”

“What?”

“That world. I dream.”

“What have you dreamed?”

“You go to mountains. Changed. As you want.”

“You’ve dreamed of me changed, walking in some kind of mountains?”

“Yes.”

“Have you had a dream like that before?”

“No.”

“And so you think I should go with them. You think I should spend the next thirty-eight years on a spaceship with these idiots because you dreamed I’d be happier on another planet.”

“Yes.”

“You’re crazy, too.”

She made some sort of breathy sound he had never heard from her before, a modest three-note trill.

“Did you laugh?” he asked.

“No.”

“Yes. You did. That was actual laughter. I’ll be goddamned.”

She made the sound again.

He leaned over her. He said, “Are you in pain?”

“No pain.”

“What does it feel like?”

“Dying.”

“More specific, please.”

“Less. Am less.”

“You feel like you’re less.”

“Room is big. Bright.”

“You feel like the room has gotten bigger and brighter.”

“Yes.”

“Do I seem bigger and brighter?”

“Loud, too.”

He lowered his voice. “Sorry,” he said.

“No. I like.”

“You like me being big and bright and loud?”

“Yes.”

She closed her eyes then, and slipped away.

Simon went downstairs again and walked onto the front porch of the farmhouse. The evening sky was dull red, striped with cloud tatters of livid orange. He could hear the children’s voices but could not see them. Soon, however, Luke ran into view. He was being chased by Twyla, who brandished the pool-cue spear. Her cardboard wings rattled behind her. Luke shrieked. Simon could not determine whether he was delighted or terrified.

When Luke saw Simon he immediately stopped running. He collected himself. He seemed to wish to appear as if he had never run or shrieked in his life. Twyla stopped as well. She stood examining the point of the spear, as if that had been her true objective, while Luke approached Simon on the porch.

Luke said, “Geekville, U.S.A.”

“You seem to be having a reasonably good time,” Simon answered.

“I’m mingling with the locals. I can pass for just about anything.”

He ambled up onto the porch and stood beside Simon, looking out at the deepening sky. Twyla remained where she stood, adjusting the knife on the end of the pool cue.

Luke said, “I’ve been thinking. I might want to go with them.”

“Uh-huh.”

“To tell you the truth, I like the idea of being a valued member. As opposed to being, say, stuck in Denver again, with no money.”

“I understand that.”

“And you?”

“They’re an odd bunch.”

“No question.”

“Emory thinks he could make some modifications on me during the trip.”

“That’dbegood.”

“It would.”

“And you know,” Luke said, “I’d rather go if you go, too. You’ve come to feel familiar to me.”

“Ditto.”

“Okay. See you later, then.”

“See you.”

Luke left the porch and went back out to the place where the little Nadian stood waiting for him. She did not raise the spear as he approached. They spoke to each other softly. Simon could not make out what they said. They went off together, away from the house and the barn, in the direction of the open country.

The next morning, Catareen was more receded. She appeared smaller in the small white bed. She lay compactly atop the sheet with her eyes closed, breathing rapidly and shallowly. She had folded her hands over her abdomen. Her legs were pressed together. It appeared as if she were trying to make herself as small as possible, as if death were a narrow aperture and she had to be ready to slip through.

Apart from her rapid breathing, there was no sign of illness. And yet she was diminishing. Simon could see it. No. He could apprehend it. Her flesh was unaffected, but she was drawing in, as if some animating force were retreating inward from the skin’s surface. Her skin was darker now, more deeply emerald. It put out a slick, mineral shine. She was becoming not alive.

She awakened, however, when Simon entered the room. Her eyes were changed. They were fading from orange to a deep, unhealthy-looking yellow, like egg yolks gone bad.

“Good morning,” Simon said. “How do you feel?”

“Dying,” she answered.

“But no pain.”

“No much.”

“Do you think you could eat something?”

“No.”

“It’s not irradiated groundhog, you know.”

“I know.”

He stood beside her. Still, even in extremis, there was this feeling that they were on a date that wasn’t going well but refused to end. He made to put his hand on her forehead but decided she probably wouldn’t wan’t him to. Besides, it would have been an empty gesture, a ritual expression of concern for the afflicted. There was no point in performing such gestures for a Nadian.

