Needle in a Timestack and Other Stories
Date: 2019-06-12 15:05:11+00:00
Keywords: fiction; sf; science fiction; humble bundle
Publisher: Open Road Media

NEEDLE IN A TIMESTACK

AND OTHER STORIES

Robert Silverberg

Contents

Introduction

Needle in a Timestack

There Was an Old Woman

The Pain Peddlers

The Sixth Palace

In Entropy’s Jaws

Absolutely Inflexible

This Is the Road

The Pope of the Chimps

The Dead Man’s Eyes

The Road to Nightfall

Multiples

Many Mansions

(Now+n, Now–n)

Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another

The Reality Trip

Chip Runner

Call Me Titan

Defenders of the Frontier

Ishmael in Love

The Secret Sharer

A Biography of Robert Silverberg

Introduction

The 1979 edition of the collection called Needle in a Timestack, the second of the three short story collections of mine that bear this title, this being the third—and how that happened is something I’ll explain in a moment—opens with these introductory words:

“‘Oh, sir, things change,’ says one of the characters in my story ‘Born with the Dead,’ and one place where that seems to be true is the publishing industry. Books go in and out of print, reappear in unexpected places with new covers and transmogrified interiors, and sometimes, even, change their contents. As herewith. My collection of stories, Needle in a Timestack, first appeared in the United States in 1966, a year later in Great Britain. In the interim the book has vanished several times, surfacing each time in a new and shinier format; but during the periods of vanishment, I have blithely borrowed stories from the collection to use in *other* collections, thinking that in the eternal Heraclitean flow of things it wouldn’t make much difference. Perhaps it doesn’t make much difference to most people, but it has begun to matter to me, and, as my various short story collections undergo their latest set of incarnations I am going to some pains to eliminate all such duplications and overlaps of material.

“So what we have here is Needle in a Timestack, but not quite the same book that was published under that title a decade and more ago. About half of the original stories have been retained; the other stories, subsequently made available in other books, have been erased here and replaced with a group of stories of about the same length, vintage, and quality that are *not* (I hope) available in any other collection of mine. It is a ploy calculated to drive bibliographers insane, but should not interfere with the pleasures of normal readers.”

And so I wrote, forty years ago, in the introduction to the second incarnation of Needle in a Timestack. That volume contained four of the ten stories from the original edition, plus five additional ones. The one thing that neither book contained was a short story called “Needle in a Timestack,” because I hadn’t happened to have written it yet. (More about that below.)

Well, sir, things changed. I did eventually write a story called “Needle in a Timestack,” and it went on to have a considerable life of its own. One nice extra bibliographical twist came a few years later, when the British Needle in a Timestack, almost entirely different in contents from the original American one, was published in the United States. I suppose it might have seemed logical to add the Playboy story to the group, thus uniting story title and book title for the first time, but I didn’t, because I had already collected it in a different book, 1984’s The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party. That was how Timestack (the collection) had yet another printing that didn’t include “Timestack” (the story).

The story, though, after passing through several of my short story collections of other titles and being reprinted in various anthologies edited by other people, ultimately, turned into a film directed by John Ridley. With the release of that film it seemed appropriate to assemble yet another story collection called Needle in a Timestack, the third of that ilk but the first that would actually contain the eponymous short story. (I spell all this out so ponderously because I really do like bibliographers, who have been tremendously helpful to me over the years as I try to keep track of the close-to-infinite number of stories and books and articles I’ve written, and I give them all the help I can.)

And so, fellows, here is what I suppose can be called the third edition of Needle in a Timestack by Robert Silverberg. Included in it are three of the stories that were in the first edition, one that was in both the first and second editions, and one carried over from edition number two. The story called “Needle in a Timestack” is finally included in a collection called Needle in a Timestack, also. And this, I promise you, is the last time I’m going to bring out a story collection with that title. I mean it. I swear a solemn oath. I am finished, absolutely finished, collecting my work under that title.

You do believe me, don’t you?

—Robert Silverberg

January 2019

Needle in a Timestack

Long, long ago I was at a science fiction convention in Los Angeles, and was talking with Bill Rotsler, a very good friend of mine, when a young man intruded on our conversation and began bothering us. Bill turned to him and said, “Go away, kid, or I’ll change your future.” At which I said, “No, tell him that you’ll change his past,” and suddenly I realized that I had handed myself a nice story idea.

I even had a ready-made title waiting for it before I wrote word one, as I have indicated above. It so happened that in 1966, when my publisher was Ballantine Books, I delivered a short story collection with a title so clunkily unwieldy that it has long disappeared from my memory. Betty Ballantine, the charming and gracious person who was my editor at that company, charmingly and graciously let me know that she thought it was a terrible title, and suggested, in its place, Needle in a Timestack. I loved it. We put it on the book, and, as I explained at great and confusing length a few pages back, I used it again a decade later on a second short story collection with a generally different table of contents. It still struck me as a lovely title, and particularly appropriate for the time-travel story I was about to write. So, at last, the short story “Needle in a Timestack,” which had not existed when I was assembling the two story collections of that name, came into being. I wrote it in January 1982—its intricate time-travel plot unfolded for me with marvelous clarity as I worked—and Alice Turner, the superb fiction editor of Playboy, bought it immediately for Playboy’s July 1983 issue.

Some years later a major American movie company bought it also. They gave me quite a lot of money, which was very pleasant, but they didn’t do anything about actually making the movie. In the fullness of time I got the rights back, and eventually my agent sold it to the same movie company, which had undergone a total change of ownership and management, and once again they let the rights lapse. But in the interim the story had attracted the attention of John Ridley, the Oscar-winning writer of Twelve Years a Slave. Ridley snapped it up, wrote a splendid script totally faithful to my story, found financing, and directed the film. Which led, finally, to the present story collection, in which story title and book title come together at last, half a century after Betty Ballantine set it all in motion.

Between one moment and the next the taste of cotton came into his mouth, and Mikkelsen knew that Tommy Hambleton had been tinkering with his past again. The cotton-in-the-mouth sensation was the standard tip-off for Mikkelsen. For other people it might be a ringing in the ears, a tremor of the little finger, a tightness in the shoulders. Whatever the symptom, it always meant the same thing: your time-track has been meddled with, your life has been retroactively transformed. It happened all the time. One of the little annoyances of modern life, everyone always said. Generally, the changes didn’t amount to much.

But Tommy Hambleton was out to destroy Mikkelsen’s marriage, or, more accurately, he was determined to unhappen it altogether, and that went beyond Mikkelsen’s limits of tolerance. In something close to panic he phoned home to find out if he still had Janine.

Her lovely features blossomed on the screen-glossy dark hair, elegant cheekbones, cool sardonic eyes. She looked tense and strained, and Mikkelsen knew she had felt the backlash of this latest attempt too.

“Nick?” she said. “Is it a phasing?”

“I think so. Tommy’s taken another whack at us, and Christ only knows how much chaos he’s caused this time.”

“Let’s run through everything.”

“All right,” Mikkelsen said. “What’s your name?”

“Janine.”

“And mine?”

“Nick. Nicholas Perry Mikkelsen. You see? Nothing important has changed.”

“Are you married?”

“Yes, of course, darling. To you.”

“Keep going. What’s our address?”

“11 Lantana Crescent.”

“Do we have children?”

“Dana and Elise. Dana is five, Elise is three. Our cat’s name is Minibelle, and—”

“Okay,” Mikkelsen said, relieved. “That much checks out. But I tasted the cotton, Janine. Where has he done it to us this time? What’s been changed?”

“It can’t be anything major, love. We’ll find it if we keep checking. Just stay calm.”

“Calm. Yes.” He closed his eyes. He took a deep breath. The little annoyances of modern life, he thought. In the old days, when time was just a linear flow from then to now, did anyone get bored with all that stability? For better or for worse it was different now. You go to bed a Dartmouth man and wake up Columbia, never the wiser. You board a plane that blows up over Cyprus, but then your insurance agent goes back and gets you to miss the flight. In the new fluid way of life there was always a second chance, a third, a fourth, now that the past was open to anyone with the price of a ticket. But what good is any of that, Mikkelsen wondered, if Tommy Hambleton can use it to disappear me and marry Janine again himself?

They punched for readouts and checked all their vital data against what they remembered. When your past is altered through time-phasing, all records of your life are automatically altered too, of course, but there’s a period of two or three hours when memories of your previous existence still linger in your brain, like the phantom twitches of an amputated limb. They checked the date of Mikkelsen’s birth, parents’ names, his nine genetic coordinates, his educational record. Everything seemed right. But when they got to their wedding date the readout said 8 Feb 2017, and Mikkelsen heard warning chimes in his mind. “I remember a summer wedding,” he said. “Outdoors in Dan Levy’s garden, the hills all dry and brown, the 24th of August.”

“So do I, Nick. The hills wouldn’t have been brown in February. But I can see it—that hot dusty day—”

“Then five months of our marriage are gone, Janine. He couldn’t unmarry us altogether, but he managed to hold us up from summer to winter.” Rage made his head spin, and he had to ask his desk for a quick buzz of tranks. Etiquette called for one to be cool about a phasing. But he couldn’t be cool when the phasing was a deliberate and malevolent blow at the center of his life. He wanted to shout, to break things, to kick Tommy Hambleton’s ass. He wanted his marriage left alone. He said, “You know what I’m going to do one of these days? I’m going to go back about fifty years and eradicate Tommy completely. Just arrange things so his parents never get to meet, and—”

“No, Nick. You mustn’t.”

“I know. But I’d love to.” He knew he couldn’t, and not just because it would be murder. It was essential that Tommy Hambleton be born and grow up and meet Janine and marry her, so that when the marriage came apart she would meet and marry Mikkelsen. If he changed Hambleton’s past, he would change hers too, and if he changed hers, he would change his own, and anything might happen. Anything. But all the same he was furious. “Five months of our past, Janine—”

“We don’t need them, love. Keeping the present and the future safe is the main priority. By tomorrow we’ll always think we were married in February of 2017, and it won’t matter. Promise me you won’t try to phase him.”

“I hate the idea that he can simply—”

“So do I. But I want you to promise you’ll leave things as they are.”

“Well—”

“Promise.”

“All right,” he said. “I promise.”

Little phasings happened all the time. Someone in Illinois makes a trip to eleventh-century Arizona and sets up tiny ripple currents in time that have a tangential and peripheral effect on a lot of lives, and someone in California finds himself driving a silver BMW instead of a gray Toyota. No one minded trifling changes like that. But this was the third time in the last twelve months, so far as Mikkelsen was able to tell, that Tommy Hambleton had committed a deliberate phasing intended to break the chain of events that had brought about Mikkelsen’s marriage to Janine.

The first phasing happened on a splendid spring day—coming home from work, sudden taste of cotton in mouth, sense of mysterious disorientation. Mikkelsen walked down the steps looking for his old ginger tomcat, Gus, who always ran out to greet him as though he thought he was a dog. No Gus. Instead a calico female, very pregnant, sitting placidly in the front hall.

“Where’s Gus?” Mikkelsen asked Janine.

“Gus? Gus who?”

“Our cat.”

“You mean Max?”

“Gus,” he said. “Sort of orange, crooked tail—”

“That’s right. But Max is his name. I’m sure it’s Max. He must be around somewhere. Look, here’s Minibelle.” Janine knelt and stroked the fat calico. “Minibelle, where’s Max?”

“Gus,” Mikkelsen said. “Not Max. And who’s this Minibelle?”

“She’s our cat, Nick,” Janine said, sounding surprised. They stared at each other.

“Something’s happened, Nick.”

“I think we’ve been time-phased,” he said.

Sensation as of dropping through trapdoor—shock, confusion, terror. Followed by hasty and scary inventory of basic life-data to see what had changed. Everything appeared in order except for the switch of cats. He didn’t remember having a female calico. Neither did Janine, although she had accepted the presence of the cat without surprise. As for Gus—Max—he was getting foggier about his name, and Janine couldn’t even remember what he looked like. But she did recall that he had been a wedding gift from some close friend, and Mikkelsen remembered that the friend was Gus Stark, for whom they had named him, and Janine was then able to dredge up the dimming fact that Gus was a close friend of Mikkelsen’s and also of Hambleton and Janine in the days when they were married, and that Gus had introduced Janine to Mikkelsen ten years ago when they were all on holiday in Hawaii.

Mikkelsen accessed the household callmaster and found no Gus Stark listed. So the phasing had erased him from their roster of friends. The general phone directory turned up a Gus Stark in Costa Mesa. Mikkelsen called him and got a freckle-faced man with fading red hair, who looked more or less familiar. But he didn’t know Mikkelsen at all, and only after some puzzling around in his memory did he decide that they had been distantly acquainted way back when, but had had some kind of trifling quarrel and had lost touch with each other years ago.

“That’s not how I think I remember it,” Mikkelsen said. “I remember us as friends for years, really close. You and Donna and Janine and I were out to dinner only last week, is what I remember, over in Newport Beach.”

“Donna?”

“Your wife.”

“My wife’s name is Karen. Jesus, this has been one hell of a phasing, hasn’t it?” He didn’t sound upset.

“I’ll say. Blew away your marriage, our friendship, and who knows what-all else.”

“Well, these things happen. Listen, if I can help you any way, fella, just call. But right now Karen and I were on our way out, and—”

“Yeah. Sure. Sorry to have bothered you,” Mikkelsen told him.

He blanked the screen.

Donna. Karen. Gus. Max. He looked at Janine.

“Tommy did it,” she said.

She had it all figured out. Tommy, she said, had never forgiven Mikkelsen for marrying her. He wanted her back. He still sent her birthday cards, coy little gifts, postcards from exotic ports.

“You never mentioned them,” Mikkelsen said.

She shrugged. “I thought you’d only get annoyed. You’ve always disliked Tommy.”

“No,” Mikkelsen said, “I think he’s interesting in his oddball way, flamboyant, unusual. What I dislike is his unwillingness to accept the notion that you stopped being his wife a dozen years ago.”

“You’d dislike him more if you knew how hard he’s been trying to get me back.”

“Oh?”

“When we broke up,” she said, “he phased me four times. This was before I met you. He kept jaunting back to our final quarrel, trying to patch it up so that the separation wouldn’t have happened. I began feeling the phasings and I knew what must be going on, and I told him to quit it or I’d report him and get his jaunt-license revoked. That scared him, I guess, because he’s been pretty well behaved ever since, except for all the little hints and innuendoes and invitations to leave you and marry him again.”

“Christ,” Mikkelsen said. “How long were you and he married? Six months?”

“Seven. But he’s an obsessive personality. He never lets go.”

“And now he’s started phasing again?”

“That’s my guess. He’s probably decided that you’re the obstacle, that I really do still love you, that I want to spend the rest of my life with you. So he needs to make us unmeet. He’s taken his first shot by somehow engineering a breach between you and your friend Gus a dozen years back, a breach so severe that you never really became friends and Gus never fixed you up with me. Only it didn’t work out the way Tommy hoped. We went to that party at Dave Cushman’s place and I got pushed into the pool on top of you and you introduced yourself and one thing led to another and here we still are.”

“Not all of us are,” Mikkelsen said. “My friend Gus is married to somebody else now.”

“That didn’t seem to trouble him much.”

“Maybe not. But he isn’t my friend any more, either, and that troubles me. My whole past is at Tommy Hambleton’s mercy, Janine! And Gus the cat is gone too. Gus was a damned good cat. I miss him.”

“Five minutes ago you weren’t sure whether his name was Gus or Max. Two hours from now you won’t know you ever had any such cat, and it won’t matter at all.”

“But suppose the same thing had happened to you and me as happened to Gus and Donna?”

“It didn’t, though.”

“It might the next time,” Mikkelsen said.

But it didn’t. The next time, which was about six months later, they came out of it still married to each other. What they lost was their collection of twentieth-century artifacts—the black-and-white television set and the funny old dial telephone and the transistor radio and the little computer with the typewriter keyboard. All those treasures vanished between one instant and the next, leaving Mikkelsen with the telltale cottony taste in his mouth, Janine with a short-lived tic below her left eye, and both of them with the nagging awareness that a phasing had occurred.

At once they did what they could to see where the alteration had been made. For the moment they both remembered the artifacts they once had owned, and how eagerly they had collected them in ’21 and ’22, when the craze for such things was just beginning. But there were no sales receipts in their files and already their memories of what they had bought were becoming blurry and contradictory. There was a grouping of glittery sonic sculptures to the corner, now, where the artifacts had been. What change had been effected in the pattern of their past to put those things in the place of the others?

They never really were sure—there was no certain way of knowing—but Mikkelsen had a theory. The big expense he remembered for 2021 was the time jaunt that he and Janine had taken to Aztec Mexico, just before she got pregnant with Dana. Things had been a little wobbly between the Mikkelsens back then, and the time jaunt was supposed to be a second honeymoon. But their guide on the jaunt had been a hot little item named Elena Schmidt, who had made a very determined play for Mikkelsen and who had had him considering, for at least half an hour of lively fantasy, leaving Janine for her.

“Suppose,” he said, “that on our original time-track we never went back to the Aztecs at all, but put the money into the artifact collection. But then Tommy went back and maneuvered things to get us interested in time jaunting, and at the same time persuaded that Schmidt cookie to show an interest in me. We couldn’t afford both the antiques and the trip; we opted for the trip, Elena did her little number on me, it didn’t cause the split that Tommy was hoping for, and now we have some gaudy memories of Moctezuma’s empire and no collection of early electronic devices. What do you think?”

“Makes sense,” Janine said.

“Will you report him, or should I?”

“But we have no proof, Nick!”

He frowned. Proving a charge of time-crime, he knew, was almost impossible, and risky besides. The very act of investigating the alleged crime could cause an even worse phase-shift and scramble their pasts beyond repair. To enter the past is like poking a baseball bat into a spiderweb: it can’t be done subtly or delicately.

“Do we just sit and wait for Tommy to figure out a way to get rid of me that really works?” Mikkelsen asked.

“We can’t just confront him with suspicions, Nick.”

“You did it once.”

“Long ago. The risks are greater now. We have more past to lose. What if he’s not responsible? What if he gets scared of being blamed for something that’s just coincidence, and really sets out to phase us? He’s so damned volatile, so unstable—if he feels threatened, he’s likely to do anything. He could wreck our lives entirely.”

“If he feels threatened? What about—”

“Please, Nick. I’ve got a hunch Tommy won’t try it again. He’s had two shots and they’ve both failed. He’ll quit it now. I’m sure he will.”

Grudgingly Mikkelsen yielded, and after a time he stopped worrying about a third phasing. Over the next few weeks, other effects of the second phasing kept turning up, the way losses gradually make themselves known after a burglary. The same thing had happened after the first one. A serious attempt at altering the past could never have just one consequence; there was always a host of trivial—or not so trivial—secondary shifts, a ramifying web of transformations reaching out into any number of other lives. New chains of associations were formed in the Mikkelsens’ lives as a result of the erasure of their plan to collect electronic artifacts and the substitution of a trip to pre-Columbian Mexico. People they had met on that trip now were good friends, with whom they exchanged gifts, spent other holidays, shared the burdens and joys of parenthood. A certain hollowness at first marked all those newly ingrafted old friendships, making them seem curiously insubstantial and marked by odd inconsistencies. But after a time everything felt real again, everything appeared to fit.

Then the third phasing happened, the one that pushed the beginning of their marriage from August to the following February, and did six or seven other troublesome little things, as they shortly discovered, to the contours of their existence.

“I’m going to talk to him,” Mikkelsen said.

“Nick, don’t do anything foolish.”

“I don’t intend to. But he’s got to be made to see that this can’t go on.”

“Remember that he can be dangerous if he’s forced into a corner,” Janine said. “Don’t threaten him. Don’t push him.”

“I’ll tickle him,” Mikkelsen said.

He met Hambleton for drinks at the Top of the Marina, Hambleton’s favorite pub, swiveling at the end of a jointed stalk a thousand feet long rising from the harbor at Balboa Lagoon. Hambleton was there when Mikkelsen came in—a small sleek man, six inches shorter than Mikkelsen, with a slick confident manner. He was the richest man Mikkelsen knew, gliding through life on one of the big microprocessor fortunes of two generations back, and that in itself made him faintly menacing, as though he might try simply to buy back, one of these days, the wife he had loved and lost a dozen years ago when all of them had been so very young.

Hambleton’s overriding passion, Mikkelsen knew, was time-travel. He was an inveterate jaunter—a compulsive jaunter, in fact, with that faintly hyperthyroid goggle-eyed look that frequent travelers get. He was always either just back from a jaunt or getting his affairs in order for his next one. It was as though the only use he had for the humdrum real-time event horizon was to serve as his springboard into the past. That was odd. What was odder still was where he jaunted. Mikkelsen could understand people who went zooming off to watch the battle of Waterloo, or shot a bundle on a first-hand view of the sack of Rome. If he had anything like Hambleton’s money, that was what he would do. But according to Janine, Hambleton was forever going back seven weeks in time, or maybe to last Christmas, or occasionally to his eleventh birthday party. Time-travel as tourism held no interest for him. Let others roam the ferny glades of the Mesozoic: he spent fortunes doubling back along his own time-track, and never went anywhen other. The purpose of Tommy Hambleton’s time-travel, it seemed, was to edit his past to make his life more perfect. He went back to eliminate every little contretemps and faux pas, to recover fumbles, to take advantage of the new opportunities that hindsight provides—to retouch, to correct, to emend. To Mikkelsen that was crazy, but also somehow charming. Hambleton was nothing if not charming. And Mikkelsen admired anyone who could invent his own new species of obsessive behavior, instead of going in for the standard hand-washing routines, or stamp-collecting or sitting with your back to the wall in restaurants.

The moment Mikkelsen arrived, Hambleton punched the autobar for cocktails and said, “Splendid to see you, Mikkelsen. How’s the elegant Janine?”

“Elegant.”

“What a lucky man you are. The one great mistake of my life was letting that woman slip through my grasp.”

“For which I remain forever grateful, Tommy. I’ve been working hard lately to hang on to her, too.”

Hambleton’s eyes widened. “Yes? Are you two having problems?”

“Not with each other. Time-track troubles. You know, we were caught in a couple of phasings last year. Pretty serious ones. Now there’s been another one. We lost five months of our marriage.”

“Ah, the little annoyances of—”

“—modern life,” Mikkelsen said. “Yes. A very familiar phrase. But these are what I’d call frightening annoyances. I don’t need to tell you, of all people, what a splendid woman Janine is, how terrifying it is to me to think of losing her in some random twitch of the time-track.”

“Of course. I quite understand.”

“I wish I understood these phasings. They’re driving us crazy. And that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

He studied Hambleton closely, searching for some trace of guilt or at least uneasiness. But Hambleton remained serene.

“How can I be of help?”

Mikkelsen said, “I thought that perhaps you, with all your vast experience in the theory and practice of time-jaunting, could give me some clue to what’s causing them, so that I can head the next one off.”

Hambleton shrugged elaborately. “My dear Nick, it could be anything! There’s no reliable way of tracing phasing effects back to their cause. All our lives are interconnected in ways we never suspect. You say this last phasing delayed your marriage by a few months? Well, then, suppose that as a result of the phasing you decided to take a last bachelor fling and went off for a weekend in Banff, say, and met some lovely person with whom you spent three absolutely casual and nonsignificant but delightful days, thereby preventing her from meeting someone else that weekend with whom in the original time-track she had fallen in love and married. You then went home and married Janine, a little later than originally scheduled, and lived happily ever after; but the Banff woman’s life was totally switched around, all as a consequence of the phasing that delayed your wedding. Do you see? There’s never any telling how a shift in one chain of events can cause interlocking upheavals in the lives of utter strangers.”

“So I realize. But why should we be hit with three phasings in a year, each one jeopardizing the whole structure of our marriage?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Hambleton. “I suppose it’s just bad luck, and bad luck always changes, don’t you think? Probably you’ve been at the edge of some nexus of negative phases that has just about run its course.” He smiled dazzlingly. “Let’s hope so, anyway. Would you care for another filtered rum?”

He was smooth, Mikkelsen thought. And impervious. There was no way to slip past his defenses, and even a direct attack—an outright accusation that he was the one causing the phasings—would most likely bring into play a whole new line of defense. Mikkelsen did not intend to risk that. A man who used time jaunting so ruthlessly to tidy up his past was too slippery to confront. Pressed, Hambleton would simply deny everything and hasten backward to clear away any traces of his crime that might remain. In any case, making an accusation of time-crime stick was exceedingly difficult, because the crime by definition had to have taken place on a track that no longer existed. Mikkelsen chose to retreat. He accepted another drink from Hambleton; they talked in a desultory way for a while about phasing theory, the weather, the stock market, the excellences of the woman they both had married, and the good old days of 2014 or so when they all used to hang out down in dear old La Jolla, living golden lives of wondrous irresponsibility. Then he extricated himself from the conversation and headed for home in a dark and brooding mood. He had no doubt that Hambleton would strike again, perhaps quite soon. How could he be held at bay? Some sort of preemptive strike, Mikkelsen wondered? Some bold leap into the past that would neutralize the menace of Tommy Hambleton forever? Chancy, Mikkelsen thought. You could lose as much as you gained, sometimes, in that sort of maneuver. But perhaps it was the only hope.

He spent the next few days trying to work out a strategy. Something that would get rid of Hambleton without disrupting the frail chain of circumstance that bound his own life to that of Janine—was it possible? Mikkelsen sketched out ideas, rejected them, tried again. He began to think he saw a way.

Then came a new phasing on a warm and brilliantly sunny morning that struck him like a thunderbolt and left him dazed and numbed. When he finally shook away the grogginess, he found himself in a bachelor flat ninety stories above Mission Bay, a thick taste of cotton in his mouth, and bewildering memories already growing thin of a lovely wife and two kids and a cat and a sweet home in mellow old Corona del Mar.

Janine? Dana? Elise? Minibelle?

Gone. All gone. He knew that he had been living in this condo since ’22, after the breakup with Yvonne, and that Melanie was supposed to be dropping in about six. That much was reality. And yet another reality still lingered in his mind, fading vanishing.

So it had happened. Hambleton had really done it, this time.

There was no time for panic or even for pain. He spent the first half hour desperately scribbling down notes, every detail of his lost life that he still remembered, phone numbers, addresses, names, descriptions. He set down whatever he could recall of his life with Janine and of the series of phasings that had led up to this one. Just as he was running dry the telephone rang. Janine, he prayed.

But it was Gus Stark. “Listen,” he began, “Donna and I got to cancel for tonight, on account of she’s got a bad headache, but I hope you and Melanie aren’t too disappointed, and—” He paused. “Hey, guy, are you okay?”

“There’s been a bad phasing,” Mikkelsen said.

“Uh-oh.”

“I’ve got to find Janine.”

“Janine?”

“Janine—Carter,” Mikkelsen said. “Slender, high cheekbones, dark hair—you know.”

“Janine,” said Stark. “Do I know a Janine? Hey, you and Melanie on the outs? I thought—”

“This had nothing to do with Melanie,” said Mikkelsen.

“Janine Carter.” Gus grinned. “You mean Tommy Hambleton’s girl? The little rich guy who was part of the La Jolla crowd ten-twelve years back when—”

“That’s the one. Where do you think I’d find her now?”

“Married Hambleton, I think. Moved to the Riviera, unless I’m mistaken. Look, about tonight, Nick—”

“Screw tonight,” Mikkelsen said. “Get off the phone. I’ll talk to you later.”

He broke the circuit and put the phone into search mode, all directories worldwide, Thomas and Janine Hambleton. While he waited, the shock and anguish of loss began at last to get to him, and he started to sweat, his hands shook, his heart raced in double time. I won’t find her, he thought. He’s got her hidden behind seven layers of privacy networks and it’s crazy to think the phone number is listed, for Christ’s sake, and—

The telephone. He hit the button. Janine calling, this time.

She looked stunned and disoriented, as though she were working hard to keep her eyes in focus. “Nick?” she said faintly. “Oh, God, Nick, it’s you, isn’t it?”

“Where are you?”

“A villa outside Nice. In Cap d’Antibes, actually. Oh, Nick—the kids—they’re gone, aren’t they? Dana. Elise. They never were born, isn’t that so?”

“I’m afraid it is. He really nailed us, this time.”

“I can still remember just as though they were real—as though we spent ten years together—oh, Nick—”

“Tell me how to find you. I’ll be on the next plane out of San Diego.”

She was silent a moment.

“No. No, Nick. What’s the use? We aren’t the same people we were when we were married. An hour or two more and we’ll forget we ever were together.”

“Janine—”

“We’ve got no past left, Nick. And no future.”

“Let me come to you!”

“I’m Tommy’s wife. My past’s with him. Oh, Nick, I’m so sorry, so awfully sorry—I can still remember, a little, how it was with us, the fun, the running along the beach, the kids, the little fat calico cat—but it’s all gone, isn’t it? I’ve got my life here, you’ve got yours. I just wanted to tell you—”

“We can try to put it back together. You don’t love Tommy. You and I belong with each other. We—”

“He’s a lot different, Nick. He’s not the man you remember from the La Jolla days. Kinder, more considerate, more of a human being, you know? It’s been ten years, after all.”

Mikkelsen closed his eyes and gripped the edge of the couch to keep from falling. “It’s been two hours,” he said. “Tommy phased us. He just tore up our life, and we can’t ever have that part of it back, but still we can salvage something, Janine, we can rebuild, if you’ll just get the hell out of that villa and—”

“I’m sorry, Nick.” Her voice was tender, throaty, distant, almost unfamiliar. “Oh, God, Nick, it’s such a mess. I loved you so. I’m sorry, Nick. I’m so sorry.”

The screen went blank.

Mikkelsen had not time-jaunted in years, not since the Aztec trip, and he was amazed at what it cost now. But he was carrying the usual credit cards and evidently his credit lines were okay, because they approved his application in five minutes. He told them where he wanted to go and how he wanted to look, and for another few hundred the makeup man worked him over, taking that dusting of early gray out of his hair and smoothing the lines from his face and spraying him with the good old Southern California tan that you tend to lose when you’re in your late thirties and spending more time in your office than on the beach. He looked at least eight years younger, close enough to pass. As long as he took care to keep from running into his own younger self while he was back there, there should be no problems.

He stepped into the cubicle and sweet-scented fog enshrouded him and when he stepped out again it was a mild December day in the year 2012, with a faint hint of rain in the northern sky. Only fourteen years back, and yet the world looked prehistoric to him, the clothing and the haircuts and the cars all wrong, the buildings heavy and clumsy, the advertisements floating overhead offering archaic and absurd products in blaring gaudy colors. Odd that the world of 2012 had not looked so crude to him the first time he had lived through it; but then the present never looks crude, he thought, except through the eyes of the future. He enjoyed the strangeness of it: it told him that he had really gone backward in time. It was like walking into an old movie. He felt very calm. All the pain was behind him now; he remembered nothing of the life that he had lost, only that it was important for him to take certain countermeasures against the man who had stolen something precious from him. He rented a car and drove quickly up to La Jolla. As he expected, everybody was at the beach club except for young Nick Mikkelsen, who was back in Palm Beach with his parents. Mikkelsen had put this jaunt together quickly but not without careful planning.

They were all amazed to see him—Gus, Dan, Leo, Christie, Sal, the whole crowd. How young they looked! Kids, just kids, barely into their twenties, all that hair, all that baby fat. He had never before realized how young you were when you were young. “Hey,” Gus said, “I thought you were in Florida!” Someone handed him a popper. Someone slipped a capsule to his ear and raucous overload music began to pound against his cheekbone. He made the rounds, grinning hugging, explaining that Palm Beach had been a bore, that he had come back early to be with the gang. “Where’s Yvonne?” he asked.

“She’ll be here in a little while,” Christie said.

Tommy Hambleton walked in five minutes after Mikkelsen. For one jarring instant Mikkelsen thought that the man he saw was the Hambleton of his own time, thirty-five years old, but no: there were little signs, and certain lack of tension in this man’s face, a certain callowness about the lips, that marked him as younger. The truth, Mikkelsen realized, is that Hambleton had never looked really young, that he was ageless, timeless, sleek and plump and unchanging. It would have been very satisfying to Mikkelsen to plunge a knife into that impeccably shaven throat, but murder was not his style, nor was it an ideal solution to his problem. Instead, he called Hambleton aside, bought him a drink and said quietly, “I just thought you’d like to know that Yvonne and I are breaking up.”

“Really, Nick? Oh, that’s so sad! I thought you two were the most solid couple here!”

“We were. We were. But it’s all over, man. I’ll be with someone else New Year’s Eve. Don’t know who, but it won’t be Yvonne.”

Hambleton looked solemn. “That’s so sad, Nick.”

“No. Not for me and not for you.” Mikkelsen smiled and nudged Hambleton amiably. “Look, Tommy, it’s no secret to me that you’ve had your eye on Yvonne for months. She knows it too. I just wanted to let you know that I’m stepping out of the picture, I’m very gracefully withdrawing, no hard feelings at all. And if she asks my advice, I’ll tell her that you’re absolutely the best man she could find. I mean it, Tommy.”

“That’s very decent of you, old fellow. That’s extraordinary!”

“I want her to be happy,” Mikkelsen said.

Yvonne showed up just as night was falling. Mikkelsen had not seen her for years, and he was startled at how uninteresting she seemed, how bland, how unformed, almost adolescent. Of course, she was very pretty, close-cropped blonde hair, merry greenish-blue eyes, pert little nose, but she seemed girlish and alien to him, and he wondered how he could ever have become so involved with her. But of course all that was before Janine. Mikkelsen’s unscheduled return from Palm Beach surprised her, but not very much, and when he took her down to the beach to tell her that he had come to realize that she was really in love with Hambleton and he was not going to make a fuss about it, she blinked and said sweetly, “In love with Tommy? Well, I suppose I could be—though I never actually saw it like that. But I could give it a try, couldn’t I? That is, if you truly are tired of me, Nick.” She didn’t seem offended. She didn’t seem heartbroken. She didn’t seem to care much at all.

He left the club soon afterward and got an express-fax message off to his younger self in Palm Beach: Yvonne has fallen for Tommy Hambleton. However upset you are, for God’s sake get over it fast, and if you happen to meet a young woman named Janine Carter, give her a close look. You won’t regret it, believe me. I’m in a position to know.

He signed it A Friend, but added a little squiggle in the corner that had always been his own special signature-glyph. He didn’t dare go further than that. He hoped young Nick would be smart enough to figure out the score.

Not a bad hour’s work, he decided. He drove back to the jaunt-shop in downtown San Diego and hopped back to his proper point in time.

There was the taste of cotton in his mouth when he emerged. So it feels that way even when you phase yourself, he thought. He wondered what changes he had brought about by his jaunt. As he remembered it, he had made the hop in order to phase himself back into a marriage with a woman named Janine, who apparently he had loved quite considerably until she had been snatched away from him in a phasing. Evidently the unphasing had not happened, because he knew he was still unmarried, with three or four regular companions—Cindy, Melanie, Elena and someone else—and none of them was named Janine. Paula, yes, that was the other one. Yet he was carrying a note, already starting to fade, that said: You won’t remember any of this, but you were married in 2016 or 17 to the former Janine Carter, Tommy Hambleton’s ex-wife, and however much you may like your present life, you were a lot better off when you were with her. Maybe so, Mikkelsen thought. God knows he was getting weary of the bachelor life, and now that Gus and Donna were making it legal, he was the only singleton left in the whole crowd. That was a little awkward. But he hadn’t ever met anyone he genuinely wanted to spend the rest of his life with, or even as much as a year with. So he had been married, had he, before the phasing? Janine? How strange, how unlike him.

He was home before dark. Showered, shaved, dressed, headed over to the Top of the Marina. Tommy Hambleton and Yvonne were in town, and he had agreed to meet them for drinks. Hadn’t seen them for years, not since Tommy had taken over his brother’s villa on the Riviera. Good old Tommy, Mikkelsen thought. Great to see him again. And Yvonne. He recalled her clearly, little snub-nosed blonde, good game of tennis, trim compact body. He’d been pretty hot for her himself, eleven or twelve years ago, back before Adrienne, before Charlene, before Georgiana, before Nedra, before Cindy, Melanie, Elena, Paula. Good to see them both again. He stepped into the skylift and went shooting blithely up the long swivel-stalk to the gilded little cupola high above the lagoon. Hambleton and Yvonne were already there.

Tommy hadn’t changed much—same old smooth slickly dressed little guy—but Mikkelsen was astonished at how time and money had altered Yvonne. She was poised, chic, sinuous, all that baby-fat burned away, and when she spoke there was the smallest hint of a French accent in her voice. Mikkelsen embraced them both and let himself be swept off to the bar.

“So glad I was able to find you,” Hambleton said. “It’s been years! Years, Nick!”

“Practically forever.”

“Still going great with the women, are you?”

“More or less,” Mikkelsen said. “And you? Still running back in time to wipe your nose three days ago, Tommy?”

Hambleton chuckled. “Oh, I don’t do much of that any more. Yvonne and I were to the Fall of Troy last winter, but the short-hop stuff doesn’t interest me these days. I—oh. How amazing?”

“What is it?” Mikkelsen asked, seeing Hambleton’s gaze go past him into the darker corners of the room.

“An old friend,” Hambleton said. “I’m sure it’s she! Someone I once knew—briefly, glancingly—” He looked toward Yvonne and said, “I met her a few months after you and I began seeing each other, love. Of course, there was nothing to it, but there could have been—there could have been—” A distant wistful look swiftly crossed Hambleton’s features and was gone. His smile returned. He said, “You should meet her, Nick. If it’s really she, I know she’ll be just your type. How amazing! After all these years! Come with me, man!”

He seized Mikkelsen by the wrist and drew him, astounded, across the room.

“Janine?” Hambleton cried. “Janine Carter?”

She was a dark-haired woman, elegant, perhaps a year or two younger than Mikkelsen, with cool perceptive eyes. She looked up, surprised. “Tommy? Is that you?”

“Of course, of course. That’s my wife, Yvonne, over there. And this—this is one of my oldest and dearest friends, Nick Mikkelsen. Nick—Janine—”

She stared up at him. “This sounds absurd,” she said, “but don’t I know you from somewhere?”

Mikkelsen felt a warm flood of mysterious energy surging through him as their eyes met. “It’s a long story,” he said. “Let’s have a drink and I’ll tell you all about it.”

There Was an Old Woman

This one dates from the first decade of my career, and here you see me moving away from the cautious generic sf-magazine style that I stuck to most of the time in these very commercial-minded early years, and attempting something a little more challenging. It was written in November 1957, accepted a few months later by Larry Shaw of Infinity Science Fiction, and published in that fine magazine’s final issue, that of November 1958 (in which I had two other stories under pseudonyms and a book review column, accounting for 75 of that issue’s 130 pages by myself). Infinity was already struggling, as were many of the other lesser science fiction magazines, when Shaw accepted the story. My ledger indicates that I finally got paid—$65—a couple of months after publication, and I suspect I didn’t have an easy time collecting.

The theme of multiple extra utero birth was sufficiently interesting to me that I would use it again, in a very different way, eight years later, in my novel Thorns, the first significant book of my literary maturity.

Since I was raised from earliest infancy to undertake the historian’s calling, and since it is now certain that I shall never claim that profession as my own, it seems fitting that I perform my first and last act as a historian.

I shall write the history of that strange and unique woman, the mother of my thirty brothers and myself, Miss Donna Mitchell.

She was a person of extraordinary strength and vision, our mother. I remember her vividly, seeing her with all her sons gathered round her in our secluded Wisconsin farmhouse on the first night of summer, after we had returned to her from every part of the country for our summer’s vacation. One-and-thirty strapping sons, each one of us six feet one inch tall, with a shock of unruly yellow hair and keen, clear blue eyes, each one of us healthy, strong, well nourished, each one of us twenty-one years and fourteen days old—one-and-thirty identical brothers.

Oh, there were differences between us, but only we and she could perceive them. To outsiders, we were identical; which was why, to outsiders, we took care never to appear together in groups. We ourselves knew the differences, for we had lived with them so long.

I knew my brother Leonard’s cheekmole—the right cheek it was, setting him off from Jonas, whose left cheek was marked with a flyspeck. l knew the faint tilt of Peter’s chin, the slight oversharpness of Dewey’s nose, the florid tint of Donald’s skin. I recognized Paul by his pendulous earlobes, Charles by his squint, Noel by the puckering of his lower lip. David had a blue-stubbled face, Mark flaring nostrils, Claude thick brows.

Yes, there were differences. We rarely confused one with another. It was second nature for me to distinguish Edward from Albert, George from Philip, Frederick from Stephen. And Mother never confused us.

She was a regal woman, nearly six feet in height, who even in middle age had retained straightness of posture and majesty of bearing. Her eyes, like ours, were blue; her hair, she told us, had once been golden like ours. Her voice was a deep, mellow contralto; rich, firm, commanding, the voice of a strong woman. She had been professor of biochemistry at some Eastern university (she never told us which one, hating its name so) and we all knew by heart the story of her bitter life and of our own strange birth.

“I had a theory,” she would say. “It wasn’t an orthodox theory, and it made people angry to think about it, so of course they threw me out. But I didn’t care. In many ways that was the most fortunate day of my life.”

“Tell us about it, Mother,” Philip would invariably ask. He was destined to be a playwright; he enjoyed the repetition of the story whenever we were together.

She said:

“I had a theory. l believed that environment controlled personality, that given the same set of healthy genes any number of different adults could be shaped from the raw material. I had a plan for testing it—but when I told them, they discharged me. Luckily, I had married a wealthy if superficial-minded executive, who had suffered a fatal coronary attack the year before. I was independently wealthy, thanks to him, and free to pursue independent research, thanks to my university discharge. So I came to Wisconsin and began my great project.”

We knew the rest of the story by heart, as a sort of litany.

We knew how she had bought a huge, rambling farm in the flat green country of central Wisconsin, a farm far from prying eyes. Then, how on a hot summer afternoon she had gone forth to the farm land nearby, and found a field hand, tall and brawny, and to his great surprise seduced him in the field where he worked.

And then the story of that single miraculous zygote, which our mother had extracted from her body and carefully nurtured in special nutrient tanks, irradiating it and freezing it and irritating it and dosing it with hormones until, exasperated, it subdivided into thirty-two, each one of which developed independently into a complete embryo.

Embryo grew into foetus, and foetus into child, in Mother’s ingenious artificial wombs. One of the thirty-two died before birth of accidental narcosis; the remainder survived, thirty-one identical males sprung from the same egg, to become us.

With the formidable energy that typified her, Mother singlehandedly nursed thirty-one baby boys; we thrived, we grew. And then the most crucial stage of the experiment began. We were differentiated at the age of eighteen months, each given his own room, his own particular toys, his own special books later on. Each of us was slated for a different profession. It was the ultimate proof of her theory. Genetically identical, physically identical except for the minor changes time had worked on our individual bodies, we would nevertheless seek out different fields of employment.

She worked out the assignments at random, she said. Philip was to be a playwright, Noel a novelist, Donald a doctor. Astronomy was Allan’s goal, Barry’s, biology, Albert’s the stage. George was to be a concert pianist, Claude a composer, Leonard a member of the bar, Dewey a dentist. Mark was to be an athlete; David, a diplomat. Journalism waited for Jonas, poetry for Peter, painting for Paul.

Edward would become an engineer, Saul a soldier, Charles a statesman; Stephen would go to sea. Martin was aimed for chemistry, Raymond for physics, James for high finance. Ronald would be a librarian, Robert a bookkeeper, John a priest, Douglas a teacher. Anthony was to be a literary critic, William an architect, Frederick an airplane pilot. For Richard was reserved a life of crime; as for myself, Harold, I was to devote my energies to the study and writing of history.

This was my mother’s plan. Let me tell of my own childhood and adolescence, to illustrate its workings.

My first recollections are of books. I had a room on the second floor of our big house. Martin’s room was to my left, and in later years I would regret it, for the air was always heavy with the stink of his chemical experiments. To my right was Noel, whose precocious typewriter sometimes pounded all night as he worked on his endless first novel.

But those manifestations came later. I remember waking one morning to find that during the night a bookcase had been placed in my room, and in it a single book—Hendrik Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind. I was four, almost five, then; thanks to Mother’s intensive training we were all capable readers by that age, and I puzzled over the big type, learning of the exploits of Charlemagne and Richard the Lionhearted and staring at the squiggly scratches that were van Loon’s illustrations.

Other books followed, in years to come. H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, which fascinated and repelled me at the same time. Toynbee, in the Somervell abridgement, and later, when I had entered adolescence, the complete and unabridged edition. Churchill, and his flowing periods and ringing prose. Sandburg’s poetic and massive life of Lincoln; Wedgwood on the Thirty Years’ War; Will Durant, in six or seven blocklike volumes.

