The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2019 Edition

Dayenu ^{James Sallis}

At 10:36 as I’m listening to accounts on the radio of a plane lost over the Arctic Sea, the noise from within the trunk gets to be so annoying that I stop the car, open up, and whack the guy with the cut-down baseball bat I stowed under the front seat. The ride’s a lot better after that. They never find the plane.

Where I’ve pulled off is this little rise from which you can see the highway rolling on for miles in both directions, my very own wee grassy knoll. The trees off the road are at that half-and-half stage, leaves gone brown closer to the ground, those above stubbornly hanging on. Because of Union Day there’s little traffic, two semis, a couple of vans and a pickup during the time I’m there, which is the only reason I’m risking everything to be out here and on the road taking care of one last piece of business. Even the government’s mostly on hold.

What they never understood, I’m thinking as I get back in the car, what it took me so long to understand, is that after rehab I became a different person. Not as in some idiotic this-changed-my-life blather, or that last two minutes of screen drama with light shining in the guy’s eyes and throbs of music. Everything changed. How the sky looks in early morning, the taste of foods, longings you can’t put a name to. Time itself, the way it comes and goes. Learning all over how to do the most basic things, walk, hold onto a glass, open doors, brush teeth, tie shoes, put your belt on from the right direction—all this reconfigures the world around you. A new person settles in. You introduce yourself to the new guy and start getting acquainted. It can take a while.

An hour later I make the delivery and go about my business, not that there is any. They’d got too close this time and I’d gone deeper to ground, pretty much as deep as one can burrow. The gig was a hold-over from before, timing rendered it possible, so I took the chance. Messages left in various dropboxes now would grow up orphans.

I was staying on the raw inner edge of the city, a gaza strip where old parts of town hang on by their fingernails to the new, in a house with rooms the size of shipping crates. Tattoo-and-piercing parlor nearby, four boarded-up houses like ghosts of mine, an art gallery through whose windows you can see paintings heavy on huge red lips, portions of iridescent automobiles, and imaginary animals.

Nostalgia, dreamland, history in a nutshell.

The house owner supposedly (this gleaned from old correspondence and visa applications) was away “hunting down his ancestry,” driven by the belief that once he knows about his great-great grandfather, his own blurry life will drift into focus. So here I am, with every item on the successful lurker’s shopping list in place: semi-abandoned neighborhood, evidence of high turnover, no one on the streets, irregular or nonexistent patrols, no deliveries, few signs of curiosity idle or otherwise.

A week or so in, it occurred to me that the neighborhood had this fairy tale thing going. Grumpy old man half a block south, bighead ogre seen peering out windows of the house covered with vines, guy with cornrows who resided at the covered bus stop and could pass for a genie, even a little girl who lived down the lane.

Look at the same frame sideways, of course, and it goes immediately dark: poverty, political pandering, ineptitude, dispossession. Where you watch from, and how you look, dictates what you see.

A cascade of strokes, they told me. Infarctions. Areas of tissue death brought on by interruptions in blood supply and oxygen deprivation—like half a dozen heart attacks moved far north. No problem, they said. We’ll go in and fix this.

So they did.

They came for me at 4 AM. No traffic or other sounds outside; the curfews were in place. And nothing more than a promise of light in the sky. The third step of the second landing creaked. I made sure of that with a bit of creative carpentry when I moved in.

Four of them. I counted the creaks. Then was out the window and down, gone truly to ground, by the time the last one hit the landing.

We wait to be gathered, my uncle always said. Tribally, commercially, virtually, finally. Uncle Cage disappeared when I was eight, in one of the myriad foreign lands where we indulged what were then called police actions. Hard upon that, his footprints and after-image began to leak away, public records, photographs, rosters. Within a matter of weeks he no longer existed.

Nothing in this old part of town had been planned. The alleyway in which I found myself was no exception; it simply came into being as buildings grew around it. Doorways, jury-rigged gates and dog-legged side paths could lead nowhere. But exits abounded. I took one at random, looking back to where their cars (always two of them, it seemed, always dark gray) sat at curbside, still and featureless as skulls.

We wait to be gathered.

That day, days before, the wind blew hard, tunneling down through the streets of the city bearing tides of refuse. Drink containers, bits of printout, feather and bone, scraps of clothing. Birds, mostly hawks, stayed put on building tops, electing not to launch themselves into the fray as, overhead, clouds collided and the large ate the small. I was on one of those building tops too, looking down at protestors who had gathered outside People’s Hall, protestors largely in their late teens or early twenties, with a sampling from the next generation up sprinkled among them. Just over a hundred, I’d say, though news reports doubled that figure.

The police had military-issue equipment: weapons, body armor, full automatics, electrics. They waded into the kids, stunned a number of them, gassed the rest, now had them facedown on the ground roughly in squares.

There are no right angles in nature.

We’re never too far from the ground. My uncle again.

Watching events below so closely, I had failed to notice the drone hovering nearby, took note of it only when one of the hawks launched from a rooftop. The hawk hit hard. Its talons scrabbled for a hold but, finding no purchase, it flew on. Unable to right itself, the drone crashed into the side of a building. Though not before it had scanned me and dialed it in.

Tulips.

In 17th century Holland, Uncle Cage told me, a single bulb of the rare Semper Augustus sold for the price of a good house. The tulip craze geared up in November 1636, ran its course, and burned itself out by February of the next year, forever a lesson on inflated markets, fabricated desire and greed of a sort not so much unlearned as endlessly learned and forgotten.

I was seven and had no idea what he was talking about. This was a year or so before he was supposed to come back for a visit, for shore leave. Before he disappeared. Before he got gathered.

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I did have memories of earlier stories, stories that would adhere over time to experiences of my own, form a latticework upon which hung notions of life untempered by slogans, manipulation and misdirection.

I took breakfast at a Quick’n’Easy, street name Queasy, directly across from the fast rail’s inner loop, watching passengers flow onto the platform then drain into the maw of the cars or out onto the streets.

An abandoned building nearby, once a pharmacy, bore an arc of spray-painted letters on its front: REBORN. Another farther along, faded red and yellow colors suggesting it had once been a bodega, read BELIEVE. Christians come into the neighborhood at night and leave their mark, evaporate like dew.

I’d barely settled in at a window seat on the 6:56 Express when the aisle seat beside me filled. We picked up speed; station, sky and buildings outside ran together in a single blurred banner. The light on the camera at the front of the car blinked steadily. I kept my face averted as though looking out the window. Not that this would help all that much, should they engage recognition software.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” I said without turning to my seat mate.

“Two hours, a smidge less. About as I expected. This was your most likely egress.”

“You ran a sim?”

“No need. The dogs were closing in, I knew where, I had absolute confidence they’d fail. There was a time we thought alike.”

“You might easily have called in the dogs yourself. Primed the pump.”

“Ah, but that would lack subtlety. Not to mention it would leave my size ten footprints scattered about digitally. Still, there it was. And when was I likely ever to have another chance to find you?”

Security came through the car randomly checking, a young woman shiny with purpose, uniform pants pressed blade-sharp, and we stopped talking. Outwardly calm, within I was anything but. Flee if possible, fight if not. But she passed us by. Moments later the train slowed almost to a stop as we drew abreast of the war memorial. Passengers went about their business, chatting to companions, working or browsing on links. One woman’s eyes never left the wall. She could not see the name, but she knew it was there. Husband? Sibling? Child? As the last row of names crawled by, the train regained speed. At the border between municipalities, guards waved us through.

We went down, temporarily, at West End Station. Sniffers had flagged probable contraband—illicit drugs or explosives, usually—so trains were held and passengers offloaded to the platform. We’d scarcely lined up behind the sensor gates when a young man near the end broke and ran, only to stop moments later as though he’d run into an invisible wall—the first time I’d seen the new electrics in action. Guards unsheathed a wafer-thin stretcher, rolled him bonelessly onto it, and bore him away. Soon we were on the move again.