He said, “They killed your family and sent you to Earth.”

“Yes.”

“I wonder-”

She waited for him to finish the question. He waited as well. He hadn’t been sure when he launched that sentence where, exactly, he expected it to land, though he could think of any number of possibilities. / wonder ifthafs why youre so remote and strange. I wonder ifthats why you came with me. I wonder if you helped me because you feel guilty about what you brought down on your own family.

When it had become apparent that he was not going to speak further, she said, “Simon?”

“Uh-huh?”

“Window.”

“You want me to close the window? Is it cold in here for you?”

“No. Take.”

“You want me to take you to the window.”

“Yes.”

“Sure. No problem.”

He paused over how and where to touch her. She helped him by lifting her long, thin Giacometti arms and putting her hands around his neck. Apparently she could no longer walk, then. He slipped his right forearm under her upper back, his left under the sinewy stalks of her thighs. He lifted her.

For a moment, she held herself apart from him. It was subtle but palpable. She maintained herself briefly as a dependent but private being. Then she relaxed and gave herself over into his arms. She was, he thought, too weak to do otherwise.

Gently, carefully (he wasn’t sure whether or not to believe her when she said she was not in pain or not in much pain), he carried her to the window. The window looked out over the packed dirt of the yard, beyond which stood the single tree under which they had had their dinner the night before. He thought it was an elm. Or an oak. He wasn’t programmed for the identification of trees. The tree stood in the precise middle of the view, like a sentry. Beyond it was the vast green flatness of the plain, bright in the early sun, suspended, without wind or cloud, as if all that empty land were waiting for something to begin, for a note to strike or a pair of hands to clap. But most prominently there was the tree, dead center, in full leaf, shimmering in the expectant silence of the morning. Simon wondered how strange this must be to Catareen this green terrestrial silence spread out under this ice-blue sky. Where she came from it was (according to the vids) mostly rock and mud, variously black, pewter, and an opaque silvery-yellow, from which tangles of moss and bracken struggled, black-green like seaweed under an eternally clouded sky that bled a soft, drizzly semilight. It was whatever villages had managed to establish themselves in the rifts and valleys that occurred here and there among the mountains, sheer and ice-tipped, pinnacled, like titanic dead gray cathedrals, vast impassive assertions of volcanic rock and permafrost that towered over the huts and corrals, the modest squares of unprosperous garden, the tiny turrets and steeples of the kings, miniature replicas of the darkly glittering peaks.

Had it been beautiful to her? Had she felt stroth there?

Simon held her before the window that looked out onto the tree. It might have been the tree and only the tree Simon had brought her to see, though of course neither he nor Catareen had thought anything of it, one ordinary tree spreading over a standard-issue patch of dirt. It was only now, at this window, with the dying Catareen in his arms and the tree so perfectly centered in the view, that Simon understood it to be in any way singular or mysterious.

He said, “Urge and urge and urge, always the procreant urge of the world.”

“Yes,” she answered.

They said nothing further. He held her as she looked out the window. Her face was brighter in the strong light. Her eyes seemed to take on a hint of their familiar depths, their orange and amber. She seemed, briefly, more alive, and it occurred to him that she might be undergoing an unexpected resurgence. Was being taken to the window some sort of healing ritual? It seemed possible. It did not seem impossible.

Then he felt her arms slackening around his neck. He understood that even this was a strain for her. He said softly, “Shall I take you back to bed now?”

“Yes,” she answered, and he did.

The compound pulsed with last-minute preparations. People and Nadians rushed from house to barn and back again. The three Nadian men, who were technicians of some kind, went up and down the ramp of the spaceship, in and out of its entry portal, with such rapidity it seemed they must be doing nothing more than touching an agreed-upon goal and hurrying out again, laughing, emitting odd little yips and yelps, slapping palms whenever they passed one another. Simon, without duties, wandered the grounds. Emory was on the front porch arguing passionately with one of the Nadian women (she was, it seemed, a doctor) and Lily, the tattooed human scientist. The mustached, small-chinned man (whose name was Arnold) seemed to have been charged with the care of Emory and Othea’s baby. He walked the infant in circles in the yard, bouncing it and saying, “Little snip, little snip, little snip.” In the barn, among the consoles and keyboards, Othea and the other Nadian woman did their best to calm the frumpily majestic Ruth, who sat performing her last-minute calculations through a fit of inexplicable tears as the bells around her neck chimed softly.