I read these books, and where I did not understand I read on anyway, knowing I would come back to that page in some year to come and bring new understanding to it. Mother helped, and guided, and chivvied. A sense of the panorama of man’s vast achievement sprang up in me. To join the roll of mankind’s chroniclers seemed the only possible end for my existence.

Each summer from my fourteenth to my seventeenth, I traveled—alone, of course, since Mother wanted to build self-reliance in us. I visited the great historical places of the United States: Washington, DC, Mount Vernon, Williamsburg, Bull Run, Gettysburg. A sense of the past rose in me.

Those summers were my only opportunities for contact with strangers, since during the year and especially during the long snowbound winters we stayed on the farm, a tight family unit. We never went to public school; obviously, it was impossible to enroll us, en masse, without arousing the curiosity my mother wished to avoid.

Instead, she tutored us privately, giving us care and attention that no professional teacher could possibly have supplied. And we grew older, diverging towards our professions like branching limbs of a tree.

As a future historian, of course, I took it upon myself to observe the changes in my own society, which was bounded by the acreage of our farm. I made notes on the progress of my brothers, keeping my notebooks well hidden, and also on the changes time was working on Mother. She stood up surprisingly well, considering the astonishing burden she had taken upon herself. Formidable was the best word to use in describing her.

We grew into adolescence. By this time Martin had an imposing chemical laboratory in his room; Leonard harangued us all on legal fine points, and Anthony pored over Proust and Kafka, delivering startling critical interpretations. Our house was a beehive of industry constantly, and I don’t remember being bored for more than three consecutive seconds, at any time. There were always distractions: Claude and George jostling for room on the piano bench while they played Claude’s four-hand sonata, Mark hurling a baseball through a front window, Peter declaiming a sequence of shocking sonnets during our communal dinner.

We fought, of course, since we were healthy individualists with sound bodies. Mother encouraged it; Saturday afternoon was wrestling time, and we pitted our growing strengths against one another.

Mother was always the dominant figure, striding tall and erect around the farm, calling to us in her familiar boom, assigning us chores, meeting with us privately. Somehow she had the knack of making each of us think we were the favorite child, the one in whose future she was most deeply interested of all. It was false, of course; though once Jonas unkindly asserted that Barry must be her real favorite, because he, like her, was a biologist.

I doubted it. I had learned much about people through my constant reading, and I knew that Mother was something extraordinary—a fanatic, if you like, or merely a woman driven by an inner demon, but still and all a person of overwhelming intellectual drive and conviction, whose will to know the truth had led her to undertake this fantastic experiment in biology and human breeding.

I knew that no woman of that sort could stoop to petty favoritism. Mother was unique. Perhaps, had she been born a man, she would have changed the entire course of human development.

When we were seventeen, she called us all together round the big table in the common room of our rambling home. She waited, needing to clear her throat only once in order to cut the hum of conversation.

“Sons,” she said, and the echo rang through the entire first floor of the house. “Sons, the time has come for you to leave the farm.”

We were stunned, even those of us who were expecting it. But she explained, and we understood, and we did not quarrel.

One could not become a doctor or a chemist or a novelist or even a historian in a total vacuum. One had to enter the world. And one needed certain professional qualifications.

We were going to college.

Not all of us, of course. Robert was to be a bookkeeper; he would go to business school. Mark had developed, through years of practice, into a superb right-handed pitcher, and he was to go to Milwaukee for a major-league tryout. Claude and George, aspiring composer and aspiring pianist, would attend an Eastern conservatory together, posing as twins.

The rest of us were to attend colleges, and those who were to go on to professions such as medicine or chemistry would plan to attend professional schools afterwards. Mother believed a college education was essential, even to a poet or a painter or a novelist.

Only one of us was not sent to any accredited institution. He was Richard, who was to be our criminal. Already he had made several sallies into the surrounding towns and cities, returning a few days or a few weeks later with money or jewels and with a guilty grin on his face. He was simply to be turned loose into the school of Life, and Mother warned him never to get caught.

As for me, I was sent to Princeton and enrolled as a liberal-arts student. Since, like my brothers, I was privately educated, I had no diplomas or similar records to show them, and they had to give me an equivalency examination in their place. Evidently I did quite well, for I was immediately accepted. I wired Mother, who sent a check for $3,000 to cover my first year’s tuition and expenses.

I enrolled as a history major; among my first-year courses were Medieval English Constitutional History and the Survey of Western Historical Currents; naturally, my marks were the highest in the class in both cases. I worked diligently and even with a sort of frenzied fury. My other courses, in the sciences or in the arts, I devoted no more nor no less time to than was necessary, but history was my ruling passion.

At least, through my first two semesters of college.

June came, and final exams, and then I returned to Wisconsin, where Mother was waiting. It was 21 June when I returned; since not all colleges end their spring semester simultaneously, some of my brothers had been home for more than a week, others had not yet arrived. Richard had sent word that he was in Los Angeles, and would be with us after the first of July. Mark had signed a baseball contract and was pitching for a team in New Mexico, and he, too, would not be with us.

The summer passed rapidly.

We spent it as we had in the old days before college, sharing our individual specialities, talking, meeting regularly and privately with Mother to discuss the goals that still lay ahead. Except for Claude and George, we had scattered in different directions, no two of us at the same school.

I returned to Princeton that fall for my sophomore year. It passed, and I made the homeward journey again, and in the fall traveled once more eastward. The junior year went by likewise.

And I began to detect signs of a curious change in my inward self. It was a change I did not dare mention to Mother on those July days when I met with her in her room near the library. I did not tell my brothers, either. I kept my knowledge to myself, brooding over it, wondering why it was that this thing should happen to me, why I should be singled out.

For I was discovering that the study of history bored me utterly and completely.

The spirit of rebellion grew in me during my final year in college. My marks had been excellent; I had achieved Phi Beta Kappa and several graduate schools were interested in having me continue my studies with them. But I had been speaking to a few chosen friends (none of whom knew my bizarre family background, of course) and my values had been slowly shifting.

I realized that I had mined history as deeply as I ever cared to. Waking and sleeping, for more than fifteen years, I had pondered Waterloo and Bunker Hill, considered the personalities of Cromwell and James II, held imaginary conversations with Jefferson and Augustus Caesar and Charles Martel. And I was bored with it.

It began to become evident to others, eventually. One day during my final semester a friend asked me, “Is there something worrying you, Harry?”

I shook my head quickly—too quickly. “No,” I said. “Why? Do I look worried?”

“You look worse than worried. You look obsessed.”

We laughed about it, and finally we went down to the student center and had a few beers, and before long my tongue had loosened a little.

I said, “There is something worrying me. And you know what it is? I’m afraid I won’t live up to the standards my family set for me.”

Guffaws greeted me. “Come off it, Harry! Phi Beta in your junior year, top class standing, a brilliant career in history ahead of you—what do they want from you, blood?”

I chuckled and gulped my beer and mumbled something innocuous, but inside I was curdling.

Everything I was, I owed to Mother. She made me what I am. But I was played out as a student of history; I was the family failure, the goat, the rotten egg. Raymond still wrestled gleefully with nuclear physics, with Heisenberg and Schrödinger and the others. Mark gloried in his fast ball and his slider and his curve. Paul daubed canvas merrily in his Greenwich Village flat near NYU, and even Robert seemed to take delight in keeping books.

Only I had failed. History had become repugnant to me. I was in rebellion against it. I would disappoint my mother, become the butt of my brothers’ scorn, and live in despair, hating the profession of historian and fitted by training for nothing else.

I was graduated from Princeton summa cum laude, a few days after my twenty-first birthday. I wired Mother that I was on my way home, and bought train tickets.

It was a long and grueling journey to Wisconsin. I spent my time thinking, trying to choose between the unpleasant alternatives that faced me.

I could attempt duplicity, telling my mother I was still studying history, while actually preparing myself for some more attractive profession—the law, perhaps.

I could confess to her at once my failure of purpose, ask her forgiveness for disappointing her and flawing her grand scheme, and try to begin afresh in another field.

Or I could forge ahead with history, compelling myself grimly to take an interest, cramping and paining myself so that my mother’s design would be complete.

None of them seemed desirable paths to take. I brooded over it, and was weary and apprehensive by the time I arrived at our farm.

The first of my brothers I saw was Mark. He sat on the front porch of the big house, reading a book which I recognized at once and with some surprise as Volume I of Churchill. He looked up at me and smiled feebly.

I frowned. “I didn’t expect to find you here, Mark. According to the local sports pages the Braves are playing on the Coast this week. How come you’re not with them?”

His voice was a low murmur. “Because they gave me my release,” he said.

“What?”

He nodded. “I’m washed up at twenty-one. They made me a free agent; that means I can hook up with any team that wants me.”

“And you’re just taking a little rest before offering yourself around?”

He shook his head. “I’m through. Kaput. Harry, I just can’t stand baseball. It’s a silly, stupid game. You know how many times I had to stand out there in baggy knickers and throw a bit of horsehide at some jerk with a club in his paws? A hundred, hundred-fifty times a game, every four days. For what? What the hell does it all mean? Why should I bother?”

There was a strange gleam in his eyes. I said, “Have you told Mother?”

“I don’t dare! She thinks I’m on leave or something. Harry, how can I tell her—”

“I know.” Briefly, I told him of my own disenchantment with history. We were mutually delighted to learn that we were not alone in our affliction. I picked up my suitcases, scrambled up the steps, and went inside.

Dewey was cleaning up the common room as I passed through. He nodded hello glumly. I said, “How’s the tooth trade?”

He whirled and glared at me viciously.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

“I’ve been accepted by four dental schools, Harry.”

“Is that any cause for misery?”

He let the broom drop, walked over to me, and whispered, “I’ll murder you if you tell Mother this. But the thought of spending my life poking around in foul-smelling oral cavities sickens me. Sickens.”

“But I thought—”

“Yeah. You thought. You’ve got it soft; you just need to dig books out of the library and rearrange what they say and call it new research. I have to drill and clean and fill and plug and—” He stopped. “Harry, I’ll kill you if you breathe a word of this. I don’t want Mother to know that I didn’t come out the way she wanted.”

I repeated what I had said to Mark—and told him about Mark, for good measure. Then I made my way upstairs to my old room. I felt a burden lifting from me; I was not alone. At least two of my brothers felt the same way. I wondered how many more were at last rebelling against the disciplines of a lifetime.

Poor Mother, I thought! Poor Mother!

Our first family council of the summer was held that night. Stephen and Saul were the last to arrive, Stephen resplendent in his Annapolis garb, Saul crisp looking and stiff-backed from West Point. Mother had worked hard to wangle appointments for those two.

We sat around the big table and chatted. The first phase of our lives, Mother told us, had ended. Now, our preliminary educations were complete, and we would undertake the final step towards our professions—those of us who had not already entered them.

Mother looked radiant that evening, tall, energetic, her white hair cropped mannishly short, as she sat about the table with her thirty-one strapping sons. I envied and pitied her: envied her for the sweet serenity of her life, which had proceeded so inexorably and without swerving towards the goal of her experiment, and pitied her for the disillusioning that awaited her.

For Mark and Dewey and I were not the only failures in the crop.

I had made discreet inquiries during the day. I learned that Anthony found literary criticism to be a fraud and a sham, that Paul knew clearly he had no talent as a painter (and, also, that very few of his contemporaries did either), that Robert bitterly resented a career of bookkeeping, that piano playing hurt George’s fingers, that Claude had had difficulty with his composing because he was tone deaf, that the journalistic grind was too strenuous for Jonas, that John longed to quit the seminarial life because he had no calling, that Albert hated the uncertain Bohemianism of an actor’s life—

We circulated, all of us raising for the first time the question that had sprouted in our minds during the past several years. I made the astonishing discovery that not one of Donna Mitchell’s sons cared for the career that had been chosen for him.

The experiment had been a resounding flop.

Late that evening, after Mother had gone to bed, we remained together, discussing our predicament. How could we tell her? How could we destroy her life’s work? And yet, how could we compel ourselves to lives of unending drudgery?

Robert wanted to study engineering; Barry, to write. I realized I cared much more for law than for history, while Leonard longed to exchange law for the physical sciences. James, our banker-manque, much preferred politics. And so it went, with Richard (who claimed five robberies, a rape, and innumerable picked pockets) pouring out his desire to settle down and live within the law as an honest farmer.

It was pathetic.

Summing up the problem in his neat forensic way, Leonard said, “Here’s our dilemma: Do we all keep quiet about this and ruin our lives, or do we speak up and ruin Mother’s experiment?”

“I think we ought to continue as is, for the time being,” Saul said. “Perhaps Mother will die in the next year or two. We can start over then.”

“Perhaps she doesn’t die?” Edward wanted to know. “She’s tough as nails. She may last another twenty or thirty or even forty years.”

“And we’re past twenty-one already,” remarked Raymond. “If we hang on too long at what we’re doing, it’ll be too late to change. You can’t start studying for a new profession when you’re thirty-five.”

“Maybe we’ll get to like what we’re doing by then,” suggested David hopefully. “Diplomatic service isn’t as bad as all that, and I’d say—”

“What about me?” Paul yelped. “I can’t paint and I know I can’t paint. I’ve got nothing but starvation ahead of me unless I wise up and get into business in a hurry. You want me to keep messing up good white canvas the rest of my life?”

“It won’t work,” said Barry in a doleful voice. “We’ll have to tell her.”

Douglas shook his head. “We can’t do that. You know just what she’ll do. She’ll bring down the umpteen volumes of notes she’s made on this experiment, and ask us if we’re going to let it all come to naught.”

“He’s right,” Albert said. “I can picture the scene now. The big organ-pipe voice blasting us for our lack of faith, the accusations of ingratitude—”

“Ingratitude?” William shouted. “She twisted us and pushed us and molded us without asking our permission. Hell, she created us with her laboratory tricks. But that didn’t give her the right to make zombies out of us.”

“Still,” Martin said, “we can’t just go to her and tell her that it’s all over. The shock would kill her.

“Well?” Richard asked in the silence that followed. “What’s wrong with that?”

For a moment, no one spoke. The house was quiet; we heard footsteps descending the stairs. We froze.

Mother appeared, an imperial figure even in her old housecoat. “You boys are kicking up too much of a racket down here,” she boomed. “I know you’re glad to see each other again after a year, but I need my sleep.”

She turned and strode upstairs again. We heard her bedroom door slam shut. For an instant we were all ten-year-olds again, diligently studying our books for fear of Mother’s displeasure.

I moistened my lips. “Well?” I asked. “I call for a vote on Richard’s suggestion.”

Martin, as a chemist, prepared the drink, using Donald’s medical advice as his guide. Saul, Stephen, and Raymond dug a grave, in the woods at the back of our property. Douglas and Mark built the coffin.

Richard, ending his criminal career with a murder to which we were all accessories before the fact, carried the fatal beverage upstairs to Mother the next morning, and persuaded her to sip it. One sip was all that was necessary; Martin had done his work well.

Leonard offered us a legal opinion: It was justifiable homicide. We placed the body in its coffin and carried it out across the fields. Richard, Peter, Jonas and Charles were her pallbearers; the others of us followed in their path.

We lowered the body into the ground and John said a few words over her. Then, slowly, we closed over the grave and replaced the sod, and began the walk back to the house.

“She died happy,” Anthony said. “She never suspected the size of her failure.” It was her epitaph.

As our banker, James supervised the division of her assets, which were considerable, into thirty-one equal parts. Noel composed a short figment of prose which we agreed summed up our sentiments.

We left the farm that night, scattering in every direction, anxious to begin life. All that went before was a dream from which we now awakened. We agreed to meet at the farm each year, on the anniversary of her death, in memory of the woman who had so painstakingly divided a zygote into thirty-two viable cells, and who had spent a score of years conducting an experiment based on a theory that had proved to be utterly false.

We felt no regret, no qualm. We had done what needed to be done, and on that last day some of us had finally functioned in the professions for which Mother had intended us.

I, too. My first and last work of history will be this, an account of Mother and her experiment, which records the beginning and the end of her work. And now it is complete.

The Pain Peddlers

This was a story I wrote for Frederik Pohl’s magazine Galaxy in November 1962. He had inveigled me back into writing science fiction after I had dropped out for a couple of years, by offering to buy anything I wrote for him so long as I didn’t hand in an absolute stinker. (The deal would terminate the first time I handed in a stinker, but I avoided doing that.) He ran this one in his August 1963 issue.

What I didn’t know I was doing here was inventing Reality TV. I had never been much of a television watcher—I didn’t even own one of the things until we started sending expeditions to the Moon, and I felt I ought to watch them—and even now I rarely look at anything on the tube except old movies. But my years as a freelance writer had taught me something about the popular arts in the United States, and my experience as a science fiction writer had taught me how to extrapolate from current social trends, and the situation described in this story struck me as something that was likely to come about some day. How soon it would come about, and with what degree of intensity, were nothing I was actually predicting back there in 1962, but the way things turned out made me seem endowed with the gift of prophecy and the story has gathered quite a bit of fame over the years as an example of the way science fiction foretells things to come.

Pain is Gain.

—Greek proverb

The phone bleeped. Northrop nudged the cut-in switch and heard Maurillo say, “We got a gangrene, chief. They’re amputating tonight.”

Northrop’s pulse quickened at the thought of action. “What’s the tab?” he asked.

“Five thousand, all rights.”

“Anesthetic?”

“Natch,” Maurillo said. “I tried it the other way.”

“What did you offer?”

“Ten. It was no go.”

Northrop sighed. “I’ll have to handle it myself, I guess. Where’s the patient?”

“Clinton General. In the wards.”

Northrop raised a heavy eyebrow and glowered into the screen. “In the wards?” he bellowed. “And you couldn’t get them to agree?”

Maurillo seemed to shrink. “It was the relatives, chief. They
were stubborn. The old man, he didn’t seem to give a damn, but the
relatives—”

“Okay. You stay there. I’m coming over to close the deal,” Northrop snapped. He cut the phone out and pulled a couple of blank waiver forms out of his desk, just in case the relatives backed down. Gangrene was gangrene, but ten grand was ten grand. And business was business. The networks were yelling. He had to supply the goods or get out.

He thumbed the autosecretary. “I want my car ready in thirty
seconds. South Street exit.”

“Yes, Mr. Northrop.”

“If anyone calls for me in the next half hour, record it. I’m going to Clinton General Hospital, but I don’t want to be called there.”

“Yes, Mr. Northrop.”

“If Rayfield calls from the network office, tell him I’m getting him a dandy. Tell him—oh, hell, tell him I’ll call him back in an hour.
That’s all.”

“Yes, Mr. Northrop.”

Northrop scowled at the machine and left his office. The gravshaft took him down forty stories in almost literally no time flat. His car
was waiting, as ordered, a long, sleek ’08 Frontenac with bubble top. Bulletproof, of course. Network producers were vulnerable to crackpot attacks.

He sat back, nestling into the plush upholstery. The car asked him where he was going, and he answered.

“Let’s have a pep pill,” he said.

A pill rolled out of the dispenser in front of him. He gulped it down. Maurillo, you make me sick, he thought. Why can’t you close a deal without me? Just once?

He made a mental note. Maurillo had to go. The organization couldn’t tolerate inefficiency.

The hospital was an old one. It was housed in one of the vulgar green-glass architectural monstrosities so popular sixty years before, a tasteless slab-sided thing without character or grace. The main door irised and Northrop stepped through, and the familiar hospital smell hit his nostrils. Most people found it unpleasant, but not Northrop. It was the smell of dollars, for him.

The hospital was so old that it still had nurses and orderlies. Oh, plenty of mechanicals skittered up and down the corridors, but here and there a middle-aged nurse, smugly clinging to her tenure, pushed a tray of mush along, or a doddering orderly propelled a broom. In his early days on video, Northrop had done a documentary on these people, these living fossils in the hospital corridors. He had won an award for the film, with its crosscuts from baggy-faced nurses to gleaming mechanicals, its vivid presentation of the inhumanity of the new hospitals. It was a long time since Northrop had done a documentary of that sort. A different kind of show was the order of the day now, ever since the intensifiers had come in.

A mechanical took him to Ward Seven. Maurillo was waiting there, a short, bouncy little man who wasn’t bouncing much now, because he knew he had fumbled. Maurillo grinned up at Northrop, a hollow grin, and said, “You sure made it fast, chief!”

“How long would it take for the competition to cut in?” Northrop countered. “Where’s the patient?”

“Down by the end. You see where the curtain is? I had the curtain put up. To get in good with the heirs. The relatives, I mean.”

“Fill me in,” Northrop said. “Who’s in charge?”

“The oldest son. Harry. Watch out for him. Greedy.”

“Who isn’t?” Northrop sighed. They were at the curtain, now. Maurillo parted it. All through the long ward, patients were stirring. Potential subjects for taping, all of them, Northrop thought. The world was so full of different kinds of sickness—and one sickness fed on another.

He stepped through the curtain. There was a man in the bed, drawn and gaunt, his hollow face greenish, stubbly. A mechanical stood next to the bed, with an intravenous tube running across and under the covers. The patient looked at least ninety. Knocking off ten years for the effects of illness still made him pretty old, Northrop thought.

He confronted the relatives.

There were eight of them. Five women, ranging from middle age
down to teens. Three men, the oldest about fifty, the other two in their
forties. Sons and daughters and nieces and granddaughters, Northrop
figured.

He said gravely, “I know what a terrible tragedy this must be for all of you. A man in the prime of his life—head of a happy family …” Northrop stared at the patient. “But I know he’ll pull through. I can see the strength in him.”

The oldest relative said, “I’m Harry Gardner. I’m his son. You’re from the network?”

“I’m the producer,” Northrop said. “I don’t ordinarily come in person, but my assistant told me what a great human situation there was here, what a brave person your father is …”

The man in the bed slept on. He looked bad.

Harry Gardner said, “We made an arrangement. Five thousand bucks. We wouldn’t do it, except for the hospital bills. They can really wreck you.”

“I understand perfectly,” Northrop said in his most unctuous tones. “That’s why we’re prepared to raise our offer. We’re well aware of the disastrous effects of hospitalization on a small family, even today, in these times of protection. And so we can offer—”

“No! There’s got to be anesthetic!” It was one of the daughters, a round, drab woman with colorless thin lips. “We ain’t going to let you make him suffer!”

Northrop smiled. “It would only be a moment of pain for him. Believe me. We’d begin the anesthesia immediately after the amputation. Just let us capture that single instant of—”

“It ain’t right! He’s old, he’s got to be given the best treatment! The pain could kill him!”

“On the contrary,” Northrop said blandly. “Scientific research
has shown that pain is often beneficial in amputation cases. It creates
a nerve block, you see, that causes a kind of anesthesia of its own,
without the harmful side effects of chemotherapy. And once the
danger vectors are controlled, the normal anesthetic procedures can
be invoked, and—” He took a deep breath, and went rolling glibly
on to the crusher, “with the extra fee we’ll provide, you can give
your dear one the absolute finest in medical care. There’ll be no reason to stint.”

Wary glances were exchanged. Harry Gardner said, “How much are you offering?”

“May I see the leg?” Northrop countered.

The coverlet was peeled back. Northrop stared.

It was a nasty case. Northrop was no doctor, but he had been in this line of work for five years, and that was long enough to give him an amateur acquaintance with disease. He knew the old man was in bad shape. It looked as though there had been a severe burn, high up along the calf, which had probably been treated only with first aid. Then, in happy proletarian ignorance, the family had let the old man rot until he was gangrenous. Now the leg was blackened, glossy, and swollen from midcalf to the ends of the toes. Everything looked soft and decayed. Northrop had the feeling that he could reach out and break the puffy toes off, one at a time.

The patient wasn’t going to survive. Amputation or not, he was probably rotten to the core by this time, and if the shock of amputation didn’t do him in, general debilitation would. It was a good prospect for the show. It was the kind of stomach-turning vicarious suffering that millions of viewers gobbled up avidly.

Northrop looked up and said, “Fifteen thousand if you’ll allow a network-approved surgeon to amputate under our conditions. And we’ll pay the surgeon’s fee besides.”

“Well …”

“And we’ll also underwrite the entire cost of postoperative care
for your father,” Northrop added smoothly. “Even if he stays in the
hospital for six months, we’ll pay every nickel, over and above the
telecast fee.”

He had them. He could see the greed shining in their eyes. They were faced with bankruptcy, and he had come to rescue them, and did it matter all that much if the old man didn’t have anesthetic when they sawed his leg off? He was hardly conscious even now. He wouldn’t really feel a thing, not really.

Northrop produced the documents, the waivers, the contracts covering residuals and Latin-American reruns, the payment vouchers, all the paraphernalia. He sent Maurillo scuttling off for a secretary, and a few moments later a glistening mechanical was taking it all down.

“If you’ll put your name here, Mr. Gardner …”

Northrop handed the pen to the eldest son. Signed, sealed, delivered.

“We’ll operate tonight,” Northrop said. “I’ll send our surgeon over immediately. One of our best men. We’ll give your father the care
he deserves.”

He pocketed the documents. It was done. Maybe it was barbaric to operate on an old man that way, Northrop thought, but he didn’t bear the responsibility, after all. He was just giving the public what it wanted, and the public wanted spouting blood and tortured nerves. And what did it matter to the old man, really? Any experienced medic could tell you he was as good as dead. The operation wouldn’t save him. Anesthesia wouldn’t save him. If the gangrene didn’t get him, postoperative shock would do him in. At worst, he would suffer only a few minutes under the knife, but at least his family would be free from the fear of financial ruin.

On the way out, Maurillo said, “Don’t you think it’s a little risky, chief? Offering to pay the hospitalization expenses, I mean?”

“You’ve got to gamble a little sometimes to get what you want,” Northrop said.

“Yeah, but that could run to fifty, sixty thousand! What‘ll that do to the budget?”

Northrop shrugged. “We’ll survive. Which is more than the old man will. He can’t make it through the night. We haven’t risked a penny, Maurillo. Not a stinking cent.”

Returning to the office, Northrop turned the papers on the Gardner amputation over to his assistants, set the wheels in motion for the show, and prepared to call it a day. There was only one bit of dirty work left to do. He had to fire Maurillo.

It wasn’t called firing, of course. Maurillo had tenure, just like the hospital orderlies and everyone else below executive rank. It was more a demotion than anything else. Northrop had been increasingly dissatisfied with the little man’s work for months, now, and today had been the clincher. Maurillo had no imagination. He didn’t know how to close a deal. Why hadn’t he thought of underwriting the hospitalization? If I can’t delegate responsibility to him, Northrop told himself, I can’t use him at all. There were plenty of other assistant producers in the outfit who’d be glad to step in.

Northrop spoke to a couple of them. He made his choice. A young fellow named Barton, who had been working on documentaries all year. Barton had done the plane-crash deal in London in the spring. He had a fine touch for the gruesome. He had been on hand at the World’s Fair fire last year in Juneau. Yes, Barton was the man.

The next part was the sticky one. Northrop phoned Maurillo, even though Maurillo was only two rooms away—these things were never done in person—and said, “I’ve got some good news for you, Ted. We’re shifting you to a new program.”

“Shifting …?”

“That’s right. We had a talk in here this afternoon, and we decided you were being wasted on the blood and guts show. You need more scope for your talents. So we’re moving you over to Kiddie Time. We think you’ll really blossom there. You and Sam Kline and Ed Bragan ought to make a terrific team.”

Northrop saw Maurillo’s pudgy face crumble. The arithmetic was getting home; over here, Maurillo was Number Two, and on the new show, a much less important one, he’d be Number Three. It was a thumping boot downstairs, and Maurillo knew it.

The mores of the situation called for Maurillo to pretend he was receiving a rare honor. He didn’t play the game. He squinted and said, “Just because I didn’t sign up that old man’s amputation?”

“What makes you think …?”

“Three years I’ve been with you! Three years, and you kick me out just like that!”

“I told you, Ted, we thought this would be a big opportunity for you. It’s a step up the ladder. It’s—”

Maurillo’s fleshy face puffed up with rage. “It’s getting junked,” he said bitterly. “Well, never mind, huh? It so happens I’ve got another offer. I’m quitting before you can can me. You can take your tenure and—”

Northrop blanked the screen.

The idiot, he thought. The fat little idiot. Well, to hell with him!

He cleared his desk, and cleared his mind of Ted Maurillo and his problems. Life was real, life was earnest. Maurillo just couldn’t take the pace, that was all.

Northrop prepared to go home. It had been a long day.

At eight that evening came word that old Gardner was about
to undergo the amputation. At ten, Northrop was phoned by the network’s own head surgeon, Dr. Steele, with the news that the operation had failed.

“We lost him,” Steele said in a flat, unconcerned voice. “We did our best, but he was a mess. Fibrillation set in, and his heart just ran away. Not a damned thing we could do.”

“Did the leg come off?”

“Oh, sure. All this was after the operation.”

“Did it get taped?”

“They’re processing it now. I‘m on my way out.”

“Okay,” Northrop said. “Thanks for calling.”

“Sorry about the patient.”

“Don‘t worry yourself,” Northrop said. “It happens to the best of us.”

The next morning, Northrop had a look at the rushes. The screening was in the twenty-third floor studio, and a select audience was
on hand—Northrop, his new assistant producer Barton, a handful of network executives, a couple of men from the cutting room. Slick, bosomy girls handed out intensifier helmets—no mechanicals doing the work here!

Northrop slipped the helmet on over his head. He felt the familiar surge of excitement as the electrodes descended, as contact was made. He closed his eyes. There was a thrum of power somewhere in the room as the EEG-amplifier went into action. The screen brightened.

There was the old man. There was the gangrenous leg. There was Dr. Steele, crisp and rugged and dimple-chinned, the network’s star surgeon, $250,000-a-year’s worth of talent. There was the scalpel, gleaming in Steele’s hand.

Northrop began to sweat. The amplified brain waves were coming through the intensifier, and he felt the throbbing in the old man’s leg, felt the dull haze of pain behind the old man’s forehead, felt the weakness of being eighty years old and half dead.

Steele was checking out the electronic scalpel, now, while the nurses fussed around, preparing the man for the amputation. In the finished tape, there would be music, narration, all the trimmings, but now there was just a soundless series of images, and, of course, the tapped brainwaves of the sick man.

The leg was bare.

The scalpel descended.

Northrop winced as vicarious agony shot through him. He could feel the blazing pain, the brief searing hellishness as the scalpel slashed through diseased flesh and rotting bone. His whole body trembled, and he bit down hard on his lips and clenched his fists and then it was over.

There was a cessation of pain. A catharsis. The leg no longer sent its pulsating messages to the weary brain. Now there was shock, the anesthesia of hyped-up pain, and with the shock came calmness. Steele went about the mop-up operation. He tidied the stump, bound it.

The rushes flickered out in anticlimax. Later, the production crew would tie up the program with interviews of the family, perhaps a shot of the funeral, a few observations on the problem of gangrene in the aged. Those things were the extras. What counted, what the viewers wanted, was the sheer nastiness of vicarious pain, and that they got in full measure. It was a gladiatorial contest without the gladiators, masochism concealed as medicine. It worked. It pulled in the viewers by the millions.

Northrop patted sweat from his forehead.

“Looks like we got ourselves quite a little show here, boys,” he said in satisfaction.

The mood of satisfaction was still on him as he left the building that day. All day he had worked hard, getting the show into its final shape, cutting and polishing. He enjoyed the element of craftsmanship. It helped him to forget some of the sordidness of the program.

Night had fallen when he left. He stepped out of the main entrance and a figure strode forward, a bulky figure, medium height, tired face. A hand reached out, thrusting him roughly back into the lobby of
the building.

At first Northrop didn’t recognize the face of the man. It was a blank face, a nothing face, a middle-aged empty face. Then he placed it.

Harry Gardner. The son of the dead man.

“Murderer!” Gardner shrilled. “You killed him! He would have lived if you’d used anesthetics! You phony, you murdered him so
people would have thrills on television!”

Northrop glanced up the lobby. Someone was coming around the bend. Northrop felt calm. He could stare this nobody down until he fled in fear.

“Listen,” Northrop said, “we did the best medical science can do for your father. We gave him the ultimate in scientific care. We—”

“You murdered him!”

“No,” Northrop said, and then he said no more, because he saw
the sudden flicker of a slice-gun in the blank-faced man’s fat hand.
He backed away, but it didn’t help, because Gardner punched the
trigger and an incandescent bolt flared out and sliced across Northrop’s belly just as efficiently as the surgeon’s scalpel had cut through the
gangrenous leg.

Gardner raced away, feet clattering on the marble floor. Northrop dropped, clutching himself. His suit was seared, and there was a slash through his abdomen, a burn an eighth of an inch wide and perhaps four inches deep, cutting through intestines, through organs, through flesh. The pain hadn’t begun yet. His nerves weren’t getting the message through to his stunned brain. But then they were, and Northrop coiled and twisted in agony that was anything but vicarious now.

Footsteps approached.

“Jeez,” a voice said.

Northrop forced an eye open. Maurillo. Of all people, Maurillo.

“A doctor,” Northrop wheezed. “Fast! Christ, the pain! Help me, Ted!”

Maurillo looked down, and smiled. Without a word, he stepped
to the telephone booth six feet away, dropped in a token, punched out a call.

“Get a van over here, fast. I’ve got a subject, chief.”

Northrop writhed in torment. Maurillo crouched next to him.
“A doctor,” Northrop murmured. “A needle, at least. Gimme a needle!
The pain—”

“You want me to kill the pain?” Maurillo laughed. “Nothing doing, chief. You just hang on. You stay alive till we get that hat on your head and tape the whole thing.”

“But you don’t work for me—you’re off the program—”

“Sure,” Maurillo said. “I’m with Transcontinental now. They’re starting a blood-and-guts show too. Only they don’t need waivers.”

Northrop gaped. Transcontinental? That bootleg outfit that peddled tapes in Afghanistan and Mexico and Ghana and God knew where else? Not even a network show, he thought. No fee. Dying in agony for the benefit of a bunch of lousy tapeleggers. That was the worst part, Northrop thought. Only Maurillo would pull a deal like that.

“A needle! For God‘s sake, Maurillo, a needle!”

“Nothing doing, chief. The van’ll be here any minute. They’ll sew you up, and we’ll tape it nice.”

Northrop closed his eyes. He felt the coiling intestines blazing within him. He willed himself to die, to cheat Maurillo and his bunch of ghouls. But it was no use. He remained alive and suffering.

He lived for an hour. That was plenty of time to tape his dying
agonies. The last thought he had was that it was a damned shame he couldn’t star on his own show.

The Sixth Palace

It was a quote from Hebrew mystical literature that touched off this story, which I wrote for Frederik Pohl’s Galaxy in February 1964 and which he published in the February 1965 issue. Soon afterward I lost my notes for the story, and wondered for years thereafter where I had come across the Lesser Hekaloth that had inspired my plot. I didn’t find out for close to fifty years, until one day late in 2014, there came an e-mail from Boruch Perl of Brooklyn, who has made a careful study of Jewish mystical lore and had read my story in a collection of mine where I had noted I had lost track of the source. “The quote,” he told me, “is from Jewish Gnosticism: Merkabah Mystic and Talmudic Tradition, by Gershom Scholem.” It is drawn, he said, from “an extremely obscure book of Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) and is based on an incident recorded in the Talmud (Hagigah 1)” in which “Ben Azai gazed (at the Divine Presence) and was killed …” I had heard of Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), the great German-born scholar who from 1933 until his retirement in 1965 held the post of Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Mr. Perl provided me with a link to the text of the Gershom Scholem book. I was at my computer in a flash.

Eureka!

There was the whole story, the mere edge of which I had come upon in 1964 and used as the inspiration for that story in Galaxy.

The Hekhaloth Books, Scholem explained, were part of a group of Jewish mystic texts, well over a thousand years old, including, among others, the Greater Hekhaloth, the Lesser Hekhaloth, and a book called Merkabah Rabbah. “Hekhaloth,” in Hebrew, means “palace” or “temple.” It is in the Lesser Hekhaloth, says Scholem, that the famous Jewish hero Rabbi Akiva, who lived from about A.D. 40 to 135, tells the tale of his journey to heaven in the company of three fellow rabbis, Ben Zoma, Ben Avuyah, and … Ben Azai! They discovered as they went that the Lord God of Israel “sitteth within seven palaces, one within another. And at the entrance to each palace are eight doorkeepers, four to the right of the lintel and four to the left of the lintel.”

And thereby hung my tale.

Ben Azai was deemed worthy and stood at the gate of the sixth palace and saw the ethereal splendor of the pure marble plates. He opened his mouth and said twice, “Water! Water!” In the twinkling of an eye they decapitated him and threw eleven thousand iron bars at him. This shall be a sign for all generations that no one should err at the gate of the sixth palace.

—Lesser Hekhaloth

There was the treasure, and there was the guardian of the treasure. And there were the whitening bones of those who had tried in vain to make the treasure their own. Even the bones had taken on a kind of beauty, lying out there by the gate of the treasure vault, under the blazing arch of heavens. The treasure itself lent beauty to everything near it—even the scattered bones, even the grim guardian.

The home of the treasure was a small world that belonged to red Valzar. Hardly more than moonsized, really, with no atmosphere to speak of, a silent, dead little world that spun through darkness a billion miles from its cooling primary. A wayfarer had stopped there once. Where from, where bound? No one knew. He had established a cache there, and there it lay, changeless and eternal, treasure beyond belief, presided over by the faceless metal man who waited with metal patience for his master’s return.

There were those who would have the treasure. They came, and were challenged by the guardian, and died.

On another world of the Valzar system, men undiscouraged by the fate of their predecessors dreamed of the hoard, and schemed to possess it. Lipescu was one: a tower of a man, golden beard, fists like hammers, gullet of brass, back as broad as a tree of a thousand years. Bolzano was another: awl-shaped, bright of eye, fast of finger, twig thick, razor sharp. They had no wish to die.

Lipescu’s voice was like the rumble of island galaxies in collision . He wrapped himself around a tankard of good black ale and said, “I go tomorrow, Bolzano.”

“Is the computer ready?”

“Programmed with everything the beast could ask me,” the big man boomed. “There won’t be a slip.”

“And if there is?” Bolzano asked, peering idly into the blue, oddly pale, strangely meek eyes of the giant. “And if the robot kills you?”

“I’ve dealt with robots before.”

Bolzano laughed. “That plain is littered with bones, friend. Yours will join the rest. Great bulky bones, Lipescu. I can see them now.”

“You’re a cheerful one, friend.”

“I’m realistic.”

Lipescu shook his head heavily. “If you were realistic, you wouldn’t be in this with me,” he said slowly. “Only a dreamer would do such a thing as this.” One meaty paw hovered in the air, pounced, caught Bolzano’s forearm. The little man winced as bones ground together. Lipescu said, “You won’t back out? If I die, you’ll make the attempt?”

“Of course I will, you idiot.”

“Will you? You’re a coward, like all little men. You’ll watch me die, and then you’ll turn tail and head for another part of the universe as fast as you know how. Won’t you?”

“I intend to profit by your mistakes,” Bolzano said in a clear, testy voice. “Let go of my arm.”

Lipescu released his grip. The little man sank back in his chair, rubbing his arm. He gulped ale. He grinned at his partner and raised his glass.

“To success,” Bolzano said.

“Yes. To the treasure.”

‘And to long life afterward.”

“For both of us,” the big man boomed.

“Perhaps,” said Bolzano. “Perhaps.”

He had his doubts. The big man was sly, Ferd Bolzano knew, and that was a good combination, not often found: slyness and size. Yet the risks were great. Bolzano wondered which he preferred—that Lipescu should gain the treasure on his attempt, thus assuring Bolzano of a share without risk, or that Lipescu should die, forcing Bolzano to venture his own life. Which was better, a third of the treasure without hazard, or the whole thing for the highest stake?

Bolzano was a good enough gambler to know the answer to that. Yet there was more than yellowness to the man; in his own way, he longed for the chance to risk his life on the airless treasure world.

Lipescu would go first. That was the agreement. Bolzano had stolen the computer, had turned it over to the big man, and Lipescu would make the initial attempt. If he gained the prize, his was the greater share. If he perished, it was Bolzano’s moment next. An odd partnership, odd terms, but Lipescu would have it no other way, and Ferd Bolzano did not argue the point with his beefy compatriot. Lipescu would return with the treasure, or he would not return at all. There would be no middle way, they both were certain.

Bolzano spent an uneasy night. His apartment, in an airy shaft of a building overlooking glittering Lake His, was a comfortable place, and he had little longing to leave it. Lipescu, by preference, lived in the stinking slums beyond the southern shore of the lake, and when the two men parted for the night they went in opposite ways. Bolzano considered bringing a woman home for the night but did not. Instead, he sat moody and wakeful before the televector screen, watching the procession of worlds, peering at the green and gold and ochre planets as they sailed through the emptiness.

Toward dawn, he ran the tape of the treasure. Octave Merlin had made that tape, a hundred years before, as he orbited sixty miles above the surface of the airless little world. Now Merlin’s bones bleached on the plain, but the tape had come home and bootlegged copies commanded a high price in hidden markets. His camera’s sharp eye had seen much.

There was the gate; there was the guardian. Gleaming, ageless, splendid. The robot stood ten feet high, a square, blocky, black shape topped by the tiny anthropomorphic head dome, featureless and sleek. Behind him the gate, wide open but impassable all the same. And behind him, the treasure, culled from the craftsmanship of a thousand worlds, left here who knew why, untold years ago.

No more mere jewels. No dreary slabs of so-called precious metal. The wealth here was not intrinsic; no vandal would think of melting the treasure into dead ingots. Here were statuettes of spun iron that seemed to move and breathe. Plaques of purest lead, engraved with lathework that dazzled the mind and made the heart hesitate. Cunning intaglios in granite, from the workshops of a frosty world half a parsec from nowhere. A scatter of opals, burning with an inner light, fashioned into artful loops of brightness.

A helix of rainbow-colored wood. A series of interlocking strips of some beast’s bone, bent and splayed so that the pattern blurred and perhaps abutted some other dimensional continuum. Cleverly carved shells, one within the other, descending to infinity. Burnished leaves of nameless trees. Polished pebbles from unknown beaches. A dizzying spew of wonders, covering some fifty square yards, sprawled out behind the gate in stunning profusion.

Rough men unschooled in the tenets of esthetics had given their lives to possess the treasure. It took no fancy knowledge to realize the wealth of it, to know that collectors strung from galaxy to galaxy would fight with bared fangs to claim their share. Gold bars did not a treasure make. But these things? Beyond duplication, almost beyond price?

Bolzano was wet with a fever of yearning before the tape had run its course. When it was over, he slumped in his chair, drained, depleted.

Dawn came. The silvery moons fell from the sky. The red sun splashed across the heavens. Bolzano allowed himself the luxury of an hour’s sleep.

And then it was time to begin …

As a precautionary measure, they left the ship in a parking orbit three miles above the airless world. Past reports were unreliable, and there was no telling how far the robot guardian’s power extended. If Lipescu were successful, Bolzano could descend and get him—and the treasure. If Lipescu failed, Bolzano would land and make his own attempt.

The big man looked even bigger, encased in his suit and in the outer casement of a dropshaft. Against his massive chest he wore the computer, an extra brain as lovingly crafted as any object in the treasure hoard. The guardian would ask him questions; the computer would help him answer. And Bolzano would listen. If Lipescu erred, possibly his partner could benefit by knowledge of the error and succeed.

“Can you hear me?” Lipescu asked.

“Perfectly. Go on, get going!”

“What’s the hurry? Eager to see me die?”

“Are you that lacking in confidence?”’ Bolzano asked. “Do you want me to go first?”

“Fool,” Lipescu muttered. “Listen carefully. If I die, I don’t want it to be in vain.”

“What would it matter to you?”

The bulky figure wheeled around. Bolzano could not see his partner’s face, but he knew Lipescu must be scowling. The giant rumbled, “Is life that valuable? Can’t I take a risk?”

“For my benefit?”

“For mine,” Lipescu said. “I’ll be coming back.”

“Go, then. The robot is waiting.”

Lipescu walked to the lock. A moment later he was through
and gliding downward, a one-man spaceship, jets flaring beneath his feet. Bolzano settled by the scanner to watch. A televector pickup homed in on Lipescu just as he made his landing, coming down in a blaze of fire. The treasure and its guardian lay about a mile away. Lipescu rid himself of the dropshaft, stepping with giant bounds toward the waiting guardian.

Bolzano watched.

Bolzano listened.