Warren waited till a teenaged Asian passenger, belt and backpack straps studded with what looked to be ancient revolver casings, passed.

“Here.”

I took what he held out, a shape and weight familiar to my hand. Its cover creased and worn though it had to be new.

“A new name, history, vitals, the data manipulated just enough that scans won’t flag it, but it’s basically you. Most anywhere in the city and surround, these will suffice. You’ll want to stay away from admin buildings, information centers.” He turned to the window. “This would be your stop.”

The announcement came then over the speakers. All our grand technology, and station calls still sound like hamsters gargling.

“Use the papers if you wish. If not, dispose of them. On the chance that you use them, Frances looks forward to seeing you.”

I turned back and motioned for him to follow.

We’re sitting in a foxhole in some country with too many vowels in its name. Officially this is a TBH, Transport Battle Habitat, and doesn’t have much of anything to do with foxholes, but that’s what we call it. Made of some mystery plastic that goes hard when you inflate it and soft again when you go the other way. Full stealth optics: bends and reflects light to blend with the surround or disappear into it—woodland, plains, whatever. Desert’s harder, of course, but you could almost feel the poor thing struggling, doing its best.

Fran is sniffing at an RP she just tore into. The pack itself looks like jerky or tree bark. A meaningless script of letters and numbers on it but no clue what waits inside. She tries to break off a piece of whatever it is and can’t, pulls the knife out of her boot.

“Adventure,” I say. “Suspense.”

“Hey, chewing on this at least will give me something to do for half an hour.” We hear the wheeze and hollow grunt of shells striking not too far off. “The boys are playing again.”

“Ding dong the witch ain’t dead.”

“Just polishing her teeth.”

“Shiny!”

Lots of time to talk out there. I know about her favorite toy when she was four or five, a plastic submarine with a compartment you filled with baking soda to make it dive and surface, dive and surface. The head made of a carved coconut with seashells for eyes and ears. Her first kiss—from a boy twice her age whose hand crawled roughly into her shorts. The twin brother who died in a bombing, in the coffeeshop across the street from the college where he taught, when she was in boot camp.

“Everybody was going,” she said when she told me about that. “My cat died. My brother. Our old man. Ever feel surrounded?”

I waited for a shell to hit, said “Nah” when one did.

Timing is everything.

She looks out the gun slot of the foxhole. “Dogs’ll be next,” she says.

The dogs were everywhere back then. Genetically manipulated, physical and mental augmentations. Ten or twelve of them would spill up over the horizon and surge towards you. Nothing short of heavy artillery stopped them. Even then, what was left of them, half dogs, forequarters, kept coming. Most of the time they couldn’t see the foxholes but knew they were there—smelled them, sensed them.

These do what we hope: circle us twice, snuffle ground, sniff air, do it all again and move on.

“Damn things give me the willies every time,” Fran says.

“They’re supposed to. Bring you up against the elemental, the savage, within yourself.”

“Deep waters, college boy. Good to see all that schooling wasn’t wasted.”

“Most of it was. But knowledge is like cobwebs, get close enough, some stick.”

Our coms crackle. Go orders. Moments later we’re over the top, on our way to finding the elemental and savage within ourselves.

At night Foragers come out, looking for food, cast-off clothing, machine parts, citizens marooned for whatever reason in their world—anything they can use. Theirs is a mission of salvage, scooping up leftovers, cast-offs, the discarded. They decline the housing, employment, health care and securities guaranteed to all, choosing to live invisibly, perilously, and when every few years the government extends offers of amnesty, those offers go ignored.

Walking away from the station into thinner ground and air, we passed a number of Foragers who looked on, even followed a bit, before concluding it unwise to approach.

Warren watched as one, a woman in her late teens or early twenties, face pale above an ankle-length dark overcoat, military issue, took a final look and withdrew. “Interesting lives,” he said.

“They’re a part of you, deep inside, that longs to scream No.”

“Perhaps not so deep as you imagine.” He touched a wall, ran his hand along it. Dark grit fell from the hand when he took it away. “How did we come to live in a world where everything is something else?”

“Other than what it seems? We’ve always lived there.”

“Then how do choices get made?”

“Faith.”

“Now there’s something you can hold onto.” He pulled out a link, looked for a moment at the screen, and replaced it. “Our plan to protect Frances—”

“By staging her death.”

“—was solid, with high probability of success.”

“Not that it would ever occur to others that it was a ploy.”

He met my eyes, an action intended to register sincerity and directness but in effect defensive.

“High probability means you ran sims,” I said, “as many times as it took for someone to get onto those runs.”

“Of course.”

“Then you had the tag. Trawled out and put them down. It wasn’t about protecting Fran.”

We walked on. Pavement out here was everywhere cracked, fractured into multiple planes, grass and weeds growing from the fissures like trees on a hundred tiny hills.

“Afterwards,” Warren said, “she simply chose not to—much as you did.”

Thinking I heard footsteps, I put out an arm to halt us. We stood quietly, breathing slowly. Nothing more came. “Do you know where she is?”

“No. Nor, we trust, do those attempting to kill her.”

“You’ve intel?”

He shook his head. “Five words to a secure address. Introduce me to your friend?”

“A safe word.”

“And her way of asking for you. A request she would make only…”

Around us, like his sentence, the city trailed off, neither quite there nor absent. Heaps of refuse that looked to be undisturbed. Few sign of rats or other rodents—larger beasts who’d rarely venture closer to the city saw to that.

College days. Stray bunches of us had got our heads filled with notions of retrieving history, scrubbing away the years, getting back to common ground we’d misplaced. Music became a part of this; for about five minutes I played at being a musician. Fell in quickly with Sid Coleman, and while I wasn’t ever much good and wasn’t going to be, I could bite into a rhythm and never let go. We started out playing for parties, college gigs and such. Later, it was mostly protest meetings.

Sid steamed with frustration from the get-go. What he wanted to do was talk politics but what everyone else wanted was for him to bring his guitar and sing. He had started out with old-time mountain music, discovered calypso and Memphis jug bands, slid into home base with songs against what we started calling the forever wars. He sang right up to the day he got his notice. That day he put his guitar away for good.

Sid and his crew were chowing down on a breakfast of beer and RPs when mortar shells struck. Eight were killed. And while Sid escaped further injury, the blasts took his hearing. This was a couple of borders over from where we are now. It’s all the same war, he used to sing, they just move it from place to place.

—Hang on, Fran said, I need to pee. She checked with the infrared scope for all clear and stepped out. Got back and said Okay…

That’s it. There isn’t any more.

Oh.

But there was.

Years later, back home, I ran into Sid on the street. I could see in his face that he didn’t remember me, though he claimed to. He wore fake fatigues, the kind they sell at discount stores, and bedroom slippers. His hair was carefully combed, with a sheen of oil that smelled rank. Don’t get out much, he said. One social engagement on my calendar every month. On the 15th, 0900 to the minute, the government check lands in my account. No fanfare, no fail, there it is, egg plopped in the nest. And there I am too, waiting to claim my money.

Someone hands you a gun, you don’t check it out before you use it, be sure of its function, you’re a fool. Same with false papers. Next morning I crossed the southeast border into Palms, a city with no industry or trade centers and of scant strategic interest, populated as it is by the aged afloat on their pensions.

Cities, like the civilizations they reflect, find their rhythm. Their surges, falls. Areas within falter, decline and bottom out, open to new strains of inhabitants and push their way back up. Palms for now was on hold, a single sustained note.

From town’s center I walked out to the grand artificial lake where picnic tables, benches, and teeter-totters squatted at eight-meter intervals around clear water. Teeter-totters, one assumes, for visiting grandchildren, though that day there were none. Plenty of elderly folk at the tables or sitting with feet in the water on low-slung walls, people a generation or two younger standing by. Caretakers.

I ended up back in town at a sparsely populated outdoor café, server and barrista of an age with those around. Bob, the server, put me in mind of oldtime French waiters, professional mien and mantle donned with his apron. The barrista’s demeanor came from warmer climes; she tapped on cup bottoms, swiveled about, triggered the steamer in syncopated bursts as she worked. Mildred’s a peach, Bob said, directing his gaze briefly that way when I commented.