Crazy, Simon thought. They’re all crazy. Though of course the passengers on the Mayflower had probably been like this, too: zealots and oddballs and ne’er-do-wells, setting out to colonize a new world because the known world wasn’t much interested in their furtive and quirky passions. It had probably always been thus, not only aboard the Mayflower but on the Viking ships; on the Ninafinta, and Santa Maria; on the first convoys sent off to explore Nadia, about which the people of Earth had harbored such extravagant hopes. It was nut jobs. It was hysterics and visionaries and petty criminals. The odes and monuments, the plaques and pageants, came later.

Simon could not settle. He could not find a plausible spot for himself. After meandering from place to place, trying to stay out of the way, trying not to look as idle as he was, he ran into Othea coming out of the barn. He spoke to her, though he knew she wouldn’t welcome it. It was something for him to do. And he did, in fact, have a question or two only she could answer.

He said, “Catareen is pretty weak today.”

“Yes,” she answered impatiently. He suspected she would have brushed him off entirely had he broached any other subject.

“Is there any chance she could rally? I mean, could she still have a good period before”

“No. There are no remissions. Some take longer than others, and frankly I suspect she could hang on for quite a while still. The more resilient individuals can take weeks and weeks.”

“We’ve decided we want to come along.”

“Good. Now, if you’ll excuse me”

“Catareen will need a bed,” Simon said. “Maybe I could go aboard with one of the technicians and figure out the best way to make her comfortable.”

“Oh, she can’t come with us.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m sorry. I’d assumed you understood. Our space is limited. We anticipate some mortality en route, and we’ve tried to allow for that. But we can’t carry a dead body for thirty-eight years. I’m afraid it’s out of the question.”

“You mean to leave her here, then.”

“In a short while, she won’t even know where she is. She wouldn’t be eating anymore, under any circumstances. We’ll leave water for her on the off chance, but I doubt she’ll want that, either.”

“You’ll let her die alone.”

“It will mean something different for her from what it might mean to you. Nourtheans are more solitary. She’ll be all right. Believe me.”

“Sure.”

“Now you really must excuse me. You can’t imagine what all I’ve got to do.”

“Of course.”

She hurried toward the house.

The day passed. Luke finally appeared, riding the horse with Twyla. He seemed to have joined the children in some way that implied membership without trust or affection. Simon saw them approaching from beyond the house. Luke sat behind Twyla like a boy pharaoh, regal and indignant-looking, as the smaller children capered in the horse’s wake. Twyla reined the horse in Simon’s direction, brought it to a halt just shy of the place where he stood. The horse blinked and shook its head. It made a low snorting noise that sounded vaguely like the word “hunk” played on an oboe.

Twyla said to Simon, “Do you like horses?”

“Who doesn’t?” he said.

“It seems that there will be no horses in the new world.”

Right, she was crazy, too. Still, she had her own version of Catareen’s lambent lizard eyes and nervous, undulating nostrils. Her gaze made Simon’s circuits buzz.

He said, “Maybe there are horses there already.”

“I will never love a horse other than Hesperia,” Twyla announced. “Not on any planet.”

“Give me a break,” Luke said.

“I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

“What I mean is, it’s just an animal”

Twyla reined the horse around and kicked it into motion again. As they departed, followed by the other children, Simon could hear Twyla saying to Luke, “You have a great deal to learn about the kingdom of animals. They are as various as any other race of beings.”

“They’re food. Any being that can’t open a bottle or loan you money is by definition…”

Simon watched them ride away. He understood that they would be carrying on this conversation together for the next eighty years or more. He wondered if Othea already had Luke in mind for Twyla. He wondered if they would have children.

He said a silent goodbye to Luke. He wished him luck.

Finally he returned to Catareen’s room. There was nowhere else for him. He felt calmer there. It was the one place in which he seemed to be something other than a tourist.