The televector pickup provided full fidelity. It was useful for Bolzano’s purposes, and useful, too, for Lipescu’s vanity, for the ,big man wanted his every moment taped for posterity. It was interesting to see Lipescu dwarfed by the guardian. The black faceless robot, squat and motionless, topped the big man by better than three feet.

Lipescu said, “Step aside.”

The robot’s reply came in surprisingly human tones, though void of any distinguishing accent. “What I guard is not to be plundered.”

“I claim them by right,” Lipescu said.

“So have many others. But their right did not exist. Nor does yours. I cannot step aside for you.”

“Test me,” Lipescu said. “See if I have the right or not!”

“Only my master may pass.”

“Who is your master? I am your master!”

“My master is he who can command me. And no one can command me who shows ignorance before me.”

“Test me, then,” Lipescu demanded.

“Death is the penalty for failure.”

“Test me.”

“The treasure does not belong to you.”

“Test me and step aside.”

“Your bones will join the rest here.”

“Test me,” Lipescu said.

Watching from aloft, Bolzano went tense. His thin body drew together like that of a chilled spider. Anything might happen now. The robot might propound riddles, like the Sphinx confronting Oedipus.

It might demand the proofs of mathematical theorems. It might ask the translation of strange words. So they gathered, from their knowledge of what had befallen other men here. And, so it seemed, to give a wrong answer was to earn instant death.

He and Lipescu had ransacked the libraries of the world. They had packed all knowledge, so they hoped, into their computer. It had taken months, even with multi-stage programming. The tiny shining globe of metal on Lipescu’s chest contained an infinity of answers to an infinity of questions.

Below, there was long silence as man and robot studied one another. Then the guardian said, “Define latitude.”

“Do you mean geographical latitude?” Lipescu asked.

Bolzano congealed with fear. The idiot, asking for a clarification! He would die before he began!

The robot said, “Define latitude.”

Lipescu’s voice was calm. “The angular distance of a point on a planet’s surface north or south of the equator, as measured from the center of the planet.”

“Which is more consonant,” the robot asked, “the minor third or the major sixth?’’

There was a pause. Lipescu was no musician. But the computer would feed him the answer.

“The minor third,” Lipescu said.

Without a pause, the robot fired another question. “Name the prime numbers between 5,237 and 7,641.”

Bolzano smiled as Lipescu handled the question with ease. So
far, so good. The robot had stuck to strictly factual questions, schoolbook stuff, posing no real problems to Lipescu. And after the initial
hesitation and quibble over latitude, Lipescu had seemed to grow
in confidence from moment to moment. Bolzano squinted at the scanner, looking beyond the robot, through the open gate, to the helter-skelter pile of treasures. He wondered which would fall to his lot when he and Lipescu divided them, two-thirds for Lipescu, the rest for him.

“Name the seven tragic poets of Elifora,” the robot said.

“Domiphar, Halionis, Slegg, Hork-Sekan—”

“The fourteen signs of the zodiac as seen from Morneez,” the robot demanded.

“The Teeth, the Serpents, the Leaves, the Waterfall, the Blot—”

“What is a pedicel?”

“The stalk of an individual flower of an inflorescence.”

“How many years did the Siege of Lamina last?”

“Eight.”

“What did the flower cry in the third canto of Somner’s Vehicles?”

“‘I ache, I sob, I whimper, I die,’” Lipescu boomed.

“Distinguish between the stamen and the pistil.”

“The stamen is the pollen-producing organ of the flower; the pistil—”

And so it went. Question after question. The robot was not content with the legendary three questions of mythology; it asked a dozen, and then asked more. Lipescu answered perfectly, prompted by the murmuring of the peerless compendium of knowledge strapped to his chest. Bolzano kept careful count: the big man had dealt magnificently with seventeen questions When would the robot concede defeat? When would it end its grim quiz and step aside?

It asked an eighteenth question, pathetically easy. All it wanted was an exposition of the Pythagorean Theorem. Lipescu did not even need the computer for that. He answered, briefly, concisely, correctly. Bolzano was proud of his burly partner.

Then the robot struck Lipescu dead.

It happened in the flickering of an eyelid. Lipescu’s voice had ceased, and he stood there, ready for the next question, but the next question did not come. Rather, a panel in the robot’s vaulted belly slid open, and something bright and sinuous lashed out, uncoiling over the ten feet or so that separated guardian from challenger, and sliced Lipescu in half. The bright something slid back out of sight. Lipescu’s trunk toppled to one side. His massive legs remained absurdly planted for a moment; then they crumpled, and a spacesuited leg kicked once, and all was still.

Stunned, Bolzano trembled in the loneliness of the cabin, and his lymph turned to water. What had gone wrong? Lipescu had given the proper answer to every question, and yet the robot had slain him. Why? Could the big man possibly have misphrased Pythagoras? No: Bolzano had listened. The answer had been flawless, as had the seventeen that preceded it. Seemingly the robot had lost patience with the game, then. The robot had cheated. Arbitrarily, maliciously, it had lashed out at Lipescu, punishing him for the correct answer.

Did robots cheat, Bolzano wondered? Could they act in malicious spite? No robot he knew was capable of such actions; but this robot was unlike all others.

For a long while, Bolzano remained huddled in the cabin. The temptation was strong to blast free of orbit and head home, treasureless but alive. Yet the treasure called to him. Some suicidal impulse drove him on. Sirenlike, the robot drew him downward.

There had to be a way to make the robot yield, Bolzano thought, as he guided his small ship down the broad barren plain. Using the computer had been a good idea, whose only defect was that it hadn’t worked. The records were uncertain, but it appeared that in the past men had died when they finally gave a wrong answer after a series of right ones. Lipescu had given no wrong answers. Yet he too had died. It was inconceivable that the robot understood some relationship of the squares on the hypotenuse and on the other two sides that was different from the relationship Lipescu had expressed

Bolzano wondered what method would work.

He plodded leadenly across the plain toward the gate and its guardian. The germ of an idea formed in him as he walked doggedly on.

He was, he knew, condemned to death by his own greed. Only extreme agility of mind would save him from sharing Lipescu’s fate. Ordinary intelligence would not work. Odyssean cleverness was the only salvation.

Bolzano approached the robot. Bones lay everywhere. Lipescu weltered in his own blood. Against that vast dead chest lay the computer, Bolzano knew. But he shrank from reaching for it. He would do without it. He looked away, unwilling to let the sight of Lipescu’s severed body interfere with the coolness of his thoughts.

He collected his courage. The robot showed no interest in him.

“Give ground,” Bolzano said. “I am here. I come for the treasure.”

“Win your right to it.”

“What must I do?”

“Demonstrate truth,” the robot said. “Reveal inwardness. Display understanding.”

“I am ready,” said Bolzano.

The robot offered a question. “What is the excretory unit of the vertebrate kidney called?”

Bolzano contemplated. He had no idea. The computer could tell him, but the computer lay strapped to fallen Lipescu. No matter. The robot wanted truth, inwardness, understanding. Lipescu had offered information. Lipescu had perished.

“The frog in the pond,” Bolzano said, “utters an azure cry.”

There was silence. Bolzano watched the robot’s front, waiting for the panel to slide open, the sinuous something to chop him in half.

The robot said, “During the War of Dogs on Vanderveer IX, the embattled colonists drew up thirty-eight dogmas of defiance. Quote the third, the ninth, the twenty-second, and the thirty-fifth.”

Bolzano pondered. This was an alien robot, product of unknown hand. How did its maker’s mind work? Did it respect knowledge? Did it treasure facts for their own sake? Or did it recognize that information is meaningless, insight a nonlogical process?

Lipescu had been logical. He lay in pieces.

“The mereness of pain,” Bolzano responded, “is ineffable and refreshing.”

The robot said, “The monastery of Kwaisen was besieged by the soldiers of Oda Nobunaga on the third of April, 1582. What words of wisdom did the abbot utter?”

Bolzano spoke quickly and buoyantly. “Eleven, forty-one, elephant, voluminous.”

The last word slipped from his lips despite an effort to retrieve it. Elephants were voluminous, he thought. A fatal slip? The robot did not appear to notice.

Sonorously, ponderously, the great machine delivered the next question.

“What is the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere of Muldonar VII?”

“False witness bears a swift sword,” Bolzano replied.

The robot made an odd humming sound. Abruptly it rolled on massive treads, moving some six feet to its left. The gate of the treasure trove stood wide, beckoning.

“You may enter,” the robot said.

Bolzano’s heart leaped. He had won! He had gained the high prize!

Others had failed, most recently less than an hour before, and their bones glistened on the plain. They had tried to answer the robot, sometimes giving right answers, sometimes giving wrong ones, and they had died. Bolzano lived.

It was a miracle, he thought. Luck? Shrewdness? Some of each, he told himself. He had watched a man give eighteen right answers and die. So the accuracy of the responses did not matter to the robot. What did? Inwardness. Understanding. Truth.

There could be inwardness and understanding and truth in random answers, Bolzano realized. Where earnest striving had failed, mockery had succeeded. He had staked his life on nonsense, and the prize was his.

He staggered forward, into the treasure trove. Even in the light gravity, his feet were like leaden weights. Tension ebbed in him. He knelt among the treasures.

The tapes, the sharp-eyed televector scanners, had not begun to indicate the splendor of what lay here. Bolzano stared in awe and rapture at a tiny disk, no greater in diameter than a man’s eye, on which myriad coiling lines writhed and twisted in patterns of rare beauty. He caught his breath, sobbing with the pain of perception as a gleaming marble spire, angled in mysterious swerves, came into view. Here, a bright beetle of some fragile waxy substance rested on a pedestal of yellow jade. There, a tangle of metallic cloth spurted dizzying patterns of luminescence. And over there—and beyond—and there—

The ransom of a universe, Bolzano thought.

It would take many trips to carry all this to his ship. Perhaps it would be better to bring the ship to the hoard, eh? He wondered, though, if he would lose his advantage if he stepped back through the gate. Was it possible that he would have to win entrance all over again? And would the robot accept his answers as willingly the second time?

It was something he would have to chance, Bolzano decided. His nimble mind worked out a plan. He would select a dozen, two dozen of the finest treasures, as much as he could comfortably carry, and take them back to the ship. Then he would lift the ship and set it down next to the gate. If the robot raised objections about his entering, Bolzano would simply depart, taking what he had already secured. There was no point in running undue risks. When he had sold this cargo, and felt pinched for money, he could always return and try to win admission once again. Certainly, no one else would steal the hoard if he abandoned it.

Selection, that was the key now.

Crouching, Bolzano picked through the treasure, choosing for portability and easy marketability. The marble spire? Too big. But the coiling disk, yes, certainly, and the beetle, of course, and this small statuette of dull hue, and the cameos showing scenes no human eye had ever beheld, and this, and this, and this—

His pulse raced. His heart thundered. He saw himself traveling from world to world, vending his wares. Collectors, museums, governments would vie with one another to have these prizes. He would let them bid each object up into the millions before he sold. And, of course, he would keep one or two for himself—or perhaps three or four—souvenirs of this great adventure.

And someday when wealth bored him he would return and face the challenge again. And he would dare the robot to question him, and he would reply with random absurdities, demonstrating his grasp of the fundamental insight that in knowledge there is only hollow merit, and the robot would admit him once more to the treasure trove.

Bolzano rose. He cradled his lovelies in his arms. Carefully, carefully, he thought. Turning, he made his way through the gate.

The robot had not moved. It had shown no interest as Bolzano plundered the hoard. The small man walked calmly past it.

The robot said, “Why have you taken those? What do you want with them?”

Bolzano smiled. Nonchalantly he replied, “I’ve taken them because they’re beautiful. Because I want them. Is there a better reason?”

“No,” the robot said, and the panel slid open in its ponderous black chest.

Too late, Bolzano realized that the test had not yet ended, that the robot’s question had arisen out of no idle curiosity. And this time he had replied in earnest, speaking in rational terms.

Bolzano shrieked. He saw the brightness coming toward him.

Death followed instantly.

In Entropy’s Jaws

This is a story that I began in January 1970 and finished, after taking a little break for a winter holiday in a warmer place than the one in which I lived, early in March of that year. It was written at a time when I was still reasonably comfortable with the conventions of science fiction and had not yet entered into the period of literary and personal chaos that would complicate my life from 1973 or so through the early 1980s. And so I blithely tackled this long, complex, challenging story, which moves among changing levels of unreality and shifting zones of time, with the sort of confidence that I would later lose and be a long time regaining.

I don’t recall much about the genesis of “In Entropy’s Jaws,” only that I wrote it for the second issue of Bob Hoskins’s paperback anthology, Infinity. Hoskins, a long-time science fiction figure whom I had known glancingly for many years, paid me well and gave me a free hand artistically, a combination that—not too surprisingly—I found irresistible, and so I did a story for each of the five issues of his anthology that appeared between 1970 and 1973. Some of my best work, too.

Static crackles from the hazy golden cloud of airborne loudspeakers drifting just below the ceiling of the spaceliner cabin. A hiss: communications filters are opening. An impending announcement from the bridge, no doubt. Then the captain’s bland, mechanical voice: “We are approaching the Panama Canal. All passengers into their bottles until the all-clear after insertion. When we come out the far side, we’ll be travelling at eighty lights toward the Perseus relay booster. Thank you.” In John Skein’s cabin the warning globe begins to flash, dousing him with red, yellow, green light, going up and down the visible spectrum, giving him some infra– and ultra– too. Not everybody who books passage on this liner necessarily has human sensory equipment. The signal will not go out until Skein is safely in his bottle. Go on, it tells him. Get in. Get in. Panama Canal coming up.

Obediently he rises and moves across the narrow cabin toward the tapering dull-skinned steel container, two and a half meters high, that will protect him against the dimensional stresses of canal insertion. He is a tall, angular man with thin lips, a strong chin, glossy black hair that clings close to his high-vaulted skull. His skin is deeply tanned but his eyes are those of one who has been in winter for some time. This is the fiftieth year of his second go-round. He is travelling alone toward a world of the Abbondanza system, perhaps the last leg on a journey that has occupied him for several years.

The passenger bottle swings open on its gaudy rhodium-jacketed hinge when its sensors, picking up Skein’s mass and thermal output, tell it that its protectee is within entry range. He gets in. It closes and seals, wrapping him in a seamless magnetic field. “Please be seated,” the bottle tells him softly. “Place your arms through the stasis loops and your feet in the security platens. When you have done this the pressor fields will automatically be activated and you will be fully insulated against injury during the coming period of turbulence.” Skein, who has had plenty of experience with faster-than-light travel, has anticipated the instructions and is already in stasis. The bottle closes. “Do you wish music?” it asks him. “A book? A vision spool? Conversation?”

“Nothing, thanks,” Skein says, and waits.

He understands waiting very well by this time. Once he was an impatient man, but this is a thin season in his life, and it has been
teaching him the arts of stoic acceptance. He will sit here with the Buddha’s own complacency until the ship is through the canal. Silent, alone, self-sufficient. If only there will be no fugues this time. Or, at least—he is negotiating the terms of his torment with his demons—at least let them not be flashforwards. If he must break loose again from the matrix of time, he prefers to be cast only into his yesterdays, never into his tomorrows.

“We are almost into the canal now,” the bottle tells him pleasantly.

“It’s all right. You don’t need to look after me. Just let me know when it’s safe to come out.”

He closes his eyes. Trying to envision the ship: a fragile glimmering purple needle squirting through clinging blackness, plunging toward the celestial vortex just ahead, the maelstrom of clashing forces, the soup of contravariant tensors. The Panama Canal, so-called. Through which the liner will shortly rush, acquiring during its passage such a garland of borrowed power that it will rip itself free of the standard fourspace; it will emerge on the far side of the canal into a strange, tranquil pocket of the universe where the speed of light is the downside limiting velocity, and no one knows where the upper limit lies.

Alarms sound in the corridor, heavy, resonant: clang, clang, clang. The dislocation is beginning. Skein is braced. What does it look like out there? Folds of glowing black velvet, furry swatches of the disrupted continuum, wrapping themselves around the ship? Titanic lightnings hammering on the hull? Laughing centaurs flashing across the twisted heavens? Despondent masks, fixed in tragic grimaces, dangling between the blurred stars? Streaks of orange, green, crimson: sick rainbows, limp, askew? In we go. Clang, clang, clang. The next phase of the voyage now begins. He thinks of his destination, holding an image of it rigidly in mind. The picture is vivid, though this is a world he has visited only in spells of temporal fugue. Too often; he has been there again and again in these moments of disorientation in time. The colors are wrong on that world. Purple sand. Blue-leaved trees. Too much manganese? Too little copper? He will forgive it its colors if it will grant him his answers. And then. Skein feels the familiar ugly throbbing at the base of his neck, as if the tip of his spine is swelling like a balloon. He curses. He tries to resist. As he feared, not even the bottle can wholly protect him against these stresses. Outside the ship the universe is being wrenched apart; some of that slips in here and throws him into a private epilepsy of the timeline. Spacetime is breaking up for him. He will go into fugue. He clings, fighting, knowing it is futile. The currents of time buffet him, knocking him a short distance into the future, then a reciprocal distance into the past, as if he is a bubble of insect spittle glued loosely to a dry reed. He cannot hold on much longer. Let it not be flashforward, he prays, wondering who it is to whom he prays. Let it not be flashforward. And he loses his grip. And shatters. And is swept in shards across time.

Of course, if x is before y then it remains eternally before y, and nothing in the passage of time can change this. But the peculiar position of the “now” can be easily expressed simply because our language has tenses. The future will be, the present is, and the past was; the light will be red, it is now yellow, and it was green. But do we, in these terms, really describe the “processional” character of time? We sometimes say that an event is future, then it is present, and finally it is past; and by this means we seem to dispense with tenses, yet we portray the passage of time. But this is really not the case; for all that we have done is to translate our tenses into the words “then” and “finally”, and into the order in which we state our clauses. If we were to omit these words or their equivalents, and mix up the clauses, our sentences would no longer be meaningful. To say that the future, the present, and the past are in some sense is to dodge the problem of time by resorting to the tenseless language of logic and mathematics. In such an atemporal language it would be meaningful to say that Socrates is mortal because all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, even though Socrates has been dead many centuries. But if we cannot describe time either by a language containing tenses or by a tenseless language, how shall we symbolize it?

He feels the curious doubleness of self, the sense of having been here before, and knows it is flashback. Some comfort in that. He is a passenger in his own skull, looking out through the eyes of John Skein on an event that he has already experienced, and which he now is powerless to alter.

His office. All its gilded magnificence. A crystal dome at the summit of Kenyatta Tower. With the amplifiers on he can see as far as Serengeti in one direction, Mombasa in another. Count the fleas on an elephant in Tsavo Park. A wall of light on the east-southeast face of the dome, housing his data-access units. No one can stare at that wall more than thirty seconds without suffering intensely from a surfeit of information. Except Skein; he drains nourishment from it, hour after hour.

As he slides into the soul of that earlier Skein he takes a brief joy in the sight of his office, like Aeneas relishing a vision of unfallen Troy, like Adam looking back into Eden. How good it was. That broad sweet desk with its subtle components dedicated to his service. The gentle psychosensitive carpet, so useful and so beautiful. The undulating
ribbon-sculpture gliding in and out of the dome’s skin, undergoing molecular displacement each time and forever exhibiting the newest of its infinity of possible patterns. A rich man’s office; he was unabashed in his pursuit of elegance. He had earned the right to luxury through the intelligent use of his innate skills. Returning now to that lost dome of wonders, he quickly seizes his moment of satisfaction, aware that shortly some souring scene of subtraction will be replayed for him, one of the stages of the darkening and withering of his life. But which one?

“Send in Coustakis,” he hears himself say, and his words give him the answer. That one. He will again watch his own destruction. Surely there is no further need to subject him to this particular reenactment. He has been through it at least seven times; he is losing count. An endless spiralling track of torment.

Coustakis is bald, blue-eyed, sharp-nosed, with the desperate look of a man who is near the end of his first go-round and is not yet sure that he will be granted a second. Skein guesses that he is about seventy. The man is unlikable: he dresses coarsely, moves in aggressive blurting little strides, and shows in every gesture and glance that he seethes with envy of the opulence with which Skein surrounds himself. Skein feels no need to like his clients, though. Only to respect. And Coustakis is brilliant; he commands respect.

Skein says, “My staff and I have studied your proposal in great detail. It’s a cunning scheme.”

“You’ll help me?”

“There are risks for me,” Skein points out. “Nissenson has a powerful ego. So do you. I could get hurt. The whole concept of synergy involves risk for the Communicator. My fees are calculated accordingly.”

“Nobody expects a Communicator to be cheap,” Coustakis mutters.

“I’m not. But I think you’ll be able to afford me. The question is whether I can afford you.”

“You’re very cryptic, Mr. Skein. Like all oracles.”

Skein smiles. “I’m not an oracle, I’m afraid. Merely a conduit through whom connections are made. I can’t foresee the future.”

“You can evaluate probabilities.”

“Only concerning my own welfare. And I’m capable of arriving at an incorrect evaluation.”

Coustakis fidgets. “Will you help me or won’t you?”

“The fee,” Skein says, “is half a million down, plus an equity
position of fifteen percent in the corporation you’ll establish with the contacts I provide.”

Coustakis gnaws at his lower lip. “So much?”

“Bear in mind that I’ve got to split my fee with Nissenson. Consultants like him aren’t cheap.”

“Even so. Ten percent.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Coustakis. I really thought we were past the point of negotiation in this transaction. It’s going to be a busy day for me, and so—” Skein passes his hand over a black rectangle on his desk and a section of the floor silently opens, uncovering the dropshaft access. He nods toward it. The carpet reveals the colors of Coustakis’s mental processes: black for anger, green for greed, red for anxiety, yellow for fear, blue for temptation, all mixed together in the hashed pattern betraying the calculations now going on in his mind. Coustakis will yield. Nevertheless Skein proceeds with the charade of standing, gesturing toward the exit, trying to usher his visitor out. “All right,” Coustakis says explosively, “fifteen percent!”

Skein instructs his desk to extrude a contract cube. He says, “Place your hand here, please,” and as Coustakis touches the cube he presses his own palm against its opposite face. At once the cube’s sleek crystalline surface darkens and roughens as the double sensory output bombards it. Skein says, “Repeat after me. I, Nicholas Coustakis, whose handprint and vibration pattern are being imprinted in this contract as I speak—”

“I, Nicholas Coustakis, whose handprint and vibration pattern are being imprinted in this contract as I speak—”

“—do knowingly and willingly assign to John Skein Enterprises, as payment for professional services to be rendered, an equity interest in Coustakis Transport Ltd or any successor corporation amounting to—”

“—do knowingly and willingly assign—”

They drone on in turns through a description of Coustakis’s corporation and the irrevocable nature of Skein’s part ownership in it. Then Skein files the contract cube and says, “If you’ll phone your bank and put your thumb on the cash part of the transaction, I’ll make contact with Nissenson and you can get started.”

“Half a million?”

“Half a million.”

“You know I don’t have that kind of money.”

“Let’s not waste time, Mr. Coustakis. You have assets. Pledge them as collateral. Credit is easily obtained.”

Scowling, Coustakis applies for the loan, gets it, transfers the funds to Skein’s account. The process takes eight minutes; Skein uses the time to review Coustakis’s ego profile. It displeases Skein to have to exert such sordid economic pressure; but the service he offers does, after all, expose him to dangers, and he must cushion the risk by high guarantees, in case some mishap should put him out of business.

“Now we can proceed,” Skein says, when the transaction is done.

Coustakis has almost invented a system for the economical instantaneous transportation of matter. It will not, unfortunately, ever be useful for living things, since the process involves the destruction of the material being shipped and its virtually simultaneous reconstitution elsewhere. The fragile entity that is the soul cannot withstand the withering blast of Coustakis’s transmitter’s electron beam. But there is tremendous potential in the freight business; the Coustakis transmitter will be able to send cabbages to Mars, computers to Pluto, and, given the proper linkage facilities, it should be able to reach the inhabited extrasolar planets.

However, Coustakis has not yet perfected his system. For five years he has been stymied by one impassable problem: keeping the beam tight enough between transmitter and receiver. Beamspread has led to chaos in his experiments; marginal straying results in the loss of transmitted information, so that that which is being sent invariably arrives incomplete. Coustakis has depleted his resources in the unsuccessful search for a solution, and thus has been forced to the desperate and costly step of calling in a Communicator.

For a price, Skein will place him in contact with someone who can solve his problem. Skein has a network of consultants on several worlds, experts in technology and finance and philology and nearly everything else. Using his own mind as the focal nexus, Skein will open telepathic communion between Coustakis and a consultant.

“Get Nissenson into a receptive state,” he orders his desk.

Coustakis, blinking rapidly, obviously uneasy, says, “First let me get it clear. This man will see everything that’s in my mind? He’ll get access to my secrets?”

“No. No. I filter the communion with great care. Nothing will pass from your mind to his except the nature of the problem you want him to tackle. Nothing will come back from his mind to yours except the answer.”

“And if he doesn’t have the answer?”

“He will.”

Skein gives no refunds in the event of failure, but he has never had a failure. He does not accept jobs that he feels will be inherently impossible to handle. Either Nissenson will see the solution Coustakis has been overlooking, or else he will make some suggestion that will nudge Coustakis toward finding the solution himself. The telepathic communion is the vital element. Mere talking would never get anywhere. Coustakis and Nissenson could stare at blueprints together for months, pound computers side by side for years, debate the difficulty with each other for decades, and still they might not hit on the answer. But the communion creates a synergy of minds that is more than a doubling of the available brainpower. A union of perceptions, a heightening, that always produces that mystic flash of insight, that leap of the intellect.

“And if he goes into the transmission business for himself afterward?” Coustakis asks.

“He’s bonded,” Skein says curtly. “No chance of it. Let’s go, now. Up and together.”

The desk reports that Nissenson, half the world away in São Paulo, is ready. Skein’s power does not vary with distance. Quickly he throws Coustakis into the receptive condition, and swings around to face the brilliant lights of his data-access units. Those sparkling, shifting little blazes kindle his gift, jabbing at the electrical rhythms of his brain until he is lifted into the energy level that permits the opening of a communion. As he starts to go up, the other Skein who is watching, the time-displaced prisoner behind his forehead, tries frenziedly to prevent him from entering the fatal linkage. Don’t. Don’t. You’ll overload. They’re too strong for you. Easier to halt a planet in its orbit, though. The course of the past is frozen; all this has already happened; the Skein who cries out in silent anguish is merely an observer, necessarily passive, here to view the maiming of his earlier self.

Skein reaches forth one tendril of his mind and engages Nissenson. With another tendril he snares Coustakis. Steadily, now, he draws the two tendrils together.

There is no way to predict the intensity of the forces that will shortly course through his brain. He has done what he could, checking the ego profiles of his client and the consultant, but that really tells him little. What Coustakis and Nissenson may be as individuals hardly matters; it is what they may become in communion that he must fear. Synergistic intensities are unpredictable. He has lived for a lifetime and a half with the possibility of a burnout.

The tendrils meet.

Skein the observer winces and tries to armor himself against the shock. But there is no way to deflect it. Out of Coustakis’s mind flows a description of the matter transmitter and a clear statement of the beam-spread problem; Skein shoves it along to Nissenson, who begins to work on a solution. But when their minds join it is immediately
evident that their combined strength will be more than Skein can control. This time the synergy will destroy him. But he cannot disengage; he has no mental circuitbreaker. He is caught, trapped, impaled. The entity that is Coustakis/Nissenson will not let go of him, for that would mean its own destruction. A wave of mental energy goes rippling and dancing along the vector of communion from Coustakis to Nissenson and goes bouncing back, pulsating and gaining strength, from Nissenson to Coustakis. A fiery oscillation is set up. Skein sees what is happening; he has become the amplifier of his own doom. The torrent of energy continues to gather power each time it reverberates from Coustakis to Nissenson, from Nissenson to Coustakis. Powerless, Skein watches the energy-pumping effect building up a mighty charge. The discharge is bound to come soon, and he will be the one who must receive it. How long? How long? The juggernaut fills the corridors of his mind. He ceases to know which end of the circuit is Nissenson, which is Coustakis; he perceives only two shining walls of mental power, between which he is stretched ever thinner, a twanging wire of ego, heating up, heating up, glowing now, emitting a searing blast of heat, particles of identity streaming away from him like so many liberated ions—

Then he lies numb and dazed on the floor of his office, grinding his face into the psychosensitive carpet, while Coustakis barks over and over, “Skein? Skein? Skein? Skein?”

Like any other chronometric device, our inner clocks are subject to their own peculiar disorders and, in spite of the substantial concordance between private and public time, discrepancies may occur as the result of sheer inattention. Mach noted that if a doctor focuses his attention on the patient’s blood, it may seem to him to squirt out before the lancet enters the skin and, for similar reasons, the feebler of two stimuli presented simultaneously is usually perceived later … Normal life requires the capacity to recall experiences in a sequence corresponding, roughly at least, to the order in which they actually occurred. It requires in addition that our potential recollections should be reasonably accessible to consciousness. These potential recollections mean not only a perpetuation within us of representations of the past, but also a ceaseless interplay between such representations and the uninterrupted input of present information from the external world. Just as our past may be at the service of our present, so the present may be remotely controlled by our past: in the words of Shelley, “Swift as a Thought by the snake Memory stung.”

“Skein? Skein? Skein? Skein?”

His bottle is open and they are helping him out. His cabin is full of intruders. Skein recognizes the captain’s robot, the medic, and a couple of passengers, the little swarthy man from Pingalore and the woman from Globe Fifteen. The cabin door is open and more people are coming in. The medic makes a cuff-shooting gesture and a blinding haze of metallic white particles wraps itself about Skein’s head. The little tingling prickling sensations spur him to wakefulness. “You didn’t respond when the bottle told you it was all right,” the medic explains. “We’re through the canal.”

“Was it a good passage? Fine. Fine. I must have dozed.”

“If you’d like to come to the infirmary—routine check, only—put you through the diagnostat—”

“No. No. Will you all please go? I assure you, I’m quite all right.”

Reluctantly, clucking over him, they finally leave. Skein gulps cold water until his head is clear. He plants himself flatfooted in mid-cabin, trying to pick up some sensation of forward motion. The ship now is travelling at something like fifteen million miles a second. How long is fifteen million miles? How long is a second? From Rome to Naples it was a morning’s drive on the autostrada. From Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was the time between twilight and darkness. San Francisco to San Diego spanned lunch to dinner by superpod. As I slide my right foot two inches forward we traverse fifteen million miles. From where to where? And why? He has not seen Earth in twenty-six months. At the end of this voyage his remaining funds will be exhausted. Perhaps he will have to make his home in the Abbondanza system; he has no return ticket. But of course he can travel to his heart’s discontent within his own skull, whipping from point to point along the timeline in the grip of the fugues.

He goes quickly from his cabin to the recreation lounge.

The ship is a second-class vessel, neither lavish nor seedy. It carries about twenty passengers, most of them, like him, bound outward on one-way journeys. He has not talked directly to any of them, but he has done considerable eavesdropping in the lounge, and by now can tag each one of them with the proper dull biography. The wife bravely joining her pioneer husband, whom she has not seen for half a decade. The remittance man under orders to place ten thousand light-years, at the very least, between himself and his parents. The glittery-eyed entrepreneur, a Phoenician merchant sixty centuries after his proper era, off to carve an empire as a middleman’s middleman. The tourists. The bureaucrat. The colonel. Among this collection Skein stands out in sharp relief; he is the only one who has not made an effort to know and be known, and the mystery of his reserve tantalizes them.

He carries the fact of his crackup with him like some wrinkled dangling yellowed wen. When his eyes meet those of any of the others he says silently, You see my deformity? I am my own survivor. I have been destroyed and lived to look back on it. Once I was a man of wealth and power, and look at me now. But I ask for no pity. Is that understood?

Hunching at the bar, Skein pushes the node for filtered rum. His drink arrives, and with it comes the remittance man, handsome, young, insinuating. Giving Skein a confidential wink, as if to say, I know. You’re on the run, too.

“From Earth, are you?” he says to Skein.

“Formerly.”

“I’m Pid Rocklin.”

“John Skein.”

“What were you doing there?”

“On Earth?” Skein shrugs. “A Communicator. I retired four years ago.”

“Oh.” Rocklin summons a drink. “That’s good work, if you have
the gift.”

“I had the gift,” Skein says. The unstressed past tense is as far into self-pity as he will go. He drinks and pushes for another one. A great gleaming screen over the bar shows the look of space: empty, here beyond the Panama Canal, although yesterday a million suns blazed
on that ebony rectangle. Skein imagines he can hear the whoosh of hydrogen molecules scraping past the hull at eighty lights. He sees them as blobs of brightness millions of miles long, going zip! and zip! and zip! as the ship spurts along. Abruptly a purple nimbus envelopes him and he drops into a flashforward fugue so quickly there is not even time for the usual futile resistance. “Hey, what’s the matter?” Pid Rocklin says, reaching for him. “Are you all—” and Skein loses the universe.

He is on the world that he takes to be Abbondanza VI, and his familiar companion, the skull-faced man, stands beside him at the edge of an oily orange sea. They appear to be having the debate about time once again. The skull-faced man must be at least a hundred and twenty years old; his skin lies against his bones with, seemingly, no flesh at all under it, and his face is all nostrils and burning eyes. Bony sockets, sharp shelves for cheekbones, a bald dome of a skull. The neck no more than wrist-thick, rising out of shriveled shoulders. Saying, “Won’t you ever come to see that causality is merely an illusion, Skein? The notion that there’s a consecutive series of events is nothing but a fraud. We impose form on our lives, we talk of time’s arrow, we say that there’s a flow from A through G and Q to Z, we make believe everything is nicely linear. But it isn’t, Skein. It isn’t.”

“So you keep telling me.”

“I feel an obligation to awaken your mind to the truth. G can come before A, and Z before both of them. Most of us don’t like to perceive it that way, so we arrange things in what seems like a more logical pattern, just as a novelist will put the motive before the murder and the murder before the arrest. But the universe isn’t a novel. We can’t make nature imitate art. It’s all random, Skein, random, random! Look there. You see what’s drifting on the sea?”

On the orange waves tosses the bloated corpse of a shaggy blue beast. Upturned saucery eyes, drooping snout, thick limbs. Why is it not waterlogged by now? What keeps it afloat?

The skull-faced man says, “Time is an ocean, and events come drifting to us as randomly as dead animals on the waves. We filter them. We screen out what doesn’t make sense and admit them to our consciousness in what seems to be the right sequence.” He laughs. “The grand delusion! The past is nothing but a series of films slipping unpredictably into the future. And vice versa.”

“I won’t accept that,” Skein says stubbornly. “It’s a demonic, chaotic, nihilistic theory. It’s idiocy. Are we greybeards before we’re children? Do we die before we’re born? Do trees devolve into seeds? Deny linearity all you like. I won’t go along.”

“You can say that after all you’ve experienced?”

Skein shakes his head. “I’ll go on saying it. What I’ve been going through is a mental illness. Maybe I’m deranged, but the universe isn’t.”

“Contrary. You’ve only recently become sane and started to see things as they really are,” the skull-faced man insists. “The trouble is that you don’t want to admit the evidence you’ve begun to perceive. Your filters are down, Skein! You’ve shaken free of the illusion of linearity! Now’s your chance to show your resilience. Learn to live with the real reality. Stop this silly business of imposing an artificial order on the flow of time. Why should effect follow cause? Why shouldn’t the seed follow the tree? Why must you persist in holding tight to a useless, outworn, contemptible system of false evaluations of experience when you’ve managed to break free of the—”

“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

“—right, Skein?”

“What happened?”

“You started to fall off your stool,” Pid Rocklin says. “You turned absolutely white. I thought you were having some kind of a stroke.”

“How long was I unconscious?”

“Oh, three, four seconds, I suppose. I grabbed you and propped you up, and your eyes opened. Can I help you to your cabin? Or maybe you ought to go to the infirmary.”

“Excuse me,” Skein says hoarsely, and leaves the lounge.

When the hallucinations began, not long after the Coustakis overload, he assumed at first that they were memory disturbances produced by the fearful jolt he had absorbed. Quite clearly most of them involved scenes of his past, which he would relive, during the moments of fugue, with an intensity so brilliant that he felt he had actually been thrust back into time. He did not merely recollect, but rather he experienced the past anew, following a script from which he could not deviate as he spoke and felt and reacted. Such strange excursions into memory could be easily enough explained: his brain had been damaged, and it was heaving old segments of experience into view in some kind of attempt to clear itself of debris and heal the wounds. But while the flashbacks were comprehensible, the flashforwards were not, and he did not recognize them at all for what they actually were. Those scenes of himself wandering alien worlds, those phantom conversations with people he had never met, those views of spaceliner cabins and transit booths and unfamiliar hotels and passenger terminals, seemed merely to be fantasies, random fictions of his injured brain. Even when he started to notice that there was a consistent pattern to these feverish glimpses of the unknown, he still did not catch on. It appeared as though he was seeing himself performing a sort of quest, or perhaps a pilgrimage; the slices of unexperienced experience that he was permitted to see began to fit into a coherent structure of travel and seeking. And certain scenes and conversations recurred, yes, sometimes several times the same day, the script always the same, so that he began to learn a few of the scenes word for word. Despite the solid texture of these episodes, he persisted in thinking of them as mere brief flickering segments of nightmare. He could not imagine why the injury to his brain was causing him to have these waking dreams of long space voyages and unknown planets, so vivid and so momentarily real, but they seemed no more frightening to him than the equally vivid flashbacks.

Only after a while, when many months had passed since the Coustakis incident, did the truth strike him. One day he found himself living through an episode that he considered to be one of his fantasies. It was a minor thing, one that he had experienced, in whole or in part, seven or eight times. What he had seen, in fitful bursts of uninvited delusion, was himself in a public garden on some hot spring morning, standing before an immense baroque building while a grotesque group of nonhuman tourists filed past him in a weird creaking, clanking procession of inhalator suits and breather-wheels and ion-disperser masks. That was all. Then it happened that a harrowing legal snarl brought him to a city in North Carolina about fourteen months after the overload, and, after having put in his appearance at the courthouse, he set out on a long walk through the grimy, decayed metropolis, and came, as if by an enchantment, to a huge metal gate behind which he could see a dark sweep of lavish forest, oaks and rhododendrons and magnolias, laid out in an elegant formal manner. It was, according to a sign posted by the gate, the estate of a nineteenth-century millionaire, now open to all and preserved in its ancient state despite the encroachments of the city on its borders.

Skein bought a ticket and went in, on foot, hiking for what seemed like miles through cool leafy glades, until abruptly the path curved and he emerged into the bright sunlight and saw before him the great grey bulk of a colossal mansion, hundreds of rooms topped by parapets and spires, with a massive portico from which vast columns of stairs descended. In wonder he moved toward it, for this was the building of his frequent fantasy, and as he approached he beheld the red and green and purple figures crossing the portico, those coiled and gnarled and looping shapes he had seen before, the eerie horde of alien travellers here to take in the wonders of Earth. Heads without eyes, eyes without heads, multiplicities of limbs and absences of limbs, bodies like tumors and tumors like bodies, all the universe’s imagination on display in these agglomerated life forms, so strange and yet not at all strange to him. But this time it was no fantasy. It fit smoothly into the sequence of the events of the day, rather than dropping, dreamlike, intrusive, into that sequence. Nor did it fade after a few moments; the scene remained sharp, never leaving him to plunge back into “real” life. This was reality itself, and he had experienced it before.

Twice more in the next few weeks things like that happened to him, until at last he was ready to admit the truth to himself about his fugues, that he was experiencing flashforwards as well as flashbacks, that he was being subjected to glimpses of his own future.

T’ang, the high king of the Shang, asked Hsia Chi saying, “In the beginning, were there already individual things?” Hsia Chi replied,
“If there were no things then, how could there be any now? If later generations should pretend that there had been no things in our time, would they be right?” Tang said, “Have things then no before and no after?” To which Hsia Chi replied, “The ends and the origins of things have no limit from which they began. The origin of one thing may be considered the end of another; the end of one may be considered the origin of the next. Who can distinguish accurately between these cycles? What lies beyond all things, and before all events, we cannot know.”

They reach and enter the Perseus relay booster, which is a whirling celestial anomaly structurally similar to the Panama Canal but not nearly so potent, and it kicks the ship’s velocity to just above a hundred lights. That is the voyage’s final acceleration; the ship will maintain this rate for two and a half days, until it clocks in at Scylla, the main deceleration station for this part of the galaxy, where it will be seized by a spongy web of forces twenty light-minutes in diameter and slowed to sublight velocities for the entry into the Abbondanza system.

Skein spends nearly all of this period in his cabin, rarely eating and sleeping very little. He reads, almost constantly, obsessively dredging from the ship’s extensive library a wide and capricious assortment of books. Rilke. Kafka. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World. Lowry, Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place. Elias. Razhuminin. Dickey. Pound. Fraisse, The Psychology of Time. Greene, Dream and Delusion. Poe. Shakespeare. Marlowe. Tourneur. The Waste Land. Ulysses. Heart of Darkness. Bury, The Idea of Progress. Jung. Buechner. Pirandello. The Magic Mountain. Ellis, The Rack. Cervantes. Blenheim. Fierst. Keats. Nietzsche. His mind swims with images and bits of verse, with floating sequences of dialogue, with unscaffolded dialectics. He dips into each work briefly, magpielike, seeking bright scraps. The words form a scaly impasto on the inner surface of his skull. He finds that this heavy verbal overdose helps, to some slight extent, to fight off the fugues; his mind is weighted, perhaps, bound by this leaden clutter of borrowed genius to the moving line of the present, and during his debauch of reading he finds himself shifting off that line less frequently than in the recent past.

His mind whirls. Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—A rope over an abyss. My patience are exhausted. See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! One drop would save my soul. I had not thought death had undone so many. These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Hoogspanning. Levensgevaar. Peligro de Muerte. Electricidad. Danger. Give me my spear. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. You like this garden? Why is it yours? We evict those who destroy! And then went down to the ship, set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea. There is no “official” theory of time, defined in creeds or universally agreed upon among Christians. Christianity is not concerned with the purely scientific aspects of the subject nor, within wide limits, with its philosophical analysis, except insofar as it is committed to a fundamentally realist view and could not admit, as some Eastern philosophies have done, that temporal existence is mere illusion. A shudder in the loins engenders there the broken wall, the burning roof and tower and Agamemnon dead. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire? These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Hieronymo’s mad again. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken. It has also lately been postulated that the physical concept of information is identical with a phenomenon of reversal of entropy. The psychologist must add a few remarks here: It does not seem convincing to me that information is eo ipso identical with a pouvoir d’organisation which undoes entropy. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih.

Nevertheless, once the ship is past Scylla and slowing toward the Abbondanza planets, the periods of fugue become frequent once again, so that he lives entrapped, shuttling between the flashing shadows of yesterday and tomorrow.

After the Coustakis overload he tried to go on in the old way, as best he could. He gave Coustakis a refund without even being asked, for he had been of no service, nor could he ever be. Instantaneous transportation of matter would have to wait. But Skein took other clients. He could still make the communion, after a fashion, and when the nature of the task was sufficiently low-level he could even deliver a decent synergetic response.

Often his work was unsatisfactory, however. Contacts would break at awkward moments, or, conversely, his filter mechanism would weaken and he would allow the entire contents of his client’s mind to flow into that of his consultant. The results of such disasters were chaotic, involving him in heavy medical expenses and sometimes in damage suits. He was forced to place his fees on a contingency basis: no synergy, no pay. About half the time he earned nothing for his output of energy. Meanwhile his overhead remained the same as always: the domed office, the network of consultants, the research staff, and the rest. His effort to remain in business was eating rapidly into the bank accounts he had set aside against just such a time of storm.

They could find no organic injury to his brain. Of course, so little was known about a Communicator’s gift that it was impossible to determine much by medical analysis. If they could not locate the centre center from which a Communicator powered his communions, how could they detect the place where he had been hurt? The medical archives were of no value; there had been eleven previous cases of overload, but each instance was physiologically unique. They told him he would eventually heal, and sent him away. Sometimes the doctors gave him silly therapies: counting exercises, rhythmic blinkings, hopping on his left leg and then his right, as if he had a stroke. But he had not had a stroke.