A couple I’d estimate to be in their eighties sat across from one another at a table nearby, each with a link propped before. She’d key in something on hers, he’d look at his. They’d both look up and smile. Then it was his turn.

Children? Images from long ago—a vacation on the big island before the embargos, places they’d lived, concerts and celebrations attended, their younger selves?

Even stolid Bob registered their happiness, careful not to interrupt but repeatedly locating himself close by lest they need something.

A frail-seeming man in eyeglasses sat reading an actual book whose title I eventually made out to be A History of Radical Thought. Interesting, that use of the indefinite article, I thought, a instead of the; one had to wonder at the content. There could be so many such histories.

When Bob set down a tea cake at another table, the woman there waited for him to walk away then quickly dipped her head and with one hand in half a moment sketched a shape in the air before her: silent prayer, and what few would recognize as the sign of the cross.

Across the street, in a park bordered on the far side by offset stands of trees, two women in sundresses, a style I recalled from childhood, were flying a kite made to look like a huge frog and awash with bright yellows, crimson, metallic blues. The runner had just let go the kite; both laughed as the frog took to sky.

Smelling of fresh earth, rich and dark, the coffee was good. I had three cups, took another walk round the lake, and remounted the train without challenge or incident. On the trip back, mechanical or guidance problems delayed us, and it grew dark as we reached the city, lights coming on about us, curfew close enough to give concern. Officials waited on the platform to issue safe passes. Elsewhere, automatic weapons cradled in their arms, soldiers who looked to be barely out of adolescence patrolled.

So there I am in a room, rooting about in the few personal belongings left behind, listening for footsteps outside in the hall or coming up stairs. How did I arrive here? We wonder that all our lives, don’t we?

It was as much the idea of a room as it was a room. Plato and Socrates might have stood at the door arguing for days. A single small window set high, its plastic treated so that light blossomed as it passed through, flooded the room with virtual sunshine. From one wall a lower panel let down to become a bed, another panel above to serve as table or desk.

Where a man lives and what’s inside his head, they’re mirrors of one another, my trainers said. In which case there shouldn’t be a whole lot going on in Merrit Li’s. And if I had the right person, I knew that wasn’t true.

My inventory disclosed a packet of expired papers and passes bound together in a drawer, a thin wallet containing recent travel visas, a drawerful of clothes, some disposable, some not, all of them dark and characterless. On his link I found itineraries and receipts, forty-six emails that seemed to be business related, though what business would be impossible to discern, and a young adult novel about the Nation Wars.

Elsewhere about the room, apportioned to the innards of various appliances, a Squeeze, a cooker, a coffee maker, I found what could only be the components of a stunner, cast in a hard plastic I’d not seen before, doubtless unkennable to scanners.

Immediately I became aware of a presence in the doorway behind me. There’d been no warning sounds, no footsteps. Right. So he had to be who and what I thought.

“We have mutual friends,” I said, turning.

“Else you wouldn’t be here.”

Older than myself by a decade and more, conceivably old enough to remember the wars he’d been reading about. No sign of recognition at the safe word. Stance and carriage, legs apart, shoulders and hips in a line, confirmed other suspicions. Military.

I glanced up from his feet at the same time he did so from mine. Anticipating attack, one sees it begin there.

“Your belongings remain as they were,” I said.

He nodded. Waited.

“Three days ago you were in Lower Cam, at a train stop where an attack took place. Two citizens were injured. The target, Frances diPalma, fled.”

“Leaving a body behind her. That one not a bystander.”

He held out both hands to signal non-aggression and, at my nod, stepped to the console to dial open the built-in screen. Habit—and of little benefit should we be on lens, but one takes the path available.

A spirited discussion of the city’s economic status bloomed onscreen: female moderator, one man in a dark suit, one in a sky blue sweater. It’s really quite simple, assuming you have the facts, the suit-wearer said. The other’s expression suggested that not once in his life had he encountered anything other than complexity, nor could he anticipate ever doing so.

“You believe I was there to take her down,” Merrit Li said.

“Yes.”

“I was there, but to a different purpose than you suppose. She is in fact a mutual friend. I know her as Molly.”

Rueful Tuesday, two days before. I had the windows dialed down while watching a feed on vanishing species. I sat back, dialed the window up, the screen down, to look across at the next building. Uncle Carl used to tell me a story about how this early jazz man, Buddy Bolden, threw a baby out the window in New Orleans and a neighbor leaned out his window and caught it. That’s about how close we were.

For a moment I could make out moving shapes over there, people, before they dialed down their window.

I had punched back in for the sad tale of vanished sea otters and was remembering how when we’d first come here to the city, half-jokingly calling ourselves settlers, jumpy with wonder, with the effort and worry of fitting in, there’d been a linkstop showing disaster movies round the clock. World after world ravaged by giant insects, tiny insects, momentous storms, awakened deep-sea creatures, carniverous plants, science, our own stupidity.

With no forewarning, otter, shore and sea contracted, siphoned down to a crawler.

Warren’s face above.

“This,” he said, then was gone.

Rosland, time stamp less than an hour ago. A train stop. Single tracks up- and downtown, a dozen people waiting. Strollers, shufflers. Solitary busker playing accordion, license pasted to his top hat, little movement otherwise. Then suddenly there was.

A man walked briskly towards a woman waiting by the uptown track. She turned, transformed at a breath from citizen to warrior, everything about her changing in that instant. She shifted legs and feet, leaned hard left as he fired, followed that lean into full motion.

Moments later, the man lay on the platform, face turned to the camera.

Then another face glancing back, gone as its owner sprinted up the walkway Fran had vanished into.

Merrit Li’s face.

Whereupon Warren’s returned.

“We think there were two other incidents, but this is the first we’ve had surveillance.”

“Fran took one of the attackers down.”

“Cleanly.”

“The second attacker followed her.”

“In the tunnel they’re off lens. We lost them. Nothing topside, nothing on connected platforms.”

“Any luck flagging her follower?”

“Check your drops. The bundle I sent should help with that.”

“We fought together at Kingston,” Merrit Li said. “Deep penetration. She had the squad.”

Doing what Rangers do.

“Not many walked away, either side.” He thumbed the sound on the room’s screen up a notch. “With the years, details have taken on a life of their own. You know the song?”

Two of them, actually. The official version, Kingston as a triumph of patriotism and the human spirit; the other underscoring the battle’s death toll, social cost, and ultimate pointlessness.

“Three of us came out of the fire. Two walking, one on Molly’s shoulder.”

Onscreen discussion of city economy had given way to the latest stats on immigration. Full-color graphs rolled across the screen. Authorities revoiced the stats and graphs: a marked uptick in Citizen Provisionals from rural regions far south, this fueled by border disputes among neighboring city-states. Graphics and voice-over were out of synch. Technician error, I thought. Then for a moment before getting shut down, voice and content changed drastically. Revisionist overdubs. Official news reestablished itself.

Li pointed to the screen, one of the southern borders. Drones from a couple generations back floated above scattered groups of ragged troops and rioters.

“I’m supposed to be there. Just about now, my CO is discovering I’m not.”

Even those you never see cast shadows. What I’d had were forests of filters and firewalls, limited access to public records, and no idea at all to whom his allegiance belonged, or if he might be off the grid entirely. But I also had Li’s face, by extrapolation his body volumes, and the way his body moved. It had taken me the best part of the two days since Warren dialed in with the clips, and a sum of chancy data diving, to find him.

“I assume your story varies little from my own,” Li said.

“Little enough.”

He waited a moment, then went on.

“One of my links stays on free scan, reach-and-grab for anything that hints of undisclosed military activity. Tagged one that felt half solid. Then another came through ringing like bells. Not much to doubt there. A takedown, and good—but it didn’t work. And seeing how it unrolled, I knew why. Molly. That first time too, I figured, so now they’d come at her twice and she put them down. They’d be getting ready to kick it into overdrive.”