She slept, mostly. He sat in the single chair at her bedside, watching her. He tried to imagine her life her long life, as it turned out before she came here. She would never, he thought, have been a particularly easy person. She must always have been defiant and stern, even by Nadian standards. She must always have harbored a privacy so deep it was almost audible, like the silence of a well. He suspected that her husband had been the friendlier one, the one with ease and amplitude. Simon thought he could picture them at home, in their hut of sticks and mud. The husband would have been forever welcoming others in, offering pipes and fermented drinks, warming the rooms by lighting fires with wood they could not easily spare.

He would have exasperated Catareen. His profligacy would have inspired countless arguments, some of them bantering, some of them bitter.

And yet, she must have loved him.

Simon knew this, somehow. He could feel the information swarming inside his head, one cell splitting into two, two into four, four into eight.

Here was Catareen’s long union. Here were her children, five of them, three girls and two boys, endlessly undecided about which of their parents was more to blame for the errors and injustices in the family. Here were their days of labor. Here were their nights together, on a mattress stuffed with leaves and hay. Here was an afternoon of no particular consequence, when Catareen stood in the doorway of her hut, looking at her village, at the sharp peaks beyond, at the pewter-colored sky that would soon release its rain; here were the sounds of her children at some game, mixed with the steady rhythm of her husband’s hoe in the garden out back; here was her sense of herself in the middle of a life that was hers and no one else’s. Here was the bittersweet savor of it, the piercing somethingness of it the pure sensation of being Catareen Callatura, at that moment, on an afternoon of no consequence, just before a rain.

And here, many years later, was her decision to withhold crops from the king’s collectors and to encourage others to do the same. Here were the doubts of her garrulous husband, a simpler soul than she. Here was his trust in her. Here were the children’s arguments, with her and among themselves. (Some would have decided by then that she was the good parent, others that she was the bad.) Here were the arrests. Here were the executions. All of them. Not only the sweet, baffled husband but the grown children, the ones who loved her and the ones who resented her, and their children, too. All of them.

The room darkened with evening. Catareen woke several times, looked around uncertainly. She must have been surprised to find herself here, dying in an unfamiliar room on a strange planet. She must, in her sleep, have forgotten. Each time she woke, Simon leaned over her and said, “It’s all right,” which was not, of course, strictly true. It was something to say.

He didn’t think she’d want him to touch her. Each time she looked at him with fading yellow eyes. Each time she drifted away again without speaking.

Presently, Luke came into the room. “Hey,” he said. “It’s almost time to get aboard.”

Simon knew by then what he would do. He seemed to have entered a decision without quite making it. The process had occurred somewhere deep in his circuitry.

He said, “I’m not going.”

“What?”

“I can’t leave her here.”

Luke hesitated. Then he said, “There’s nothing we can do for her, you know.”

“I can be here. I can do that.”

“Do you know what that means? We can’t turn around and come back for you.”

“I know that.”

“I want you to come,” Luke said. There was a hint of whine in his tone.

He was in fact a twelve-year-old boy. It was easy to forget that.

Simon said, “You’ll be fine without me.”

“I know. I know I will. I still want you to come.”

“What’s that you’ve got there?” Simon asked. Luke was holding something in a white plastic bag.

“Oh. Just this.”

He reached into the bag and produced the little china bowl they’d bought from the old woman in Denver.

“You’re taking that to another planet?”

“It was my mother’s.”

“What?”

“I don’t know how Gaya ended up with it. We left Denver kind of quickly, one of Mom’s credit-card things blew up, and I guess Gaya got to our apartment before the authorities did. I remember this bowl from when I was a baby. Mom must have boosted it. She’d never have bought something like this.”

Luke stood holding the bowl in both hands. It appeared to put out a faint glow in the darkening room.

“Is there some kind of writing on it?” Simon asked.

“Doesn’t mean shit.”

“Come on.”

“It’s a language from some loser country. One of those places with horrible weather and a long line of demented rulers. One of those places that seem to have existed only so their citizens could devote their lives to trying to get the hell out.”

“Do you know what it says?”

“Nope. No idea.”

“But you want to take it with you.”