For a time he was able to maintain his business on the momentum of his reputation. Then, as word got around that he had been hurt
and was no longer any good, clients stopped coming. Even the contingency basis for fees failed to attract them. Within six months he found that he was lucky to find a client a week. He reduced his rates, and that seemed only to make things worse, so he raised them to something not far below what they had been at the time of the overload. For a while the pace of business increased, as if people were getting the impression that Skein had recovered. He gave such spotty service, though. Blurred and wavering communions, unanticipated positive feedbacks, filtering problems, information deficiencies, redundancy surpluses—”You take your mind in your hands when you go to Skein,” they were saying now.

The fugues added to his professional difficulties.

He never knew when he would snap into hallucination. It might happen during a communion, and often did. Once he dropped back to the moment of the Coustakis-Nissenson hookup and treated a terrified client to a replay of his overload. Once, although he did not understand at the time what was happening, he underwent a flashforward and carried the client with him to a scarlet jungle on a formaldehyde world, and when Skein slipped back to reality the client remained in the scarlet jungle. There was a damage suit over that one, too.

Temporal dislocation plagued him into making poor guesses. He took on clients whom he could not possibly serve and wasted his time on them. He turned away people whom he might have been able to help to his own profit. Since he was no longer anchored firmly to his timeline, but drifted in random oscillations of twenty years or more in either direction, he forfeited the keen sense of perspective on which he had previously founded his professional judgments. He grew haggard and lean, also. He passed through a tempest of spiritual doubts that amounted to total submission and then total rejection of faith within the course of four months. He changed lawyers almost weekly. He liquidated assets with invariably catastrophic timing to pay his cascading bills.

A year and a half after the overload, he formally renounced his registration and closed his office. It took six months more to settle the remaining damage suits. Then, with what was left of his money, he bought a spaceliner ticket and set out to search for a world with purple sand and blue-leaved trees, where, unless his fugues had played him false, he might be able to arrange for the repair of his broken mind.

Now the ship has returned to the conventional fourspace and dawdles planetward at something rather less than half the speed of light. Across the screens there spreads a necklace of stars; space is crowded here. The captain will point out Abbondanza to anyone who asks: a lemon-colored sun, bigger than that of Earth, surrounded by a dozen bright planetary pips. The passengers are excited. They buzz, twitter, speculate, anticipate. No one is silent except Skein. He is aware of many love affairs; he has had to reject several offers just in the past three days. He has given up reading and is trying to purge his mind of all he has stuffed into it. The fugues have grown worse. He has to write notes to himself, saying things like You are a passenger aboard a ship heading for Abbondanza VI, and will be landing in a few days, so that he does not forget which of his three entangled timelines is the true one.

Suddenly he is with Nilla on the island in the Gulf of Mexico, getting aboard the little excursion boat. Time stands still here; it could almost be the twentieth century. The frayed, sagging cords of the rigging. The lumpy engine inefficiently converted from internal combustion to turbines. The mustachioed Mexican bandits who will be their guides today. Nilla, nervously coiling her long blonde hair, saying, “Will I get seasick, John? The boat rides right in the water, doesn’t it? It won’t even hover a little bit?”

“Terribly archaic,” Skein says. “That’s why we’re here.”

The captain gestures them aboard. Juan, Francisco, Sebastián. Brothers. Los hermanos. Yards of white teeth glistening below the drooping moustaches. With a terrible roar the boat moves away from the dock. Soon the little town of crumbling pastel buildings is out of sight and they are heading jaggedly eastward along the coast, green shoreward water on their left, the blue depths on the right. The morning sun coming up hard. “Could I sunbathe?” Nilla asks. Unsure of herself; he has never seen her this way, so hesitant, so abashed. Mexico has robbed her of her New York assurance. “Go ahead,” Skein says. “Why not?” She drops her robe. Underneath she wears only a waist-strap; her heavy breasts look white and vulnerable in the tropic glare, and the small nipples are a faded pink. Skein sprays her with protective sealant and she sprawls out on the deck. Los hermanos stare hungrily and talk to each other in low rumbling tones. Not Spanish. Mayan, perhaps? The natives have never learned to adopt the tourists’ casual nudity here. Nilla, obviously still uneasy, rolls over and lies face down. Her broad smooth back glistens.

Juan and Francisco yell. Skein follows their pointing fingers. Porpoises! A dozen of them, frisking around the bow, keeping just ahead of the boat, leaping high and slicing down into the blue water. Nilla gives a little cry of joy and rushes to the side to get a closer look. Throwing her arm self-consciously across her bare breasts. “You don’t need to do that,” Skein murmurs. She keeps herself covered. “How lovely they are,” she says softly. Sebastián comes up beside them. “Amigos,” he says. “They are. My friends.” The cavorting porpoises eventually disappear. The boat bucks bouncily onward, keeping close to the island’s beautiful empty palmy shore. Later they anchor, and he and Nilla swim masked, spying on the coral gardens. When they haul themselves on deck again it is almost noon. The sun is terrible. “Lunch?” Francisco asks. “We make you good lunch now?” Nilla laughs. She is no longer hiding her body. “I’m starved!” she cries.

“We make you good lunch,” Francisco says, grinning, and he and Juan go over the side. In the shallow water they are clearly visible near the white sand of the bottom. They have spear guns; they hold their breaths and prowl. Too late Skein realizes what they are doing. Francisco hauls a fluttering spiny lobster out from behind a rock. Juan impales a huge pale crab. He grabs three conchs also, surfaces, dumps his prey on the deck. Francisco arrives with the lobster. Juan, below again, spears a second lobster. The animals are not dead; they crawl sadly in circles on the deck as they dry. Appalled, Skein turns to Sebastián and says, “Tell them to stop. We’re not that hungry.” Sebastián, preparing some kind of salad, smiles and shrugs. Francisco has brought up another crab, bigger than the first. “Enough,” Skein says. “Basta! Basta!” Juan, dripping, tosses down three more conchs. “You pay us good,” he says. “We give you good lunch.” Skein shakes his head. The deck is becoming a slaughterhouse for ocean life. Sebastián now energetically slits conch shells, extracts the meat, drops it into a vast bowl to marinate in a yellow-green fluid. “Basta!” Skein yells: Is that the right word in Spanish? He knows it’s right in Italian. Los hermanos look amused. The sea is full of life, they seem to be telling him. We give you good lunch. Suddenly Francisco erupts from the water, bearing something immense. A turtle! Forty, fifty pounds! The joke has gone too far. “No,” Skein says. “Listen, I have to forbid this. Those turtles are almost extinct. Do you understand that? Muerto. Perdido. Desaparecido. I won’t eat a turtle. Throw it back. Throw it back.” Francisco smiles. He shakes his head. Deftly he binds the turtle’s flippers with rope. Juan says, “Not for lunch, señor. For us. For to sell. Mucho dinero.” Skein can do nothing. Francisco and Sebastián have begun to hack up the crabs and lobsters. Juan slices peppers into the bowl where the conchs are marinating. Pieces of dead animals litter the deck. “Oh, I’m starving,” Nilla says. Her waist-strap is off too, now. The turtle watches the whole scene, beady-eyed. Skein shudders. Auschwitz, he thinks. Buchenwald. For the animals it’s Buchenwald every day.

Purple sand, blue-leaved trees. An orange sea gleaming not far to the west under a lemon sun. “It isn’t much farther,” the skull-faced man says. “You can make it. Step by step by step is how.”

“I’m winded,” Skein says. “Those hills—”

“I’m twice your age, and I’m doing fine.”

“You’re in better shape. I’ve been cooped up on spaceships for months and months.”

“Just a short way on,” says the skull-faced man. “About a hundred meters from the shore.”

Skein struggles on. The heat is frightful. He has trouble getting a footing in the shifting sand. Twice he trips over black vines whose fleshy runners form a mat a few centimeters under the surface; loops of the vines stick up here and there. He even suffers a brief fugue, a seven-second flashback to a day in Jerusalem. Somewhere at the core of his mind he is amused by that: a flashback within a flashforward. Encapsulated concentric hallucinations. When he comes out of it, he finds himself getting to his feet and brushing sand from his clothing. Ten steps onward the skull-faced man halts him and says, “There it is. Look there, in the pit.”

Skein sees a funnel-shaped crater right in front of him, perhaps five meters in diameter at ground level and dwindling to about half that width at its bottom, some six or seven meters down. The pit strikes him as a series of perfect circles making up a truncated cone. Its sides are smooth and firm, almost glazed, and the sand has a brown tinge. In the pit, resting peacefully on the flat floor, is something that looks like a golden amoeba the size of a large cat. A row of round blue-black eyes crosses the hump of its back. From the perimeter of its body comes a soft green radiance.

“Go down to it,” the skull-faced man says. “The force of its power falls off with the cube of the distance; from up here you can’t feel it.
Go down. Let it take you over. Fuse with it. Make communion, Skein, make communion!”

“And will it heal me? So that I’ll function as I did before the trouble started?”

“If you let it heal you, it will. That’s what it wants to do. It’s a completely benign organism. It thrives on repairing broken souls. Let it into your head, let it find the damaged place. You can trust it. Go down.”

Skein trembles on the edge of the pit. The creature below flows and eddies, becoming first long and narrow, then high and squat, then resuming its basically circular form. Its color deepens almost to scarlet, and its radiance shifts toward yellow. As if preening and stretching itself. It seems to be waiting for him. It seems eager. This is what he has sought so long, going from planet to wearying planet. The skull-faced man, the purple sand, the pit, the creature. Skein slips his sandals off. What have I to lose? He sits for a moment on the pit’s rim; then he shimmies down, sliding part of the way, and lands softly, close beside the being that awaits him. And immediately feels its power.

He enters the huge desolate cavern that is the cathedral of Haghia Sophia. A few Turkish guides lounge hopefully against the vast marble pillars. Tourists shuffle about, reading to each other from cheap plastic guidebooks. A shaft of light enters from some improbable aperture and splinters against the Moslem pulpit. It seems to Skein that he hears the tolling of bells and feels incense prickling at his nostrils. But how can that be? No Christian rites have been performed here in a thousand years. A Turk looms before him. “Show you the mosyics?” he says. Mosyics. “Help you understand this marvelous building? A dollar. No? Maybe change money? A good rate. Dollars, marks, Eurocredits, what? You speak English? Show you the mosyics?” The Turk fades. The bells grow louder. A row of bowed priests in white silk robes files past the altar, chanting in—what? Greek? The ceiling is encrusted with gems. Gold plate gleams everywhere. Skein senses the terrible complexity of the cathedral, teeming now with life, a whole universe engulfed in this gloom, a thousand chapels packed with worshippers, long lines waiting to urinate in the crypts, a marketplace in the balcony, jeweled necklaces changing hands with low murmurs of negotiation, babies being born behind the alabaster sarcophagi, the bells tolling, dukes nodding to one another, clouds of incense swirling toward the dome, the figures in the mosaics alive, making the sign of the Cross, smiling, blowing kisses, the pillars moving now, becoming fat-middled as they bend from side to side, the entire colossal structure shifting and flowing and melting. And a ballet of Turks. “Show you the mosyics?” “Change money?” “Postcards? Souvenir of Istanbul?” A plump, pink American face: “You’re John Skein, aren’t you? The Communicator? We worked together on the big fusion-chamber merger in ‘53.” Skein shakes his head. “It must be that you are mistaken,” he says, speaking in Italian. “I am not he. Pardon. Pardon.” And joins the line of chanting priests.

Purple sand, blue-leaved trees. An orange sea under a lemon sun. Looking out from the top deck of the terminal, an hour after landing, Skein sees a row of towering hotels rising along the nearby beach. At once he feels the wrongness: there should be no hotels. The right planet has no such towers; therefore this is another of the wrong ones.

He suffers from complete disorientation as he attempts to place himself in sequence. Where am I? Aboard a liner heading toward Abbondanza VI. What do I see? A world I have previously visited. Which one? The one with the hotels. The third out of seven, isn’t it?

He has seen this planet before, in flashforwards. Long before he left Earth to begin his quest he glimpsed those hotels, that beach. Now he views it in flashback. That perplexes him. He must try to see himself as a moving point travelling through time, viewing the scenery now from this perspective, now from that.

He watches his earlier self at the terminal. Once it was his future self. How confusing, how needlessly muddling! “I’m looking for an old Earthman,” he says. “He must be a hundred, hundred-twenty years old. A face like a skull—no flesh at all, really. A brittle man. No? Well, can you tell me, does this planet have a life-form about this big, a kind of blob of golden jelly, that lives in pits down by the seashore, and—no? No? Ask someone else, you say? Of course. And perhaps a hotel room? As long as I’ve come all this way.”

He is getting tired of finding the wrong planets. What folly this is, squandering his last savings on a quest for a world seen in a dream! He would have expected planets with purple sand and blue-leaved trees to be uncommon, but no, in an infinite universe one can find a dozen of everything, and now he has wasted almost half his money and close to a year, visiting two planets and this one and not finding what he seeks.

He goes to the hotel they arrange for him.

The beach is packed with sunbathers, most of them from Earth. Skein walks among them. “Look,” he wants to say, “I have this trouble with my brain, an old injury, and it gives me these visions of myself in the past and future, and one of the visions I see is a place where there’s a skull-faced man who takes me to a kind of amoeba in a pit that can heal me, do you follow? And it’s a planet with purple sand and blue-leaved trees, just like this one, and I figure if I keep going long enough I’m bound to find it and the skull-face and the amoeba, do you follow me? And maybe this is the planet after all, only I’m in the wrong part of it. What should I do? What hope do you think I really have?” This is the third world. He knows that he must visit a number of wrong ones before he finds the right one. But how many? How many? And when will he know that he has the right one?

Standing silent on the beach, he feels confusion come over him,
and drops into fugue, and is hurled to another world. Purple sand, blue-leaved trees. A fat, friendly Pingalorian consul. “A skull-faced man? No, I can’t say I know of any.” Which world is this, Skein wonders? One that I have already visited, or one that I have not yet come to? The manifold layers of illusion dazzle him. Past and future and present lie like a knot around his throat. Shifting planes of reality; intersecting films of event. Purple sand, blue-leaved trees. Which planet is this? Which one? Which one? He is back on the crowded beach. A lemon sun. An orange sea. He is back in his cabin on the spaceliner. He sees a note in his own handwriting: You are a passenger aboard a ship heading for Abbondanza VI, and will be landing in a few days. So everything was a vision. Flashback? Flashforward? He is no longer able to tell. He is baffled by these identical worlds. Purple sand. Blue-leaved trees. He wishes he knew how to cry.

Instead of a client and a consultant for today’s communion, Skein has a client and a client. A man and a woman, Michaels and Miss Schumpeter. The communion is of an unusually intimate kind. Michaels has been married six times, and several of the marriages apparently have been dissolved under bitter circumstances. Miss Schumpeter, a woman of some wealth, loves Michaels but doesn’t entirely trust him; she wants a peep into his mind before she’ll put her thumb to the marital cube. Skein will oblige. The fee has already been credited to his account. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. If she does not like what she finds in her beloved’s soul, there may not be any marriage, but Skein will have been paid.

A tendril of his mind goes to Michaels, now. A tendril to Miss Schumpeter. Skein opens his filters. “Now you’ll meet for the first time,” he tells them. Michaels flows to her. Miss Schumpeter flows to him. Skein is merely the conduit. Through him pass the ambitions, betrayals, failures, vanities, deteriorations, disputes, treacheries, lusts, generosities, shames, and follies of these two human beings. If he wishes, he can examine the most private sins of Miss Schumpeter and the darkest yearnings of her future husband. But he does not care. He sees such things every day. He takes no pleasure in spying on the psyches of these two. Would a surgeon grow excited over the sight of Miss Schumpeter’s Fallopian tubes or Michaels’s pancreas? Skein is merely doing his job. He is no voyeur, simply a Communicator. He looks upon himself as a public utility.

When he severs the contact, Miss Schumpeter and Michaels both are weeping.

“I love you!” she wails.

“Get away from me!” he mutters.

Purple sand. Blue-leaved trees. Oily orange sea.

The skull-faced man says, “Won’t you ever come to see that causality is merely an illusion, Skein? The notion that there’s a consecutive series of events is nothing but a fraud. We impose form on our lives, we talk of time’s arrow, we say that there’s a flow from A through G and Q to Z, we make believe everything is nicely linear. But it isn’t, Skein. It isn’t.”

“So you keep telling me.”

“I feel an obligation to awaken your mind to the truth. G can come before A, and Z before both of them. Most of us don’t like to perceive it that way, so we arrange things in what seems like a more logical pattern, just as a novelist will put the motive before the murder and the murder before the arrest. But the universe isn’t a novel. We can’t make nature imitate art. It’s all random, Skein, random, random!”

“Half a million?”

“Half a million.”

“You know I don’t have that kind of money.”

“Let’s not waste time, Mr. Coustakis. You have assets. Pledge them as collateral. Credit is easily obtained.” Skein waits for the inventor to clear his loan. “Now we can proceed,” he says, and tells his desk, “Get Nissenson into a receptive state.”

Coustakis says, “First let me get it clear. This man will see everything that’s in my mind? He’ll get access to my secrets?”

“No. No. I filter the communion with great care. Nothing will pass from your mind to his except the nature of the problem you want him to tackle. Nothing will came come back from his mind to yours except the answer.”

“And if he doesn’t have the answer?”

“He will.”

“And if he goes into the transmission business for himself afterward?”

“He’s bonded,” Skein says curtly. “No chance of it. Let’s go, now. Up and together.”

“Skein? Skein? Skein? Skein?”

The wind is rising. The sand, blown aloft, stains the sky grey. Skein clambers from the pit and lies by its rim, breathing hard. The skull-faced man helps him get up.

Skein has seen this series of images hundreds of times. “How do you feel?” the skull-faced man asks.

“Strange. Good. My head seems so clear!”

“You had communion down there?”

“Oh, yes. Yes.”

“And?”

“I think I’m healed,” Skein says in wonder. “My strength is back. Before, you know, I felt cut down to the bone, a minimum version of myself. And now. And now.” He lets a tendril of consciousness slip forth. It meets the mind of the skull-faced man. Skein is aware of a glassy interface; he can touch the other mind, but he cannot enter it. “Are you a Communicator too?” Skein asks, awed.

“In a sense. I feel you touching me. You’re better, aren’t you?”

“Much. Much. Much.”

“As I told you. Now you have your second chance, Skein. Your gift has been restored. Courtesy of our friend in the pit. They love being helpful.”

“Skein? Skein? Skein? Skein?”

We conceive of time either as flowing or as enduring. The problem is how to reconcile these concepts. From a purely formalistic point of view there exists no difficulty, as these properties can be reconciled by means of the concept of a duratio successiva. Every unit of time measure has this characteristic of a flowing permanence: an hour streams by while it lasts and so long as it lasts. Its flowing is thus identical with its duration. Time, from this point of view, is transitory; but its passing away lasts.

In the early months of his affliction he experienced a great many scenes of flashforward while in fugue. He saw himself outside the nineteenth-century mansion, he saw himself in a dozen lawyers’ offices, he saw himself in hotels, terminals, spaceliners, he saw himself discussing the nature of time with the skull-faced man, he saw himself trembling on the edge of the pit, he saw himself emerging healed, he saw himself wandering from world to world, looking for the right one with purple sand and blue-leaved trees. As time unfolded most of these flash-forwards duly entered the flow of the present; he did come to the mansion, he did go to those hotels and terminals, he did wander those useless worlds. Now, as he approaches Abbondanza VI, he goes through a great many flashbacks and a relatively few flashforwards, and the flashforwards seem to be limited to a fairly narrow span of time, covering his landing on Abbondanza VI, his first meeting with the skull-faced man, his journey to the pit, and his emergence, healed, from the amoeba’s lair. Never anything beyond that final scene. He wonders if time is going to run out for him on Abbondanza VI.

The ship lands on Abbondanza VI half a day ahead of schedule. There are the usual decontamination procedures to endure, and while they are going on Skein rests in his cabin, counting minutes to liberty. He is curiously confident that this will be the world on which he finds the skull-faced man and the benign amoeba. Of course, he has felt that way before, looking out from other spaceliners at other planets of the proper coloration, and he has been wrong. But the intensity of his confidence is something new. He is sure that the end of his quest lies here.

“Debarkation beginning now,” the loudspeakers say.

He joins the line of outgoing passengers. The others smile, embrace, whisper; they have found friends or even mates on this voyage. He remains apart. No one says goodbye to him. He emerges into a brightly lit terminal, a great cube of glass that looks like all the other terminals scattered across the thousands of worlds that man has reached. He could be in Chicago or Johannesburg or Beirut: the scene is one of porters, reservations clerks, customs officials, hotel agents, taxi drivers, guides. A blight of sameness spreading across the universe. Stumbling through the customs gate, Skein finds himself set upon. Does he want a taxi, a hotel room, a woman, a man, a guide, a homestead plot, a servant, a ticket to Abbondanza VII, a private car, an interpreter, a bank, a telephone? The hubbub jolts Skein into three consecutive ten-second fugues, all flashbacks; he sees a rainy day in Tierra del Fuego, he conducts a communion to help a maker of sky-spectacles perfect the plot of his latest extravaganza, and he puts his palm to a cube in order to dictate contract terms to Nicholas Coustakis. Then Coustakis fades, the terminal reappears, and Skein realizes that someone has seized him by the left arm just above the elbow. Bony fingers dig painfully into his flesh. It is the skull-faced man. “Come with me,” he says. “I’ll take you where you want to go.”

“This isn’t just another flashforward, is it?” Skein asks, as he has watched himself ask so many times in the past. “I mean you’re really here to get me.”

The skull-faced man says, as Skein has heard him say so many times in the past, “No, this time it’s no flashforward. I’m really here to get you.”

“Thank God. Thank God. Thank God.”

“Follow along this way. You have your passport handy?”

The familiar words. Skein is prepared to discover he is merely in fugue, and expects to drop back into frustrating reality at any moment. But no. The scene does not waver. It holds firm. It holds. At last he has caught up with this particular scene, overtaking it and enclosing it, pearl-like, in the folds of the present. He is on the way out of the terminal. The skull-faced man helps him through the formalities. How withered he is! How fiery the eyes, how gaunt the face! Those frightening orbits of bone jutting through the skin of the forehead. That parched cheek. Skein listens for a dry rattle of ribs. One sturdy punch and there would be nothing left but a cloud of white dust, slowly settling.

“I know your difficulty,” the skull-faced man says. “You’ve been caught in entropy’s jaws. You’re being devoured. The injury to your mind—it’s tipped you into a situation you aren’t able to handle. You could handle it, if you’d only learn to adapt to the nature of the perceptions you’re getting now. But you won’t do that, will you? And you want to be healed. Well, you can be healed here, all right. More or less healed. I’ll take you to the place.”

“What do you mean, I could handle it, if I’d only learn to adapt?”

“Your injury has liberated you. It’s shown you the truth about time. But you refuse to see it.”

“What truth?” Skein asks flatly.

“You still try to think that time flows neatly from alpha to omega, from yesterday through today to tomorrow,” the skull-faced man
says, as they walk slowly through the terminal. “But it doesn’t. The idea of the forward flow of time is a deception we impose on ourselves in childhood. An abstraction, agreed upon by common convention, to make it easier for us to cope with phenomena. The truth is that events are random, that chronological flow is only our joint hallucination, that if time can be said to flow at all, it flows in all ‘directions’ at once. Therefore—”

“Wait,” Skein says. “How do you explain the laws of thermodynamics? Entropy increases, available energy constantly diminishes, the universe heads toward ultimate stasis.”

“Does it?”

“The second law of thermodynamics—”

“Is an abstraction,” the skull-faced man says, “which unfortunately fails to correspond with the situation in the true universe. It isn’t a divine law. It’s a mathematical hypothesis developed by men who weren’t able to perceive the real situation. They did their best to account for the data within a framework they could understand. Their laws are formulations of probability, based on conditions that hold within closed systems, and given the right closed system the second law is useful and illuminating. But in the universe as a whole it simply isn’t true. There is no arrow of time. Entropy does not necessarily increase. Natural processes can be reversible. Causes do not invariably precede effects. In fact, the concepts of cause and effect are empty. There are neither causes nor effects, but only events, spontaneously generated, which we arrange in our minds in comprehensible patterns of sequence.”

“No,” Skein mutters. “This is insanity!”

“There are no patterns. Everything is random.”

“No.”

“Why not admit it? Your brain has been injured. What was destroyed was the centre center of temporal perception, the node that humans use to impose this unreal order on events. Your time filter has burned out. The past and the future are as accessible to you as the present, Skein: you can go where you like, you can watch events drifting past as they really do. Only you haven’t been able to break up your old habits of thought. You still try to impose the conventional entropic order on things, even though you lack the mechanism to do it, now, and the conflict between what you perceive and what you think you perceive is driving you crazy. Eh?”

“How do you know so much about me?”

The skull-faced man chuckles. “I was injured in the same way as you. I was cut free from the timeline long ago, through the kind of overload you suffered. And I’ve had years to come to terms with the new reality. I was as terrified as you were, at first. But now I understand. I move about freely. I know things, Skein.” A rasping laugh. “You need rest, though. A room, a bed. Time to think things over. Come. There’s no rush now. You’re on the right planet; you’ll be all right soon.”

Further, the association of entropy increase with time’s arrow is in no sense circular; rather, it both tells us something about what will happen to natural systems in time, and about what the time order must be for a series of states of a system. Thus, we may often establish a time order among a set of events by use of the time-entropy association, free from any reference to clocks and magnitudes of time intervals from the present. In actual judgments of before-after we frequently do this on the basis of our experience (even though without any explicit knowledge of the law of entropy increase): we know, for example, that for iron in air the state of pure metal must have been before that of a rusted surface, or that the clothes will be dry after, not before, they have hung in the hot sun.

A tense, humid night of thunder and temporal storms. Lying alone in his oversize hotel room, five kilometers from the purple shore, Skein suffers fiercely from fugue.

“Listen, I have to forbid this. Those turtles are almost extinct. Do you understand that? Muerto. Perdido. Desaparecido. I won’t eat a turtle. Throw it back. Throw it back.”

“I’m happy to say your second go-round has been approved, Mr. Skein. Not that there was ever any doubt. A long and happy new life to you, sir.”

“Go down to it. The force of its power falls off with the cube of the distance; from up here you can’t feel it. Go down. Let it take you over. Fuse with it. Make communion, Skein, make communion!”

“Show you the mosyics? Help you understand this marvelous building? A dollar. No? Maybe change money? A good rate.”

“First let me get it clear. This man will see everything that’s in my mind? He’ll get access to my secrets?”

“I love you.”

“Get away from me!”

“Won’t you ever come to see that causality is merely an illusion, Skein? The notion that there’s a consecutive series of events is nothing but a fraud. We impose form on our lives, we talk of time’s arrow, we say that there’s a flow from A through G and Q to Z, we make believe everything is nicely linear. But it isn’t, Skein. It isn’t.”

Breakfast on a leafy veranda. Morning light out of the west, making the trees glow with an ultramarine glitter. The skull-faced man joins him. Skein secretly searches the parched face. Is everything an illusion? Perhaps he is an illusion.

They walk toward the sea. Well before noon they reach the shore. The skull-faced man points to the south, and they follow the coast; it is often a difficult hike, for in places the sand is washed out and they must detour inland, scrambling over quartzy cliffs. The monstrous old man is indefatigable. When they pause to rest, squatting on a timeless purple strand made smooth by the recent tide, the debate about time resumes, and Skein hears words that have been echoing in his skull for four years and more. It is as though everything up till now has been a rehearsal for a play, and now at last he has taken the stage.

“Won’t you ever come to see that causality is merely an illusion, Skein?”

“I feel an obligation to awaken your mind to the truth.”

“Time is an ocean, and events come drifting to us as randomly as dead animals on the waves.”

Skein offers all the proper cues.

“I won’t accept that! It’s demonic, chaotic, nihilistic theory.”

“You can say that after all you’ve experienced?”

“I’ll go on saying it. What I’ve been going through is a mental illness. Maybe I’m deranged, but the universe isn’t.”

“Contrary. You’ve only recently become sane and started to see things as they really are. The trouble is that you don’t want to admit the evidence you’ve begun to perceive. Your filters are down, Skein! You’ve shaken free of the illusion of linearity! Now’s your chance to show your resilience. Learn to live with the real reality. Stop this silly business of imposing an artificial order on the flow of time. Why should effect follow cause? Why shouldn’t the seed follow the tree? Why must you persist in holding tight to a useless, outworn, contemptible system of false evaluations of experience when you’ve managed to break free of the—”

“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

By early afternoon they are many kilometers from the hotel, still keeping as close to the shore as they can. The terrain is uneven and divided, with rugged fingers of rock running almost to the water’s edge, and Skein finds the journey even more exhausting than it had seemed in his visions of it. Several times he stops, panting, and has to be urged to go on.

“It isn’t much farther,” the skull-faced man says. “You can make it. Step by step is how.”

“I’m winded. Those hills—”

“I’m twice your age, and I’m doing fine.”

“You’re in better shape. I’ve been cooped up on spaceships for months and months.”

“Just a short way on,” says the skull-faced man. “About a hundred meters from the shore.”

Skein struggles on. The heat is frightful. He trips in the sand; he is blinded by sweat; he has a momentary flashback fugue. “There it is,” the skull-faced man says finally. “Look there, in the pit.”

Skein beholds the conical crater. He sees the golden amoeba

“Go down to it,” the skull-faced man says. “The force of its power falls off with the cube of the distance; from up here you can’t feel it. Go down. Let it take you over. Fuse with it. Make communion, Skein, make communion!”

“And will it heal me? So that I’ll function as I did before the trouble started?”

“If you let it heal you, it will. That’s what it wants to do. It’s a completely benign organism. It thrives on repairing broken souls. Let it into your head; let it find the damaged place. You can trust it. Go down.”

Skein trembles on the edge of the pit. The creature below flows and eddies, becoming first long and narrow, then high and squat, then resuming its basically circular form. Its color deepens almost to scarlet, and its radiance shifts toward yellow. As if preening and stretching itself. It seems to be waiting for him. It seems eager. This is what he has sought so long, going from planet to wearying planet. The skull-faced man, the purple sand, the pit, the creature. Skein slips his sandals off. What have I to lose? He sits for a moment on the pit’s rim; then he shimmies down, sliding part of the way, and lands softly, close beside the being that awaits him. And immediately feels its power. Something brushes against his brain. The sensation reminds him of the training sessions of his first go-round, when the instructors were showing him how to develop his gift. The fingers probing his consciousness. Go on, enter, he tells them. I’m open. And he finds himself in contact with the being of the pit. Wordless. A two-way flow of unintelligible images is the only communion; shapes drift from and into his mind. The universe blurs. He is no longer sure where the center of his ego lies. He has thought of his brain as a sphere with himself at its center, but now it seems extended, elliptical, and an ellipse has no center, only a pair of focuses, here and here, one focus in his own skull and one—where?—within that fleshy amoeba. And suddenly he is looking at himself through the amoeba’s eyes. The large biped with the bony body. How strange, how grotesque! Yet it suffers. Yet it must be helped. It is injured. It is broken. We go to it with all our love. We will heal. And Skein feels something flowing over the bare folds and fissures of his brain. But he can no longer remember whether he is the human or the alien, the bony one or the boneless. Their identities have mingled. He goes through fugues by the scores, seeing yesterdays and tomorrows, and everything is formless and without content; he is unable to recognize himself or to understand the words being spoken. It does not matter. All is random. All is illusion. Release the knot of pain you clutch within you. Accept. Accept. Accept. Accept.

He accepts.

He releases.

He merges.

He casts away the shreds of ego, the constricting exoskeleton of self, and placidly permits the necessary adjustments to be made.

The possibility, however, of genuine thermodynamic entropy decrease for an isolated system—no matter how rare—does raise an objection to the definition of time’s direction in terms of entropy. If a large, isolated system did by chance go through an entropy decrease as one state evolved from another, we would have to say that time “went backward” if our definition of time’s arrow were basically in terms of entropy increase. But with an ultimate definition of the forward direction of time in terms of the actual occurrence of states, and measured time intervals from the present, we can readily accommodate the entropy decrease; it would become merely a rare anomaly in the physical processes of the natural world.

The wind is rising. The sand, blown aloft, stains the sky grey. Skein clambers from the pit and lies by its rim, breathing hard. The skull-faced man helps him get up.

Skein has seen this series of images hundreds of times. “How do you feel?” the skull-faced man asks.

“Strange. Good. My head seems clear!”

“You had communion down there?”

“Oh, yes. Yes.”

“And?”

“I think I’m healed,” Skein says in wonder. “My strength is back. Before, you know, I felt cut down to the bone, a minimum version of myself. And now. And now.” He lets a tendril of consciousness slip forth. It meets the mind of the skull-faced man. Skein is aware of a glassy interface; he can touch the other mind, but he cannot enter it. “Are you a Communicator too?” Skein asks, awed.

“In a sense. I feel you touching me. You’re better, aren’t you?”

“Much. Much. Much.”

“As I told you. Now you have your second chance, Skein. Your gift has been restored. Courtesy of our friend in the pit. They love being helpful.”

“What shall I do now? Where shall I go?”

“Anything. Anywhere. Anywhen. You’re free to move along the timeline as you please. In a state of controlled, directed fugue, so to speak. After all, if time is random, if there is no rigid sequence of events—”

“Yes.”

“Then why not choose the sequence that appeals to you? Why stick to the set of abstractions your former self has handed you? You’re a free man, Skein. Go. Enjoy. Undo your past. Edit it. Improve on it. It isn’t your past, any more than this is your present. It’s all one, Skein, all one. Pick the segment you prefer.”

He tests the truth of the skull-faced man’s words. Cautiously Skein steps three minutes into the past and sees himself struggling up out of the pit. He slides four minutes into the future and sees the skull-faced man, alone, trudging northward along the shore. Everything flows. All is fluidity. He is free. He is free.

“You see, Skein?”

“Now I do,” Skein says. He is out of entropy’s jaws. He is time’s master, which is to say he is his own master. He can move at will. He can defy the imaginary forces of determinism. Suddenly he realizes what he must do now. He will assert his free will; he will challenge entropy on its home ground. Skein smiles. He cuts free of the timeline and floats easily into what others would call the past.

“Get Nissenson into a receptive state,” he orders his desk.

Coustakis, blinking rapidly, obviously uneasy, says, “First let me get it clear. This man will see everything that’s in my mind? He’ll get access to my secrets?”

“No. No. I filter the communion with great care. Nothing will pass from your mind to his except the nature of the problem you want him to tackle. Nothing will come back from his mind to yours except the answer.”

“And if he doesn’t have the answer?”

“He will.”

“And if he goes into the transmission business for himself afterward?” Coustakis asks.

“He’s bonded,” Skein says curtly. “No chance of it. Let’s go, now. Up and together.”

The desk reports that Nissenson, half the world away in São Paulo, is ready. Quickly Skein throws Coustakis into the receptive condition, and swings around to face the brilliant lights of his data-access units. Here is the moment when he can halt the transaction. Turn again, Skein. Face Coustakis, smile sadly, inform him that the communion will be impossible. Give him back his money, send him off to break some other Communicator’s mind. And live on, whole and happy, ever after. It was at this point, visiting this scene endlessly in his fugues, that Skein silently and hopelessly cried out to himself to stop. Now it is within his power, for this is no fugue, no illusion of time-shift. He has shifted. He is here, carrying with him the knowledge of all that is to come, and he is the only Skein on the scene, the operative Skein. Get up, now. Refuse the contract.

He does not. Thus he defies entropy. Thus he breaks the chain.

He peers into the sparkling, shifting little blazes until they kindle his gift, jabbing at the electrical rhythms of his brain until he is lifted into the energy level that permits the opening of a communion. He starts to go up. He reaches forth one tendril of his mind and engages Nissenson. With another tendril he snares Coustakis. Steadily, now, he draws the two tendrils together. He is aware of the risks, but believes he can surmount them.

The tendrils meet.

Out of Coustakis’s mind flows a description of the matter transmitter and a clear statement of the beam-spread problem; Skein shoves it along to Nissenson, who begins to work on a solution. The combined strength of the two minds is great, but Skein deftly lets the excess charge bleed away and maintains the communion with no particular effort, holding Coustakis and Nissenson together while they deal with their technical matters. Skein pays little attention as their excited minds rush toward answers. If you. Yes, and then. But if. I see, yes. I could. And. However, maybe I should. I like that. It leads to. Of course. The inevitable result. Is it feasible, though? I think so. You might have to. I could. Yes. I could. I could.

“I thank you a million times,” Coustakis says to Skein. “It was all so simple, once we saw how we ought to look at it. I don’t begrudge your fee at all. Not at all.”

Coustakis leaves, glowing with delight. Skein, relieved, tells his desk, “I’m going to allow myself a three-day holiday. Fix the schedule to move everybody up accordingly.”

He smiles. He strides across his office, turning up the amplifiers, treating himself to the magnificent view. The nightmare undone. The past revised. The burnout avoided. All it took was confidence. Enlightenment. A proper understanding of the processes involved.

He feels the sudden swooping sensations of incipient temporal fugue. Before he can intervene to regain control, he swings off into darkness and arrives instantaneously on a planet of purple sand and blue-leaved trees. Orange waves lap at the shore. He stands a few meters from a deep conical pit. Peering into it, he sees an amoebalike creature lying beside a human figure; strands of the alien’s jellylike substance are wound around the man’s body. He recognizes the man to be John Skein. The communion in the pit ends; the man begins to clamber from the pit. The wind is rising. The sand, blown aloft, stains the sky grey. Patiently he watches his younger self struggling up from the pit. Now he understands. The circuit is closed; the knot is tied; the identity loop is complete. He is destined to spend many years on Abbondanza VI, growing ancient and withered. He is the skull-faced man.

Skein reaches the rim of the pit and lies there, breathing hard. He helps Skein get up.

“How do you feel?” he asks.

Absolutely Inflexible

Despite the rigors of college work, I wrote short stories steadily throughout 1954—one in April, two in May, three in June, two in October after the summer break. And I eventually sold them all, too. But progress was slow and often discouraging, and it wasn’t until the summer of 1955 that there was any pattern of consistent sales.

I had finished my third year of college by then, and—though I intended to return for the final year and collect my degree—I was already beginning to believe that I might actually be able to earn a modest living of some sort as a professional science-fiction writer. The evidence in favor of that, so far, was pretty slim: “Gorgon Planet,” “The Silent Colony,” the book Revolt on Alpha C, and then a couple of stories, “The Martian” and “Yokel with Portfolio,” that were bought by a minor magazine called Imagination in February and May of 1955. My total income from all of that was $352.60 spread over a year and a half, not a great deal even in those days. But I was finding it easier and easier to construct short stories that—to me—seemed at least as good as most of those that the innumerable sf magazines of the day were publishing, and I was getting encouraging response from my agent about the new pieces I sent him once or twice a month. What I didn’t know was that most of the boom-era magazines that had begun publication in 1953 were on their last legs by the early months of 1955, and that my agent’s enthusiasm didn’t mean much, because it was his usual practice to send a cheery note (ghostwritten by one of his employees) about any story that stood half a chance of being published by someone, somewhere, eventually. So I stepped up my pace of production as the college year came to its close, and by June of 1955 I was writing a story a week.

“Absolutely Inflexible” was among them—one of my first successful tries at the time-paradox theme. I suppose it’s more than a little indebted to Robert A. Heinlein’s classic “By His Bootstraps,” but what time-paradox story isn’t? And it has some strength of its own, enough to have seen it through an assortment of anthology appearances over the years, and even, for a while, to be a bestseller for one of the pioneering on-line publishers of the 1990s. It was bought, after making the rounds for about six months, by the veteran editor-publisher Leo Margulies, who ran it in the July 1956 issue of the underrated magazine he had founded and edited, Fantastic Universe.

The detector over in one corner of Mahler’s little office gleamed a soft red. He indicated it with a weary gesture of his hand to the sad-eyed time jumper who sat slouched glumly across the desk from him, looking cramped and uncomfortable in the bulky spacesuit he was compelled to wear.

“You see,” Mahler said, tapping his desk. “They’ve just found another one. We’re constantly bombarded with you people. When you get to the Moon, you’ll find a whole Dome full of them. I’ve sent over four thousand there myself since I took over the bureau. And that was eight years ago—in 2776. An average of five hundred a year. Hardly a day goes by without someone dropping in on us.”

“And not one has been set free,” the time jumper said. “Every time-traveler who’s come here has been packed off to the Moon immediately. Every one.”

“Every one,” Mahler said. He peered through the thick shielding, trying to see what sort of man was hidden inside the spacesuit. Mahler often wondered about the men he condemned so easily to the Moon. This one was small of stature, with wispy locks of white hair pasted to his high forehead by perspiration. Evidently he had been a scientist, a respected man of his time, perhaps a happy father (although very few of the time jumpers were family men). Perhaps he possessed some bit of scientific knowledge that would be invaluable to the twenty-eighth century; perhaps not. It did not matter. Like all the rest, he would have to be sent to the Moon, to live out his remaining days under the grueling, primitive conditions of the Dome.

“Don’t you think that’s a little cruel?” the other asked. “I came here with no malice, no intent to harm whatsoever. I’m simply a scientific observer from the past. Driven by curiosity, I took the Jump. I never expected that I’d be walking into life imprisonment.”

“I’m sorry,” Mahler said, getting up. He decided to end the interview; he had to get rid of this jumper because there was another coming right up. Some days they came thick and fast, and this looked like one of them. But the efficient mechanical tracers never missed one.

“But can’t I live on Earth and stay in this spacesuit?” the time-jumper asked, panicky now that he saw his interview with Mahler was coming to an end. “That way I’d be sealed off from contact at all times.”

“Please don’t make this any harder for me,” Mahler said. “I’ve explained to you why we must be absolutely inflexible about this. There cannot—must not—be any exceptions. It’s two centuries since last there was any occurrence of disease on Earth. In all this time we’ve lost most of the resistance acquired over the previous countless generations of disease. I’m risking my life coming so close to you, even with the spacesuit sealing you off.”

Mahler signaled to the tall, powerful guards waiting in the corridor, grim in the casings that protected them from infection. This was always the worst moment.

“Look,” Mahler said, frowning with impatience. “You’re a walking death-trap. You probably carry enough disease germs to kill half the world. Even a cold, a common cold, would wipe out millions now. Resistance to disease has simply vanished over the past two centuries; it isn’t needed, with all diseases conquered. But you time-travelers show up loaded with potentialities for all the diseases the world used to have. And we can’t risk having you stay here with them.”

“But I’d—”

“I know. You’d swear by all that’s holy to you or to me that you’d never leave the confines of the spacesuit. Sorry. The word of the most honorable man doesn’t carry any weight against the safety of the lives of Earth’s billions. We can’t take the slightest risk by letting you stay on Earth. It’s unfair, it’s cruel, it’s everything else. You had no idea you would walk into something like this. Well, it’s too bad for you. But you knew you were going on a one-way trip to the future, and you’re subject to whatever that future wants to do with you, since there’s no way of getting back.”

Mahler began to tidy up the papers on his desk in a way that signaled finality. “I’m terribly sorry, but you’ll just have to see our way of thinking about it. We’re frightened to death at your very presence here. We can’t allow you to roam Earth, even in a spacesuit. No; there’s nothing for you but the Moon. I have to be absolutely inflexible. Take him away,” he said, gesturing to the guards. They advanced on the little man and began gently to ease him out of Mahler’s office.

Mahler sank gratefully into the pneumochair and sprayed his throat with laryngogel. These long speeches always left him feeling exhausted, his throat feeling raw and scraped. Someday I’ll get throat cancer from all this talking, Mahler thought. And that’ll mean the nuisance of an operation. But if I don’t do this job, someone else will have to.

Mahler heard the protesting screams of the time jumper impassively. In the beginning he had been ready to resign when he first witnessed the inevitable frenzied reaction of jumper after jumper as the guards dragged them away, but eight years had hardened him.

They had given him the job because he was hard, in the first place. It was a job that called for a hard man. Condrin, his predecessor, had not been the same sort of man Mahler was, and for that reason Condrin was now himself on the Moon. He had weakened after heading the Bureau for a year and had let a jumper go; the jumper had promised to secrete himself at the tip of Antarctica, and Condrin, thinking that Antarctica was as safe as the Moon, had foolishly released him. That was when they called Mahler in. In eight years Mahler had sent four thousand men to the Moon. (The first was the runaway jumper, intercepted in Buenos Aires after he had left a trail of disease down the hemisphere from Appalachia to Argentine Protectorate. The second was Condrin.)

It was getting to be a tiresome job, Mahler thought. But he was proud to hold it. It took a strong man to do what he was doing. He leaned back and awaited the arrival of the next jumper.