“You have any idea why she was targeted?”

“It’s not like we were sending Union Day cards to one another, with a nice write-up about our year.”

“Right. Time to time, I’d hear things. She married and had a family up in Minnesota or Vancouver. She was consulting for or riding herd on private companies. She’d taken up teaching. Until last week, as far as I knew, she was dead.”

“While on assignment.”

“What we all heard. Turns out we weren’t the only ones.”

Li didn’t react, didn’t ask where that came from. The pieces were falling together in his mind. “A crawler,” he said.

“Followed by full-frontal assault. Once that closed down, Fran elected to stay off chart.”

“The moves on her could be flashback from that.”

“Could be.”

“And we don’t know who the crawler found.”

“What we know between us doesn’t take up much space in the world.”

Li glanced back at the screen. Forsaken drones. Ragtag troops and rioters. “Everything’s like paper folded so many times you can’t tell what it is anymore.”

I remembered Warren’s rhetorical How did we come to live in a world where everything is something else?

“Molly called out to you,” Li said.

“Relayed a message with a trigger word.” I told him much of the rest as well.

“Wanted you at her back.”

“As you said, they’ll be stepping it up.”

“And you came to me.”

Yes.

“So now she has us both.”

“Or will have.”

Li pulled his duffel from a shelf by the door. “Not much here I can’t leave behind. Give me ten minutes. Molly, you, me. Damn near have the makings of a volunteer army here, don’t we? A militia—just like that hoary old piece of 1787 paper said.”

What I remember is questions, questions that should have been easy enough but weren’t, and I had no idea why. What is today’s date? Do you know where you are? It took time before I realized the voices were speaking to me. They were voices beamed in from some far-off world that had nothing to do with me, grotesque half-faces hovering over me, random collections of features that changed and changed again.

Do you know where you are?

No—but at some point I began looking about for clues. Hospital, I said early on, but that wasn’t good enough.

Gradually I came to understand that at the end of each night shift someone wrote the new day’s date on a whiteboard at one side of the room along with the physician, RN and NA assigned that shift, so pretty soon (with no idea what soon in this circumstance might encompass) I had that much covered.

Progress.

Good boy.

They were so pleased.

Over time, too, I learned to fake recognition of staff members, and to look for the hospital’s name, which I never could keep hold of in my mind, on nametags.

Yep, I know where I am all right.

And it’s the 21st. (Though if they pushed for day of the week I foundered. That wasn’t on the whiteboard.)

Seizures? I answered. Stroke?

Then the questions got harder. After which they said let’s go for a walk why don’t we, an absurd goal given my inability to turn unassisted in bed or move my legs, the physical therapist’s verbal commands meeting with no greater success in converting directive to action than those coursing along my nervous system.

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But I needed ambulation to qualify for further rehab. So therapist Abraham sandbagged me into sitting position, hauled me to our feet and, with mine dragging and scraping at the floor, carried me the required half dozen steps, the unlikeliest dance partners ever.

We were on our fifth, maybe sixth provisional government by then. Some were ill-advised, rapidly imploding coalitions, so… five, six, seven, who can be sure? This one had begun to look as though it might stick, like the stray cat that follows you home and, once fed, stays.

I learned that later, of course.

Three worlds, Abraham said, coexist. There was the old world of things as they are—of acceptance, of discipline, where we take what pleasure exists in what we have and expect no more. There was the new world, in which everything, country, selves, the world’s very face, becomes endlessly reinvented, remade, refurbished. And now this third world struggling to be born, where old world and new will learn to live with one another.

Like Abraham and myself scuttling across the hospital’s tiled floors.

I’m not supposed to be talking like this, Abraham said.

We were on a break, and he’d pushed me outside, to a patio bordered by scrubby bushes and smelling of rosemary, where with minimal help I’d successfully tottered from the wheelchair and stumbled five terrifying steps to a bench. Applause would have been in order.

I asked if reinventing myself was not what I was doing.

More like rebuilding, he said. Refurbishing.

When I was a child, living in the first of our many homes, money was aflow, families and the neighborhood on their way up. If you tore a house down entire, you had to apply for new building permits. Leave one wall standing, it could pass as a remodel. So crews arrived in trucks and on foot to swarm over the site, piles of roofing, earth, brick and siding appeared, and within days, where the Jacobs or Shah house had been, there stood, in moonlight among hills of rubble, the ruins of a single wall.

Ready to get back to work? Abraham said. Patiently they await: Leg lifts, stationary cycling, weights, countless manifestations of pulleys and resistance. Row… Pull… Hold… Hold. Stepping over minefields of what look like tiny traffic cones. Balancing atop a footboard mounted on half a steel ball. Both of those last while clinging to walk bars and waiting for the state to wither away as Abraham said the old books predicted.

But five weeks further in, buckets of sweat lost to history, I’ve still not progressed past totter, trip and hope like hell I’ll make it to the bench. A convocation gets called. The physician I’ve taken to thinking of as Doc Salvage is spokesperson. Here’s the story, he begins. He smiles, then puts away the smile so it won’t get in the way of what he has to say.

They fully appreciate the work I’ve done. My attitude. My doggedness. My determination. They know I’ve hung on like a snapping turtle and refused to let go. The consensus is that we (pronoun modulating now to first-person plural) have gone as far as might reasonably be expected. In short, I can stay as I was, with severely diminished capacities, or.

Or being that I undergo an experimental procedure.

They would reboot and reconnect synapses, restore neural pathways, rewire connections that had failed to regenerate autonomously. And while they were in there they’d go ahead and rearrange the furniture. Spruce things up here and there. New carpet, fresh paint.

You have the technology to do that? I asked.

We do.

And I’ll be myself again, physically?

A better version. Though we understand (the smile is back) that sentimentally you may be attached to the present one.

And what of risks? Complications?

Oh, nothing terribly untoward. More or less the standard OR checklist: bleeds, infection, drug reactions. A long recovery.

You’ve all this certainty, with an experimental procedure?

Life itself is an experimental procedure. As you know.

And I’ve already had a long recovery.

Ah, that. Fundamentally you will have to start over, I’m afraid. Begin again.

And so I did in subsequent months as Doc Salvage and crew watched closely to assess development and as I pushed harder at my limits than I’d ever have thought possible. We were down in the swirly deep, in the sludge, as Abraham deemed. But within weeks the leg that before could scarcely clear the floor now could kick higher than my head, I could hop across the room, steady as a fence post, on a single foot, and fingers could pick bits of straw from off the table top. I could climb, crawl, swim, run, lift.

And wonder at what I’d been told, what I’d not.

You’ve taken note, Doc Salvage said six months later, how little resistance there is for you in physical activity.

Uncharacteristically, window shades were up behind him and light streamed in, so that he appeared to have a halo about his body, or to be going subtly out of focus.

All much as we anticipated, he said. But it is far from being the story’s end.

He paused, letting the moment stretch. Something reflective passed outside, a car, a copter, a drone, tossing stabs of light against the rear wall.

Our bodies teem with censors built and inculcated into us, Doc Salvage continued, censors that create distraction, indecision, delay—drag, if you will. Morality. Cultural mores. Emotions. Most particularly the last. And we have learned how to bypass those. Eliminate the drag. We can peel away emotions, mute them, dial them down to the very threshhold.

As, he said, we’ve done with you.

Which explained a lot of what had been going on in body and mind, things I’d been unable to put into words.

I now fit, they believed, a container they’d made for me.

But already, even then, I was spilling from it.

They had given me something. They had taken something. On such barter is a society founded. How much control over our lives do we retain, how much cede to the state? What debts do we take on in exchange for the state’s benefits? How does the state balance its responsibilities to the individual and to the collective? To what degree does it exist to serve, to what degree to oversee, its citizenry?

Theories grinding against one another in the dark.