“I paid for it.”

“With my money.”

Luke shrugged and put the bowl back into the bag. Only the sound of Catareen’s breath was audible. Ee-um-fah-um-so, faint as a curtain worried by wind.

Simon thought he could see the bowl on another planet some time in the next century, sitting on a shelf, where it would silently reflect an alien light. This small and fragile object, bearing its untranslatable message, was the entire estate of a woman who had intentionally deformed her child and then abandoned him. The bowl would travel to another sun, although it was neither rare nor precious.

Biologicals were mysterious.

Luke said, “You’re absolutely sure you don’t want to come?”

“I do want to come. But I’m staying here.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

Luke went and stood beside the slumbering Catareen. “Goodbye,” he said softly. She did not respond.

Luke said, “If I was a better person, I’d stay, too.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no reason for both of us to stay.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

“But you wanted to hear it anyway, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. I did.”

“Is this what Christians refer to as absolution?”

“Uh-huh. Anybody can do it. You don’t need a priest.”

“You don’t really believe in this crap, do you? Really?"

“I do. I really do. Can’t help it.”

Luke stood solemnly at Catareen’s bedside. He held the bowl close to his chest.

“She’s had a long life. Now she’s going to the Lord.”

“Frankly it creeps me out a little when you say things like that,” Simon said.

“It shouldn’t. If you don’t like ‘Lord,’ pick another word. She’s going home. She’s going back to the party. Whatever you like.”

“I suppose you have some definite ideas about an afterlife.”

“Sure. We get reabsorbed into the earthly and celestial mechanism.”

“No heaven?”

“That’s heaven.”

“What about realms of glory? What about walking around in golden slippers?”

“We abandon consciousness as if we were waking from a bad dream. We throw it off like clothes that never fit us right. It’s an ecstatic release we’re physically unable to apprehend while we’re in our bodies. Orgasm is our best hint, but it’s crude and minor by comparison.”

“This is what Holy Fire taught you?”

“No, they were idiots. It’s just something I know. The way you know your poetry.”

“I don’t know poetry, exactly. I contain it.”

“Same difference, don’t you think? Hey, it’s about time for me to blast off to another planet.”

“I’ll walk you downstairs. I’d like to say goodbye to the others.”

“Okay.”

They went together to the base of the ship. It was humming now. It put out a faint glow like the one that had emanated from Luke’s mother’s bowl in the dimness of the sickroom. The settlers were assembled at the bottom of the ramp. At the top of the ramp, the entranceway was a square of perfect white light.

Emory said heartily to Simon, “Here we go, then.”

“I’ve just come to see you off,” Simon told him. “You’re not coming?”

Simon explained. Emory listened. When Simon had finished, Emory said, “This is really rather extraordinary, you know.”

“What is?”

“You.”

“I’m not extraordinary. Please don’t patronize me.” Emory said, “A child said”

“I don’t feel like reciting poetry just now,” Simon told him.

“Really?”

“Really.”

Emory smiled and nodded. “As you wish,” he said.

Twyla approached from the crowd, with Luke behind her. She said to Simon, “If you’re staying here, you could take care of Hesperia.”

“I guess I could.”

“The neighbors are coming to get her tomorrow. Tell them they can’t have her after all. Tell them you’re going to keep her. Will you do that?”

“Sure.”

Luke said, “He can’t take care of a horse. The neighbors are a better bet. They’re horse people, right?”

“Hesperia would be one of the herd to them. She’ll be Simon’s only horse.”

“This is assuming Simon wants or needs a horse. This is assuming he’d have any idea what to do with a horse.”

Othea said, “We need to be getting on board now.” She held the infant in her arms.

Emory said to Simon, “It seems I did a better job with you than I’d realized.”

“Have a good trip,” Simon said.

“Same to you. Excuse me, I’ve got to do a head count. Don’t wander off. I want to say a proper goodbye.”

Emory strode off into the crowd. Luke and Twyla continued bickering about the horse. The argument seemed to be leading them into other, more general areas of disagreement.

Simon decided it was as good a time as any to slip away. No one seemed to notice when he did.