The door slid smoothly open as the burly body of Dr. Fournet, the Bureau’s chief medical man, broke the photo-electronic beam. Mahler glanced up. Fournet carried a time-rig dangling from one hand.

“Took this away from our latest customer,” Fournet said. “He told the medic who examined him that it was a two-way rig, and I thought I’d bring it to show you.”

Mahler came to full attention quickly. A two-way rig? Unlikely, he thought. But it would mean the end of the dreary jumper prison on the Moon if it were true. Only how could a two-way rig exist?

He reached out and took it from Fournet. “It seems to be a conventional twenty-fourth century type,” he said.

“But notice the extra dial here,” Fournet said, pointing. Mahler peered and nodded.

“Yes. It seems to be a two-way rig. But how can we test it? And it’s not really very probable,” Mahler said. “Why should a two-way rig suddenly show up from the twenty-fourth century when no other traveler’s had one? We don’t even have two-way time-travel ourselves, and our scientists don’t think it’s possible. Still,” he mused, “it’s a nice thing to dream about. We’ll have to study this a little more closely. But I don’t seriously think it’ll work. Bring him in, will you?”

As Fournet turned to signal the guards, Mahler asked him, “What’s his medical report, by the way?”

“From here to here,” Fournet said sombrely. “You name it, he’s carrying it. Better get him shipped off to the Moon as soon as possible. I won’t feel safe until he’s off this planet.” The big medic waved to the guards.

Mahler smiled. Fournet’s overcautiousness was proverbial in the Bureau. Even if a jumper were to show up completely free from disease, Fournet would probably insist that he was carrying everything from asthma to leprosy.

The guards brought the jumper into Mahler’s office. He was fairly tall, Mahler saw, and young. It was difficult to see his face clearly through the dim plate of the protective spacesuit all jumpers were compelled to wear, but Mahler could tell that the young time-jumper’s face had much of the lean, hard look of Mahler’s own. It seemed that the jumper’s eyes had widened in surprise as he entered the office, but Mahler was not sure.

“I never dreamed I’d find you here,” the jumper said. The transmitter of the spacesuit brought his voice over deeply and resonantly. “Your name is Mahler, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Mahler agreed.

“To go all these years—and find you. Talk about improbabilities!”

Mahler ignored him, declining to take up the gambit. He had found it was good practice never to let a captured jumper get the upper hand in conversation. His standard procedure was firmly to explain to the jumper the reasons why it was imperative that he be sent to the Moon, and then send him, as quickly as possible.

“You say this is a two-way time-rig?” Mahler asked, holding up the flimsy-looking piece of equipment.

“That’s right,” the other agreed. “Works both ways. If you pressed the button, you’d go straight back to 2360 or thereabouts.”

“Did you build it?”

“Me? No, hardly,” said the jumper. “I found it. It’s a long story, and I don’t have time to tell it. In fact, if I tried to tell it, I’d only make things ten times worse than they are, if that’s possible. No. Let’s get this over with, shall we? I know I don’t stand much of a chance with you, and I’d just as soon make it quick.”

“You know, of course, that this is a world without disease—” Mahler began sonorously.

“And that you think I’m carrying enough germs of different sorts to wipe out the whole world. And therefore you have to be absolutely inflexible with me. I won’t try to argue with you. Which way is the Moon?”

Absolutely inflexible. The phrase Mahler had used so many times, the phrase that summed him up so neatly. He chuckled to himself; some of the younger technicians must have tipped the jumper off about the usual procedure, and the jumper was resigned to going peacefully, without bothering to plead. It was just as well.

Absolutely inflexible.

Yes, Mahler thought, the words fit him well. He was becoming a stereotype in the Bureau. Perhaps he was the only Bureau chief who had never relented and let a jumper go. Probably all the others, bowed under the weight of the hordes of curious men flooding in from the past, had finally cracked and taken the risk. But not Mahler; not Absolutely Inflexible Mahler. He knew the deep responsibility that rode on his shoulders, and he had no intention of failing what amounted to a sacred trust. His job was to find the jumpers and get them off Earth as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Every one. It was a task that required unsoftening inflexibility.

“This makes my job much easier,” Mahler said. “I’m glad I won’t have to convince you of the necessity of my duty.”

“Not at all,” the other agreed. “I understand. I won’t even waste my breath. You have good reasons for what you’re doing, and nothing I say can alter them.” He turned to the guards. “I’m ready. Take me away.”

Mahler gestured to them, and they led the jumper away. Amazed, Mahler watched the retreating figure, studying him until he could no longer be seen.

If they were all like that, Mahler thought.

I could have got to like that one. That was a sensible man—one of the few. He knew he was beaten, and he didn’t try to argue in the face of absolute necessity. It’s too bad he had to go; he’s the kind of man I’d like to find more often these days.

But I mustn’t feel sympathy, Mahler told himself.

He had performed his job so well so long because he had managed to suppress any sympathy for the unfortunates he had to condemn. Had there been someplace else to send them—back to their own time, preferably—he would have been the first to urge abolition of the Moon prison. But, with no place else to send them, he performed this job efficiently and automatically.

He picked up the jumper’s time-rig and examined it. A two-way rig would be the solution, of course. As soon as the jumper arrives, turn him around and send him back. They’d get the idea soon enough. Mahler found himself wishing it were so; he often wondered what the jumpers stranded on the Moon must think of him.

A two-way rig could change the world completely; its implications were staggering. With men able to move with ease backward and forward in time, past, present, and future would blend into one mind-numbing new entity. It was impossible to conceive of the world as it would be, with free passage in either direction.

But even as Mahler fondled the confiscated time-rig he realized something was wrong. In the six centuries since the development
of time-travel, no one had yet developed a known two-way rig. And, more important, there were no documented reports of visitors from
the future. Presumably, if a two-way rig existed, such visitors would
be commonplace.

So the jumper had been lying, Mahler thought with regret. The two-way rig was an impossibility. He had merely been playing a game with his captors. This couldn’t be a two-way rig, because the past held no record of anyone’s going back.

Mahler examined the rig. There were two dials on it, one the conventional forward dial and the other indicating backward travel. Whoever had prepared this hoax had gone to considerable extent to document it. Why?

Could it be that the jumper had told the truth? Mahler wished he could somehow test the rig in his hands; there was always that one chance that it might actually work, that he would no longer have to be the rigid dispenser of justice, Absolutely Inflexible Mahler.

He looked at it. As a time machine, it was fairly crude. It made use of the standard distorter pattern, but the dial was the clumsy wide-range twenty-fourth-century one; the vernier system, Mahler reflected, had not been introduced until the twenty-fifth.

Mahler peered closer to read the instruction label. PLACE LEFT HAND HERE, it said. He studied it carefully. The ghost of a thought wandered into his mind; he pushed it aside in horror, but it recurred. It would be so simple. What if—?

No.

But—

PLACE LEFT HAND HERE.

He reached out tentatively with his left hand.

Just a bit—

No.

PLACE LEFT HAND HERE.

He touched his hand gingerly to the indicated place. There was a little crackle of electricity. He let go, quickly, and started to replace the time-rig on his desk when the desk abruptly faded out from under him.

The air was foul and grimy. Mahler wondered what had happened to the conditioner. Then he looked around.

Huge, grotesque buildings raised to the sky. Black, despairing clouds of smoke overhead. The harsh screech of an industrial society.

He was in the middle of an immense city, with streams of people rushing past him on the street at a furious pace. They were all small, stunted creatures, angry-looking, their faces harried, neurotic. It was the same black, frightened expression Mahler had seen so many times on the faces of jumpers escaping to what they hoped might be a more congenial future.

He looked at the time-rig clutched in one hand, and knew what had happened.

The two-way rig.

It meant the end of the Moon prisons. It meant a complete revolution in civilization. But he had no further business back in this age of nightmare. He reached down to activate the time-rig.

Abruptly someone jolted him from behind. The current of the crowd swept him along, as he struggled to regain his control over himself. Suddenly a hand reached out and grabbed the back of his neck.

“Got a card, Hump?”

He whirled to face an ugly, squinting-eyed man in a dull-brown uniform with a row of metallic buttons.

“Hear me? Where’s your card, Hump? Talk up or you get Spotted.”

Mahler twisted out of the man’s grasp and started to jostle his way through the crowd, desiring nothing more than a moment to set the time-rig and get out of this disease-ridden squalid era. As he shoved people out of his way, they shouted angrily at him.

“There’s a Hump!” someone called. “Spot him!”

The cry became a roar. “Spot him! Spot him!”

Wherever—whenever—he was, it was no place to stay in long. He turned left and went pounding down a side street, and now it was a full-fledged mob that dashed after him, shouting wildly.

“Send for the Crimers!” a deep voice boomed. “They’ll Spot him!”

Someone caught up to him, and without looking Mahler reached behind and hit out, hard. He heard a dull grunt of pain, and continued running. The unaccustomed exercise was tiring him rapidly.

An open door beckoned. He stepped inside, finding himself inside a machine store of sorts, and slammed the door shut. They still had manual doors, a remote part of his mind observed coldly.

A salesman came towards him. “Can I help you, sir? The latest models, right here.”

“Just leave me alone,” Mahler panted, squinting at the time-rig. The salesman watched uncomprehendingly as Mahler fumbled with the little dial.

There was no vernier. He’d have to chance it and hope he hit the right year. The salesman suddenly screamed and came to life, for reasons Mahler would never understand. Mahler averted him and punched the stud viciously.

It was wonderful to step back into the serenity of twenty-eighth-century Appalachia. Small wonder so many time jumpers come here, Mahler reflected, as he waited for his overworked heart to calm down. Almost anything would be preferable to then.

He looked around the quiet street for a Convenience where he could repair the scratches and bruises he had acquired during his brief stay in the past. They would scarcely be able to recognize him at the Bureau in his present battered condition, with one eye nearly closed, a great livid welt on his cheek, and his clothing hanging in tatters.

He sighted a Convenience and started down the street, pausing at the sound of a familiar soft mechanical whining. He looked around to see one of the low-running mechanical tracers of the Bureau purring up the street towards him, closely followed by the two Bureau guards, clad in their protective casings.

Of course. He had arrived from the past, and the detectors had recorded his arrival, as they would that of any time-traveler. They never missed.

He turned and walked towards the guards. He failed to recognize either one, but this did not surprise him; the Bureau was a vast
and wide-ranging organization, and he knew only a handful of the many guards who accompanied the tracers. It was a pleasant relief to see the tracer; the use of tracers had been instituted during his administration, so at least he knew he hadn’t returned too early along the time-stream.

“Good to see you,” he called to the approaching guards. “I had a little accident in the office.”

They ignored him and methodically unpacked a spacesuit from the storage trunk of the mechanical tracer. “Never mind talking,” one said. “Get into this.”

He paled. “But I’m no jumper,” he said. “Hold on a moment, fellows. This is all a mistake. I’m Mahler—head of the Bureau. Your boss.”

“Don’t play games with us, fellow,” the taller guard said, while the other forced the spacesuit down over Mahler. To his horror, Mahler saw that they did not recognize him at all.

“If you’ll just come peacefully and let the Chief explain everything to you, without any trouble—” the short guard said.

“But I am the Chief,” Mahler protested. “I was examining a two-way time-rig in my office and accidentally sent myself back to the past. Take this thing off me and I’ll show you my identification card; that should convince you.”

“Look, fellow, we don’t want to be convinced of anything. Tell it to the Chief if you want. Now, are you coming, or do we bring you?”

There was no point, Mahler decided, in trying to prove his identity to the clean-faced young medic who examined him at the Bureau office. That would only add more complications, he realized. No; he would wait until he reached the office of the Chief.

He saw now what had happened: Apparently he had landed somewhere in his own future, shortly after his own death. Someone else had taken over the Bureau, and he, Mahler, was forgotten. (Mahler suddenly realized with a shock that at this very moment his ashes were probably reposing in an urn at the Appalachia Crematorium.)

When he got to the Chief of the Bureau, he would simply and calmly explain his identity and ask for permission to go back the ten or twenty or thirty years to the time in which he belonged, and where he could turn the two-way rig over to the proper authorities and resume his life from his point of departure. And when that happened, the jumpers would no longer be sent to the Moon, and there would be no further need for Absolutely Inflexible Mahler.

But, he realized, if I’ve already done this then why is there still a Bureau now? An uneasy fear began to grow in him.

“Hurry up and finish that report,” Mahler told the medic.

“I don’t know what the rush is,” the medic said. “Unless you like it on the Moon.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Mahler said confidently. “If I told you who I am, you’d think twice about—”

“Is this thing your time-rig?” the medic asked boredly, interrupting.

“Not really. I mean—yes, yes it is,” Mahler said. “And be careful with it. It’s the world’s only two-way rig.”

“Really, now?” said the medic. “Two ways, eh?”

“Yes. And if you’ll take me in to your Chief—”

“Just a minute. I’d like to show this to the Head Medic.”

In a few moments the medic returned. “All right, let’s go to the Chief now. I’d advise you not to bother arguing; you can’t win. You should have stayed where you came from.”

Two guards appeared and jostled Mahler down the familiar corridor to the brightly lit little office where he had spent eight years. Eight years on the other side of the fence.

As he approached the door of what had once been his office, he carefully planned what he would say to his successor. He would explain the accident, demonstrate his identity as Mahler, and request permission to use the two-way rig to return to his own time. The Chief would probably be belligerent at first, then curious, finally amused at the chain of events that had ensnarled Mahler. And, of course, he would let him go, after they had exchanged anecdotes about their job, the job they both held at the same time and across a gap of years. Mahler swore never again to touch a time machine, once he got back. He would let others undergo the huge job of transmitting the jumpers back to their own eras.

He moved forward and broke the photoelectronic beam. The door to the Bureau Chief’s office slid open. Behind the desk sat a tall, powerful-looking man, lean, hard.

Me.

Through the dim plate of the spacesuit into which he had been stuffed, Mahler saw the man behind the desk. Himself. Absolutely Inflexible Mahler. The man who had sent four thousand men to the Moon, without exception, in the unbending pursuit of his duty.

And if he’s Mahler—

Who am I?

Suddenly Mahler saw the insane circle complete. He recalled the jumper, the firm, deep-voiced, unafraid time jumper who had arrived claiming to have a two-way rig and who had marched off to the Moon without arguing. Now Mahler knew who that jumper was.

But how did the cycle start? Where did the two-way rig come from in the first place? He had gone to the past to bring it to the present to take it to the past to—

His head swam. There was no way out. He looked at the man behind the desk and began to walk towards him, feeling a wall of circumstance growing around him, while he, in frustration, tried impotently to beat his way out.

It was utterly pointless to argue. Not with Absolutely Inflexible Mahler. It would just be a waste of breath. The wheel had come full circle, and he was as good as on the Moon. He looked at the man behind the desk with a new, strange light in his eyes.

“I never dreamed I’d find you here,” the jumper said. The transmitter of the spacesuit brought his voice over deeply and resonantly.

This Is the Road

Many were the anthologies of original science fiction that were spawned in the early 1970s, and not a few of them were edited by me. One format that I particularly liked was the novella trio, in which some writer would propound a theme for stories and three other writers independently worked to that theme at short-novel length. Usually I chose myself as one of the three writers for each trio volume, a process that produced novellas such as “How It Was When the Past Went Away,” “Thomas the Proclaimer,” and “The Feast of St. Dionysus,” all of them reprinted in earlier volumes of this series.

Of all these trio books of mine, I have particular affection for the one called No Mind of Man, which got put together around a living-room table in Berkeley, California, one day in the spring or summer of 1972. All three authors were present—Terry Carr, Richard A. Lupoff, and me—three old-time science fiction fans who had gone on to become professional writers, who had known each other well when we all lived in New York City, and now, in the 1970s, had all turned up living in the San Francisco Bay area. One of us—I don’t remember who it was—suggested that the three of us ought to do a novella book together. Someone else—I don’t remember which one of us that was either—proposed that we write stories of transformation. Lupoff—that I do remember—provided the title, No Mind of Man. And off we went to write our novellas.

Dick Lupoff, who had worked for IBM before becoming a freelance writer, did a splendid high-tech story, “The Partridge Project.” Terry Carr, whose stories often had soaring, joyous spiritual themes, produced the exhilarating “The Winds at Starmont.” And my contribution was the novella reprinted here, which I wrote in January of 1973, and of which I always have been fond, particularly for the elegiac final page or so, beginning with the lines, “These are the times we were meant to live in, and no asking why …”

Close students of my work may find a few familiar passages in the text. Half a dozen years later, when I was writing the novel Lord Valentine’s Castle, I coolly plagiarized myself to the tune of a few hundred words, transforming the wagon journey of Crown and Leaf and Sting and Shadow into an incident involving my band of itinerant jugglers on the giant planet Majipoor. There is otherwise no connection between the two stories: I needed a tense wagon journey through a forest, and I knew where a good one was available, and without any hesitation I lifted a few choice bits from it and put them in place in my new book. But I did get the permission of the original author first, at least. Most plagiarists are not that courteous.

Leaf, lolling cozily with Shadow on a thick heap of furs in the air wagon’s snug passenger castle, heard rain beginning to fall and made a sour face: very likely he would soon have to get up and take charge of driving the wagon, if the rain was the sort of rain he thought it was.

This was the ninth day since the Teeth had begun to lay waste to the eastern provinces. The airwagon, carrying four who were fleeing the invaders’ fierce appetites, was floating along Spider Highway somewhere between Theptis and Northman’s Rib, heading west, heading west as fast as could be managed. Jumpy little Sting was at the power reins, beaming dream commands to the team of six nightmares that pulled the wagon along; burly Crown was amidwagon, probably plotting vengeance against the Teeth, for that was what Crown did most of the time; that left Leaf and Shadow at their ease, but not for much longer. Listening to the furious drumming of the downpour against the wagon’s taut-stretched canopy of big-veined stickskin, Leaf knew that this was no ordinary rain, but rather the dread purple rain that runs the air foul and brings the no-leg spiders out to hunt. Sting would never be able to handle the wagon in a purple rain. What a nuisance, Leaf thought, cuddling close against Shadow’s sleek, furry blue form. Before long he heard the worried snorting of the nightmares and felt the wagon jolt and buck: yes, beyond any doubt, purple rain, no-leg spiders. His time of relaxing was just about over.

Not that he objected to doing his fair share of the work. But he had finished his last shift of driving only half an hour ago. He had earned his rest. If Sting was incapable of handling the wagon in this weather—and Shadow too, Shadow could never manage in a purple rain—then Crown ought to take the reins himself. But of course Crown would do no such thing. It was Crown’s wagon and he never drove it himself. “I have always had underbreeds to do the driving for me,” Crown had said ten days ago, as they stood in the grand plaza of Holy Town with the fires of the Teeth blazing in the outskirts.

“Your underbreeds have all fled without waiting for their master,” Leaf had reminded him.

“So? There are others to drive.”

“Am I to be your underbreed?” Leaf asked calmly. “Remember, Crown, I’m of the Pure Stream stock.”

“I can see that by your face, friend. But why get into philosophical disputes? This is my wagon. The invaders will be here before nightfall. If you would ride west with me, these are the terms. If they’re too bitter for you to swallow, well, stay here and test your luck against the mercies of the Teeth.”

“I accept your terms,” Leaf said.

So he had come aboard—and Sting, and Shadow—under the condition that the three of them would do all the driving. Leaf felt degraded by that—hiring on, in effect, as an indentured underbreed—but what choice was there for him? He was alone and far from his people; he had lost all his wealth and property; he faced sure death as the swarming hordes of Teeth devoured the eastland. He accepted Crown’s terms. An aristocrat knows the art of yielding better than most. Resist humiliation until you can resist no longer, certainly, but then accept, accept, accept. Refusal to bow to the inevitable is vulgar and melodramatic. Leaf was of the highest caste, Pure Stream, schooled from childhood to be pliable, a willow in the wind, bending freely to the will of the Soul. Pride is a dangerous sin; so is stubbornness; so too, more than the others, is foolishness. Therefore, he labored while Crown lolled. Still, there were limits even to Leaf’s capacity for acceptance, and he suspected those limits would be reached shortly.

On the first night, with only two small rivers between them and the Teeth and the terrible fires of Holy Town staining the sky, the fugitives halted briefly to forage for jellymelons in an abandoned field, and as they squatted there, gorging on ripe succulent fruit, Leaf said to Crown, “Where will you go, once you’re safe from the Teeth on the far side of the Middle River?”

“I have distant kinsmen who live in the Flatlands,” Crown replied. “I’ll go to them and tell them what has happened to the Dark Lake folk in the east, and I’ll persuade them to take up arms and drive the Teeth back into the icy wilderness where they belong. An army of liberation, Leaf, and I’ll lead it.” Crown’s dark face glistened with juice. He wiped at it. “What are your plans?”

“Not nearly so grand. I’ll seek kinsmen too, but not to organize an army. I wish simply to go to the Inland Sea, to my own people, and live quietly among them once again. I’ve been away from home too many years. What better time to return?” Leaf glanced at Shadow. “And you?” he asked her. “What do you want out of this journey?”

“I want only to go wherever you go,” she said.

Leaf smiled. “You, Sting?”

“To survive,” Sting said. “Just to survive.”

Mankind had changed the world, and the changed world had worked changes in mankind. Each day the wagon brought the travelers to some new and strange folk who claimed descent from the old ancestral stock, though they might be water-breathers or have skins like tanned leather or grow several pairs of arms. Human, all of them, human, human, human. Or so they insisted. If you call yourself human, Leaf thought, then I will call you human too. Still, there were gradations of humanity. Leaf, as a Pure Stream, thought of himself as more nearly human than any of the peoples along their route, more nearly human even than his three companions; indeed, he sometimes tended to look upon Crown, Sting, and Shadow as very much other than human, though he did not consider that a fault in them. Whatever dwelled in the world was without fault, so long as it did no harm to others. Leaf had been taught to respect every breed of mankind, even the underbreeds. His companions were certainly no underbreeds: they were solidly midcaste, all of them, and ranked not far below Leaf himself. Crown, the biggest and strongest and most violent of them, was of the Dark Lake line. Shadow’s race was Dancing Stars, and she was the most elegant, the most supple of the group. She was the only female aboard the wagon. Sting, who sprang from the White Crystal stock, was the quickest of body and spirit, mercurial, volatile. An odd assortment, Leaf thought. But in extreme times one takes one’s traveling companions as they come. He had no complaints. He found it possible to get along with all of them, even Crown. Even Crown.

The wagon came to a jouncing halt. There was the clamor of hooves stamping the sodden soil; then shrill high-pitched cries from Sting and angry booming bellowings from Crown; and finally a series of muffled hissing explosions. Leaf shook his head sadly. “To waste our ammunition on no-leg spiders—”

“Perhaps they’re harming the horses,” Shadow said. “Crown is rough, but he isn’t stupid.”

Tenderly Leaf stroked her smooth haunches. Shadow tried always to be kind. He had never loved a Dancing Star before, though the sight of them had long given him pleasure: they were slender beings, bird-boned and shallow-breasted, and covered from their ankles to their crested skulls by fine dense fur the color of the twilight sky in winter. Shadow’s voice was musical and her motions were graceful; she was the antithesis of Crown.

Crown now appeared, a hulking figure thrusting bluntly through the glistening beaded curtains that enclosed the passenger castle. He glared malevolently at Leaf. Even in his pleasant moments Crown seemed angry, an effect perhaps caused by his eyes, which were bright red where those of Leaf and most other kinds of humans were white. Crown’s body was a block of meat, twice as broad as Leaf and half again as tall, though Leaf did not come from a small-statured race. Crown’s skin was glossy, greenish-purple in colour, much like burnished bronze; he was entirely without hair and seemed more like a massive statue of an oiled gladiator than a living being. His arms hung well below his knees; equipped with extra joints and terminating in hands the size of great baskets, they were superb instruments of slaughter. Leaf offered him the most agreeable smile he could find. Crown said, without smiling in return, “You better get back on the reins, Leaf. The road’s turning into one big swamp. The horses are uneasy. It’s a purple rain.”

Leaf had grown accustomed, in these nine days, to obeying Crown’s brusque orders. He started to obey now, letting go of Shadow and starting to rise. But then, abruptly, he arrived at the limits of his acceptance.

“My shift just ended,” he said.

Crown stared. “I know that. But Sting can’t handle the wagon in this mess. And I just killed a bunch of mean-looking spiders. There’ll be more if we stay around here much longer.”

“So?”

“What are you trying to do, Leaf?”

“I guess I don’t feel like going up front again so soon.”

“You think Shadow here can hold the reins in this storm?” Crown asked coldly.

Leaf stiffened. He saw the wrath gathering in Crown’s face. The big man was holding his natural violence in check with an effort, there would be trouble soon if Leaf remained defiant. This rebelliousness went against all of Leaf’s principles, yet he found himself persisting in it and even taking a wicked pleasure in it. He chose to risk the confrontation and discover how firm Crown intended to be. Boldly he said, “You might try holding the reins yourself, friend.”

“Leaf!” Shadow whispered, appalled.

Crown’s face became murderous. His dark, shining cheeks puffed and went taut; his eyes blazed like molten nuggets; his hands closed and opened, closed and opened, furiously grasping air. “What kind of crazy stuff are you trying to give? We have a contract, Leaf. Unless you’ve suddenly decided that a Pure Stream doesn’t need to abide by—”

“Spare me the class prejudice, Crown. I’m not pleading Pure Stream as an excuse to get out of working. I’m tired and I’ve earned my rest.”

Shadow said softly, “Nobody’s denying you your rest, Leaf. But Crown’s right that I can’t drive in a purple rain. I would if I could. And Sting can’t do it either. That leaves only you.”

“And Crown,” Leaf said obstinately.

“There’s only you,” Shadow murmured. It was like her to take no sides, to serve ever as a mediator. “Go on, Leaf. Before there’s real trouble. Making trouble like this isn’t your usual way.”

Leaf felt bound to pursue his present course, however perilous. He shook his head. “You, Crown. You drive.”

In a throttled voice Crown said, “You’re pushing me too far. We have a contract.”

All Leaf’s Pure Stream temperance was gone now. “Contract? I agreed to do my fair share of the driving, not to let myself be yanked up from my rest at a time when—”

Crown kicked at a low wickerwork stool, splitting it. His rage was boiling close to the surface. Swollen veins throbbed in his throat. He said, still controlling himself, “Get out there right now, Leaf, or by the Soul I’ll send you into the All-Is-One!”

“Beautiful, Crown. Kill me, if you feel you have to. Who’ll drive your damned wagon for you then?”

“I’ll worry about that then.”

Crown started forward, swallowing air, clenching fists.

Shadow sharply nudged Leaf’s ribs. “This is going beyond the point of reason,” she told him. He agreed. He had tested Crown and he had his answer, which was that Crown was unlikely to back down; now enough was enough, for Crown was capable of killing. The huge Dark Laker loomed over him, lifting his tremendous arms as though to bring them crashing against Leaf’s head. Leaf held up his hands, more a gesture of submission than of self-defence.

“Wait,” he said. “Stop it, Crown. I’ll drive.”

Crown’s arms descended anyway. Crown managed to halt the killing blow midway, losing his balance and lurching heavily against the side of the wagon. Clumsily he straightened. Slowly he shook his head. In a low, menacing voice he said, “Don’t ever try something like this again, Leaf.”

“It’s the rain,” Shadow said. “The purple rain. Everybody does strange things in a purple rain.”

“Even so,” Crown said, dropping onto the pile of furs as Leaf got up. “The next time, Leaf, there’ll be bad trouble. Now go ahead. Get up front.”

Nodding to him, Leaf said, “Come up front with me, Shadow.”

She did not answer. A look of fear flickered across her face.

Crown said, “The driver drives alone. You know that, Leaf. Are you still testing me? If you’re testing me, say so and I’ll know how to deal with you.”

“I just want some company, as long as I have to do an extra shift.”

“Shadow stays here.”

There was a moment of silence. Shadow was trembling. “All right,” Leaf said finally. “Shadow stays here.”

“I’ll walk a little way toward the front with you,” Shadow said, glancing timidly at Crown. Crown scowled but said nothing. Leaf stepped out of the passenger castle; Shadow followed. Outside, in the narrow passageway leading to the midcabin, Leaf halted, shaken, shaking, and seized her. She pressed her slight body against him and they embraced, roughly, intensely. When he released her she said, “Why did you try to cross him like that? It was such a strange thing for you to do, Leaf.”

“I just didn’t feel like taking the reins again so soon.”

“I know that.”

“I want to be with you.”

“You’ll be with me a little later,” she said. “It didn’t make sense for you to talk back to Crown. There wasn’t any choice. You had to drive.”

“Why?”

“You know. Sting couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.”

“And Crown?”

She looked at him oddly. “Crown? How would Crown have taken the reins?”

From the passenger castle came Crown’s angry growl: “You going to stand there all day, Leaf? Go on! Get in here, Shadow!”

“I’m coming,” she called.

Leaf held her a moment. “Why not? Why couldn’t he have driven? He may be proud, but not so proud that—”

“Ask me another time,” Shadow said, pushing him away. “Go. Go. You have to drive. If we don’t move along we’ll have the spiders upon us.”

On the third day westward they had arrived at a village of Shapechangers. Much of the countryside through which they had been passing was deserted, although the Teeth had not yet visited it, but these Shapechangers went about their usual routines as if nothing had happened in the neighboring provinces. These were angular, long-legged people, sallow of skin, nearly green in hue, who were classed generally somewhere below the midcastes, but above the underbreeds. Their gift was metamorphosis, a slow softening of the bones under voluntary control that could, in the course of a week, drastically alter the form of their bodies, but Leaf saw them doing none of that, except for a few children who seemed midway through strange transformations, one with ropy, seemingly boneless arms, one with grotesquely distended shoulders, one with stiltlike legs. The adults came close to the wagon, admiring its beauty with soft cooing sounds, and Crown went out to talk with them. “I’m on my way to raise an army,” he said. “I’ll be back in a month or two, leading my kinsmen out of the Flatlands. Will you fight in our ranks? Together we’ll drive out the Teeth and make the eastern provinces safe again.”

The Shapechangers laughed heartily. “How can anyone drive out the Teeth?” asked an old one with a greasy mop of blue-white hair. “It was the will of the Soul that they burst forth as conquerors, and no one can quarrel with the Soul. The Teeth will stay in these lands for a thousand thousand years.”

“They can be defeated!” Crown cried.

“They will destroy all that lies in their path, and no one can stop them.”

“If you feel that way, why don’t you flee?” Leaf asked.

“Oh, we have time. But we’ll be gone long before your return with your army.” There were giggles. “We’ll keep ourselves clear of the Teeth. We have our ways. We make our changes and we slip away.”

Crown persisted. “We can use you in our war against them. You have valuable gifts. If you won’t serve as soldiers, at least serve us as spies. We’ll send you into the camps of the Teeth, disguised as—”

“We will not be here,” the old Shapechanger said, “and no one will be able to find us,” and that was the end of it.

As the airwagon departed from the Shapechanger village, Shadow at the reins, Leaf said to Crown, “Do you really think you can defeat the Teeth?”

“I have to.”

“You heard the old Shapechanger. The coming of the Teeth was the will of the Soul. Can you hope to thwart that will?”

“A rainstorm is the will of the Soul also,” Crown said quietly. “All the same, I do what I can to keep myself dry. I’ve never known the Soul to be displeased by that.”

“It’s not the same. A rainstorm is a transaction between the sky and the land. We aren’t involved in it; if we want to cover our heads, it doesn’t alter what’s really taking place. But the invasion of the Teeth is a transaction between tribe and tribe, a reordering of social patterns. In the great scheme of things, Crown, it may be a necessary process, preordained to achieve certain ends beyond our understanding. All events are part of some larger whole, and everything balances out, everything compensates for something else. Now we have peace, and now it’s the time for invaders, do you see? If that’s so, it’s futile to resist.”

“The Teeth broke into the eastlands,” said Crown, “and they massacred thousands of Dark Lake people. My concern with necessary processes begins and ends with that fact. My tribe has nearly been wiped out. Yours is still safe, up by its ferny shores. I will seek help and gain revenge.”

“The Shapechangers laughed at you. Others will also. No one will want to fight the Teeth.”

“I have cousins in the Flatlands. If no one else will, they’ll mobilize themselves. They’ll want to repay the Teeth for their crime against the Dark Lakers.”

“Your western cousins may tell you, Crown, that they prefer to remain where they are safe. Why should they go east to die in the name of vengeance? Will vengeance, no matter how bloody, bring any of your kinsmen back to life?”

“They will fight,” Crown said.

“Prepare yourself for the possibility that they won’t.”

“If they refuse,” said Crown, “then I’ll go back east myself, and wage my war alone until I’m overwhelmed. But don’t fear for me, Leaf. I’m sure I’ll find plenty of willing recruits.”

“How stubborn you are, Crown. You have good reason to hate the Teeth, as do we all. But why let that hatred cost you your only life? Why not accept the disaster that has befallen us, and make a new life for yourself beyond the Middle River, and forget this dream of reversing the irreversible?”

“I have my task,” said Crown.

Forward through the wagon Leaf moved, going slowly, head down, shoulders hunched, feet atickle with the urge to kick things. He felt sour of spirit, curdled with dull resentment. He had let himself become angry at Crown, which was bad enough; but worse, he had let that anger possess and poison him. Not even the beauty of the wagon could lift him: ordinarily its superb construction and elegant furnishings gave him joy, the swirl-patterned fur hangings, the banners of gossamer textiles, the intricate carved inlays, the graceful strings of dried seeds and tassels that dangled from the vaulted ceilings, but these wonders meant nothing to him now. That was no way to be, he knew.

The airwagon was longer than ten men of the Pure Stream lying head to toe, and so wide that it spanned nearly the whole roadway. The finest workmanship had gone into its making: Flower Giver artisans, no doubt of it, only Flower Givers could build so well. Leaf imagined dozens of the fragile little folk toiling earnestly for months, all smiles and silence, long, slender fingers and quick, gleaming eyes, shaping the great wagon as one might shape a poem. The main frame was of lengthy pale spears of light, resilient wingwood, elegantly laminated into broad curving strips with a colorless fragrant mucilage and bound with springy withes brought from the southern marshes. Over this elaborate armature tanned sheets of stickskin had been stretched and stitched into place with thick yellow fibers drawn from the stick-creatures’ own gristly bodies. The floor was of dark shining nightflower-wood planks, buffed to a high finish and pegged together with great skill. No metal had been employed in the construction of the wagon, nor any artificial substances: nature had supplied everything. Huge and majestic though the wagon was, it was airy and light, light enough to float on a vertical column of warm air generated by magnetic rotors whirling in its belly; so long as the earth turned, so would the rotors, and when the rotors were spinning the wagon drifted cat-high above the ground, and could be tugged easily along by the team of nightmares.

It was more a mobile palace than a wagon, and wherever it went it stirred excitement: Crown’s love, Crown’s joy, Crown’s estate, a wondrous toy. To pay for the making of it Crown must have sent many souls into the All-Is-One, for that was how Crown had earned his livelihood in the old days, as a hired warrior, a surrogate killer, fighting one-on-one duels for rich eastern princelings too weak or too lazy to defend their own honor. He had never been scratched, and his fees had been high; but all that was ended now that the Teeth were loose in the eastlands.

Leaf could not bear to endure being so irritable any longer. He paused to adjust himself, closing his eyes and listening for the clear tone that sounded always at the center of his being. After a few minutes he found it, tuned himself to it, let it purify him. Crown’s unfairness ceased to matter. Leaf became once more his usual self, alert and outgoing, aware and responsive.

Smiling, whistling, he made his way swiftly through the wide, comfortable, brightly lit midcabin, decorated with Crown’s weapons and other grim souvenirs of battle, and went on into the front corridor that led to the driver’s cabin.

Sting sat slumped at the reins. White Crystal folk such as Sting
generally seemed to throb and tick with energy; but Sting looked exhausted, emptied, half dead of fatigue. He was a small, sinewy being, narrow of shoulder and hip, with colorless skin of a waxy, horny texture, pocked everywhere with little hairy nodes and whorls. His muscles were long and flat; his face was cavernous, beaked nose and tiny chin, dark mischievous eyes hidden in bony recesses. Leaf touched his shoulder. “It’s all right,” he said. “Crown sent me to relieve you.” Sting nodded feebly but did not move. The little man was quivering like a frog. Leaf had always thought of him as indestructible, but in the grip of this despondency Sting seemed more fragile even than Shadow.

“Come,” Leaf murmured. “You have a few hours for resting. Shadow will look after you.”

Sting shrugged. He was hunched forward, staring dully through the clear curving window, stained now with splashes of muddy tinted water.

“The dirty spiders,” he said. His voice was hoarse and frayed. “The filthy rain. The mud. Look at the horses, Leaf. They’re dying of fright, and so am I. We’ll all perish on this road, Leaf, if not of spiders then of poisoned rain, if not of rain then of the Teeth, if not of the Teeth then of something else. There’s no road for us but this one, do you realize that? This is the road, and we’re bound to it like helpless underbreeds, and we’ll die on it.”

“We’ll die when our turn comes, like everything else, Sting, and not a moment before.”

“Our turn is coming. Too soon. Too soon. I feel death-ghosts close at hand.”

“Sting!”

Sting made a weird ratcheting sound low in his throat, a sort of rusty sob. Leaf lifted him and swung him out of the driver’s seat, settling him gently down in the corridor. It was as though he weighed nothing at all. Perhaps just then that was true. Sting had many strange gifts. “Go on,” Leaf said. “Get some rest while you can.”

“How kind you are, Leaf.”

“And no more talk of ghosts.”

“Yes,” Sting said. Leaf saw him struggling against fear and despair and weariness. Sting appeared to brighten a moment, flickering on the edge of his old vitality; then the brief glow subsided, and, smiling a pale smile, offering a whisper of thanks, he went aft.

Leaf took his place in the driver’s seat.

Through the window of the wagon—thin, tough sheets of stickskin, the best quality, carefully matched, perfectly transparent—he confronted a dismal scene. Rain dark as blood was falling at a steep angle, scourging the spongy soil, kicking up tiny fountains of earth. A bluish miasma rose from the ground, billows of dark, steamy fog, the acrid odour of which had begun to seep into the wagon. Leaf sighed and reached for the reins. Death-ghosts, he thought. Haunted. Poor Sting, driven to the end of his wits.

And yet, and yet, as he considered the things Sting had said, Leaf realized that he had been feeling somewhat the same way, these past few days: tense, driven, haunted. Haunted. As though unseen presences, mocking, hostile, were hovering near. Ghosts? The strain, more likely, of all that he had gone through since the first onslaught of the Teeth. He had lived through the collapse of a rich and intricate civilization. He moved now through a strange world, all ashes and seaweed. He was haunted, perhaps, by the weight of the unburied past, by the memory of all that he had lost.

A rite of exorcism seemed in order.

Lightly he said, aloud, “If there are any ghosts in here, I want you to listen to me. Get out of this cabin. That’s an order. I have work to do.”

He laughed. He picked up the reins and made ready to take control of the team of nightmares.

The sense of an invisible presence was overwhelming.

Something at once palpable and intangible pressed clammily against him. He felt surrounded and engulfed. It’s the fog, he told himself. Dark blue fog, pushing at the window, sealing the wagon into a pocket of vapor. Or was it? Leaf sat quite still for a moment, listening. Silence. He relinquished the reins, swung about in his seat, carefully inspected the cabin. No one there. An absurdity to be fidgeting like this. Yet the discomfort remained. This was no joke now. Sting’s anxieties had infected him, and the malady was feeding on itself, growing more intense from moment to moment, making him vulnerable to any stray terror that whispered to him. Only with a tranquil mind could he attain the state of trance a nightmare-driver must enter; and trance seemed unattainable so long as he felt the prickle of some invisible watcher’s gaze on the back of his neck. This rain, he thought, this damnable rain. It drives everybody crazy. In a clear, firm voice Leaf said, “I’m altogether serious. Show yourself and get yourself out of this cabin.”

Silence.

He took up the reins again. No use. Concentration was impossible. He knew many techniques for centering himself, for leading his consciousness to a point of unassailable serenity. But could he achieve that now, jangled and distracted as he was? He would try. He had to succeed. The wagon had tarried in this place much too long already. Leaf summoned all his inner resources; he purged himself, one by one, of every discord; he compelled himself to slide into trance.

It seemed to be working. Darkness beckoned to him. He stood at the threshold. He started to step across.

“Such a fool, such a foolish fool,” said a sudden dry voice out of nowhere that nibbled at his ears like the needle-toothed mice of the White Desert.

The trance broke. Leaf shivered as if stabbed and sat up, eyes bright, face flushed with excitement.

“Who spoke?”

“Put down those reins, friend. Going forward on this road is a heavy waste of spirit.”

“Then I wasn’t crazy and neither was Sting. There is something in here!”

“A ghost, yes a ghost, a ghost, a ghost!” The ghost showered him with laughter.

Leaf’s tension eased. Better to be troubled by a real ghost than to be vexed by a fantasy of one’s own disturbed mind. He feared madness far more than he did the invisible. Besides, he thought he knew what this creature must be.

“Where are you, ghost?”

“Not far from you. Here I am. Here. Here.” From three different parts of the cabin, one after another. The invisible being began to sing. Its song was high-pitched, whining, a grinding tone that stretched Leaf’s patience intolerably. Leaf still saw no one, though he narrowed his eyes and stared as hard as he could. He imagined he could detect a faint veil of pink light floating along the wall of the cabin, a smoky haze moving from place to place, a shimmering film like thin oil on water, but whenever he focused his eyes on it the misty presence appeared to evaporate.

Leaf said, “How long have you been aboard this wagon?”

“Long enough.”

“Did you come aboard at Theptis?”

“Was that the name of the place?” asked the ghost disingenuously. “I forget. It’s so hard to remember things.”

“Theptis,” said Leaf. “Four days ago.”

“Perhaps it was Theptis,” the ghost said. “Fool! Dreamer!”

“Why do you call me names?”

“You travel a dead road, fool, and yet nothing will turn you from it.” The invisible one snickered. “Do you think I’m a ghost, Pure Stream?”

“I know what you are.”

“How wise you’ve become!”

“Such a pitiful phantom. Such a miserable drifting wraith. Show yourself to me, ghost.”

Laughter reverberated from the corners of the cabin. The voice said, speaking from a point close to Leaf’s left ear, “The road you choose to travel has been killed ahead. We told you that when you came to us, and yet you went onward, and still you go onward. Why are you so rash?”

“Why won’t you show yourself? A gentleman finds it discomforting to speak to the air.”

Obligingly the ghost yielded, after a brief pause, some fraction of its invisibility. A vaporous crimson stain appeared in the air before Leaf, and he saw within it dim, insubstantial features, like projections on a screen of thick fog. He believed he could make out a wispy white beard, harsh glittering eyes, lean curving lips; a whole forbidding face, a fleshless torso. The stain deepened momentarily to scarlet and for a moment Leaf saw the entire figure of the stranger revealed, a long narrow-bodied man, dried and withered, grinning ferociously at him. The edges of the figure softened and became mist. Then Leaf saw only vapor again, and then nothing.

“I remember you from Theptis,” Leaf said. “In the tent of Invisibles.”

“What will you do when you come to the dead place on the highway?” the invisible one demanded. “Will you fly over it? Will you
tunnel under it?”

“You were asking the same things at Theptis,” Leaf replied. “I will make the same answer that the Dark Laker gave you then. We will go forward, dead place or no. This is the only road for us.”

They had come to Theptis on the fifth day of their flight—a grand city, a splendid mercantile emporium, the gateway to the west,
sprawling athwart a place where two great rivers met and many highways converged. In happy times any and all peoples might be found in Theptis, Pure Streams and White Crystals and Flower Givers and Sand Shapers and a dozen others jostling one another in the busy streets, buying and selling, selling and buying, but mainly Theptis was a city of Fingers—the merchant caste, plump and industrious, thousands upon thousands of them concentrated in this one city.

The day Crown’s airwagon reached Theptis much of the city was ablaze, and they halted on a broad stream-split plain just outside the metropolitan area. An improvised camp for refugees had sprouted there, and tents of black and gold and green cloth littered the meadow like new nightshoots. Leaf and Crown went out to inquire after the news. Had the Teeth sacked Theptis as well? No, an old and sagging Sand Shaper told them. The Teeth, so far as anyone had heard, were still well to the east, rampaging through the coastal cities. Why the fires, then? The old man shook his head. His energy was exhausted, or his patience, or his courtesy. If you want to know anything else, he said, ask them. They know everything. And he pointed toward a tent opposite his.