The truth is this: Our enemies at the time were messing about with neurotoxins. It was those neurotoxins, not a CVA, not seizures as I’d been told, that came upon me in the burned-out fields of the far northwest. Those upon whose reach I was borne to the government hospital to awaken empty, blank, and helpless, isolate fragments of the world cascading around me.

The truth is this as well: I was changed. By the gas. By Doc’s procedure. By the experience of reinhabiting my own body. And later, by my actions.

Only with time did I come to understand the scope and nature of the changes within. Doc was right that emotions no longer obscured my actions; about much else he was wrong.

A single image remains from before medics scooped me up. I am dragging myself across stubble. I can hear nothing, feel nothing. My legs refuse to function. And all I can see—this fills my vision—are my arms out before me. They stretch and stretch again. Each time I pull my body forward, they stretch more. My hand, my fingers, are yards away, meters, miles. And I do not advance.

But within a year of that meeting with Doc Salvage I was on the move. There was much, in this fledgling nation, to be done.

The lamentations of old men forever fall deaf on youngster’s ears, my uncle said. He knew that early.

Sometimes I imagine myself an old man tied by sheets into my chair in the day room of a care center speaking—even though there is no one listening, no one there to listen—about the things I did, things I refused to do, things I never quite recovered from doing.

At a table nearby, two men and a woman play cards, some game in which single cards get dealt back onto the table. In at least ten minutes no one’s put down a card. It’s the woman’s turn. The men sit unmoving, hands before them, cards fanned. They could be mannikins propped there. On the screen across the day room a giant face says she loves us, in the same movie that plays at this time every Tuesday, but no one cares.

How does one assay right and wrong? With change crashing down all around us, do the words even have meaning?

Is everything finally relative?

What would you give, Sid Coleman used to sing, in exchange for your soul? An old, old song.

I know that the world of which I speak sitting here tied into my chair would be unrecognizable to the young. Unrecognizable to most anyone, really, should they chance to be around to hear. And as I speak, I watch cockroaches scuttling on the wall, lose my thoughts, begin to wonder about the cockroach’s world. They’ve been around forever, never changed.

All this, of course, knowing that I will never be an old man.

“This is your place?”

“Borrowed. Property is theft—right?”

Out on the farthest edge of the city. Forager territory. Dog-pack-and-worse territory. I looked about at the cot, racks of storage cells, plastic units stacked variously to form furniture of a sort. All of it graceless and functional, the sole concession to domestication being a plaque hung on a side wall and jiggered to look like an old-time sampler: Always Drink Upstream of the Herd.

“You can’t be here often, or for extended periods. What happens when you’re not?”

“I have guard rats.” He began pulling cubes from one of the stacks. “Joking. About theft and property, too.” He reconfigured the cubes as a chair, more or less. “Those who live out here and I have an understanding. Turns out we’ve much in common.”

“Being?”

“That you deal with an unfree world by making yourself so free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. Camus, I think.”

“Yet you run with the marshals of that world.”

“Their screens, drones and watchers catch most of what happens on the surface of their world. But much goes on beneath, in ours.”

“Giants of the deep?”

“Minnows and small fish. Thousands upon thousands of us. Where the true history resides.”

Li pulled a link from his pocket, punched in.

“The villagers want to climb the hill and storm the castle, and there is no castle. The castle is all around us. What we have to do is learn to live in it.”

As he spoke, perfectly relaxed, he was sweeping and scanning at impressive speed. “Ever come across a series of children’s books, Billy’s Adventures?”

I shook my head.

“I read them when I was five, six. The first one started off: ‘Two years it was that I lived among the goats. Two years that I went about on all fours, ate whatever came before me.’ Like most kid’s books, as much as anything else they were put out there as socializers. Teach the boys and girls how to get along with others, shore up received wisdom, hip-hurrah things-as-they-are. But scratch the surface and what was underneath gave the lie to what was on top. The books weren’t about joining the march, they were about staying apart while appearing to fit in. They were profoundly subversive.”

Back when this area was a functioning part of the city, Li’s squat had been a service facility, a utilities satellite maybe, a goods depot. Layers of steel shelving six- and eight-units deep sat against the rear wall. Stained and worn cement floors, splayed heads of ancient cables jutting from the wall. Steel everywhere, of a grade not seen for better than half a century, including the door that now rang open to admit an elderly man in clothing at once suggestive of tie-dye and camouflage. Balding, I saw as he slipped off his cloth cap.

“And so here you are back with us,” the man said. Trace of a far-northern accent in his voice. “And not alone.”

Li introduced us. “Thank you for minding the burrow, Daniel—as ever.”

“Well then, we can’t have just anyone moving in here, can we? We do have standards.” Then to me: “Welcome to the junkyard.”

Li had continued to monitor his link as we spoke. Now he beckoned me. The screen showed a street in the central city, masses of people moving along, dodges, feints, near-collisons.

“There,” Li said. The cursor became an arrow, touched on one individual moving at a good clip close to storefronts and walls. “And there.” Two larger figures, perhaps six meters back, matching speed with the first. “I’m piggybacked on security feeds. Seconds ago, sniffers at the corner dinged.”

“Those two are armed.”

We watched as the lone figure turned into a narrow side street or entryway. Both pursuers hesitated at the mouth, then stepped in, first one, then, on a six count, the other. People streamed by on the sidewalk. We waited. Moving at an easy pace, the single, smaller figure emerged. Patently she’d taken note where the cameras were and kept her face averted, but size and carriage were unmistakeable.

Fran.

Molly.

“By now she’s in the wind and the area’s spilling over with police.”

“And those hunting her will have new dogs in the area along with them,” Li said. “Unless, of course, they’re the same.” He thumbed over to news feeds. No mention of the incident. Then to the city’s official feeds, where delays from technical problems had been reported in the area and citizens were advised to consider alternate routes. “So many multiple realities,” Li said. “Is it any wonder we’re unable to see the world straight on?”

Time passed, as it will, however hard one holds on.

Li told me about religious practices among the Melanese who during old wars and due to the island’s tactical location, grew accustomed to airplanes arriving almost daily filled with goods, some of which got shared, much of which got cast off and reclaimed. For many years after, with that war over, the islanders carved long clearings like runways in the forest, built small fires along them to either side, constructed a wooden hut for a man to sit in with wooden disks on his ears as headphones and bamboo shoots jutting out like antennae. They waited for the airplanes to return with goods. Everything was in place. Everything was just as before. But no airplanes came.

It began to feel as though what we were doing in our approach to the whole Fran-Molly affair wasn’t far removed.

Why would Fran signal for backup then fail to make contact, even to make herself visible? Leapfrog, maybe? Assuming we’d move in and her pursuers’s focus would shift to us, leaving her free to… what?

Look again.

There had been urgency, power, in that attack. The air crackled with it. Fran knew where cameras were placed, carefully kept her face averted. From visual evidence her pursuers also knew, yet took little effort to skirt the cameras. (1) They were protected or (2) They didn’t exist.

And just what did we hope to learn by endlessly reviewing the incident? “One works with what one has,” Li said every time we thumbed up the file.

What we had was next to nothing.

And hellhounds on our trails. We could all but hear them snuffling around out there in the dark.

Government after government fell, each trailing in its wake the exhausted spume of grand theories. Anomie had come piecemeal over so long a time that we were hard pressed to remember or imagine another way. Platitudes, slogans and homilies had supplanted thought. That, or unfocused, unbridled hatred.

Was the government at which we arrived a better one, or were we simply too exhausted to go on? The bigfish capitalism we fled and the overseer government we embraced had much the same disregard for bedrock democratic principles. But each individual was housed, educated to the extent he or she elected, provided sustenance and medical care, state-sponsored burial.

Border disputes, blockades, financial sloughs, outright attacks, the collapse of alliances. Those early years thrummed with dangers to which our nascent union, fussily jamming the day, often reacted with little regard for long-term consequence.