He resumed his place beside Catareen in the dim, cool room. From outside he heard the sounds of the departure. A ringing of metal, three clear notes in succession. A strange sound of suction, unidentifiable, that came and went. And every now and then the sound of voices, a child calling, an adult answering. They were indistinct. They seemed to come from far away, farther than he knew them to be.

He did not wish to see the ship depart. He preferred to be here, in this quiet room.

As time passed he drifted into sleep and out again. His head fell onto his chest, and he jerked awake. Each time when he woke he was briefly surprised to find himself here, with the dark silent form laid out on the bed. Each time he understood that he was in fact here. Then he’d fall asleep again.

Finally he got onto the bed beside Catareen. He was so tired. He wanted only to lie down. He moved carefully, trying not to disturb her. He arranged his body beside hers on the narrow mattress.

Her eyelids fluttered open. She turned her head and looked at him. She was quiet for a while. Then she said, “You.”

Her voice had thinned. It was a low whistle, barely audible.

“Me,” he answered. “When you go?”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“When you go?”

“I’m not going.”

“You are.”

“No. I’m staying here.”

“Not.”

He said, “I wouldn’t want to go without you.” It was not what he’d meant to say. It did not seem quite literally true. And yet, he’d said it.

“You go,” she said.

“Shh. Don’t talk.” As if he’d ever imagined asking her to speak less.

She said, “Go.”

He answered, “This is where I want to be.”

She looked at him. Her eyes were fading. She opened her mouth to speak but could not speak.

“Sleep,” he said. “Just sleep. I’ll be right here.”

She closed her eyes. Carefully, he put his arm over her. Then he decided she probably wouldn’t want that. He removed his arm. He inclined his head toward hers, let the skin of his cheek touch the skin of her forehead. He thought she would not mind that.

Soon he was asleep, too.

He dreamed that he stood in a high place. It was bright and windy. In the dream he could not determine whether he was on a mountain or a building. He knew only that he was standing on something solid and that the earth was far below. From where he stood he could see people walking across a plain. They were distant, and yet he could see them perfectly. There were men and women and children. They were all going in the same direction. They were leaving something behind. He could just barely make it out. It was a darkness, a sense of gathering storm, far away, shot through with flashes of light, green-tinted, unhealthy, small shivers and bursts of light that appeared and disappeared in the roil of cloudy darkness. The people were walking away from it, but he could not see what it was they were moving toward. A brilliant wind blew against him, and he could only face into it. He could only look at that which the people were fleeing. He hoped they were going to something better. He imagined mountains and forests, rivers, a pure windswept cleanliness, but he could not see it. He could only see the people walking through the grass. He could only see what was on their faces: hope and fear and determination, a furious ardency he could not put a name to. The wind grew louder around him. He understood that the wind in his dream was the sound of a spacecraft, departing for another world.

He awoke. It was still dark. He could still hear the wind from his dream.

He knew immediately that Catareen had died.

She lay rigid. Her eyes were closed. The orange no longer shone through the thin membranes of her eyelids. Simon put his hand on her small, smooth head. It was cool as a stone.

He wondered: Had she hastened her death in the hope that he might still be able to get aboard the ship? Could a Nadian do something like that? It was impossible to say.

The ship. He might still have time to get aboard, then.

He ran from the room, down the stairs, and outside. He knew. Of course he knew. Still, he shouted, “Wait.”

The ship was one hundred feet or more above the ground, quivering as its reactor prepared to deliver the blast. It floated, humming. Its three spider legs had been retracted. It was a perfect silver platter, trembling as if it might flip over, girdled with green-gold porthole lights. Centered in its underside was the circle of the reactor, deepening from blinding white to volcanic red. Ten, nine, eight…

Simon ran to the empty place where the ship had been. He shouted, “Wait, please, wait.” He stood shouting in the middle of the scorched circle the ship had left behind. He knew it was too late. Even if they could see him (they could not see him), there was no way to bring the ship down again, no rope or ladder to unfurl.

“No,” he shouted. “Please, oh, please, wait for me.”