Leaf looked into the tent and found it empty; then he looked again and saw upright shadows moving about in it, tenuous figures that existed at the very bounds of visibility and could be perceived only by tricks of the light as they changed place in the tent. They asked him within, and Crown came also. By the smoky light of their tentfire they were more readily seen: seven or eight men of the Invisible stock, nomads, ever mysterious, gifted with ways of causing beams of light to travel around or through their bodies so that they might escape the scrutiny of ordinary eyes. Leaf, like everyone else not of their kind, was uncomfortable among Invisibles. No one trusted them; no one was capable of predicting their actions, for they were creatures of whim and caprice, or else followed some code the logic of which was incomprehensible to outsiders. They made Leaf and Crown welcome, adjusting their bodies until they were in clear sight, and offering the visitors a flagon of wine, a bowl of fruit. Crown gestured toward Theptis. Who had set the city afire? A red-bearded Invisible with a raucous rumbling voice answered that on the second night of the invasion the richest of the Fingers had panicked and had begun to flee the city with their most precious belongings, and as their wagons rolled through the gates the lesser breeds had begun to loot the Finger mansions, and brawling had started once the wine cellars were pierced, and fires broke out, and there was no one to make the fire wardens do their work, for they were all underbreeds and the masters had fled. So the city burned and was still burning, and the survivors were huddled here on the plain, waiting for the rubble to cool so that they might salvage valuables from it, and hoping that the Teeth would not fall upon them before they could do their sifting. As for the Fingers, said the Invisible, they were all gone from Theptis now.

Which way had they gone? Mainly to the northwest, by way of Sunset Highway, at first; but then the approach to that road had become choked by stalled wagons butted one up against another, so that the only way to reach the Sunset now was by making a difficult detour through the sand country north of the city, and once that news became general the Fingers had turned their wagons southward. Crown wondered why no one seemed to be taking Spider Highway westward. At this a second Invisible, white-bearded, joined the conversation. Spider Highway, he said, is blocked just a few days’ journey west of here: a dead road, a useless road. Everyone knows that, said the white-bearded Invisible.

“That is our route,” said Crown.

“I wish you well,” said the Invisible. “You will not get far.”

“I have to get to the Flatlands.”

“Take your chances with the sand country,” the red-bearded one advised, “and go by way of the Sunset.”

“It would waste two weeks or more,” Crown replied. “Spider Highway is the only road we can consider.” Leaf and Crown exchanged wary glances. Leaf asked the nature of the trouble on the highway, but the Invisibles said only that the road had been “killed,” and would offer no amplification. “We will go forward,” Crown said, “dead place or no.”

“As you choose,” said the older Invisible, pouring more wine. Already both Invisibles were fading; the flagon seemed suspended in mist. So, too, did the discussion become unreal, dreamlike, as answers no longer followed closely upon the sense of questions, and the words of the Invisibles came to Leaf and Crown as though swaddled in thick wool. There was a long interval of silence, at last, and when Leaf extended his empty glass the flagon was not offered to him, and he realized finally that he and Crown were alone in the tent. They left it and asked at other tents about the blockage on Spider Highway, but no one knew anything of it, neither some young Dancing Stars nor three flat-faced Water Breather women nor a family of Flower Givers. How reliable was the word of Invisibles? What did they mean by a “dead” road? Suppose they merely thought the road was ritually impure, for some reason understood only by Invisibles. What value, then, would their warning have to those who did not subscribe to their superstitions? Who knew at any time what the words of an Invisible meant? That night in the wagon the four of them puzzled over the concept of a road that has been “killed,” but neither Shadow’s intuitive perceptions nor Sting’s broad knowledge of tribal dialects and customs could provide illumination. In the end Crown reaffirmed his decision to proceed on the road he had originally chosen, and it was Spider Highway that they took out of Theptis. As they proceeded westward they met no one traveling the opposite way, though one might expect the eastbound lanes to be thronged with a flux of travelers turning back from whatever obstruction might be closing the road ahead. Crown took cheer in that; but Leaf observed privately that their wagon appeared to be the only vehicle on the road in either direction, as if everyone else knew better than to make the attempt. In such stark solitude they journeyed four days west of Theptis before the purple rain hit them.

Now the Invisible said, “Go into your trance and drive your horses. I’ll dream beside you until the awakening comes.”

“I prefer privacy.”

“You won’t be disturbed.”

“I ask you to leave.”

“You treat your guests coldly.”

“Are you my guest?” Leaf asked. “I don’t remember extending an invitation.”

“You drank wine in our tent. That creates in you an obligation to offer reciprocal hospitality.” The Invisible sharpened his bodily intensity until he seemed as solid as Crown; but even as Leaf observed the effect he grew thin again, fading in patches. The far wall of the cabin showed through his chest, as if he were hollow. His arms had disappeared, but not his gnarled long-fingered hands. He was grinning, showing crooked close-set teeth. There was a strange scent in the cabin, sharp and musky, like vinegar mixed with honey. The Invisible said, “I’ll ride with you a little longer,” and vanished altogether.

Leaf searched the corners of the cabin, knowing that an Invisible could always be felt even if he eluded the eyes. His probing hands encountered nothing. Gone, gone, gone, whisking off to the place where snuffed flames go, eh? Even that odor of vinegar and honey was diminishing. “Where are you?” Leaf asked. “Still hiding somewhere else?” Silence. Leaf shrugged. The stink of the purple rain was the dominant scent again. Time to move on, stowaway or no. Rain was hitting the window in huge murky windblown blobs. Once more Leaf picked up the reins. He banished the Invisible from his mind.

These purple rains condensed out of drifting gaseous clots in the upper atmosphere—dank clouds of chemical residues that arose from the world’s most stained, most injured places and circled the planet like malign tempests. Upon colliding with a mass of cool air such a poisonous cloud often discharged its burden of reeking oils and acids in the form of a driving rainstorm; and the foulness that descended could be fatal to plants and shrubs, to small animals, sometimes even to man.

A purple rain was the cue for certain somber creatures to come forth from dark places: scuttering scavengers that picked eagerly through the dead and dying, and larger, more dangerous things that preyed on the dazed and choking living. The no-leg spiders were among the more unpleasant of these.

They were sinister spherical beasts the size of large dogs, voracious in the appetite and ruthless in the hunt. Their bodies were plump, covered with coarse, rank brown hair; they bore eight glittering eyes above sharp-fanged mouths. No-legged they were indeed, but not immobile, for a single huge fleshy foot, something like that of a snail, sprouted from the underbellies of these spiders and carried them along at a slow, inexorable pace. They were poor pursuers, easily avoided by healthy animals; but to the numbed victims of a purple rain they were deadly, moving in to strike with hinged, poison-barbed claws that leaped out of niches along their backs. Were they truly spiders? Leaf had no idea. Like almost everything else, they were a recent species, mutated out of the-Soul-only-knew-what during the period of stormy biological upheavals that had attended the end of the old industrial civilization, and no one yet had studied them closely, or cared to.

Crown had killed four of them. Their bodies lay upside down at the edge of the road, upturned feet wilting and drooping like plucked toadstools. About a dozen more spiders had emerged from the low hills flanking the highway and were gliding slowly toward the stalled wagon; already several had reached their dead comrades and were making ready to feed on them, and some of the others were eyeing the horses.

The six nightmares, prisoners of their harnesses, prowled about uneasily in their constricted ambits, anxiously scraping at the muddy ground with their hooves. They were big, sturdy beasts, black as death, with long feathery ears and high-domed skulls that housed minds as keen as many human’s, sharper than some. The rain annoyed the horses but could not seriously harm them, and the spiders could be kept at bay with kicks, but plainly the entire situation disturbed them.

Leaf meant to get them out of here as rapidly as he could.

A slimy coating covered everything the rain had touched, and the road was a miserable quagmire, slippery as ice. There was peril for all of them in that. If a horse stumbled and fell it might splinter a leg, causing such confusion that the whole team might be pulled down; and as the injured nightmares thrashed about in the mud the hungry spiders would surely move in on them, venomous claws rising, striking, delivering stings that stunned, and leaving the horses paralyzed, helpless, vulnerable to eager teeth and strong jaws. As the wagon traveled onward through this swampy rainsoaked district Leaf would constantly have to steady and reassure the nightmares, pouring his energy into them to comfort them, a strenuous task, a task that had wrecked poor Sting.

Leaf slipped the reins over his forehead. He became aware of the consciousness of the six fretful horses.

Because he was still awake, contact was misty and uncertain. A waking mind was unable to communicate with the animals in any useful way. To guide the team he had to enter a trance state, a dream state; they would not respond to anything so gross as conscious intelligence. He looked about for manifestations of the Invisible. No, no sign of him. Good. Leaf brought his mind to dead center.

He closed his eyes. The technique of trance was easy enough for him, when there were no distractions.

He visualized a tunnel, narrow-mouthed and dark, slanting into the ground. He drifted toward its entrance.

Hovered there a moment.

Went down into it.

Floating, floating, borne downward by warm, gentle currents: he sinks in a slow spiral descent, autumn leaf on a springtime breeze. The tunnel’s walls are circular, crystalline, lit from within, the light growing in brightness as he drops toward the heart of the world. Gleaming scarlet and blue flowers, brittle as glass, sprout from crevices at meticulously regular intervals.

He goes deep, touching nothing. Down.

Entering a place where the tunnel widens into a round smooth-walled chamber, sealed at the end. He stretches full-length on the floor. The floor is black stone, slick and slippery; he dreams it soft and yielding, womb-warm. Colors are muted here, sounds are blurred. He hears far-off music, percussive and muffled, rat-a-rat, rat-a-rat, blllooom, blllooom.

Now at least he is able to make full contact with the minds of the horses.

His spirit expands in their direction; he envelops them, he takes them into himself. He senses the separate identity of each, picks up the shifting play of their emotions, their prancing fantasies, their fears. Each mare has her own distinct response to the rain, to the spiders, to the sodden highway. One is restless, one is timid, one is furious, one is sullen, one is tense, one is torpid. He feeds energy to them. He pulls them together. Come, gather your strength, take us onward: this is the road, we must be on our way.

The nightmares stir.

They react well to his touch. He believes that they prefer him over Shadow and Sting as a driver: Sting is too manic, Shadow too permissive. Leaf keeps them together, directs them easily, gives them the guidance they need. They are intelligent, yes, they have personalities and goals and ideals, but also they are beasts of burden, and Leaf never forgets that, for the nightmares themselves do not.

Come, now. Onward.

The road is ghastly. They pick at it and their hooves make sucking sounds coming up from the mud. They complain to him. We are cold, we are wet, we are bored. He dreams wings for them to make their way easier. To soothe them he dreams sunlight for them, bountiful warmth, dry highway, an easy trot. He dreams green hillsides, cascades of yellow blossoms, the flutter of hummingbirds’ wings, the droning of bees. He gives the horses sweet summer, and they grow calm; they lift their heads; they fan their dream-wings and preen; they are ready now to resume the journey. They pull as one. The rotors hum happily. The wagon slides forward with a smooth coasting motion.

Leaf, deep in trance, is unable to see the road, but no matter; the horses see it for him and send him images, fluid, shifting dream-images, polarized and refracted and diffracted by the strangenesses of their vision and the distortions of dream communication, six simultaneous and individual views. Here is the road, bordered by white birches whipped by an angry wind. Here is the road, an earthen swath slicing through a forest of mighty pines bowed down by white new snow. Here is the road, a ribbon of fertility, from which dazzling red poppies spring wherever a hoof strikes. Fleshy-finned blue fishes do headstands beside the road. Paunchy burghers of the Finger tribe spread brilliantly laundered tablecloths along the grassy margin and make lunch out of big-eyed reproachful oysters. Masked figures dart between the horses’ legs. The road curves, curves again; doubles back on itself, crosses itself in a complacent loop. Leaf integrates this dizzying many-hued inrush of data, sorting the real from the unreal, blending and focusing the input and using it to guide himself in guiding the horses. Serenely he coordinates their movements with quick confident impulses of thought, so that each animal will pull with the same force. The wagon is precariously balanced on its column of air, and an unequal tug could well send it slewing into the treacherous thicket to the left of the road. He sends quicksilver messages down the thick conduit from his mind to theirs. Steady there, steady, watch that boggy patch coming up! Ah! Ah, that’s my girl! Spiders on the left, careful! Good! Yes, yes, ah, yes! He pats their heaving flanks with a strand of his mind. He rewards their agility with dreams of the stable, of newly mown hay, of stallions waiting at journey’s end.

From them—for they love him, he knows they love him—he gets warm dreams of the highway, all beauty and joy, all images converging into a single idealized view, majestic groves of wingwood trees and broad meadows through which clear brooks flow. They dream his own past life for him, too, feeding back to him nuggets of random autobiography mined in the seams of his being. What they transmit is filtered and transformed by their alien sensibilities, colored with hallucinatory glows and tugged and twisted into other-dimensional forms, but yet he is able to perceive the essential meaning of each tableau: his childhood among the parks and gardens of the Pure Stream enclave near the Inland Sea, his wanderyears among the innumerable, unfamiliar, not-quite-human breeds of the hinterlands, his brief, happy sojourn in the fog-swept western country, his eastward journey in early manhood, always following the will of the Soul, always bending to the breezes, accepting whatever destiny seizes him, eastward now, his band of friends closer than brothers in his adopted eastern province, his sprawling lakeshore home there, all polished wood and billowing tented pavilions, his collection of relics of mankind’s former times—pieces of machinery, elegant coils of metal, rusted coins, grotesque statuettes, wedges of imperishable plastic—housed in its own wing with its own curator. Lost in these reveries he ceases to remember that the home by the lake has been reduced to ashes by the Teeth, that his friends of kinder days are dead, his estates overrun, his pretty things scattered in the kitchen-middens.

Imperceptibly, the dream turns sour.

Spiders and rain and mud creep back into it. He is reminded, through some darkening of tone of the imagery pervading his dreaming mind, that he has been stripped of everything and has become, now that he has taken flight, merely a driver hired out to a bestial Dark Lake mercenary who is himself a fugitive.

Leaf is working harder to control the team now. The horses seem less sure of their footing, and the pace slows; they are bothered about something, and a sour, querulous anxiety tinges their messages to him. He catches their mood. He sees himself harnessed to the wagon alongside the nightmares, and it is Crown at the reins, Crown wielding a terrible whip, driving the wagon frenziedly forward, seeking allies who will help him fulfill his fantasy of liberating the lands the Teeth have taken. There is no escape from Crown. He rises above the landscape like a monster of congealed smoke, growing more huge until he obscures the sky. Leaf wonders how he will disengage himself from Crown. Shadow runs beside him, stroking his cheeks, whispering to him, and he asks her to undo the harness, but she says she cannot, that it is their duty to serve Crown, and Leaf turns to Sting, who is harnessed on his other side, and he asks Sting for help, but Sting coughs and slips in the mud as Crown’s whip flicks his backbone. There is no escape. The wagon heels and shakes. The right-hand horse skids, nearly falls, recovers. Leaf decides he must be getting tired. He has driven a great deal today, and the effort is telling. But the rain is still falling—he breaks through the veil of illusions, briefly, past the scenes of spring and summer and autumn, and sees the blue-black water dropping in wild handfuls from the sky—and there is no one else to drive, so he must continue.

He tries to submerge himself in deeper trance, where he will be less readily deflected from control.

But no, something is wrong, something plucks at his consciousness, drawing him toward the waking state. The horses summon him to wakefulness with frightful scenes. One beast shows him the wagon about to plunge through a wall of fire. Another pictures them at the brink of a vast impassable crater. Another gives him the image of giant boulders strewn across the road; another, a mountain of ice blocking the way; another, a pack of snarling wolves; another, a row of armored warriors standing shoulder to shoulder, lances at the ready. No doubt of it. Trouble. Trouble. Trouble. Perhaps they have come to the dead place in the road. No wonder that Invisible was skulking around. Leaf forces himself to awaken.

There was no wall of fire. No warriors, no wolves, none of those things. Only a palisade of newly felled timbers facing him some hundred paces ahead on the highway, timbers twice as tall as Crown, sharpened to points at both ends and thrust deep into the earth one up against the next and bound securely with freshly cut vines. The barricade spanned the highway completely from edge to edge; on its right it was bordered by a tangle of impenetrable thorny scrub; on its left it extended to the brink of a steep ravine.

They were stopped.

Such a blockade across a public highway was inconceivable. Leaf blinked, coughed, rubbed his aching forehead. Those last few minutes of discordant dreams had left a murky, gritty coating on his brain. This wall of wood seemed like some sort of dream too, a very bad one. Leaf imagined he could hear the Invisible’s cool laughter somewhere close at hand. At least the rain appeared to be slackening, and there were no spiders about. Small consolations, but the best that were available.

Baffled, Leaf freed himself of the reins and awaited the next event. After a moment or two he sensed the joggling rhythms that told of Crown’s heavy forward progress through the cabin. The big man peered into the driver’s cabin.

“What’s going on? Why aren’t we moving?”

“Dead road.”

“What are you talking about?”

“See for yourself,” Leaf said wearily, gesturing toward the window.

Crown leaned across Leaf to look. He studied the scene an endless moment, reacting slowly. “What’s that? A wall?”

“A wall, yes.”

“A wall across a highway? I never heard of anything like that.”

“The Invisibles at Theptis may have been trying to warn us about this.”

“A wall. A wall.” Crown shook with perplexed anger. “It violates all the maintenance customs! Soul take it, Leaf, a public highway is—”

“—sacred and inviolable. Yes. What the Teeth have been doing in the east violates a good many maintenance customs too,” Leaf said. “And territorial customs as well. These are unusual times everywhere.” He wondered if he should tell Crown about the Invisible who was on board. One problem at a time, he decided. “Maybe this is how these people propose to keep the Teeth out of their country, Crown.”

“But to block a public road—”

“We were warned.”

“Who could trust the word of an Invisible?”

“There’s the wall,” Leaf said. “Now we know why we didn’t meet anyone else on the highway. They probably put this thing up as soon as they heard about the Teeth, and the whole province knows enough to avoid Spider Highway. Everyone but us.”

“What folk dwell here?”

“No idea. Sting’s the one who would know.”

“Yes, Sting would know,” said the high, clear, sharp-edged voice of Sting from the corridor. He poked his head into the cabin. Leaf saw Shadow just behind him. “This is the land of the Tree Companions,” Sting said. “Do you know of them?”

Crown shook his head. “Not I,” said Leaf.

“Forest-dwellers,” Sting said. “Tree-worshippers. Small heads, slow brains. Dangerous in battle—they use poisoned darts. There are nine tribes of them in this region, I think, under a single chief. Once they paid tribute to my people, but I suppose in these times all that has ended.”

“They worship trees?” Shadow said lightly. “And how many of their gods, then, did they cut down to make this barrier?”

Sting laughed. “If you must have gods, why not put them to some good use?”

Crown glared at the wall across the highway as he once might have glared at an opponent in the duelling ring. Seething, he paced a narrow path in the crowded cabin. “We can’t waste any more time. The Teeth will be coming through this region in a few days, for sure. We’ve got to reach the river before something happens to the bridges ahead.”

“The wall,” Leaf said.

“There’s plenty of brush lying around out there,” said Sting. “We could build a bonfire and burn it down.”

“Green wood,” Leaf said. “It’s impossible.”

“We have hatchets,” Shadow pointed out. “How long would it take for us to cut through timbers as thick as those?”

Sting said, “We’d need a week for the job. The Tree Companions would fill us full of darts before we’d been chopping an hour.”

“Do you have any ideas?” Shadow said to Leaf.

“Well, we could turn back toward Theptis and try to find our way to Sunset Highway by way of the sand country. There are only two roads from here to the river, this and the Sunset. We lose five days, though, if we decide to go back, and we might get snarled up in whatever chaos is going on in Theptis, or we could very well get stranded in the desert trying to reach the highway. The only other choice I see is to abandon the wagon and look for some path around the wall on foot, but I doubt very much that Crown would—”

“Crown wouldn’t,” said Crown, who had been chewing his lip in tense silence. “But I see some different possibilities.”

“Go on.”

“One is to find these Tree Companions and compel them to clear this trash from the highway. Darts or no darts, one Dark Lake and one Pure Stream side by side ought to be able to terrify twenty tribes of pinhead forest folk.”

“And if we can’t?” Leaf asked.

“That brings us to the other possibility, which is that this wall isn’t particularly intended to protect the neighborhood against the Teeth
at all, but that these Tree Companions have taken advantage of the
general confusion to set up some sort of toll-raising scheme. In that case, if we can’t force them to open the road, we can find out what
they want, what sort of toll they’re asking, and pay it if we can and be on our way.”

“Is that Crown who’s talking?” Sting asked. “Talking about paying a toll to underbreeds of the forest? Incredible!”

Crown said, “I don’t like the thought of paying toll to anybody. But it may be the simplest and quickest way to get out of here. Do you think I’m entirely a creature of pride, Sting?”

Leaf stood up. “If you’re right that this is a toll station, there’d be some kind of gate in the wall. I’ll go out there and have a look at it.”

“No,” said Crown, pushing him lightly back into his seat. “There’s danger here, Leaf. This part of the work falls to me.” He strode toward the midcabin and was busy there a few minutes. When he returned he was in his full armor: breastplates, helmet, face mask, greaves, everything burnished to a high gloss. In those few places where his bare skin showed through, it seemed but a part of the armor. Crown looked like a machine. His mace hung at his hip, and the short shaft of his extensor sword rested easily along the inside of his right wrist, ready to spring to full length at a squeeze. Crown glanced toward Sting and said, “I’ll need your nimble legs. Will you come?”

“As you say.”

“Open the midcabin hatch for us, Leaf.”

Leaf touched a control on the board below the front window. With a soft, whining sound a hinged door near the middle of the wagon swung upward and out, and a stepladder sprouted to provide access to the ground. Crown made a ponderous exit. Sting, scorning the ladder, stepped down: it was the special gift of the White Crystal people to be able to transport themselves short distances in extraordinary ways.

Sting and Crown began to walk warily toward the wall. Leaf, watching from the driver’s seat, slipped his arm lightly about the waist of Shadow, who stood beside him, and caressed her smooth fur. The rain had ended; a gray cloud still hung low, and the gleam of Crown’s armor was already softened by fine droplets of moisture. He and Sting were nearly to the palisade, now, Crown constantly scanning the underbrush as if expecting a horde of Tree Companions to spring forth. Sting, loping along next to him, looked like some agile little two-legged beast, the top of his head barely reaching to Crown’s hip.

They reached the palisade. Thin, late-afternoon sunlight streamed over its top. Kneeling, Sting inspected the base of the wall, probing at the soil with his fingers, and said something to Crown, who nodded and pointed upward. Sting backed off, made a short running start, and lofted himself, rising almost as though he were taking wing. His leap carried him soaring to the wall’s jagged crest in a swift blurred flight. He appeared to hover for a long moment while choosing a place to land. At last he alighted in a precarious, uncomfortable-looking position, sprawled along the top of the wall with his body arched to avoid the timber’s sharpened tips, his hands grasping two of the stakes and his feet wedged between two others. Sting remained in this desperate contortion for a remarkably long time, studying whatever lay beyond the barricade; then he let go his hold, sprang lightly outward, and floated to the ground, a distance some three times his own height. He landed upright, without stumbling. There was a brief conference between Crown and Sting. Then they came back to the wagon.

“It’s a toll-raising scheme, all right,” Crown muttered. “The middle timbers aren’t embedded in the earth. They end just at ground level and form a hinged gate, fastened by two heavy bolts on the far side.”

“I saw at least a hundred Tree Companions back of the wall,” Sting said. “Armed with blowdarts. They’ll be coming around to visit us in a moment.”

“We should arm ourselves,” Leaf said.

Crown shrugged. “We can’t fight that many of them. Not twenty-five to one, we can’t. The best hand-to-hand man in the world is helpless against little forest folk with poisoned blowdarts. If we aren’t able to awe them into letting us go through, we’ll have to buy them off somehow. But I don’t know. That gate isn’t nearly wide enough for the wagon.”

He was right about that. There was the dry scraping squeal of wood against wood—the bolts were being unfastened—and then the gate swung slowly open. When it had been fully pushed back it provided an opening through which any good-size cart of ordinary dimensions might pass, but not Crown’s magnificent vehicle. Five or six stakes on each side of the gate would have to be pulled down in order for the wagon to go by.

Tree Companions came swarming toward the wagon, scores of them—small, naked folk with lean limbs and smooth blue-green skin. They looked like animated clay statuettes, casually pinched into shape: their hairless heads were narrow and elongated, with flat sloping foreheads, and their long necks looked flimsy and fragile. They had shallow chests and bony, meatless frames. All of them, men and women both, wore reed dart-blowers strapped to their hips. As they danced and frolicked about the wagon they set up a ragged, irregular chanting, tuneless and atonal, like the improvised songs of children caught up in frantic play.

“We’ll go out to them,” Crown said. “Stay calm, make no sudden moves. Remember that these are underbreeds. So long as we think
of ourselves as men and them as nothing more than monkeys, and make them realize we think that way, we’ll be able to keep them under control.”

“They’re men,” said Shadow quietly. “Same as we. Not monkeys.”

“Think of them as like monkeys,” Crown told her. “Otherwise we’re lost. Come, now.”

They left the wagon, Crown first, then Leaf, Sting, Shadow. The cavorting Tree Companions paused momentarily in their sport as the four travelers emerged; they looked up, grinned, chattered, pointed,
did handsprings and headstands. They did not seem awed. Did Pure Stream mean nothing to them? Had they no fear of Dark Lake? Crown, glowering, said to Sting, “Can you speak their language?”

“A few words.”

“Speak to them. Ask them to send their chief here to me.”

Sting took up a position just in front of Crown, cupped his hands to his mouth, and shouted something high and piercing in a singsong language. He spoke with exaggerated, painful clarity, as one does in addressing a blind person or a foreigner. The Tree Companions snickered and exchanged little yipping cries. Then one of them came dancing forward, planted his face a handsbreadth from Sting’s, and mimicked Sting’s words, catching the intonation with comic accuracy. Sting looked frightened, and backed away half a pace, butting accidentally into Crown’s chest. The Tree Companion loosed a stream of words, and when he fell silent Sting repeated his original phrase in a more subdued tone.

“What’s happening?” Crown asked. “Can you understand anything?”

“A little. Very little.”

“Will they get the chief?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t know if he and I are talking about the same things.”

“You said these people pay tribute to White Crystal.”

“Paid,” Sting said. “I don’t know if there’s any allegiance any longer. I think they may be having some fun at our expense. I think what he said was insulting, but I’m not sure. I’m just not sure.”

“Stinking monkeys!”

“Careful, Crown,” Shadow murmured. “We can’t speak their language, but they may understand ours.”

Crown said, “Try again. Speak more slowly. Get the monkey to speak more slowly. The chief, Sting, we want to see the chief! Isn’t there any way you can make contact?”

“I could go into trance,” Sting said. “And Shadow could help me with the meanings. But I’d need time to get myself together. I feel too quick now, too tense.” As if to illustrate his point he executed a tiny jumping movement, blur-snap-hop, that carried him laterally a few paces to the left. Blur-snap-hop and he was back in place again. The Tree Companion laughed shrilly, clapped his hands, and tried to imitate Sting’s little shuttling jump. Others of the tribe came over; there were ten or twelve of them now, clustered near the entrance to the wagon. Sting hopped again: it was like a twitch, a tic. He started to tremble. Shadow reached toward him and folded her slender arms about his chest, as though to anchor him. The Tree Companions grew more agitated; there was a hard, intense quality about their playfulness now. Trouble seemed imminent. Leaf, standing on the far side of Crown, felt a sudden knotting of the muscles at the base of his stomach. Something nagged at his attention, off to his right out in the crowd of Tree Companions; he glanced that way and saw an azure brightness, elongated and upright, a man-size strip of fog and haze, drifting and weaving among the forest folk. Was it the Invisible? Or only some trick of the dying daylight, slipping through the residual vapor of the rainstorm? He struggled for a sharp focus, but the figure eluded his gaze, slipping ticklingly beyond sight as Leaf followed it with his eyes. Abruptly he heard a howl from Crown and turned just in time to see a Tree Companion duck beneath the huge man’s elbow and go sprinting into the wagon. “Stop!” Crown roared. “Come back!” And, as if a signal had been given, seven or eight others of the lithe little tribesmen scrambled aboard.

There was death in Crown’s eyes. He beckoned savagely to Leaf and rushed through the entrance. Leaf followed. Sting, sobbing, huddled in the entranceway, making no attempt to halt the Tree Companions who were streaming into the wagon. Leaf saw them climbing over everything, examining, inspecting, commenting. Monkeys, yes. Down in the front corridor Crown was struggling with four of them, holding one in each vast hand, trying to shake free two others who were climbing his armored legs. Leaf confronted a miniature Tree Companion woman, a gnomish bright-eyed creature whose bare lean body glistened with sour sweat, and as he reached for her she drew not a dart-blower but a long narrow blade from the tube at her hip, and slashed Leaf fiercely along the inside of his left forearm. There was a quick, frightening gush of blood, and only some moments afterward did he feel the fiery lick of the pain. A poisoned knife? Well, then, into the All-Is-One with you, Leaf. But if there had been poison, he felt no effects of it; he wrenched the knife from her grasp, jammed it into the wall, scooped her up, and pitched her lightly through the open hatch of the wagon. No more Tree Companions were coming in, now. Leaf found two more, threw them out, dragged another out of the roofbeams, tossed him after the others, went looking for more. Shadow stood in the hatchway, blocking it with her frail arms outstretched. Where was Crown? Ah. There. In the trophy room. “Grab them and carry them to the hatch!” Leaf yelled. “We’re rid of most of them!”

“The stinking monkeys,” Crown cried. He gestured angrily. The Tree Companions had seized some treasure of Crown’s, some ancient suit of mail, and in their childish buoyancy had ripped the fragile links apart with their tug-of-war. Crown, enraged, bore down on them, clamped one hand on each tapering skull—“Don’t!” Leaf shouted, fearing darts in vengeance—and squeezed, cracking them like nuts. He tossed the corpses aside and, picking up his torn trophy, stood sadly pressing the sundered edges together in a clumsy attempt at repair.

“You’ve done it now,” Leaf said. “They were just being inquisitive. Now we’ll have war, and we’ll be dead before nightfall.”

“Never,” Crown grunted.

He dropped the chainmail, scooped up the dead Tree Companions, carried them dangling through the wagon, and threw them like offal into the clearing. Then he stood defiantly in the hatchway, inviting their darts. None came. Those Tree Companions still aboard the wagon, five or six of them, appeared empty-handed, silent, and slipped hastily around the hulking Dark Laker. Leaf went forward and joined Crown. Blood was still dripping from Leaf’s wound; he dared not induce clotting nor permit the wound to close until he had been purged of whatever poison might have been on the blade. A thin, straight cut, deep and painful, ran down his arm from elbow to wrist. Shadow gave a soft little cry and seized his hand. Her breath was warm against the edges of the gash. “Are you badly injured?” she whispered.

“I don’t think so. It’s just a question of whether the knife was
poisoned.”

“They poison only their darts,” said Sting. “But there’ll be infection to cope with. Better let Shadow look after you.”

“Yes,” Leaf said. He glanced into the clearing. The Tree Companions, as though thrown into shock by the violence that had come from their brief invasion of the wagon, stood frozen along the road in silent groups of nine or ten, keeping their distance. The two dead ones lay crumpled where Crown had hurled them. The unmistakable figure of the Invisible, transparent but clearly outlined by a dark perimeter, could be seen to the right, near the border of the thicket: his eyes glittered fiercely, his lips were twisted in a strange smile. Crown was staring at him in slack-jawed astonishment. Everything seemed suspended, held floating motionless in the bowl of time. To Leaf the scene was an eerie tableau in which the only sense of ongoing process was supplied by the throbbing in his slashed arm. He hung moored at the center, waiting, waiting, incapable of action, trapped like others in timelessness. In that long pause he realized that another figure had appeared during the melee, and stood now calmly ten paces or so to the left of the grinning Invisible: a Tree Companion, taller than the others of his kind, clad in beads and gimcracks but undeniably a being of presence and majesty.

“The chief has arrived,” Sting said hoarsely.

The stasis broke. Leaf released his breath and let his rigid body slump. Shadow tugged at him, saying, “Let me clean that cut for you.” The chief of the Tree Companions stabbed the air with three outstretched fingers, pointing at the wagon, and called out five crisp, sharp, jubilant syllables; slowly and grandly he began to stalk toward the wagon. At the same moment the Invisible flickered brightly, like a sun about to die, and disappeared entirely from view. Crown, turning to Leaf, said in a thick voice, “It’s all going crazy here. I was just imagining I saw one of the Invisibles from Theptis skulking around by the underbrush.”

“You weren’t imagining anything,” Leaf told him. “He’s been riding secretly with us since Theptis. Waiting to see what would happen to us when we came to the Tree Companions’ wall.”

Crown looked jarred by that. “When did you find that out?” he demanded.

Shadow said, “Let him be, Crown. Go and parley with the chief. If I don’t clean Leaf’s wound soon—”

“Just a minute. I need to know the truth. Leaf, when did you find out about this Invisible?”

“When I went up front to relieve Sting. He was in the driver’s cabin. Laughing at me, jeering. The way they do.”

“And you didn’t tell me? Why?”

“There was no chance. He bothered me for a while, and then he vanished, and I was busy driving after that, and then we came to the wall, and then the Tree Companions—”

“What does he want from us?” Crown asked harshly, face pushed close to Leaf’s.

Leaf was starting to feel fever rising. He swayed and leaned on Shadow. Her taut, resilient little form bore him with surprising strength. He said tiredly, “I don’t know. Does anyone ever know what one of them wants!” The Tree Companion chief, meanwhile, had come up beside them and in a lusty, self-assured way slapped his open palm several times against the side of the wagon, as though taking possession of it. Crown whirled. The chief coolly spoke, voice level, inflections controlled. Crown shook his head. “What’s he saying?” he barked. “Sting? Sting?”

“Come,” Shadow said to Leaf. “Now. Please.”

She led him toward the passenger castle. He sprawled on the furs while she searched busily through her case of unguents and ointments; then she came to him with a long green vial in her hand and said, “There’ll be pain for you now.”

“Wait.”

He centered himself and disconnected, as well as he was able, the network of sensory apparatus that conveyed messages of discomfort from his arm to his brain. At once he felt his skin growing cooler, and he realized for the first time since the battle how much pain he had been in: so much that he had not had the wisdom to do anything about it. Dispassionately he watched as Shadow, all efficiency, probed his wound, parting the lips of the cut without squeamishness and swabbing its red interior. A faint tickling, unpleasant but not painful, was all he sensed. She looked up, finally, and said, “There’ll be no infection. You can allow the wound to close now.” In order to do that Leaf had to reestablish the neural connections to a certain degree, and as he unblocked the flow of impulses he felt sudden startling pain, both from the cut itself and from Shadow’s medicines; but quickly he induced clotting, and a moment afterward he was deep in the disciplines that would encourage the sundered flesh to heal. The wound began to close. Lightly Shadow blotted the fresh blood from his arm and prepared a poultice; by the time she had it in place, the gaping slash had reduced itself to a thin raw line. “You’ll live,” she said. “You were lucky they don’t poison their knives.” He kissed the tip of her nose and they returned to the hatch area.

Sting and the Tree Companion chief were conducting some sort of discussion in pantomime, Sting’s motions sweeping and broad, the chief’s the merest flicks of fingers, while Crown stood by, an impassive column of darkness, arms folded sombrely. As Leaf and Shadow reappeared Crown said, “Sting isn’t getting anywhere. It has to be a trance parley or we won’t make contact. Help him, Shadow.”

She nodded. To Leaf, Crown said, “How’s the arm?”

“It’ll be all right.”

“How soon?”

“A day. Two, maybe. Sore for a week.”

“We may be fighting again by sunrise.”

“You told me yourself that we can’t possibly survive a battle with these people.”

“Even so,” Crown said. “We may be fighting again by sunrise. If there’s no other choice, we’ll fight.”

“And die?”

“And die,” Crown said.

Leaf walked slowly away. Twilight had come. All vestiges of the rain had vanished, and the air was clear, crisp, growing chill, with a light wind out of the north that was gaining steadily in force. Beyond the thicket the tops of tall ropy-limbed trees were whipping about. The shards of the moon had moved into view, rough daggers of whiteness doing their slow dance about one another in the darkening sky. The poor old shattered moon, souvenir of an era long gone: it seemed a scratchy mirror for the tormented planet that owned it, for the fragmented race of races that was mankind. Leaf went to the nightmares, who stood patiently in harness, and passed among them, gently stroking their shaggy ears, caressing their blunt noses. Their eyes, liquid, intelligent, watchful, peered into his almost reproachfully. You promised us a stable, they seemed to be saying. Stallions, warmth, newly mown hay. Leaf shrugged. In this world, he told them wordlessly, it isn’t always possible to keep one’s promises. One does one’s best, and one hopes that that is enough.

Near the wagon Sting has assumed a cross-legged position on the damp ground. Shadow squats beside him; the chief, mantled in dignity, stands stiffly before them, but Shadow coaxes him with gentle gestures to come down to them. Sting’s eyes are closed and his head lolls forward. He is already in trance. His left hand grasps Shadow’s muscular furry thigh; he extends his right, palm upward, and after a moment the chief puts his own palm to it. Contact: the circuit is closed.

Leaf has no idea what messages are passing among the three of them, but yet, oddly, he does not feel excluded from the transaction. Such a sense of love and warmth radiates from Sting and Shadow and even from the Tree Companion that he is drawn in, he is enfolded by their communion. And Crown, too, is engulfed and absorbed by the group aura; his rigid martial posture eases, his grim face looks strangely peaceful. Of course it is Sting and Shadow who are most closely linked; Shadow is closer now to Sting than she has ever been to Leaf, but Leaf is untroubled by this. Jealousy and competitiveness are inconceivable now. He is Sting, Sting is Leaf, they all are Shadow and Crown, there are no boundaries separating one from another, just as there will be no boundaries in the All-Is-One that awaits every living creature, Sting and Crown and Shadow and Leaf, the Tree Companions, the Invisibles, the nightmares, the no-leg spiders.

They are getting down to cases now. Leaf is aware of strands of opposition and conflict manifesting themselves in the intricate negotiation that is taking, place. Although he is still without a clue to the content of the exchange, Leaf understands that the Tree Companion chief is stating a position of demand—calmly, bluntly, immovable—and Sting and Shadow are explaining to him that Crown is not at all likely to yield. More than that Leaf is unable to perceive, even when he is most deeply enmeshed in the larger consciousness of the trance-wrapped three. Nor does he know how much time is elapsing. The symphonic interchange—demand, response, development, climax—continues repetitively, indefinitely, reaching no resolution.

He feels, at last, a running-down, an attenuation of the experience. He begins to move outside the field of contact, or to have it move outside him. Spiderwebs of sensibility still connect him to the others even as Sting and Shadow and the chief rise and separate, but they are rapidly thinning and fraying, and in a moment they snap.

The contact ends.

The meeting was over. During the trance-time night had fallen, an extraordinarily black night against which the stars seemed unnaturally bright. The fragments of the moon had traveled far across the sky. So it had been a lengthy exchange; yet in the immediate vicinity of the wagon nothing seemed altered. Crown stood like a statue beside the wagon’s entrance; the Tree Companions still occupied the cleared ground between the wagon and the gate. Once more a tableau, then: how easy it is to slide into motionlessness, Leaf thought, in these impoverished times. Stand and wait, stand and wait; but now motion returned. The Tree Companion pivoted and strode off without a word, signaling to his people, who gathered up their dead and followed him through the gate. From within they tugged the gate shut; there was the screeching sound of the bolts being forced home. Sting, looking dazed, whispered something to Shadow, who nodded and lightly touched his arm. They walked haltingly back to the wagon.

“Well?” Crown asked finally.

“They will allow us to pass,” Sting said.

“How courteous of them.”

“But they claim the wagon and everything that is in it.”

Crown gasped. “By what right?”

“Right of prophecy,” said Shadow. “There is a seer among them, an old woman of mixed stock, part White Crystal, part Tree Companion, part Invisible. She has told them that everything that has happened lately in the world was caused by the Soul for the sake of enriching the Tree Companions.”

“Everything? They see the onslaught of the Teeth as a sign of divine favor?”

“Everything,” said Sting. “The entire upheaval. All for their benefit. All done so that migrations would begin and refugees would come to this place, carrying with them valuable possessions, which they would surrender to those whom the Soul meant should own them, meaning the Tree Companions.”

Crown laughed roughly. “If they want to be brigands, why not practice brigandage outright, with the right name on it, and not blame their greed on the Soul?”

“They don’t see themselves as brigands,” Shadow said. “There can be no denying the chief’s sincerity. He and his people genuinely believe that the Soul has decreed all this for their own special good, that the time has come—”

“Sincerity!”

“—for the Tree Companions to become people of substance and property. Therefore they’ve built this wall across the highway, and as refugees come west, the Tree Companions relieve them of their possessions with the blessing of the Soul.”

“I’d like to meet their prophet,” Crown muttered.

Leaf said, “It was my understanding that Invisibles were unable to breed with other stocks.”

Sting told him, with a shrug, “We report only what we learned as we sat there dreaming with the chief. The witch-woman is part Invisible, he said. Perhaps he was wrong, but he was doing no lying. Of that I’m certain.”

“And I,” Shadow put in.

“What happens to those who refuse to pay tribute?” Crown asked.

“The Tree Companions regard them as thwarters of the Soul’s design,” said Sting, “and fall upon them and put them to death. And then seize their goods.”

Crown moved restlessly in a shallow circle in front of the wagon, kicking up gouts of soil out of the hard-packed roadbed. After a moment he said, “They dangle on vines. They chatter like foolish monkeys. What do they want with the merchandise of civilized folk? Our furs, our statuettes, our carvings, our flutes, our robes?”

“Having such things will make them equal in their own sight to the higher stocks,” Sting said. “Not the things themselves, but the possession of them, do you see, Crown?”

“They’ll have nothing of mine!”

“What will we do, then?” Leaf asked. “Sit here and wait for their darts?”

Crown caught Sting heavily by the shoulder. “Did they give us any sort of time limit? How long do we have before they attack?”

“There was nothing like an ultimatum. The chief seems unwilling to enter into warfare with us.”

“Because he’s afraid of his betters!”

“Because he thinks violence cheapens the decree of the Soul,” Sting replied evenly. “Therefore he intends to wait for us to surrender our belongings voluntarily.”

“He’ll wait a hundred years!”

“He’ll wait a few days,” Shadow said. “If we haven’t yielded, the attack will come. But what will you do, Crown? Suppose they were willing to wait your hundred years. Are you? We can’t camp here forever.”

“Are you suggesting we give them what they ask?”

“I merely want to know what strategy you have in mind,” she said. “You admit yourself we can’t defeat them in battle. We haven’t done a very good job of aweing them into submission. You recognize that any attempt to destroy their wall will bring them upon us with their darts. You refuse to turn back and look for some other westward route. You rule out the alternative of yielding to them. Very well, Crown. What do you have in mind?”

“We’ll wait a few days,” Crown said thickly.

“The Teeth are heading this way!” Sting cried. “Shall we sit here and let them catch us?”

Crown shook his head. “Long before the Teeth get here, Sting, this place will be full of other refugees, many of them, as unwilling to give up their goods to these folk as we are. I can feel them already on the road, coming this way, two days’ march from us, perhaps less. We’ll make alliance with them. Four of us may be helpless against a swarm of poisonous apes, but fifty or a hundred strong fighters would send them scrambling up their own trees.”

“No one will come this way,” said Leaf. “No one but fools. Everyone passing through Theptis knows what’s been done to the highway here. What good is the aid of fools?”

“We came this way,” Crown snapped. “Are we such fools?”

“Perhaps we are. We were warned not to take Spider Highway, and we took it anyway.”

“Because we refused to trust the word of Invisibles.”

“Well, the Invisibles happened to be telling the truth, this time,” Leaf said. “And the news must be all over Theptis. No one in his right mind will come this way now.”

“I feel marchers already on the way, hundreds of them,” Crown said. “I can sense these things, sometimes. What about you, Sting? You feel things ahead of time, don’t you? They’re coming, aren’t they? Have no fear, Leaf. We’ll have allies here in a day or so, and then let these thieving Tree Companions beware.” Crown gestured broadly. “Leaf, set the nightmares loose to graze. And then everybody inside the wagon. We’ll seal it and take turns standing watch through the night. This is a time for vigilance and courage.”

“This is a time for digging graves,” Sting murmured sourly, as they clambered into the wagon.