Ever on the go, the world’s contours shifting and reshaping themselves even as I passed among them, I grew accustomed to media and official reports of a world far removed from that I witnessed. Which among these gaping disparities were sinister, which utilitarian? And just what was it I was doing out there? The people’s work? The government’s? That of a handful of wizards behind the curtain? One of Sid Coleman’s songs comes to mind again, “Which Side Are You On,” not all that much of a song really, but a damned good question. I wonder every day.

I was a good soldier, as soldiers go. One would expect years of such service to fix in place conventional, conservative beliefs. Instead, they honed within me an innate aversion to authority and to organizations in general. When I rummage in the attics of my mind, what I come up with is an immiscible regard for personal and civil liberty.

Claeton, pronounced Claytown by locals, mid-January and so cold that when your nose dripped, icicles formed. A thick white mist rose permanently from the ground. Bare trees loomed in the distance, looking as though someone had strung together a display of the hairless legs and knobby knees of old men. We inhabited a ghostly sea bottom.

Hansard and I were squirreled down in a scatter of boulders where a mountain range ran out into flatlands. There was one pass through the range and a patrol from Revisionist forces was on it. We were waiting for them.

Everyone knew the satellites were up there, circling tirelessly, bloated with information. And if satellites monitored even this afterbirth of a landscape, I told Hansard, they had to be watching us as well—not us here, us everywhere. Hansard shrugged and squeezed a nutrient pack to start it warming.

Drones might have dealt with the patrol, of course. Quickly. Efficiently. But drones hadn’t the dramatic effect of a couple of warriors suddenly appearing at the mouth of the cave. Something in our blood and ancestral memory—others of our kind come for us.

Hansard finished drinking his nutrient, rolled the pack into a compact ball and stuffed it in a cargo pocket. The wind rose then, mist swirling like huge capes, cold biting into bones. Go codes buzzed in the bones behind our ears.

We couldn’t pronounce the name of the place but were told it translated as Daredevil or Devil-May-Care. Biting cold had turned stewpot hot, barren landscape to cramped and crowded city. The stench of used-up air was everywhere. You could smell bodies and what they left behind. Sweat mixed with fine grit, pollen and laden gases and never went away. It coated your body, a hard film, a second skin that cracked when you moved. Hansard, rumors said, had gone down up here near the Canadian border some weeks before.

That time, we almost failed to make it out, beating a retreat through disruptions turning ever more chaotic (dodging raindrops, an old Marxist might have said) hours before the region tore itself apart, this being what happens when a government eloquently tottering on two legs gets one of them kicked out from under.

They came for us on the bullet train in Oregon. I turned from the window where sunlight shone blindingly on water, blinked, and there they were. Boots, jeans, Union jackets with the patches torn off. I’ve a brief memory of Tomas aloft, zigzagging towards the car’s rear on the backs of the seats, right foot, left, starboard, port, before I turned to confront the others. All became in that instant clear and distinct. I could see the tiniest bunching of a muscle in the shoulder of one before that arm moved, see another’s eyes tip to the left before head and body followed, sense the one about to bound directly toward me from all but imperceptible shifts in footing and posture.

I remember condensation on windows from the chill inside the car, the wide staring eyes of a child.

Afterwards, we liberated a pickup from a parking lot nearby and rode that pale horse into Keizer to be about our business.

Years after that day in Oregon, and as many after what I’m recounting here, Fran and I stand where Merritt Li died. In those years, wildness has reclaimed that edge of the city. Sunlight spins toward us off the lake to our left as though in wafer-thin sheets. Spanish moss beards the branches of water oaks populated by dove and by dun-colored pigeons that were once city birds. Fran touches another oak near us; scaly ridges of its bark break off in her hand.

We’re the only ones, she says.

Who will remember, I say.

It’s become rote now.

No memorials for such as Merritt Li.

Only memory.

For another who has been erased. Who has been gathered. And for a time before Fran speaks again, we are quiet. Our voices drift away into the call of birds, the sough of wind.

Our kind were redundant before and will be again.

As the successful revolutionary must always be, right?

Okay. She laughs. They can be redundant too.

A heron floats in over the trees and lands at water’s edge. A heron! Who would have believed there were herons left? I see the same light in Fran’s eyes as in mine. Still, after all that has happened in our lives, we have the capacity for surprise, for wonder.

When I was eleven, a contrarian even then, I made a list of all the stuff I never wanted to see again on TV and in movies. Wrote it out on a sheet of ruled paper, signed and dated the document, and submitted it to my parents.

People jumping just ahead of flames as house, car, pier, ship or what-have-you explodes.

The disarming of bombs with everyone else sent away as our hero or heroine sweatily decides which wire to cut.

Police or soldiers putting down their guns in hostage situations.

Hostage situations.

The cop, finally pushed to his/her limit, tossing badge or detective’s shield onto his/her CO’s desk.

The cast, be they doctors, lawyers, or cops, all striding side by side, often in slow motion, along a corridor on their way to another fine yet difficult day as credits roll.

“I wanted to give back.”

“This is your chance to do the right thing.”

“You’re not going to die on me!”

How with two minutes left in the show the bad guy tells us why he’s done all he has, that it’s all justified.

The original screed ran two pages. In following years, amendments—additions, truthfully—added another fourteen, growing ever more prolix until attentions strayed elsewhere. From time to time as I submitted new editions, I requested progress reports from my parents. Could he have been so innocent, that fledgling contrarian, as to believe some channel existed whereby they might actually deal with these issues? Was he attempting to bend the world to some latent image he had in mind? Just to shout out to the world: I am here? Whatever else it may have presaged, the project attests that at least, even then, I was paying attention.

By this time I’d got heavily into reading and may have had at the back of my mind, like that movement in the room’s corner you can’t locate when looking straight on, intimations of how powerfully words affect—how they give form to—the world about us.

I became aware that my greatest pleasure lay not in what was happening within the confines of the narrative but in its textures: the surround, the moods and rhythms, the shifting colors. And that it was auxiliary characters I found most interesting. A quiet rejection of celebrity, maybe—this sense that those spun out to screen’s edge, the postmen, foils, second bananas, loyal companions and walk-ons, are the ones who matter? History with its drums and wagons and wars marches past, and we go on scrabbling to stay in place, huddled with our families and tribes, setting tables, trying to find enough to eat.

Sheer plod makes plow down sillion shine, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote. Not that, when you come down to it, we do a hell of a lot of shining. At best we give off just enough light to hold away the dark for an hour or two. That’s all the fire Prometheus had to give us.

Light was failing, if never the fire, as Merritt Li and I made our way on glistening streets, cleaving insofar as we could to shadow and walls. Rain had begun hours earlier. Streetlights shimmered with halos, windows wore jackets of glaze—as would lens. That gave small comfort at the same time that the fact of fewer bodies abroad gave caution.

We weren’t following leads so much as what someone once called wandering to find direction and someone else called searching for a black hat in a pitch-black room.

Rain made a rich stew of a hundred smells. Took away edges and corners and the hard surface of things. The city was feeling its way towards beauty.

There did seem to be a rudimentary pattern, the attacks moving outward from city’s center, but patterns, what’s there, what’s not, can’t be trusted. Apophenia. The perception of order in random data. See three dots on an otherwise blank page, right away you’re trying to fit them together. Nonetheless, we were trolling in rude circles towards the outer banks, touching down at rail stations, pedestrian nodes, crossroads and terminals of every sort. That amounted to a lot of being out there in the open, exposed, and as chancy for Li as for me at this point, but (returning to a prior observation) what else did we have?

In such situations, while outwardly you’re alert to every small shift or turn, changes in light, in movements around you, your own heartbeat or breathing, inwardly you’re floating free, allowing your mind to do what it does best unpinned. Thoughts skitter, burn, and flare out, some shapeless, others barbed. As I scurried from sillion to sillion, bench to stairway to arcade, thoughts of childhood, books, folk songs, populism and political exhaustion accompanied me.

All I wanted was for my life, when you picked it up in your hands, to have some weight to it, Fran once told me. Rain coming down then outside our TBH as it was now on city streets, the two of us waiting for nightfall and go codes, foxhole reeking of processed food, stale air, unwashed bodies.