The reactor fired. Simon was consumed by red light, obliterated by it. He was momentarily made only of light, blinded, shouting. It was not hot; it was only bright. The reactor made a small sound, a mechanical cough, and then the ship hurtled upward so fast it seemed to vanish entirely. By the time the red light had dissipated, by the time Simon’s sight was restored, it was already impossible to tell which light was the ship and which was one of the nearer stars.

Simon stood looking up at the sky. He fixed on a moving light that might have been the ship, though he could not be sure. The sky was full of starlike lights that moved, that could have been fly craft from Eurasia or secret weapons aimed at various enemies or alien ships bearing pilgrims from one world to another. The sky was full of travelers. Simon remained under the stars and the points of moving light shouting, “Wait, wait, wait, oh, please, wait for me.”

When he was finished shouting there was nothing to do but go back into the empty house. He returned to the bedroom. He lay awake beside Catareen’s body, which contained no trace of her. She had departed entirely. Her flesh had joined the inanimate objects of the room; it was no more than the chair or the lamp.

He lay beside the body until the room began to pale with the first light of morning.

By the time the sun was fully risen, he had dug her grave. He chose a place behind the farmhouse, in the shade of the tree they had looked at together through the bedroom window. When the hole was deep enough he went and lifted her body and carried it outside. She weighed almost nothing. In death, she was like a collapsed umbrella. He held her body carefully, with her head pressed to his chest, though of course it made no difference. As he carried her across the yard the horse nickered. It wanted to be fed.

Before he fed the horse he took Catareen to the grave, sat awkwardly on its crumbly edge, then slid down and laid her on the cool, moist earth. It didn’t seem right to put dirt directly onto her face. He thought at first he would go back into the house for a cloth but decided instead to remove his shirt and drape it over her head. He thought she should have something of his in the grave with her, though of course it made no difference.

When her features were shrouded by his T-shirt he reached up, took a handful of earth, and spread it over her face. He worked carefully and gently. He added another handful, and another. He covered her handful by handful until she was entirely blanketed by earth. Until she had disappeared. Then he hoisted himself out of the grave and shoveled the rest of the dirt in.

The horse whinnied insistently. It needed to be fed. He went and fed the horse.

The sun was high by then. The heat of the day had begun. He was alone here, with the horse and Catareen’s grave. The others were on their way to a new world, one that might be beautiful or might be barren.

He made breakfast for himself and washed the dishes. It was nine-thirty on a summer morning in an empty house on the outskirts of Denver. He walked onto the porch and looked at what was there. Grass and sky. A single finger of cloud, dissolving in the searing blue above the distant mountain range.

It was time to go.

He saddled the horse. He was drawn more to the idea of riding the horse than he was to the prospect of driving away in the Winnebago. The Winnebago could stay here, in the heat and the silence. The sun would rise and fall and rise again on the truck and the house, on the scorched circle where the spaceship had been, on Catareen’s unmarked grave.

He mounted the horse and rode out. He would ride west, he thought. He would ride to California. He would ride in that direction. He and the horse might die of starvation or the sun. They might be attacked by nomads and zealots. Or they might get to the Pacific. They might go all the way to the far edge of the continent and stand on a beach before what he imagined to be a restive, infinite blue. Assuming of course that the ocean was still untainted. There was no way of knowing, was there?

He rode west. He rode until the farm was out of sight, until he was no one and nothing but a man on a horse in a vast emptiness, a world of grass and sky. The horse walked steadily on. It was unconcerned. It was only walking. It had no idea about anything.

Simon and the horse would have to get across the mountains. What were they called? The Rockies. People had done that, though. People who were now long dead had ridden horses across these mountains and reached whatever waited for them on the other side. They had buried their dead. They had carried with them bowls that bore messages written in forgotten languages. They had carried memories of a pond or of a tree perfectly centered in an accidental view or of being left behind as others sailed away. They had harbored unreasonable hopes. They had built cities that rose and fell and might for all he knew be rising again.

The woman was in the ground. The child was on his way to another world. Simon was on his way someplace, and there might be nothing there. No, there was something everywhere. He was going into his future. There was nothing to do but ride into it.

A pure change happened. He felt it buzzing through his circuits. He had no name for it.

He said aloud, “The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them.”

He rode on then, through the long grass toward the mountains.