Crown and Shadow stood the first round of watches while Leaf and Sting napped in the back. Leaf fell asleep at once and dreamed he was living in some immense brutal eastern city—the buildings and street plan were unfamiliar to him, but the architecture was definitely eastern in style, gray and heavy, all parapets and cornices—that was coming under attack by the Teeth.

He observed everything from a many-windowed gallery atop an enormous square-sided brick tower that seemed like a survival from some remote prehistoric epoch. First, from the north, came the sound of the war song of the invaders, a nasty unendurable buzzing drone, piercing and intense, like the humming of highspeed polishing wheels at work on metal plates. That dread music brought the inhabitants of the city spilling into the streets—all stocks, Flower Givers and Sand Shapers and White Crystals and Dancing Stars and even Tree Companions, absurdly garbed in mercantile robes as though they were so many fat citified Fingers—but no one was able to escape, for there were so many people, colliding and jostling and stumbling and falling in helpless heaps, that they blocked every avenue and alleyway.

Into this chaos now entered the vanguard of the Teeth; shuffling forward in their peculiar bent-kneed crouch, trampling those who had fallen. They looked half-beast, half-demon: squat thick-thewed flat-headed long-muzzled creatures, naked, hairy, their skins the color of sand, their eyes glinting with insatiable hungers. Leaf’s dreaming mind subtly magnified and distorted them so that they came hopping into the city like a band of giant toothy frogs, thump-thump, bare fleshy feet slapping pavement in sinister reverberations, short powerful arms swinging almost comically at each leaping stride. The kinship of mankind meant nothing to these carnivorous beings. They had been penned up too long in the cold, mountainous, barren country of the far northeast, living on such scraps and strings as the animals of the forest yielded, and they saw their fellow humans as mere meat stockpiled by the Soul against this day of vengeance. Efficiently, now, they began their round-up in the newly conquered city, seizing everyone in sight, cloistering the dazed prisoners in hastily rigged pens: these we eat tonight at our victory feast; these we save for tomorrow’s dinner; these become dried meat to carry with us on the march; these we kill for sport; these we keep as slaves. Leaf watched the Teeth erecting their huge spits. Kindling their fierce roasting-fires. Diligent search teams fanned out through the suburbs. No one would escape. Leaf stirred and groaned, reached the threshold of wakefulness, fell back into dream. Would they find him in his tower? Smoke, gray and greasy, boiled up out of a hundred parts of town. Leaping flames. Rivulets of blood ran in the streets. He was choking. A terrible dream. But was it only a dream? This was how it had actually been in Holy Town hours after he and Crown and Sting and Shadow had managed to get away, this was no doubt as it had happened in city after city along the tormented coastal strip, very likely something of this sort was going on now in—where?—Bone Harbor? Ved-uru? Alsandar? He could smell the penetrating odor of roasting meat. He could hear the heavy lalloping sound of a Teeth patrol running up the stairs of his tower. They had him. Yes, here, now, now, a dozen Teeth bursting suddenly into his hiding place, grinning broadly—Pure Stream, they had captured a Pure Stream! What a coup! Beasts. Beasts. Prodding him, testing his flesh. Not plump enough for them, eh? This one’s pretty lean. We’ll cook him anyway. Pure Stream meat, it enlarges the soul, it makes you into something more than you were. Take him downstairs! To the spit, to the spit, to the—

“Leaf?”

“I warn you—you won’t like—the flavor—”

“Leaf, wake up!”

“The fires—oh, the stink!”

“Leaf!”

It was Shadow. She shook him gently, plucked at his shoulder. He blinked and slowly sat up. His wounded arm was throbbing again; he felt feverish. Effects of the dream. A dream, only a dream. He shivered and tried to center himself, working at it, banishing the fever, banishing the shreds of dark fantasy that were still shrouding his mind.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I was dreaming about the Teeth,” he told her. He shook his head, trying to clear it. “Am I to stand watch now?”

She nodded. “Up front. Driver’s cabin.”

“Has anything been happening?”

“Nothing. Not a thing.” She reached up and drew her fingertips lightly along the sides of his jaws. Her eyes were warm and bright, her smile was loving. “The Teeth are far away, Leaf.”

“From us, maybe. Not from others.”

“They were sent by the will of the Soul.”

“I know, I know.” How often had he preached acceptance! This is the will, and we bow to it. This is the road, and we travel it uncomplainingly. But yet, but yet—he shuddered. The dream mode persisted. He was altogether disoriented. Dream-Teeth nibbled at his flesh. The inner chambers of his spirit resonated to the screams of those on the spits, the sounds of rending and tearing, the unbearable reek of burning cities. In ten days, half a world torn apart. So much pain, so much death, so much that had been beautiful destroyed by relentless savages who would not halt until, the Soul only knew when, they had had their full measure of revenge. The will of the Soul sends them upon us. Accept. Accept. He could not find his center. Shadow held him, straining to encompass his body with her arms. After a moment he began to feel less troubled, but he remained scattered, diffused, present only in part, some portion of his mind nailed as if by spikes into that monstrous ash-strewn wasteland that the Teeth had created out of the fair and fertile eastern provinces.

She released him. “Go,” she whispered. “It’s quiet up front. You’ll be able to find yourself again.”

He took her place in the driver’s cabin, going silently past Sting, who had replaced Crown on watch amidwagon. Half the night was gone. All was still in the roadside clearing; the great wooden gate was shut tight and nobody was about. By cold starlight Leaf saw the nightmares browsing patiently at the edge of the thicket. Gentle horses, almost human. If I must be visited by nightmares, he thought, let it be by their kind.

Shadow had been right. In the stillness he grew calm, and perspective returned. Lamentation would not restore the shattered eastland, expressions of horror and shock would not turn the Teeth into pious tillers of the soil. The Soul had decreed chaos: so be it. This is the road we must travel, and who dares ask why? Once the world had been whole and now it is fragmented, and that is the way things are because that is the way things were meant to be. He became less tense. Anguish dropped from him. He was Leaf again.

Toward dawn the visible world lost its sharp starlit edge; a soft fog settled over the wagon, and rain fell for a time, a light, pure rain, barely audible, altogether different in character from yesterday’s vicious storm. In the strange light just preceding sunrise the world took on a delicate pearly mistiness; and out of that mist an apparition materialized. Leaf saw a figure come drifting through the closed gate—through it—a ghostly, incorporeal figure. He thought it might be the Invisible who had been lurking close by the wagon since Theptis, but no, this was a woman, old and frail, an attenuated woman, smaller even than Shadow, more slender. Leaf knew who she must be: the mixed-blood woman. The prophetess, the seer, she who had stirred up these Tree Companions to block the highway. Her skin had the White Crystal waxiness of texture and the White Crystal nodes of dark, coarse hair; the form of her body was essentially that of a Tree Companion, thin and long-armed; and from her Invisible forebears, it seemed, she had inherited that perplexing intangibility, that look of existing always on the borderland between hallucination and reality, between mist and flesh. Mixed-bloods were uncommon; Leaf had rarely seen one, and never had encountered one who combined in herself so many different stocks. It was said that people of mixed blood had strange gifts. Surely this one did. How had she bypassed the wall? Not even Invisibles could travel through solid wood. Perhaps this was just a dream, then, or possibly she had some way of projecting an image of herself into his mind from a point within the Tree Companion village. He did not understand.

He watched her a long while. She appeared real enough. She halted twenty paces from the nose of the wagon and scanned the entire horizon slowly, her eyes coming to rest at last on the window of the driver’s cabin. She was aware, certainly, that he was looking at her, and she looked back, eye to eye, staring unflinchingly. They remained locked that way for some minutes. Her expression was glum and opaque, a withered scowl, but suddenly she brightened and smiled intensely at him and it was such a knowing smile that Leaf was thrown into terror by the old witch, and glanced away, shamed and defeated.

When he lifted his head she was out of view; he pressed himself against the window, craned his neck, and found her down near the middle of the wagon. She was inspecting its exterior workmanship at close range, picking and prying at the hull. Then she wandered away, out to the place where Sting and Shadow and the chief had had their conference, and sat down cross-legged where they had been sitting. She became extraordinarily still, as if she were asleep, or in trance. Just when Leaf began to think she would never move again, she took a pipe of carved bone from a pouch at her waist, filled it with a gray-blue powder, and lit it. He searched her face for tokens of revelation, but nothing showed on it; she grew ever more impassive and unreadable. When the pipe went out, she filled it again, and smoked a second time, and still Leaf watched her, his face pushed awkwardly against the window, his body growing stiff. The first rays of sunlight now arrived, pink shading rapidly into gold. As the brightness deepened the witch-woman imperceptibly became less solid; she was fading away, moment by moment, and shortly he saw nothing of her but her pipe and her kerchief, and then the clearing was empty. The long shadows of the six nightmares splashed against the wooden palisade. Leaf’s head lolled. I’ve been dozing, he thought. It’s morning, and all’s well. He went to awaken Crown.

They breakfasted lightly. Leaf and Shadow led the horses to water at a small clear brook five minutes’ walk toward Theptis. Sting foraged awhile in the thicket for nuts and berries, and having filled two pails, went aft to doze in the furs. Crown brooded in his trophy room and said nothing to anyone. A few Tree Companions could be seen watching the wagon from perches in the crowns of towering red-leaved trees on the hillside just behind the wall. Nothing happened until midmorning. Then, at a time when all four travelers were within the wagon, a dozen newcomers appeared, forerunners of the refugee tribe that Crown’s intuitions had correctly predicted. They came slowly up the road, on foot, dusty and tired-looking, staggering beneath huge untidy bundles of belongings and supplies. They were square-headed muscular people, as tall as Leaf or taller, with the look of warriors about them; they carried short swords at their waists, and both men and women were conspicuously scarred. Their skins were gray, tinged with pale green, and they had more fingers and toes than was usual among mankind.

Leaf had never seen their sort before. “Do you know them?” he asked Sting.

“Snow Hunters,” Sting said. “Close kin to the Sand Shapers, I think. Midcaste and said to be unfriendly to strangers. They live southwest of Theptis, in the hill country.”

“One would think they’d be safe there,” said Shadow.

Sting shrugged. “No one’s safe from the Teeth, eh? Not even on the highest hills. Not even in the thickest jungles.”

The Snow Hunters dropped their packs and looked around. The wagon drew them first; they seemed stunned by the opulence of it. They examined it in wonder, touching it as the witch-woman had, scrutinizing it from every side. When they saw faces looking out at them, they nudged one another and pointed and whispered, but they did not smile, nor did they wave greetings. After a time they went on to the wall and studied it with the same childlike curiosity. It appeared to baffle them. They measured it with their outstretched hands, pressed their bodies against it, pushed at it with their shoulders, tapped the timbers, plucked at the sturdy bindings of vine. By this time perhaps a dozen more of them had come up the road; they too clustered about the wagon, doing as the first had done, and then continued toward the wall. More and more Snow Hunters were arriving, in groups of three or four. One trio, standing apart from the others, gave the impression of being tribal leaders; they consulted, nodded, summoned and dismissed other members of the tribe with forceful gestures of their hands.

“Let’s go out and parley,” Crown said. He donned his best armor and selected an array of elegant dress weapons. To Sting he gave a slender dagger. Shadow would not bear arms, and Leaf preferred to arm himself in nothing but Pure Stream prestige. His status as a member of the ancestral stock, he found, served him as well as a sword in most encounters with strangers.

The Snow Hunters—about a hundred of them now had gathered, with still more down the way—looked apprehensive as Crown and his companions descended from the wagon. Crown’s bulk and gladiatorial swagger seemed far more threatening to these strong-bodied warlike folk than they had been to the chattering Tree Companions, and Leaf’s presence too appeared disturbing to them. Warily they moved to form a loose semicircle about their three leaders; they stood close by one another, murmuring tensely, and their hands hovered near the hilts of their swords.

Crown stepped forward. “Careful,” Leaf said softly. “They’re on edge. Don’t push them.”

But Crown, with a display of slick diplomacy unusual for him, quickly put the Snow Hunters at their ease with a warm gesture of greeting—hands pressed to shoulders, palms outward, fingers spread wide—and a few hearty words of welcome. Introductions were exchanged. The spokesman for the tribe, an iron-faced man with frosty eyes and hard cheekbones, was called Sky; the names of his co-captains were Blade and Shield. Sky spoke in a flat, quiet voice, everything on the same note. He seemed empty, burned out, a man who had entered some realm of exhaustion far beyond mere fatigue. They had been on the road for three days and three nights almost without a halt, said Sky. Last week a major force of Teeth had started westward through the midcoastal lowlands bound for Theptis, and one band of these, just a few hundred warriors, had lost its way, going south into the hill country. Their aimless wanderings brought these straying Teeth without warning into the secluded village of the Snow Hunters, and there had been a terrible battle in which more than half of Sky’s people had perished. The survivors, having slipped away into the trackless forest, had made their way by back roads to Spider Highway, and, numbed by shock and grief, had been marching like machines toward the Middle River, hoping to find some new hillside in the sparsely populated territories of the far northwest. They could never return to their old home, Shield declared, for it had been desecrated by the feasting of the Teeth.

“But what is this wall?” Sky asked.

Crown explained, telling the Snow Hunters about the Tree Companions and their prophetess, and of her promise that the booty of all refugees was to be surrendered to them. “They lie in wait for us with their darts,” Crown said. “Four of us were helpless against them. But they would never dare challenge a force the size of yours. We’ll have their wall smashed down by nightfall!”

“The Tree Companions are said to be fierce foes,” Sky remarked quietly.

“Nothing but monkeys,” said Crown. “They’ll scramble to their treetops if we just draw our swords.”

“And shower us with their poisoned arrows,” Shield muttered. “Friend, we have little stomach for further warfare. Too many of us have fallen this week.”

“What will you do?” Crown cried. “Give them your swords, and your tunics and your wives’ rings and the sandals off your feet?”

Sky closed his eyes and stood motionless, remaining silent for a long moment. At length, without opening his eyes, he said in a voice that came from the center of an immense void, “We will talk with the Tree Companions and learn what they actually demand of us, and then we will make our decisions and form our plans.”

“The wall—if you fight beside us, we can destroy this wall, and open the road to all who flee the Teeth!”

With cold patience Sky said, “We will speak with you again afterward,” and turned away. “Now we will rest, and wait for the Tree Companions to come forth.”

The Snow Hunters withdrew, sprawling out along the margin of the thicket just under the wall. There they huddled in rows, staring at the ground, waiting. Crown scowled, spat, shook his head. Turning to Leaf he said, “They have the true look of fighters. There’s something that marks a fighter apart from other men, Leaf, and I can tell when it’s there, and these Snow Hunters have it. They have the strength, they have the power; they have the spirit of battle in them. And yet, see them now! Squatting there like fat frightened Fingers!”

“They’ve been beaten badly,” Leaf said. “They’ve been driven from their homeland. They know what it is to look back across a hilltop and see the fires in which your kinsmen are being cooked. That takes the fighting spirit out of a person, Crown.”

“No. Losing makes the flame burn brighter. It makes you feverish with the desire for revenge.”

“Does it? What do you know about losing? You were never so much as touched by any of your opponents.”

Crown glared at him. “I’m not speaking of dueling. Do you think my life has gone untouched by the Teeth? What am I doing here on this dirt road with all that I still own packed into a single wagon? But I’m no walking dead man like these Snow Hunters. I’m not running away, I’m going to find an army. And then I’ll go back east and take my vengeance. While they—afraid of monkeys—”

“They’ve been marching day and night,” Shadow said. “They must have been on the road when the purple rain was falling. They’ve spent all their strength while we’ve been riding in your wagon, Crown. Once they’ve had a little rest, perhaps they—”

“Afraid of monkeys!”

Crown shook with wrath. He strode up and down before the wagon, pounding his fists into his thighs. Leaf feared that he would go across to the Snow Hunters and attempt by bluster to force them into an alliance. Leaf understood the mood of these people: shattered and drained though they were, they might lash out in sudden savage irritation if Crown goaded them too severely. Possibly some hours of rest, as Shadow had suggested, and they might feel more like helping Crown drive his way through the Tree Companions’ wall. But not now. Not now.

The gate in the wall opened. Some twenty of the forest folk emerged, among them the tribal chief and—Leaf caught his breath in awe—the ancient seeress, who looked across the way and bestowed on Leaf another of her penetrating comfortless smiles.

“What kind of creature is that?” Crown asked.

“The mixed-blood witch,” said Leaf. “I saw her at dawn, while I was standing watch.”

“Look!” Shadow cried. “She flickers and fades like an Invisible! But her pelt is like yours, Sting, and her shape is that of—”

“She frightens me,” Sting said hoarsely. He was shaking. “She foretells death for us. We have little time left to us, friends. She is the goddess of death, that one.” He plucked at Crown’s elbow, unprotected by the armour. “Come! Let’s start back along Spider Highway! Better to take our chances in the desert than to stay here and die!”

“Quiet,” Crown snapped. “There’s no going back. The Teeth are already in Theptis. They’ll be moving out along this road in a day or two. There’s only one direction for us.”

“But the wall,” Sting said.

“The wall will be in ruins by nightfall,” Crown told him.

The chief of the Tree Companions was conferring with Sky and Blade and Shield. Evidently the Snow Hunters knew something of the language of the Tree Companions, for Leaf could hear vocal interchanges, supplemented by pantomime and sign language. The chief pointed to himself often, to the wall, to the prophetess; he indicated the packs the Snow Hunters had been carrying; he jerked his thumb angrily toward Crown’s wagon. The conversation lasted nearly half an hour and seemed to reach an amicable outcome. The Tree Companions departed, this time leaving the gate open. Sky, Shield, and Blade moved among their people, issuing instructions. The Snow Hunters drew food from their packs—dried roots, seeds, smoked meat—and lunched in silence. Afterward, boys who carried huge waterbags made of sewn hides slung between them on poles went off to the creek to replenish their supply, and the rest of the Snow Hunters rose, stretched, wandered in narrow circles about the clearing, as if getting ready to resume the march. Crown was seized by furious impatience. “What are they going to do?” he demanded. “What deal have they made?”

“I imagine they’ve submitted to the terms,” Leaf said.

“No! No! I need their help!” Crown, in anguish, hammered at himself with his fists. “I have to talk to them,” he muttered.

“Wait. Don’t push them, Crown.”

“What’s the use? What’s the use?” Now the Snow Hunters were hoisting their packs to their shoulders. No doubt of it; they were going to leave. Crown hurried across the clearing. Sky, busily directing the order of march, grudgingly gave him attention. “Where are you going?” Crown asked.

“Westward,” said Sky.

“What about us?”

“March with us, if you wish.”

“My wagon!”

“You can’t get it through the gate, can you?”

Crown reared up as though he would strike the Snow Hunter in rage. “If you would aid us, the wall would fall! Look, how can I abandon my wagon? I need to reach my kinsmen in the Flatlands. I’ll assemble an army; I’ll return to the east and push the Teeth back into the mountains where they belong. I’ve lost too much time already. I must get through. Don’t you want to see the Teeth destroyed?”

“It’s nothing to us,” Sky said evenly. “Our lands are lost to us forever. Vengeance is meaningless. Your pardon. My people need my guidance.”

More than half the Snow Hunters had passed through the gate already. Leaf joined the procession. On the far side of the wall he discovered that the dense thicket along the highway’s northern rim had been cleared for a considerable distance, and a few small wooden buildings, hostelries or depots, stood at the edge of the road. Another twenty or thirty paces farther along, a secondary path led northward into the forest; this was evidently the route to the Tree Companions’ village. Traffic on that path was heavy just now. Hundreds of forest folk were streaming from the village to the highway, where a strange, repellent scene was being enacted. Each Snow Hunter in turn halted, unburdened himself of his pack, and laid it open. Three or four Tree Companions then picked through it, each seizing one item of value—a knife, a comb, a piece of jewelry, a fine cloak—and running triumphantly off with it. Once he had submitted to this harrying of his possessions, the Snow Hunter gathered up his pack, shouldered it, and marched on, head bowed, body slumping. Tribute. Leaf felt chilled. These proud warriors, homeless now, yielding up their remaining treasures to—he tried to choke off the word, and could not—to a tribe of monkeys. And moving onward, soiled, unmanned. Of all that he had seen since the Teeth had split the world apart, this was the most sad.

Leaf started back toward the wagon. He saw Sky, Shield, and
Blade at the rear of the column of Snow Hunters. Their faces were ashen; they could not meet his eyes. Sky managed a half-hearted salute as he passed by.

“I wish you good fortune on your journey,” Leaf said.

“I wish you better fortune than we have had,” said Sky hollowly, and went on.

Leaf found Crown standing rigid in the middle of the highway, hands on hips. “Cowards!” he called in a bitter voice. “Weaklings!”

“And now it’s our turn,” Leaf said.

“What do you mean?”

“The time’s come for us to face hard truths. We have to give up the wagon, Crown.”

“Never.”

“We agree that we can’t turn back. And we can’t go forward so long as the wall’s there. If we stay here, the Tree Companions will eventually kill us, if the Teeth don’t overtake us first. Listen to me, Crown. We don’t have to give the Tree Companions everything we have. The wagon itself, some of our spare clothing, some trinkets, the furnishings of the wagon—they’ll be satisfied with that. We can load the rest of our goods on the horses and go safely through the gate as foot-pilgrims.”

“I ignore this, Leaf.”

“I know you do. I also know what the wagon means to you. I wish you could keep it. I wish I could stay with the wagon myself. Don’t you think I’d rather ride west in comfort than slog through the rain and the cold? But we can’t keep it. We can’t keep it, Crown, that’s the heart of the situation. We can go back east in the wagon and get lost in the desert, we can sit here and wait for the Tree Companions to lose patience and kill us, or we can give up the wagon and get out of this place with our skins still whole. What sort of choices are those? We have no choice. I’ve been telling you that for two days. Be reasonable, Crown!”

Crown glanced coldly at Sting and Shadow. “Find the chief and go into trance with him again. Tell him that I’ll give him swords, armor, his pick of the finest things in the wagon. So long as he’ll dismantle part of the wall and let the wagon itself pass through.”

“We made that offer yesterday,” Sting said glumly.

“And?”

“He insists on the wagon. The old witch has promised it to him for a palace.”

“No,” Crown said. “NO!” His wild roaring cry echoed from the hills. After a moment, more calmly, he said, “I have another idea. Leaf, Sting, come with me. The gate’s open. We’ll go to the village and seize the witch-woman. We’ll grab her quickly, before anyone realizes what we’re doing. They won’t dare molest us while she’s in our hands. Then, Sting, you tell the chief that unless they open the wall for us, we’ll kill her.” Crown chuckled. “Once she realizes we’re serious, she’ll tell them to hop it. Anybody that old wants to live forever. And they’ll obey her. You can bet on that. They’ll obey her! Come, now.” Crown started toward the gate at a vigorous pace. He took a dozen strides, halted, looked back. Neither Leaf nor Sting had moved.

“Well? Why aren’t you coming?”

“I won’t do it,” said Leaf tiredly. “It’s crazy, Crown. She’s a witch, she’s part Invisible—she already knows your scheme. She probably knew of it before you knew of it yourself. How can we hope to catch her?”

“Let me worry about that.”

“Even if we did, Crown—no. No. I won’t have any part of it. It’s an impossible idea. Even if we did seize her. We’d be standing there holding a sword to her throat, and the chief would give a signal, and they’d put a hundred darts in us before we could move a muscle. It’s insane, Crown.”

“I ask you to come with me.”

“You’ve had your answer.”

“Then I’ll go without you.”

“As you choose,” Leaf said quietly. “But you won’t be seeing me again.”

“Eh?”

“I’m going to collect what I own and let the Tree Companions take their pick of it, and then I’ll hurry forward and catch up with the Snow Hunters. In a week or so I’ll be at the Middle River. Shadow, will you come with me, or are you determined to stay here and die with Crown?”

The Dancing Star looked toward the muddy ground. “I don’t know,” she said. “Let me think a moment.”

“Sting?”

“I’m going with you.”

Leaf beckoned to Crown. “Please. Come to your senses, Crown. For the last time—give up the wagon and let’s get going, all four of us.”

“You disgust me.”

“Then this is where we part,” Leaf said. “I wish you good fortune. Sting, let’s assemble our belongings. Shadow? Will you be coming with us?”

“We have an obligation toward Crown,” she said.

“To help him drive his wagon, yes. But not to die a foolish death for him. Crown has lost his wagon, Shadow, though he won’t admit that yet. If the wagon’s no longer his, our contract is voided. I hope you’ll join us.”

He entered the wagon and went to the midcabin cupboard where he stored the few possessions he had managed to bring with him out of the east. A pair of glistening boots made of the leathery skins of stick-creatures, two ancient copper coins, three ornamental ivory medallions, a shirt of dark red silk, a thick, heavily worked belt—not much, not much at all, the salvage of a lifetime. He packed rapidly. He took with him a slab of dried meat and some bread; that would last him a day or two, and when it was gone he would learn from Sting or the Snow Hunters the arts of gathering food in the wilderness.

“Are you ready?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Sting said. His pack was almost empty—a change of clothing, a hatchet, a knife, some smoked fish, nothing else.

“Let’s go, then.”

As Sting and Leaf moved toward the exit hatch, Shadow scrambled up into the wagon. She looked tight-strung and grave; her nostrils were flared, her eyes downcast. Without a word she went past Leaf and began loading her pack. Leaf waited for her. After a few minutes she reappeared and nodded to him.

“Poor Crown,” she whispered. “Is there no way—”

“You heard him,” Leaf said.

They emerged from the wagon. Crown had not moved. He stood as if rooted, midway between wagon and wall. Leaf gave him a quizzical look, as if to ask whether he had changed his mind, but Crown took no notice. Shrugging, Leaf walked around him, toward the edge of the thicket, where the nightmares were nibbling leaves. Affectionately he reached up to stroke the long neck of the nearest horse, and Crown suddenly came to life, shouting, “Those are my animals! Keep your hands off them!”

“I’m only saying goodbye to them.”

“You think I’m going to let you have some? You think I’m that crazy, Leaf?”

Leaf looked sadly at him. “We plan to do our traveling on foot, Crown. I’m only saying goodbye. The nightmares were my friends. You can’t understand that, can you?”

“Keep away from those animals! Keep away!”

Leaf sighed. “Whatever you say.” Shadow, as usual, was right: poor Crown. Leaf adjusted his pack and moved off toward the gate, Shadow beside him, Sting a few paces to the rear. As he and Shadow reached the gate, Leaf looked back and saw Crown still motionless, saw Sting pausing, putting down his pack, dropping to his knees. “Anything wrong?” Leaf called.

“Tore a bootlace,” Sting said. “You two go on ahead. It’ll take me a minute to fix it.”

“We can wait.”

Leaf and Shadow stood within the frame of the gate while Sting knotted his lace. After a few moments he rose and reached for his pack, saying, “That ought to hold me until tonight, and then I’ll see if I can’t—”

“Watch out!” Leaf yelled.

Crown erupted abruptly from his freeze, and, letting forth a lunatic cry, rushed with terrible swiftness toward Sting. There was no chance for Sting to make one of his little leaps: Crown seized him, held him high overhead like a child, and, grunting in frantic rage, hurled the little man toward the ravine. Arms and legs flailing, Sting traveled on a high arc over the edge; he seemed to dance in midair for an instant, and then he dropped from view. There was a long diminishing shriek, and silence. Silence.

Leaf stood stunned. “Hurry,” Shadow said. “Crown’s coming!”

Crown, swinging around, now rumbled like a machine of death toward Leaf and Shadow. His wild red eyes glittered ferociously. Leaf did not move; Shadow shook him urgently, and finally he pushed himself into action. Together they caught hold of the massive gate and, straining, swung it shut, slamming it just as Crown crashed into it. Leaf forced the reluctant bolts into place. Crown roared and pounded at the gate, but he was unable to force it.

Shadow shivered and wept. Leaf drew her to him and held her for a moment. At length he said, “We’d better be on our way. The Snow Hunters are far ahead of us already.”

“Sting—”

“I know. I know. Come, now.”

Half a dozen Tree Companions were waiting for them by the wooden houses. They grinned, chattered, pointed to the packs. “All right,” Leaf said. “Go ahead. Take whatever you want. Take everything, if you like.”

Busy fingers picked through his pack and Shadow’s. From Shadow the Tree Companions took a brocaded ribbon and a flat, smooth green stone. From Leaf they took one of the ivory medallions, both copper coins, and one of his stickskin boots. Tribute. Day by day, pieces of the past slipped from his grasp. He pulled the other boot from the pack and offered it to them, but they merely giggled and shook their heads. “One is of no use to me,” he said. They would not take it. He tossed the boot into the grass beside the road.

The road curved gently toward the north and began a slow rise, following the flank of the forested hills in which the Tree Companions made their homes. Leaf and Shadow marched, mechanically, saying little. The bootprints of the Snow Hunters were everywhere along the road, but the Snow Hunters themselves were far ahead, out of sight. It was early afternoon, and the day had become bright, unexpectedly warm. After an hour Shadow said, “I must rest.”

Her teeth were clacking. She crouched by the roadside and wrapped her arms about her chest. Dancing Stars, covered with thick fur, usually wore no clothing except in the bleakest winters; but her pelt did her no good now.

“Are you ill?” he asked.

“It’ll pass. I’m reacting. Sting—”

“Yes.”

“And Crown. I feel so unhappy about Crown.”

“A madman,” Leaf said. “A murderer.”

“Don’t judge him so casually, Leaf. He’s a man under sentence of death, and he knows it, and he’s suffering from it, and when the fear and pain became unbearable to him he reached out for Sting. He didn’t know what he was doing. He needed to smash something, that was all, to relieve his own torment.”

“We’re all going to die sooner or later,” Leaf said. “That doesn’t generally drive us to kill our friends.”

“I don’t mean sooner or later. I mean that Crown will die tonight or tomorrow.”

“Why should he?”

“What can he do now to save himself, Leaf?”

“He could yield to the Tree Companions and pass the gate on foot, as we’ve done.”

“You know he’d never abandon the wagon.”

“Well, then, he can harness the nightmares and turn around toward Theptis. At least he’d have a chance to make it through to the Sunset Highway that way.”

“He can’t do that either,” Shadow said.

“Why not?”

“He can’t drive the wagon.”

“There’s no one left to do it for him. His life’s at stake. For once he could eat his pride and—”

“I didn’t say won’t drive the wagon, Leaf. I said can’t. Crown’s incapable. He isn’t able to make dream contact with the nightmares. Why do you think he always used hired drivers? Why was he so insistent on making you drive in the purple rain? He doesn’t have the mind-power. Did you ever see a Dark Laker driving nightmares? Ever?”

Leaf stared at her. “You knew this all along?”

“From the beginning, yes.”

“Is that why you hesitated to leave him at the gate? When you were talking about our contract with him?”

She nodded. “If all three of us left him, we were condemning him to death. He has no way of escaping the Tree Companions now unless he forces himself to leave the wagon, and he won’t do that. They’ll fall on him and kill him, today, tomorrow, whenever.”

Leaf closed his eyes, shook his head. “I feel a kind of shame. Now that I know we were leaving him helpless. He could have spoken.”

“Too proud.”

“Yes. Yes. It’s just as well he didn’t say anything. We all have responsibilities to one another, but there are limits. You and I and Sting were under no obligation to die simply because Crown couldn’t bring himself to give up his pretty wagon. But still—still—” He locked his hands tightly together. “Why did you finally decide to leave, then?”

“For the reason you just gave. I didn’t want Crown to die, but I didn’t believe I owed him my life. Besides, you had said you were going to go, no matter what.”

“Poor, crazy Crown.”

“And when he killed Sting—a life for a life, Leaf. All vows are canceled now. I feel no guilt.”

“Nor I.”

“I think the fever is leaving me.”

“Let’s rest a few minutes more,” Leaf said.

It was more than an hour before Leaf judged Shadow strong enough to go on. The highway now described a steady upgrade, not steep but making constant demands on their stamina, and they moved slowly. As the day’s warmth began to dwindle, they reached the crest of the grade, and rested again at a place from which they could see the road ahead winding in switchbacks into a green, pleasant valley. Far below were the Snow Hunters, resting also by the side of a fair-size stream.

“Smoke,” Shadow said. “Do you smell it?”

“Campfires down there, I suppose.”

“I don’t think they have any fires going. I don’t see any.”

“The Tree Companions, then.”

“It must be a big fire.”

“No matter,” Leaf said. “Are you ready to continue?”

“I hear a sound—”

A voice from behind and uphill of them said, “And so it ends the usual way, in foolishness and death, and the All-Is-One grows greater.”

Leaf whirled, springing to his feet. He heard laughter on the hillside and saw movements in the underbrush; after a moment he made out a dim, faintly outlined figure, and realized that an Invisible was coming toward them, the same one, no doubt, who had traveled with them from Theptis.

“What do you want?” Leaf called.

“Want? Want? I want nothing. I’m merely passing through.” The Invisible pointed over his shoulder. “You can see the whole thing from the top of this hill. Your big friend put up a mighty struggle, he killed many of them, but the darts, the darts—” The Invisible laughed. “He was dying, but even so he wasn’t going to let them have his wagon. Such a stubborn man. Such a foolish man. Well, a happy journey to you both.”

“Don’t leave yet!” Leaf cried. But even the outlines of the Invisible were fading. Only the laughter remained, and then that too was gone. Leaf threw desperate questions into the air and, receiving no replies, turned and rushed up the hillside, clawing at the thick shrubbery. In ten minutes he was at the summit, and stood gasping and panting, looking back across a precipitous valley to the stretch of road they had just traversed. He could see everything clearly from here: the Tree Companion village nestling in the forest, the highway, the shacks by the side of the road, the wall, the clearing beyond the wall. And the wagon. The roof was gone and the sides had tumbled outward. Bright spears of flame shot high, and a black, billowing cloud of smoke stained the air. Leaf stood watching Crown’s pyre a long while before returning to Shadow.

They descended toward the place where the Snow Hunters had made their camp. Breaking a long silence, Shadow said, “There must once have been a time when the world was different, when all people were of the same kind, and everyone lived in peace. A golden age, long gone. How did things change, Leaf? How did we bring this upon ourselves?”

“Nothing has changed,” Leaf said, “except the look of our bodies. Inside we’re the same. There never was any golden age.”

“There were no Teeth, once.”

“There were always Teeth, under one name or another. True peace never lasted long. Greed and hatred always existed.”

“Do you believe that, truly?”

“I do. I believe that mankind is mankind, all of us the same whatever our shape, and such changes as come upon us are trifles, and the best we can ever do is find such happiness for ourselves as we can,
however dark the times.”

“These are darker times than most, Leaf.”

“Perhaps.”

“These are evil times. The end of all things approaches.”

Leaf smiled. “Let it come. These are the times we were meant to live in, and no asking why, and no use longing for easier times. Pain ends when acceptance begins. This is what we have now. We make the best of it. This is the road we travel. Day by day we lose what was never ours, day by day we slip closer to the All-Is-One, and nothing matters, Shadow, nothing except learning to accept what comes. Yes?”

“Yes,” she said. “How far is it to the Middle River?”

“Another few days.”

“And from there to your kinsmen by the Inland Sea?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “However long it takes us is however long it will take. Are you very tired?”

“Not as tired as I thought I’d be.”

“It isn’t far to the Snow Hunters’ camp. We’ll sleep well tonight.”

“Crown,” she said. “Sting.”

“What about them?”

“They also sleep.”

“In the All-Is-One,” Leaf said. “Beyond all trouble. Beyond all pain.”

“And that beautiful wagon is a charred ruin!”

“If only Crown had had the grace to surrender it freely, once he knew he was dying. But then he wouldn’t have been Crown, would he? Poor Crown. Poor crazy Crown.” There was a stirring ahead, suddenly. “Look. The Snow Hunters see us. There’s Sky. Blade.” Leaf waved at them and shouted. Sky waved back, and Blade, and a few of the others. “May we camp with you tonight?” Leaf called. Sky answered something, but his words were blown away by the wind. He sounded friendly, Leaf thought. He sounded friendly. “Come,” Leaf said, and he and Shadow hurried down the slope.

The Pope of the Chimps

There’s not much to say about this story except that it is a personal favorite of mine. I wrote it in June of 1981, quickly, with great passion and conviction, in response to an invitation from the writer Alan Ryan to do a story for an anthology of science fiction stories on religious themes called Perpetual Light. The anthology appeared the following year and the story was nominated for a Nebula Award. It probably would have won if it had appeared in one of the widely distributed science fiction magazines instead of an anthology that relatively few of the voters had read. But it has frequently appeared in anthologies ever since. I think I’ve rarely managed such a depth of characterization—of man and beast—within such a small compass.

Early last month Vendelmans and I were alone with the chimps in the compound when suddenly he said, “I’m going to faint.” It was a sizzling May morning, but Vendelmans had never shown any sign of noticing unusual heat, let alone suffering from it. I was busy talking to Leo and Mimsy and Mimsy’s daughter Muffin, and I registered Vendelmans’s remark without doing anything about it. When you’re intensely into talking by sign language, as we are in the project, you sometimes tend not to pay a lot of attention to spoken words.

But then Leo began to sign the trouble sign at me, and I turned around and saw Vendelmans down on his knees in the grass, white-faced, gasping, covered with sweat. A few of the chimpanzees who aren’t as
sensitive to humans as Leo is thought it was a game and began to pantomime him, knuckles to the ground and bodies going limp. “Sick—” Vendelmans said. “Feel—terrible—”

I called for help, and Gonzo took his left arm and Kong took his right and somehow, big as he was, we managed to get him out of the compound and up the hill to headquarters. By then he was complaining about sharp pains in his back and under his arms, and I realized that it wasn’t just heat prostration. Within a week the diagnosis was in.

Leukemia.

They put him on chemotherapy and hormones, and after ten days he was back with the project, looking cocky. “They’ve stabilized it,” he told everyone. “It’s in remission and I might have ten or twenty years left, or even more. I’m going to carry on with my work.”

But he was gaunt and pale, with a tremor in his hands, and it was a frightful thing to have him among us. He might have been fooling himself, though I doubted it, but he wasn’t fooling any of us: to us he was a memento mori, a walking death’s-head-and-crossbones. That laymen think scientists are any more casual about such things than anyone else is something I blame Hollywood for. It is not easy to go about your daily work with a dying man at your side—or a dying man’s wife, for Judy Vendelmans showed in her frightened eyes all the grief that Hal Vendelmans himself was repressing. She was going to lose a beloved husband unexpectedly soon and she hadn’t had time to adjust to it and her pain was impossible to ignore. Besides, the nature of Vendelmans’s dyingness was particularly unsettling because he had been so big and robust and outgoing, a true Rabelaisian figure, and somehow between one moment and the next he was transformed into a wraith. “The finger of God,” Dave Yost said. “A quick flick of Zeus’s pinkie and Hal shrivels like cellophane in a fireplace.” Vendelmans was not yet forty.

The chimps suspected something, too.

Some of them, such as Leo and Ramona, are fifth-generation signers, bred for alpha intelligence, and they pick up subtleties and nuances very well. “Almost human,” visitors like to say of them. We dislike that tag, because the important thing about chimpanzees is that they aren’t human, that they are an alien intelligent species; but yet I know what people mean. The brightest of the chimps saw right away that something was amiss with Vendelmans, and started making odd remarks. “Big one rotten banana,” said Ramona to Mimsy while I was nearby. “He getting empty,” Leo said to me as Vendelmans stumbled past us. Chimp metaphors never cease to amaze me. And Gonzo asked him outright: “You go away soon?”

“Go away” is not the chimp euphemism for death. So far as our animals know, no human being has ever died. Chimps die. Human beings go away. We have kept things on that basis from the beginning, not intentionally at first, but such arrangements have a way of institutionalizing themselves. The first member of the group to die was Roger Nixon, in an automobile accident in the early years of the project long before my time here, and apparently no one wanted to confuse or disturb the animals by explaining what had happened to him, so no explanations were offered. My second or third year here, Tim Lippinger was killed in a ski-lift failure, and again it seemed easier not to go into details with them. And by the time of Will Bechstein’s death in that helicopter crack-up four years ago the policy was explicit: we chose not to regard his disappearance from the group as death, but mere going away, as if he had only retired. The chimps do understand death, of course. They may even equate it with going away, as Gonzo’s question suggests. But if they do, they surely see human death as something quite different from chimpanzee death—a translation to another state of being, an ascent on a chariot of fire. Yost believes that they have no comprehension of human death at all, that they think we are immortal, that they think we are gods.

Vendelmans now no longer pretends that he isn’t dying. The leukemia is plainly acute, and he deteriorates physically from day to day. His original this-isn’t-actually-happening attitude has been replaced by a kind of sullen, angry acceptance. It is only the fourth week since the onset of the ailment and soon he’ll have to enter the hospital.

And he wants to tell the chimps that he’s going to die.

“They don’t know that human beings can die,” Yost said.

“Then it’s time they found out,” Vendelmans snapped. “Why perpetuate a load of mythological bullshit about us? Why let them think we’re gods? Tell them outright that I’m going to die, the way old Egbert died and Salami and Mortimer.”

“But they all died naturally,” Jan Morton said.

“And I’m not dying naturally?”

She became terribly flustered. “Of old age, I mean. Their life cycles clearly and understandably came to an end and they died and the chimps understood it. Whereas you—” She faltered.

“—am dying a monstrous and terrible death midway through my life,” Vendelmans said, and started to break down and recovered with a fierce effort, and Jan began to cry, and it was generally a bad scene from which Vendelmans saved us by going on, “It should be of philosophical importance to the project to discover how the chimps react to a revaluation of the human metaphysic. We’ve ducked every chance we’ve had to help them understand the nature of mortality. Now I propose we use me to teach them that humans are subject to the same laws they are. That we are not gods.”

“And that gods exist,” said Yost, “who are capricious and unfathomable and to whom we ourselves are as less than chimps.”

Vendelmans shrugged. “They don’t need to hear all that now. But it’s time they understood what we are. Or rather, it’s time that we learned how much they already understand. Use my death as a way of finding out. It’s the first time they’ve been in the presence of a human who’s actually in the process of dying. The other times one of us has died, it’s always been in some sort of accident.”

Burt Christensen said, “Hal, have you already told them anything about—”

“No,” Vendelmans said. “Of course not. Not a word. But I see them talking to each other. They know.”

We discussed it far into the night. The questions needed careful examination because of the far-reaching consequences of any change we might make in the metaphysical givens of our animals. These chimps have lived in a closed environment here for decades, and the culture they have evolved is a product of what we have chosen to teach them, compounded by their own innate chimpness plus whatever we have unknowingly transmitted to them about ourselves or them. Any radical conceptual material we offer them must be weighed thoughtfully, because its effects will be irreversible, and those who succeed us in this community will be unforgiving if we do anything stupidly premature. If the plan is to observe a community of intelligent primates over a period of many human generations, studying the changes in their intellectual capacity as their linguistic skills increase, then we must at all times take care to let them find things out for themselves, rather than skewing our data by giving the chimps more than their current concept-processing abilities may be able to handle.

On the other hand. Vendelmans was dying right now, allowing us a dramatic opportunity to convey the concept of human mortality. We had at best a week or two to make use of that opportunity: then it might be years before the next chance.

“What are you worried about?” Vendelmans demanded.

Yost said, “Do you fear dying, Hal?”

“Dying makes me angry. I don’t fear it; but I still have things to do, and I won’t be able to do them. Why do you ask?”

“Because so far as we know the chimps see death—chimp death—as simply part of the great cycle of events, like the darkness that comes after the daylight. But human death is going to come as a revelation to them, a shock. And if they pick up from you any sense of fear or even anger over your dying, who knows what impact that will have on their way of thought?”

“Exactly. Who knows? I offer you a chance to find out!” By a narrow margin, finally we voted to let Hal Vendelmans share his death with the chimpanzees. Nearly all of us had reservations about that. But plainly Vendelmans was determined to have a useful death, a meaningful death; the only way he could face his fate at all was by contributing it like this to the project. And in the end I think most of us cast our votes his way purely out of our love for him.

We rearranged the schedules to give Vendelmans more contact with the animals. There are ten of us, fifty of them; each of us has a special field of inquiry—number theory, syntactical innovation, metaphysical exploration, semiotics, tool use, and so on—and we work with chimps of our own choice, subject, naturally, to the shifting patterns of subtribal bonding within the chimp community. But we agreed that Vendelmans would have to offer his revelations to the alpha intelligences—Leo, Ramona, Grimsky, Alice and Attila—regardless of the current structure of the chimp-human dialogues. Leo, for instance, was involved in an ongoing interchange with Beth Rankin on the notion of the change of seasons. Beth more or less willingly gave up her time with Leo to Vendelmans, for Leo was essential in this. We learned long ago that anything important had to be imparted to the alphas first, and they will impart it to the others. A bright chimp knows more about teaching things to his duller cousins than the brightest human being.