Within months of that, the GK virus had carved away fully a sixth of our population, especially among the elderly, infants and the chronically ill, all those with compromised immune systems, poor general health, low physical reserves.

Explanations for the virus? Natural selection at work in an overpopulated world, willful thinning of the herd by intellectual or financial elitists, Biblical cleansing, our own current government’s research gone amiss, biologic agents introduced by any of a dozen or more current enemies.

Or that old friend happenstance.

Substantive as they were, Li’s and my excursions had yielded little more than an anecdotal accounting of the city as it stood, along with instances of kindness, cruelty, anxiety and insouciance in fairly equal measure, in every conceivable shape or form.

Crews were busily tearing out the forest of digital billboards at city center, these having recently been judged (depending on the assessor) unaesthetic or ineffective.

The dry riverbed, cemented over years ago, was now being uncemented on its way to becoming a canal complete with boats and waterside city parks. Government-stamped posters with artists’ renditions of the final result hung everywhere. Those of a cynical disposition well might wonder where funds for this massive project originated. More positive souls might choose not to take note of the disrepair in surrounding streets.

Repeatedly as we moved through the city we encountered flash-mob protests. Participants assembled without preamble at rail stations, on street corners, in the city’s open spaces. Most protestors were young, some looked as though they’d awakened earlier in the day from Rip Van Winkle naps. They’d demonstrate, sometimes with silence and dialogue cards, other times with chants or improvised songs, and within minutes fade back into the crowd, before authorities showed up.

“We’re chasing shadows at midnight,” Merritt Li says one day.

And I hear Fran, another day, another time, saying “We’re the shadow of shadows.”

We’d come in country under cover of night, the two of us, and trekked on foot miles inland. The sky was starting to lighten and birds to sing when we reached the extraction point. Joon Kaas had not spoken a word the whole time, from the moment we breached his room. He had looked up and nodded, risen and gone ahead of us when signalled to do so. Now at the clearing he lowered his head, to pray I think, before meeting Fran’s eyes (instinctively aware she was prime) and nodding again, whether in surrender or some fashion of absolution I can’t say.

“He knew,” she said after.

That we were coming. Of course he did. And how it had to end.

Later I would understand that for most of his countrymen, thousands of them cast onto the streets and huddled together in houses, the eternally poor and forgotten, those without influence who went on scratching out a bare subsistence as terrible engines fell to earth all around them, Joon Kaas was a savior. With his passing, much of what he had worked to put in place, his challenges to privilege and to authority, new laws and mandates, new protections, began one by one to disappear.

Perhaps more than anything else, we’ve enslaved ourselves to the grand notion of progress. In our minds we’ve left behind yesterday’s errors, last year’s lack of knowledge and crude half measures. Now we’re headed straight up the slope, getting better and better, getting it right. But really we go on hauling along these sacks of goods we can’t let go of, can’t get rid of, tearing apart our world only to rebuild it to the old image.

In 1656 Spinoza was excommunicated from Amsterdam’s Portuguese-Jewish congregation for inveighing against those who promoted ignorance and irrational beliefs in order to lead citizens to act against their own best interests, to embrace conformism and orthodoxy, to surrender freedom for security. This, even though Dutch society had long agreed upon liberty, individual rights and freedom of thought. Four hundred years down the road, not much has changed. Same hazard signs at the roadside. Same crooked roads.

It was in the last months of the struggle, while I was over the border in Free Alaska commandeering armaments, that I first felt the gears slipping. Four degrees coldly Fahrenheit outside. With a wind that felt to be removing skin slice by micrometric slice. Fortunately I was inside, and alone, when it happened, having just entered a safe house there. I remembered walking in and stepping towards the bathroom. Now I was on the floor, with urine puddled about me. How long? Five, six minutes by my timer. Vision blurred—a consequence of the fall? Taste of metal, copper, in the back of my throat. And I couldn’t move.

That was far too familiar, a replay of week after week in rehab, frantically sending messages to legs, arms and hands that refused to comply, Abraham urging me on.

I doubt the immobility lasted more than a minute, but hours of panic got packed into it. I began to remember other stutters and misfires, each gone unremarked at the time. Now they took on weight, bore down.

“What are you thinking?” Fran will ask not long after, on our visit to Merritt Li’s final foothold.

“An old sea diver’s creed,” I tell her, unsure myself of the connection, thinking of the fighters we took down there, of Merritt Li going down, of my own fall and my jacked-up system, “the one thing a diver forgets at great peril: If it moves, it wants to kill you.”

Then I tell her what happened at the safe house, what it means. Simple physics, really. Put more current in the wire, it burns out faster.

“When did you know?”

“From the first, at some level—wordlessly. One sleepless morning in Toledo I got up, tapped in, and pulled the records. I wasn’t supposed to be able to do that. They had little idea what I could do.”

I, the soft machinery that was me, was failing. Sparks failed to catch, messages misfired, data was corrupted.

I had, I supposed, a few months left.

We never knew how Merritt Li came to be there.

His and my courses were set so as to bring the two of us together, close enough to rendezvous anyway, every three hours. When he didn’t show at the old waterworks, I went looking. We both carried ancient low-frequency ’sponders we thought wouldn’t be tapped. Guess we were wrong. They knew I was coming.

He had two of them back against a wall of stacked, partly crushed vehicles, tanklike cruisers from the last century. Two others, halfway across a bare dirt clearing hard as steel, had turned away to intercept me. Where numbers five and six came from I have no idea, they dropped out of nowhere like Dorothy.

A couple of them had weapons we’d never seen, the kind that, if you go looking, don’t exist. Focused toxin’s my guess. Or some fry-brain electronic equivalent. I saw nothing, no muzzle flash, no recoil, no exhaust, when one of those locked on Li lifted his handgun, but I saw the result. Li went down convulsing, limbs thrashing independently as though they belonged to different bodies.

Three of the four coming for me fell almost at the same time, one down, two down, three, without sound or obvious reason. Once I’d dealt with the fourth and looked again, the two by Li were on the ground and still. The whole sequence in just under sixteen seconds.

Movement atop a battered steel shed to the right took my attention, as it was meant to do.

Never show yourself against the sky.

Unless you’re purposefully announcing yourself, of course.

She came down in three stages, over the side and catch with the left, swing to the right, drop and turn. Faultless as ever. No sign of what weapon she’d used. I recalled her late interest in antiquities, blowpipes and the like. One violinist wants shiny new and perfectly functional, another’s always looking for old and funky, an instrument that makes you work to get the music out.

Her hair was cropped short and had tight curls of gray like steel filings in it. The row of geometrical earrings, circle, square, triangle, cross, was gone from the left ear. Otherwise not much had changed. Musculature stood out in the glisten of sweat on her skin. Yellow T-shirt, green pants.

“Interesting choice of clothing for someone doing her best to be invisible.”

“Figured if it came to it and I stood dead still, they might take me for a vegetable.”

Blood had pooled in Li’s face, turning it purple, then burst in a scatter of darker splotches across it. Limbs were rigid. No respiration, no pulse. A pandemic of that: No pulse or respiration in the ones she’d put down either.

“Here we go leaving a mess behind us,” I said.

“Ah, well.”

“With a bigger mess waiting ahead.”

“Ah, well again.” She snatched the mystery weapons from those by Li. “We hit the floor with whoever shows up on our dance card.” Then looked around. “No eyes out here. No trackers.”

“Chosen for it. So they’re not government.”

“Who can say?” At the time we believed them to be a single team, didn’t understand there were three factions at work, a tangle of forces.

Fran had dropped to a squat and was breaking down one of the weapons. “Indications are, they think of themselves as freedom fighters. Then again, who doesn’t? Freedom from taxes, bureaucracy, using the wrong texts at school? Or maybe they just want to tear the house down. Maybe we should have asked them.”

She stood and brought over the gutted weapon. “Ever seen a power source like that?” A bright blue marble with no apparent harness or connection, spinning gyroscopically in a chamber not much larger than itself. “Have to wonder what else they have.”

“Six less footmen, for a start.”

“There’ll be backup. We should be missing.”

“Missing, we’re good at.”

“Have been till now.”

She retrieved the second weapon and we started away. Darkness had begun unfurling from the ground and the air smelled of rain. Insects called to one another from trees and high grass, invisibly.

“When I was a child,” Fran said, “no more than four or five, there was a cricket that sang outside my window every night. I’d go to bed, lie there in the dark and listen to it sing, night after night. Then one night it didn’t. I knew it was dead, whatever dead was, and I cried.”

Fran as a child, crying, I could scarcely picture. “Why were these six, and the others, on you?”

She pulled the power source from the first weapon, discarded its carcass. “They weren’t.”

She’d been working a private job much like that of mine back before the team in dark gray cars came for me, and stumbled onto something that wasn’t right. She finished the job and took to side roads, kicking over traces till she realized that both job and not-rightness were come-ons. Hand-tied lures, she said, designed to bring her out. So out she came. They were stalking her. She was stalking them, coming in and out of sight. Getting a fix on them. Who they might be, how many.

“They were moving around in teams, randomly, and about where you’d expect, train stations, transfer points. They’d see me, hang back, never close. Which was how I knew it went deeper. So I stepped it up.”

“And they stepped in.”

“Maybe they got impatient. Maybe like me they decided to push to see what pushed back. And I sent a message up the line to you—which is what they anticipated.”

By this time we were moving towards the central city but on back streets long forsaken, block after block of abandoned warehouses and storage facilities from a past in which people were driven to accumulate so much that it spilled over. We’d spotted a few stragglers of the kind that, once seen, quickly vanish. Tree dwellers brought to earth, I think of them, on the ground but never quite of this world.

A razor-cold January morning. Snow falling past the windows—silently, but you can’t help looking that way again and again, listening. How could something take over the world to such degree and make no sound? The room’s warmth moved in slow tides toward the windows, tugging at our skin as it passed by. Even the machines were silent as I did my best to become one with them.

Abraham watched and paced me, speaking in low tones about Ethical Suicides back during our string of interim governments.

“Not much there when you go looking…. Loosen up, I can see your shoulders knotting…. Barely enough information to chew on…. Breathe. Everything comes from the breathing….”

I’d often wondered how a man with such leanings could possibly wind up working where he did. Were his intimations a furtive challenge, a testing?

“This is difficult for us to grasp, but you have to look back, to the sense of powerlessness that got tapped into. People were convinced that government, that the country itself, was broken and couldn’t be repaired. They saw an endless cycle of paralysis and decay about which they could do nothing. ES’s were not about themselves, they were about something much larger.”

I stopped to catch breath and shake muscles loose. Took the water bottle from Abraham. Eager electrolytes swarmed within. “Absolute altruism? In addition to which, they acted knowing their actions would come to nothing?”

“That’s how it looks to us. To them, who can say? Can we ever appraise the time in which we act?” Abraham stacked virtual weights on the upper-body pulleys, thought a moment and dialed it down a notch. “You’re skeptical.”

“Of more and more every day.”

“With good reason.” He reached for the water bottle at the very moment I held it out. Another dead soldier had become a joke between us.

Shortly thereafter, as had become our custom, sheathed in featherweight warmsuits, we were walking the grounds. Snow still fell, but lightly, haltingly. “When I first came, not so many years ago,” Abraham said, “there were still dove in the trees, calling to one another. It was the loneliest sound I’d ever heard.”

The rehab facility had originated at city’s edge, adjacent to a cemetery with old religious and older racial divisions, then, as the city burgeoned, found itself ever closer to center. The cemetery was gone, doves too, but bordering stands of trees and dense growth remained.

Further in towards the heart of the complex sat the original building about which all else had accrued, three storeys of rust-colored brick facade and clear plastic windows that on late evenings caught up the sun’s light to transform it into swirling, ungraspable, ghostlike figures. Other times, passing by, I’d look up to see those within, on the second floor, peering out, and feel a pull at something deep inside myself, an uneasiness for which I had neither word nor explanation.

It was Abraham who took me there late one night. The colony, as he put it, is sleeping, nessun dorma. Entering, we passed up narrow stairs and along a corridor with indirect lighting set low in the walls, then to a single door among dozens. There was a scarred window in the door and in the window, still as a portrait in its frame, a face.

“This is Julie,” Abraham said.

The woman’s face turned slightly as though to locate the sound of his voice. Her eyes behind the glass were cloudy and unfocused. They didn’t move, didn’t see. After a moment she shuffled back away from the door, obviously in pain, perhaps remembering what had happened other times when voices came and the door opened.

“Surely you must have known,” Abraham said. “You had to suspect.”

That scientific advances do not happen without experimentation, and that experimentation walks hand in hand with failure?

So much gone deeply wrong with this woman, so many failures in the world that put her there.

Most of the rest you know, or a version of it. You live in a world formed by the rest. You also believe you had some say in the making of that world, I suspect, and I suppose you did, but it was a small say, three or four words lost to a crowded page. There’s a long line of wizards behind the curtain vying for their turn at the wheel. When Fran and I floated to the top one more time before sinking out of sight for good, whatever grand intentions might have been packed away in our luggage, truthfully we were doing little more than the wizards’s work. Can we ever appraise the time in which we act? Probably not. How do we decide? With a wary smile and fingers crossed.

It was Abraham who called out to me, and to others like me with whom he had worked over the years. Abraham, who once carried me across the room as though I could walk, to qualify me for rehab. Abraham who never hesitates to remind us that we stagger from place to place, day to day, beneath the moral weight of acts we didn’t commit but for which we are responsible. That in allowing ourselves collectively to think certain thoughts we risk damaging, even destroying, the lives of millions, yet surely, if any of this means anything at all, we must be free to think those thoughts, to think all thoughts.

Never forget it’s because of such men as Abraham and Merritt Li that you have the life you do, with its fundamental rights and fail-safes.

Try always to remember the responsibility that comes with those freedoms.

The easy part of government? Ideals. Rational benevolence.

The hardest? Avoiding the terrible gravity of bureaucracy, the pull away from service towards self-survival.

Max Weber had it right over a century ago.

Not much time left for me now. What came to the fore in that Alaska safe house has run its course. I can feel systems shutting down one by one, like lights going off sequentially from room to room, hallway to hallway. The overloaded wire burning down. I’m intrigued by how familiar it feels, how welcome, a visit from an old friend.

Fran is here waiting with me.

Opposite my bed there’s a window that for a long while I took to be a link screen as in it I watched people come and go, out in the world, I thought. Couples strolling, crowds flowing off platforms and onto trains, scenes of towns like Claeton, like those in Oregon. Children playing. But that couldn’t be right, could it?

I am 8. I have no idea as yet how much heartache is in the world, how much pain, how it goes on building, day by day. I have a new toy, a two-tier garage made of tin, with ramps and tiny pumps and service pits, and I’m running my truck from one to another, making engine sounds, brake sounds, happy driver sounds. On a TV against the wall at room’s end, videos of war machines flanked by infantry unspool as a government official inset upper left reads from a prompter saying that high-level talks are underway and that we expect—

And that can’t be right either. I’m imagining this, surely, not the garage, the garage was real, but the crash of that newscast into my revery… Am I dreaming? It’s harder and harder to tell memory from dream, imaginings from hallucination. Harder and harder, too, to summon much concern which is which, to believe it matters.

All in a moment I am that child with his garage, I am pulling myself along with impossible arms after the toxins take over, I am struggling to stand and stay upright in rehab once brought home from the battlefield and yet again after the surgery, I am driving deserted highways at 10:36 on Union Day.

Fran leans close, her hand on mine. I see but cannot feel it. As she will not hear the last thing I tell her. That we go on and on and, all the time, terrible engines whirl and crash about us, in the great empty spaces that surround our lives.