The next morning Hal and Judy Vendelmans took Leo, Ramona and Attila aside and held a long conversation with them. I was busy in a different part of the compound with Gonzo, Mimsy, Muffin, and Chump, but I glanced over occasionally to see what was going on. Hal looked radiant—like Moses just down from the mountain after talking with God. Judy was trying to look radiant too, working at it, but her grief kept breaking through: once I saw her turn away from the chimps and press her knuckles to her teeth to hold it back.

Afterward Leo and Grimsky had a conference out by the oak grove. Yost and Charley Damiano watched it with binoculars, but they couldn’t make much sense out of it. The chimps, when they sign to each other, use modified gestures much less precise than the ones they use with us; whether this marks the evolution of a special chimp-to-chimp argot designed not to be understood by us, or is simply a factor of chimp reliance on supplementary nonverbal ways of communicating, is something we still don’t know, but the fact remains that we have trouble comprehending the sign language they use with each other, particularly the form the alphas use. Then, too, Leo and Grimsky kept wandering in and out of the trees, as if perhaps they knew we were watching them and didn’t want us to eavesdrop. A little later in the day, Ramona and Alice had the same sort of meeting. Now all five of our alphas must have been in on the revelation.

Somehow the news began to filter down to the rest of them.

We weren’t able to observe actual concept transmission. We did notice that Vendelmans, the next day, began to get rather more attention than normal. Little troops of chimpanzees formed about him as he moved—slowly, and in obvious difficulty—about the compound. Gonzo and Chump, who had been bickering for months, suddenly were standing side by side staring intently at Vendelmans. Chicory, normally shy, went out of her way to engage him in a conversation—about the ripeness of the apples on the tree, Vendelmans reported. Anna Livia’s young twins, Shem and Shaun, climbed up and sat on Vendelmans’s shoulders.

“They want to find out what a dying god is really like,” Yost said quietly.

“But look there,” Jan Morton said.

Judy Vendelmans had an entourage too: Mimsy, Muffin, Claudius, Buster, and Kong. Staring in fascination, eyes wide, lips extended, some of them blowing little bubbles of saliva.

“Do they think she’s dying too?” Beth wondered.

Yost shook his head. “Probably not. They can see there’s nothing physically wrong with her. But they’re picking up the sorrow vibes, the death vibes.”

“Is there any reason to think they’re aware that Hal is Judy’s mate?” Christensen asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Yost said. “They can see that she’s upset. That interests them, even if they have no way of knowing why Judy would be more upset than any of the rest of us.”

“More mysteries out yonder,” I said, pointing into the meadow. Grimsky was standing by himself out there, contemplating something. He is the oldest of the chimps, gray-haired, going bald, a deep thinker. He has been here almost from the beginning, more than thirty years, and very little has escaped his attention in that time.

Far off to the left, in the shade of the big beech tree, Leo stood similarly in solitary meditation. He is twenty, the alpha male of the community, the strongest and by far the most intelligent. It was eerie to see the two of them in their individual zones of isolation, like distant sentinels, like Easter Island statues, lost in private reveries.

“Philosophers,” Yost murmured.

Yesterday Vendelmans returned to the hospital for good. Before he went, he made his farewells to each of the fifty chimpanzees, even the infants. In the past week he has altered markedly; he is only a shadow of himself, feeble, wasted. Judy says he’ll live only another few weeks.

She has gone on leave and probably won’t come back until after Hal’s death. I wonder what the chimps will make of her “going away,” and of her eventual return.

She said that Leo had asked her if she was dying, too.

Perhaps things will get back to normal here now.

Christensen asked me this morning, “Have you noticed the way they seem to drag the notion of death into whatever conversation you’re having with them these days?”

I nodded. “Mimsy asked me the other day if the moon dies when the sun comes up and the sun dies when the moon is out. It seemed like such a standard primitive metaphor that I didn’t pick up on it at first. But Mimsy’s too young for using metaphor that easily and she isn’t particularly clever. The older ones must be talking about dying a lot, and it’s filtering down.”

“Chicory was doing subtraction with me.” Christensen said. “She signed, ‘You take five, two die, you have three.’ Later she turned it into a verb: ‘Three die one equals two.’”

Others reported similar things. Yet none of the animals were talking about Vendelmans and what was about to happen to him, nor were they asking any overt questions about death or dying. So far as we were able to perceive, they had displaced the whole thing into metaphorical diversions. That in itself indicated a powerful obsession. Like most obsessives, they were trying to hide the thing that most concerned them, and they probably thought they were doing a good job of it. It isn’t their fault that we’re able to guess what’s going on in their minds. They are, after all—and we sometimes have to keep reminding ourselves of this—only chimpanzees.

They are holding meetings on the far side of the oak grove, where the little stream runs. Leo and Grimsky seem to do most of the talking, and the others gather around and sit very quietly as the speeches are made. The groups run from ten to thirty chimps at a time. We are unable to discover what they’re discussing, though of course we have an idea. Whenever one on us approaches such a gathering, the chimps very casually drift off into three or four separate groups and look exceedingly innocent—”We just out for some fresh air, boss.”

Charley Damiano wants to plant a bug in the grove. But how do you spy on a group that converses only in sign language? Cameras aren’t as easily hidden as microphones.

We do our best with binoculars. But what little we’ve been able to observe has been mystifying. The chimp-to-chimp signs they use at these meetings are even more oblique and confusing than the ones we had seen earlier. It’s as if they’re holding their meetings in pig-Latin, or double-talk or in some entirely new and private language.

Two technicians will come tomorrow to help us mount cameras in the grove.

Hal Vendelmans died last night. According to Judy, who phoned Dave Yost, it was very peaceful right at the end, an easy release. Yost and I broke the news to the alpha chimps just after breakfast. No euphemisms, just the straight news. Ramona made a few hooting sounds and looked as if she might cry, but she was the only one who seemed emotionally upset. Leo gave me a long deep look of what was almost certainly compassion, and then he hugged me very hard. Grimsky wandered away and seemed to be signing to himself in the new system. Now a meeting seems to be assembling in the oak grove, the first one in more than a week.

The cameras are in place. Even if we can’t decipher the new signs, we can at least tape them and subject them to computer analysis until we begin to understand.

Now we’ve watched the first tapes of a grove meeting, but I can’t say we know a lot more than we did before.

For one thing, they disabled two of the cameras right at the outset. Attila spotted them and sent Gonzo and Claudius up into the trees to yank them out. I suppose the remaining cameras went unnoticed; but by accident or deliberate diabolical craftiness, the chimps positioned themselves in such a way that none of the cameras had a clear angle. We did record a few statements from Leo and some give-and-take between Alice and Anna Livia. They spoke in a mixture of standard signs and the new ones, but, without a sense of the context, we’ve found it impossible to generate any sequence of meanings. Stray signs such as “shirt,” “hat,” “human,” “change” and “banana fly,” interspersed with undecipherable stuff, seem to be adding up to something, but no one is sure what. We observed no mention of Hal Vendelmans nor any direct references to death. We may be misleading ourselves entirely about the significance of all this.

Or perhaps not. We codified some of the new signs, and this afternoon I asked Ramona what one of them meant. She fidgeted and hooted and looked uncomfortable—and not simply because I was asking her to do a tough abstract thing like giving a definition. She was worried. She looked around for Leo, and when she saw him she made that sign at him. He came bounding over and shoved Ramona away. Then he began to tell me how wise and good and gentle I am. He may be a genius, but even a genius chimp is still a chimp, and I told him I wasn’t fooled by all his flattery. Then I asked him what the new sign meant.

“Jump high come again,” Leo signed.

A simple chimpy phrase referring to fun and frolic? So I thought at first, and so did many of my colleagues. But Dave Yost said, “Then why was Ramona so evasive about defining it?”

“Defining isn’t easy for them,” Beth Rankin said.

“Ramona’s one of the five brightest. She’s capable of it. Especially since the sign can be defined by use of four other established signs, as Leo proceeded to do.”

“What are you getting at, Dave?” I asked.

Yost said, ‘Jump high come again’ might be about a game they like to play, but it could also be an eschatological reference, sacred talk, a concise metaphorical way to speak of death and resurrection, no?”

Mick Falkenburg snorted. “Jesus, Dave, of all the nutty Jesuitical bullshit—”

“Is it?”

“It’s possible sometimes to be too subtle in your analysis,” Falkenburg said. “You’re suggesting that these chimpanzees have a theology?”

“I’m suggesting that they may be in the process of evolving a religion,” Yost replied.

Can it be?

Sometimes we lose our perspective with these animals, as Mick indicated, and we overestimate their intelligence; but just as often, I think, we underestimate them.

Jump high come again.

I wonder. Secret sacred talk? A chimpanzee theology? Belief in life after death? A religion?

They know that human beings have a body of ritual and belief that they call religion, though how much they really comprehend about it is hard to tell. Dave Yost, in his metaphysical discussions with Leo and some of the other alphas, introduced the concept long ago. He drew a hierarchy that began with God and ran downward through human beings and chimpanzees to dogs and cats and onward to insects and frogs, by way of giving the chimps some sense of the great chain of life. They had seen bugs and frogs and cats and dogs, but they wanted Dave to show them God, and he was forced to tell them that God is not actually tangible and accessible, but lives high overhead although His essence penetrates all things. I doubt that they grasped much of that. Leo, whose nimble and probing intelligence is a constant illumination to us, wanted Yost to explain how we talked to God and how God talked to us if He wasn’t around to make signs, and Yost said that we had a thing called religion, which was a system of communicating with God. And that was where he left it, a long while back.

Now we are on guard for any indications of a developing religious consciousness among our troop. Even the scoffers—Mick Falkenburg, Beth, to some degree, Charley Damiano—are paying close heed. After all, one of the underlying purposes of this project is to reach an understanding of how the first hominids managed to cross the intellectual boundary that we like to think separates the animals from humanity. We can’t reconstruct a bunch of Australopithecines and study them; but we can watch chimpanzees who have been given the gift of language build a quasi-protohuman society, and it is the closest thing to traveling back in time that we are apt to achieve. Yost thinks, I think, Burt Christensen is beginning to think, that we have inadvertently kindled an awareness of the divine, of the numinous force that must be worshipped, by allowing them to see that their gods—us—can be struck down and slain by an even higher power.

The evidence so far is slim. The attention given Vendelmans and Judy; the solitary meditations of Leo and Grimsky; the large gatherings in the grove; the greatly accelerated use of modified sign language in chimp-to-chimp talk at those gatherings; the potentially eschatological reference we think we see in the sign that Leo translated as “jump high come again.” That’s it. To those of us who want to interpret that as the foundations of religion, it seems indicative of what we want to see; to the rest, it all looks like coincidence and fantasy. The problem is that we are dealing with nonhuman intelligence and we must take care not to impose our own thought-constructs. We can never be certain if we are operating from a value system anything like that of the chimps. The built-in ambiguities of the sign-language grammar we must use with them complicate the issue. Consider the phrase “banana fly” that Leo used in a speech—a sermon?—in the oak grove, and remember Ramona’s reference to the sick Vendelmans as “rotten banana.” If we take fly to be a verb, “banana fly” might be considered a metaphorical description of Vendelman’s ascent to heaven. If we take it to be a noun, Leo might have been talking about the Drosophila flies that feed on decaying fruit, a metaphor for the corruption of the flesh after death. On the other hand, he may simply have been making a comment about the current state of our garbage dump.

We have agreed for the moment not to engage the chimpanzees in any direct interrogation about any of this. The Heisenberg principle is eternally our rule here: the observer can too easily perturb the thing observed, so we must make only the most delicate of measurements. Even so, of course, our presence among the chimps is bound to have its impact, but we do what we can to minimize it by avoiding leading questions and watching in silence.

Two unusual things today. Taken each by each, they would be interesting without being significant; but if we use each to illuminate the other, we begin to see things in a strange new light, perhaps.

One thing is an increase in vocalizing, noticed by nearly everyone, among the chimps. We know that chimpanzees in the wild have a kind of rudimentary spoken language—a greeting call, a defiance call, the grunts that mean “I like the taste of this,” the male chimp’s territorial hoot, and such—nothing very complex, really not qualitatively much beyond the language of birds and dogs. They also have a fairly rich nonverbal language, a vocabulary of gestures and facial expressions. But it was not until the first experiments decades ago in teaching chimpanzees human sign-language that any important linguistic capacity became apparent in them. Here at the research station the chimps communicate almost wholly in signs, as they have been trained to do for generations and as they have taught their young ones to do; they revert to hoots and grunts only in the most elemental situations. We ourselves communicate mainly in signs when we are talking to each other while working with the chimps, and even in our humans-only conferences, we use signs as much as speech, from long habit. But suddenly the chimps are making sounds at each other. Odd sounds, unfamiliar sounds, weird, clumsy imitations, one might say, of human speech. Nothing that we can understand, naturally: the chimpanzee larynx is simply incapable of duplicating the phonemes humans use. But these new grunts, these tortured blurts of sound, seem intended to mimic our speech. It was Damiano who showed us, as we were watching a tape of a grove session, how Attila was twisting his lips with his hands in what appeared unmistakably to be an attempt to make human sounds come out.

Why?

The second thing is that Leo has started wearing a shirt and a hat. There is nothing remarkable about a chimp in clothing; although we have never encouraged such anthropomorphization here, various animals have taken a fancy from time to time to some item of clothing, have begged it from its owner and have worn it for a few days or even weeks. The novelty here is that the shirt and the hat belonged to Hal Vendelmans, and that Leo wears them only when the chimps are gathered in the oak grove, which Dave Yost has lately begun calling the “holy grove.” Leo found them in the toolshed beyond the vegetable garden. The shirt is ten sizes too big, Vendelmans having been so brawny, but Leo ties the sleeves across his chest and lets the rest dangle down over his back almost like a cloak.

What shall we make of this?

Jan is the specialist in chimp verbal processes. At the meeting tonight she said, “It sounds to me as if they’re trying to duplicate the rhythms of human speech even though they can’t reproduce the actual sounds. They’re playing at being human.”

“Talking the god-talk,” said Dave Yost.

“What do you mean?” Jan asked.

“Chimps talk with their hands. Humans do, too, when speaking with chimps, but when humans talk to humans, they use their voices. Humans are gods to chimps, remember. Talking in the way the gods talk is one way of remaking yourself in the image of the gods, of putting on divine attributes.”

“But that’s nonsense,” Jan said. “I can’t possibly—”

“Wearing human clothing,” I broke in excitedly, “would also be a kind of putting on divine attributes, in the most literal sense of the phrase. Especially if the clothes—”

“—had belonged to Hal Vendelmans,” said Christensen.

“The dead god,” Yost said.

We looked at each other in amazement.

Charley Damiano said, not in his usual skeptical way, but in a kind of wonder, “Dave, are you hypothesizing that Leo functions as some sort of priest, that those are his sacred garments?”

“More than just a priest,” Yost said. “A high priest, I think. A pope. The pope of the chimps.”

Grimsky is suddenly looking very feeble. Yesterday we saw him moving slowly through the meadow by himself, making a long circuit of the grounds as far out as the pond and the little waterfall, then solemnly and ponderously staggering back to the meeting place at the far side of the grove. Today he has been sitting quietly by the stream, occasionally rocking slowly back and forth, now and then dipping his feet in. I checked the records: he is forty-three years old, well along for a chimp, although some have been known to live fifty years and more. Mick wanted to take him to the infirmary, but we decided against it; if he is dying, and by all appearances he is, we ought to let him do it with dignity in his own way. Jan went down to the grove to visit him and reported that he shows no apparent signs of disease. His eyes are clear; his face feels cool. Age has withered him and his time is at hand. I feel an enormous sense of loss, for he has a keen intelligence, a long memory, a shrewd and thoughtful nature. He was the alpha male of the troop for many years, but a decade ago, when Leo came of age, Grimsky abdicated in his favor with no sign of a struggle. Behind Grimsky’s grizzled forehead there must lie a wealth of subtle and mysterious perceptions, concepts and insights about which we know practically nothing, and very soon all that will be lost. Let us hope he’s managed to teach his wisdom to Leo and Attila and Alice and Ramona.

Today’s oddity: a ritual distribution of meat.

Meat is not very important in the diet of chimps, but they do like to have some, and as far back as I can remember, Wednesday has been meat-day here, when we give them a side of beef or some slabs of mutton or something of that sort. The procedure for dividing up the meat betrays the chimps’ wild heritage, for the alpha males eat their fill first while the others watch, and then the weaker males beg for a share and are allowed to move in to grab, and finally the females and young ones get the scraps. Today was meat-day. Leo, as usual, helped himself first, but what happened after that was astounding. He let Attila feed, and then told Attila to offer some meat to Grimsky, who is even weaker today and brushed it aside. Then Leo put on Vendelmans’s hat and began to parcel out scraps of meat to the others. One by one they came up to him in the current order of ranking and went through the standard begging maneuver, hand beneath chin, palm upward, and Leo gave each one a strip of meat.

“Like taking communion,” Charley Damiano muttered. “With Leo the celebrant at the Mass.”

Unless our assumptions are totally off base, there is a real religion going on here, perhaps created by Grimsky and under Leo’s governance. And Hal Vendelmans’s faded old blue work hat is the tiara of the pope.

Beth Rankin woke me at dawn and said, “Come fast. They’re doing something strange with old Grimsky.”

I was up and dressed and awake in a hurry. We have a closed-circuit system now that pipes the events in the grove back to us, and we paused at the screen so that I could see what was going on. Grimsky sat on his knees at the edge of the stream, eyes closed, barely moving. Leo, wearing the hat, was beside him, elaborately tying Vendelmans’s shirt over Grimsky’s shoulders. A dozen or more of the other adult chimps were squatting in a semicircle in front of them.

Burt Christensen said, “What’s going on? Is Leo making Grimsky the assistant pope?”

“I think Leo is giving Grimsky the last rites,” I said.

What else could it have been? Leo wore the sacred headdress. He spoke at length using the new signs—the ecclesiastical language, the chimpanzee equivalent of Latin or Hebrew or Sanskrit—and as his oration went on and on, the congregation replied periodically with outbursts of—I suppose—response and approval, some in signs, some with grunting garbled pseudohuman sounds that Dave Yost thought was their version of godtalk. Throughout it all Grimsky was—silent and remote, though occasionally he nodded or murmured or tapped both his shoulders in a gesture whose meaning was unknown to us. The ceremony went on for more than an hour. Then Grimsky leaned forward, and Kong and Chump took him by the arms and eased him down until he was lying with his cheek against the ground.

For two, three, five minutes all the chimpanzees were still. At last Leo came forward and removed his hat, setting it on the ground beside Grimsky, and with great delicacy he untied the shirt Grimsky wore. Grimsky did not move. Leo draped the shirt over his own shoulders and donned the hat again.

He turned to the watching chimps and signed, using the old signs that were completely intelligible to us, “Grimsky now be human being.”

We stared at each other in awe and astonishment. A couple of us were sobbing. No one could speak.

The funeral ceremony seemed to be over. The chimps were dispersing. We saw Leo sauntering away, hat casually dangling from one hand, the shirt in the other, trailing over the ground: Grimsky alone remained by the stream. We waited ten minutes and went down to the grove. Grimsky seemed to be sleeping very peacefully, but he was dead, and we gathered him up—Burt and I carried him; he seemed to weigh almost nothing—and took him back to the lab for the autopsy.

In mid-morning the sky darkened and lightning leaped across the hills to the north. There was a tremendous crack of thunder almost instantly and sudden tempestuous rain. Jan pointed to the meadow. The male chimps were doing a bizarre dance, roaring, swaying, slapping their feet against the ground, hammering their hands against the trunks of the trees, ripping off branches and flailing the earth with them. Grief? Terror? Joy at the translation of Grimsky to a divine state? Who could tell? I had never been frightened by our animals before—I knew them too well, I regarded them as little hairy cousins—but now they were terrifying creatures and this was a scene out of time’s dawn, as Gonzo and Kong and Attila and Chump and Buster and Claudius and even Pope Leo himself went thrashing about in that horrendous rain, pounding out the steps of some unfathomable rite.

The lightning ceased and the rain moved southward as quickly as it had come, and the dancers went slinking away, each to his favorite tree. By noon the day was bright and warm and it was as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

Two days after Grimsky’s death I was awakened again at dawn, this time by Mick Falkenburg. He shook my shoulder and yelled at me to wake up, and as I sat there blinking he said, “Chicory’s dead! I was out for an early walk and I found her near the place where Grimsky died.”

“Chicory? But she’s only—”

“Eleven, twelve, something like that. I know.”

I put my clothes on while Mick woke the others, and we went down to the stream. Chicory was sprawled out, but not peacefully—there was a dribble of blood at the corner of her mouth, her eyes were wide and horrified, her hands were curled into frozen talons. All about her in the moist soil of the stream bank were footprints. I searched my memory for an instance of murder in the chimp community and could find nothing remotely like it—quarrels, yes, and lengthy feuds and some ugly ambushes and battles, fairly violent, serious injuries now and then. But this had no precedent.

“Ritual murder,” Yost murmured.

“Or a sacrifice, perhaps?” suggested Beth Rankin.

“Whatever it is,” I said, “they’re learning too fast. Recapitulating the whole evolution of religion, including the worst parts of it. We’ll have to talk to Leo.”

“Is that wise?” Yost asked.

“Why not?”

“We’ve kept hands off so far. If we want to see how this thing unfolds—”

“During the night,” I said, “the pope and the college of cardinals ganged up on a gentle young female chimp and killed her. Right now they may be off somewhere sending Alice or Ramona or Anna Livia’s twins to chimp heaven. I think we have to weigh the value of observing the evolution of chimp religion against the cost of losing irreplaceable members of a unique community. I say we call in Leo and tell him that it’s wrong to kill.”

“He knows that,” said Yost. “He must. Chimps aren’t murderous animals.”

“Chicory’s dead.”

“And if they see it as a holy deed?” Yost demanded.

“Then one by one we’ll lose our animals, and at the end we’ll just have a couple of very saintly survivors. Do you want that?”

We spoke with Leo. Chimps can be sly and they can be manipulative, but even the best of them, and Leo is the Einstein of chimpanzees, does not seem to know how to lie. We asked him where Chicory was and Leo told us that Chicory was now a human being. I felt a chill at that. Grimsky was also a human being, said Leo. We asked him how he knew that they had become human and he said, “They go where Vendelmans go. When human go away, he become god. When chimpanzee go away, he become human. Right?”

“No,” we said.

The logic of the ape is not easy to refute. We told him that death comes to all living creatures, that it is natural and holy, but that only God could decide when it was going to happen. God, we said, calls His creatures to Himself one at a time. God had called Hal Vendelmans, God had called Grimsky, God would someday call Leo and all the rest here. But God had not yet called Chicory. Leo wanted to know what was wrong with sending Chicory to Him ahead of time. Did that not improve Chicory’s condition? No, we replied. No, it only did harm to Chicory. Chicory would have been much happier living here with us than going to God so soon. Leo did not seem convinced. Chicory, he said, now could talk words with her mouth and wore shoes on her feet. He envied Chicory very much.

We told him that God would be angry if any more chimpanzees died. We told him that we would be angry. Killing chimpanzees was wrong, we said. It was not what God wanted Leo to be doing.

“Me talk to God, find out what God wants,” Leo said.

We found Buster dead by the edge of the pond this morning, with indications of another ritual murder. Leo coolly stared us down and explained that God had given orders that all chimpanzees were to become human beings as quickly as possible, and this could only be achieved by the means employed on Chicory and Buster.

Leo is confined now in the punishment tank and we have suspended this week’s meat distribution. Yost voted against both of those decisions, saying we ran the risk of giving Leo the aura of a religious martyr, which would enhance his already considerable power. But these killings have to stop. Leo knows, of course, that we are upset about them. But if he believes his path is the path of righteousness, nothing we say or do is going to change his mind.

Judy Vendelmans called today. She has put Hal’s death fairly well behind her, misses the project, misses the chimps. As gently as I could, I told her what has been going on here. She was silent a very long time—Chicory was one of her favorites, and Judy has had enough grief already to handle for one summer—but finally she said, “I think I know what can be done. I’ll be on the noon flight tomorrow.”

We found Mimsy dead in the usual way late this afternoon. Leo is still in the punishment tank—the third day. The congregation has found a way to carry out its rites without its leader. Mimsy’s death has left me stunned, but we are all deeply affected, virtually unable to proceed with our work. It may be necessary to break up the community entirely to save the animals. Perhaps we can send them to other research centers for a few months, three of them here, five there, until this thing subsides. But what if it doesn’t subside? What if the dispersed animals convert others elsewhere to the creed of Leo?”

The first thing Judy said when she arrived was, “Let Leo out. I want to talk with him.”

We opened the tank. Leo stepped forth, uneasy, abashed, shading his eyes against the strong light. He glanced at me, at Yost, at Jan, as if wondering which one of us was going to scold him; and then he saw Judy and it was as though he had seen a ghost. He made a hollow rasping sound deep in his throat and backed away. Judy signed hello and stretched out her arms to him. Leo trembled. He was terrified. There was nothing unusual about one of us going on leave and returning after a month or two, but Leo must not have expected Judy ever to return, must in fact have imagined her gone to the same place her husband had gone, and the sight of her shook him. Judy understood all that, obviously, for she quickly made powerful use of it, signing to Leo, “I bring you message from Vendelmans.”

“Tell tell tell!”

“Come walk with me,” said Judy.

She took him by the hand and led him gently out of the punishment area and into the compound and down the hill toward. the meadow. I watched from the top of the hill, the tall, slender woman and the compact, muscular chimpanzee close together, side by side, hand in hand, pausing now to talk, Judy signing and Leo replying in a flurry of gestures, then Judy again for a long time, a brief response from Leo, another cascade of signs from Judy, then Leo squatting, tugging at blades of grass, shaking his head, clapping hand to elbow in his expression of confusion, then to his chin, then taking Judy’s hand. They were gone for nearly an hour. The other chimps did not dare approach them. Finally Judy and Leo, hand in hand, came quietly up the hill to headquarters again. Leo’s eyes were shining and so were Judy’s.

She said, “Everything will be all right now. That’s so, isn’t it, Leo?”

Leo said, “God is always right.”

She made a dismissal sign and Leo went slowly down the hill. The moment he was out of sight, Judy turned away from us and cried a little, just a little; then she asked for a drink; and then she said, “It isn’t easy, being God’s messenger.”

“What did you tell him?” I asked.

“That I had been in heaven visiting Hal. That Hal was looking down all the time and he was very proud of Leo, except for one thing, that Leo was sending too many chimpanzees to God too soon. I told him that God was not yet ready to receive Chicory and Buster and Mimsy, that they would have to be kept in storage cells for a long time until their true time came, and that was not good for them. I told him that Hal wanted Leo to know that God hoped he would stop sending him chimpanzees. Then I gave Leo Hal’s old wristwatch to wear when he conducts services, and Leo promised he would obey Hal’s wishes. That was all. I suspect I’ve added a whole new layer of mythology to what’s developing here, and I trust you won’t be angry with me for doing it. I don’t believe any more chimps will be killed. And I think I’d like another drink.”

Later in the day we saw the chimps assembled by the stream. Leo held his arm aloft and sunlight blazed from the band of gold on his slim hairy wrist, and a great outcry of grunts in god-talk went up from the congregation and they danced before him, and then he donned the sacred hat and the sacred shirt and moved his arms eloquently in the secret sacred gestures of the holy sign language.

There have been no more killings. I think no more will occur. Perhaps after a time our chimps will lose interest in being religious, and go on to other pastimes. But not yet, not yet. The ceremonies continue, and grow ever more elaborate, and we are compiling volumes of extraordinary observations, and God looks down and is pleased. And Leo proudly wears the emblems of his papacy as he bestows his blessing on the worshipers in the holy grove.

The Dead Man’s Eyes

A crime story, one of the few I’ve ever written. Crime fiction has never interested me as a reader, let alone as a writer. I’ve read the Sherlock Holmes stories with pleasure, yes, and some Simenons, and in 1985 I suddenly read seven or eight Elmore Leonard books in one unceasing burst. But such acknowledged masters of the genre as P. D. James or John D. MacDonald inspire only yawns in me, which is not to say that they aren’t masters, only that the thing they do so well is a thing that basically does not speak to any of my concerns. Doubtless a lot of mystery writers feel the same way about even the best science fiction. “The Dead Man’s Eyes” isn’t a detective story, but it is crime fiction, to the extent that it seems actually to have been in the running for the Edgar Award given out by the Mystery Writers of America. It’s also science fiction, though, built as it is around a concept of detection that exists today only as the wildest speculation.

I wrote it in a moment of agreeable ease and fluency in the summer of 1987, and Alice Turner of Playboy bought it in an equally uncomplicated way and published it in her August 1988 issue. I’m never enthusiastic about complications, but the summer is a time when I particularly like everything to go smoothly. This one did.

On a crisp afternoon of high winds late in the summer of 2017 Frazier murdered his wife’s lover, a foolish deed that he immediately regretted. To murder anyone was stupid, when there were so many more effective alternatives available; but even so, if murder was what he had to do, why murder the lover? Two levels of guilt attached there: not only the taking of a life, but the taking of an irrelevant life. If you had to kill someone, he told himself immediately afterward, then you should have killed her. She was the one who had committed the crime against the marriage, after all. Poor Hurwitt had been only a means, a tool, virtually an innocent bystander. Yes, kill her, not him. Kill yourself, even. But Hurwitt was the one he had killed, a dumb thing to do and done in a dumb manner besides.

It had all happened very quickly, without premeditation. Frazier was attending a meeting of the Museum trustees, to discuss expanding the Hall of Mammals. There was a recess; and because the day was so cool, the air so crystalline and bracing, he stepped out on the balcony that connected the old building with the Pilgersen Extension for a quick breather. Then the sleek bronze door of the Pilgersen opened far down the way and a dark-haired man in a grubby blue-gray lab coat appeared. Frazier saw at once, by the rigid set of his high shoulders and the way his long hair fluttered in the wind, that it was Hurwitt.

He wants to see me, Frazier thought. He knows I’m attending the meeting today and he’s come out here to stage the confrontation at last, to tell me that he loves my famous and beautiful wife, to ask me bluntly to clear off and let him have her all to himself.

Frazier’s pulse began to rise, his face grew hot. Even while he was thinking that it was oddly old-fashioned to talk of letting Hurwitt have Marianne, that in fact Hurwitt had probably already had Marianne in every conceivable way and vice versa but that if now he had some idea of setting up housekeeping with her—unbelievable, unthinkable!—this was hardly the appropriate place to discuss it with him, another and more primordial area of his brain was calling forth torrents of adrenaline and preparing him for mortal combat.

But no: Hurwitt didn’t seem to have ventured onto the balcony for any man-to-man conference with his lover’s husband. Evidently he was simply taking the short-cut from his lab in the Pilgersen to the fourth-floor cafeteria in the old building. He walked with his head down, his brows knitted, as though pondering some abstruse detail of trilobite anatomy, and he took no notice of Frazier at all.

“Hurwitt?” Frazier said finally, when the other man was virtually abreast of him.

Caught by surprise, Hurwitt looked up, blinking. He appeared not to recognize Frazier for a moment. For that moment he was frozen in mid-blink, his unkempt hair a dark halo about him, his awkward rangy body off balance between strides, his peculiar glinting eyes flashing like yellow beacons. In fury Frazier imagined this man’s bony nakedness, pale and gaunt, probably with sparse ropy strands of black hair sprouting on a white chest, imagined those long arms wrapped around Marianne, imagined those huge knobby fingers cupping her breasts, imagined that thin-lipped wide mouth covering hers. Imagined the grubby lab coat lying crumpled at the foot of the bed, and her silken orange wrap beside it. That was what sent Frazier over the brink, not the infidelities themselves, not the thought of the sweaty embraces—there was plenty of that in each of her films, and it had never meant a thing to him, for he knew it was only well-paid make-believe—and not the rawboned look of the man or his uncouth stride or even the manic glint of those strange off-color eyes, those eerie topaz eyes, but the lab coat, stained and worn with a button missing and a pocket-flap dangling, lying beside Marianne’s discarded silk. For her to take such a lover, a pathetic dreary poker of fossils, a hollow-chested laboratory drudge—no, no, no—

“Hello, Loren,” Hurwitt said. He smiled amiably, he offered his hand. His eyes, though, narrowed and seemed almost to glow. It must be those weird eyes, Frazier thought, that Marianne has fallen in love with. “What a surprise, running into you out here.”

And stood there smiling, and stood there holding out his hand, and stood there with his frayed lab coat flapping in the breeze.

Suddenly Frazier was unable to bear the thought of sharing the world with this man an instant longer. He watched himself as though from a point just behind his own right ear as he went rushing forward, seized not Hurwitt’s hand but his wrist, and pushed rather than pulled, guiding him swiftly backward toward the parapet and tipping him up and over. It took perhaps a quarter of a second. Hurwitt, gaping, astonished, rose as though floating, hovered for an instant, began to descend. Frazier had one last look at Hurwitt’s eyes, bright as glass, staring straight into his own, photographing his assailant’s face; and then Hurwitt went plummeting downward.

My God, Frazier thought, peering over the edge. Hurwitt lay face down in the courtyard five stories below, arms and legs splayed, lab coat billowing about him.

He was at the airport an hour later, with a light suitcase that carried no more than a day’s change of clothing and a few cosmetic items. He flew first to Dallas, endured a 90-minute layover, went on to San Francisco, doubled back to Calgary as darkness descended, and caught a midnight special to Mexico City, where he checked into a hotel using the legal commercial alias that he employed when doing business in Macao, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

Standing on the terrace of a tower thirty stories above the Zona Rosa, he inhaled musky smog, listened to the squeals of traffic and the faint sounds of far-off drums, watched flares of green lightning in the choking sky above Popocatepetl, and wondered whether he should jump. Ultimately he decided against it. He wanted to share nothing whatever with Hurwitt, not even the manner of his death. And suicide would be an overreaction anyway. First he had to find out how much trouble he was really in.

The hotel had InfoLog. He dialed in and was told that queries were billed at five million pesos an hour, pro rated. Vaguely he wondered whether that was as expensive as it sounded. The peso was practically worthless, wasn’t it? What could that be in dollars, a hundred bucks, five hundred, maybe? Nothing.

“I want Harvard Legal,” he told the screen. “Criminology. Forensics. Technical. Evidence technology.” Grimly he menued down and down until he was near what he wanted. “Eyeflash,” he said. “Theory, techniques. Methods of detail recovery. Acceptance as evidence. Reliability of record. Frequency of reversal on appeal. Supreme Court rulings, if any.”

Back to him, in surreal fragments which, at an extra charge of three million pesos per hour, pro rated, he had printed out for him, came blurts of information:

Perceptual pathways in outer brain layers … broad-scale optical architecture … images imprinted on striate cortex, or primary visual cortex … inferior temporal neurons … cf. McDermott and Brunetti, 2007, utilization of lateral geniculate body as storage for visual data … inferior temporal cortex … uptake of radioactive glucose … downloading … degrading of signal … degeneration period … Pilsudski signal-enhancement filter … Nevada vs. Bensen, 2011 … hippocampus simulation … amygdala … acetylcholine … U.S. Supreme Court, 23 March 2012 … cf Gross and Bernstein, 13 Aug 2003 … Mishkin … Appenzeller …

Enough. He shuffled the printouts in a kind of hard-edged stupor until dawn; and then, after a hazy calculation of time-zone differentials, he called his lawyer in New York. It took four bounces, but the telephone tracked him down in the commute, driving in from Connecticut.

Frazier keyed in the privacy filter. All the lawyer would know was that some client was calling; the screen image would be a blur, the voice would be rendered universal, generalized, unidentifiable. It was more for the lawyer’s protection than Frazier’s: there had been nasty twists in jurisprudence lately, and lawyers were less and less willing to run the risk of being named accomplices after the fact. Immediately came a query about the billing. Bill to my hotel room, Frazier replied, and the screen gave him a go-ahead.

“Let’s say I’m responsible for causing a fatal injury and the victim had a good opportunity to see me as the act was occurring. What are the chances that they can recover eyeflash pictures?”

“Depends on how much damage was received in the process of the death. How did it happen?”

“Privileged communication?”

“Sorry. No.”

“Even under filter?”

“Even. If the mode of death was unique or even highly distinctive and unusual, how can I help but draw the right conclusion? And then I’ll know more than I want to know.”

“It wasn’t unique,” Frazier said. “Or distinctive, or unusual. But I still won’t go into details. I can tell you that the injury wasn’t the sort that would cause specific brain trauma. I mean, nothing like a bullet between the eyes, or falling into a vat of acid, or—”

“All right. I follow. This take place in a major city?”

“Major, yes.”

“In Missouri, Alabama, or Kentucky?”

“None of those,” said Frazier. “It took place in a state where eyeflash recovery is legal. No question of that.”

“And the body? How long after death do you estimate it would have been found?”

“Within minutes, I’d say.”

“And when was that?”

Frazier hesitated. “Within the past twenty-four hours.”

“Then there’s almost total likelihood that there’s a readily recoverable photograph in your victim’s brain of whatever he saw at the moment of death. Beyond much doubt it’s already been recovered. Are you sure he was looking at you as he died?”

“Straight at me.”

“My guess is there’s probably a warrant out for you already. If you want me to represent you, kill the privacy filter so I can confirm who you are, and we’ll discuss our options.”

“Later,” Frazier said. “I think I’d rather try to make a run for it.”

“But the chances of your getting away with—”

“This is something I need to do,” said Frazier. “I’ll talk to you some other time.”

He was almost certainly cooked. He knew that. He had wasted critical time running frantically back and forth across the continent yesterday, when he should have been transferring funds, setting up secure refuges, and such. The only question now was whether they were already looking for him, in which case there’d be blocks on his accounts everywhere, a passport screen at every airport, worldwide interdicts of all sorts. But if that was so they’d already have traced him to this hotel. Evidently they hadn’t, which meant that they hadn’t yet uncovered the Southeast Asian trading alias and put interdicts on that. Well, it was just a lousy manslaughter case, or maybe second-degree at worst: they had more serious things to worry about, he supposed.

Checking out of the hotel without bothering about breakfast, he headed for the airport and used his corporate credit card to buy himself a flight to Belize. There he bought a ticket to Surinam, and just before his plane was due to leave he tried his personal card in the cash disburser and was pleasantly surprised to find that it hadn’t yet been yanked. He withdrew the maximum. Of course now there was evidence that Loren Frazier had been in Belize this day, but he wasn’t traveling as Frazier, and he’d be in Surinam before long, and by the time they traced him there, assuming that they could, he’d be somewhere else, under some other name entirely. Maybe if he kept dodging for six or eight months he’d scramble his trail so thoroughly that they’d never be able to find him. Did they pursue you forever, he wondered? A time must come when they file and forget. Of course, he might not want to keep running forever, either. Already he missed Marianne. Despite what she had done.

He spent three days in Surinam at a little pastel-green Dutch hotel at the edge of Paramaribo, eating spicy noodle dishes and waiting to be arrested. Nobody bothered him. He used a cash machine again, keying up one of his corporate accounts and transferring a bundle of money into the account of Andreas Schmidt of Zurich, which was a name he had used seven years ago for some export-import maneuvers involving Zimbabwe and somehow, he knew not why, had kept alive for eventualities unknown. This was an eventuality, now. When he checked the Schmidt account he found that there was money in it already, significant money, and that his Swiss passport had not yet expired. The Swiss charge-d’affaires in Guyana was requested to prepare a duplicate for him. A quick boat trip up the Marowijne River took him to St. Laurent on the French Guiana side of the river, where he was able to hire a driver to take him to Cayenne, and from there he flew to Georgetown in Guyana. A smiling proxy lawyer named Chatterji obligingly picked up his passport for him from the Swiss, and under the name of Schmidt he went on to Buenos Aires. There he destroyed all his Frazier documentation. He resisted the temptation to find out whether there was a Frazier interdict out yet. No sense handing them a trail extending down to Buenos Aires just to gratify his curiosity. If they weren’t yet looking for him because he had murdered Hurwitt, they’d be looking for him on a simple missing-persons hook by this time. One way or another, it was best to forget about his previous identity and operate as Schmidt from here on.

This is almost fun, he thought.

But he missed his wife terribly.

While sitting in sidewalk cafes on the broad Avenida de 9 Julio, feasting on huge parrilladas sluiced down by carafe after carafe of red wine, he brooded obsessively on Marianne’s affair. It made no sense. The world-famous actress and the awkward rawboned paleontologist: why? How was it possible? She had been making a commercial at the museum—Frazier, in fact, had helped to set the business up in his capacity as member of the board of trustees—and Hurwitt, who was the head of the department of invertebrate paleontology, or some such thing, had volunteered to serve as the technical consultant. Very kind of him, everyone said. Taking time away from his scientific work. He seemed so bland, so juiceless: who could suspect him of harboring lust for the glamorous film personality? Nobody would have imagined it. But things must have started almost at once. Some chemistry between them, beyond all understanding. People began to notice, and then to give Frazier strange little knowing looks. Eventually even he caught on. A truly loving husband is generally just about the last one to know, because he will always put the best possible interpretation on the data. But after a time the accumulation of data becomes impossible to overlook or deny or reason away. There are always small changes when something like that has begun: they start to read books of a kind they’ve never read before, they talk of different things, they may even show some new moves in bed. Then comes the real carelessness, the seemingly unconscious slips that scream the actual nature of the situation. Frazier was forced finally to an acceptance of the truth. It tore at his heart. There was no room in their marriage for such stuff. Despite his money, despite his power, he had never gone in for the casual morality of the intercontinental set, and neither, so he thought, had Marianne. This was the second marriage for each: the one that was supposed to carry them happily on to the finish. And now look.

“Senor? Another carafe?”

“No,” he said. “Yes. Yes.” He stared at his plate. It was full of sausages, sweetbreads, grilled steak. Where had all that come from? He was sure he had eaten everything. It must have grown back. Moodily he stabbed a plump blood sausage and ate without noticing. Took a drink. They mixed the wine with seltzer water here, half and half. Maybe it helped you put away those tons of meat more easily.

Afterward, strolling along the narrow, glittering Calle Florida with the stylish evening promenade flowing past him on both sides, he caught sight of Marianne coming out of a jeweler’s shop. She wore gaucho leathers, emerald earrings, skin-tight trousers of gold brocade. He grunted as though he had been struck and pressed his elbows against his sides as one might do if expecting a second blow. Then an elegant young Argentinian uncoiled himself from a curbside table and trotted quickly toward her, and they laughed and embraced and ran off arm in arm, sweeping right past him without even a glance. He remembered, now: women all over the world were wearing Marianne’s face this season. This one, in fact, was too tall by half a head. But he would have to be prepared for such incidents wherever he went. Mariannes everywhere, bludgeoning him with their beauty and never even knowing what they had done. He found himself wishing that the one who had been sleeping with that museum man was just another Marianne clone, that the real one was at home alone now, waiting for him, wondering, wondering.

In Montreal six weeks later, using a privacy filter and one of his corporate cards, he risked putting through a call to his apartment and discovered that there was an interdict on his line. When he tried the office number an android mask appeared on the screen and he was blandly told that Mr. Frazier was unavailable. The android didn’t know when Mr. Frazier would be available. Frazier asked for Markman, his executive assistant, and a moment later a bleak, harried, barely recognizable face looked out at him. Frazier explained that he was a representative of the Bucharest account, calling about a highly sensitive matter. “Don’t you know?” Markman said. “Mr. Frazier’s disappeared. The police are looking for him.” Frazier asked why, and Markman’s face dissolved in an agony of shame, bewilderment, protective zeal. “There’s a criminal charge against him,” Markman whispered, nearly in tears.

He called his lawyer next and said, “I’m calling about the Frazier case. I don’t want to kill the filter but I imagine you won’t have much trouble figuring out who I am.”

“I imagine I won’t. Just don’t tell me where you are, okay?”

The situation was about as he expected. They had recovered the murder prints from the dead man’s eyes: a nice shot, embedded deep in the cortical tissue, Frazier looming up against Hurwitt, nose to nose, a quick cut to the hand reaching for Hurwitt’s arm, a wild free-form pan to the sky as Frazier lifted Hurwitt up and over the parapet. “Pardon me for saying this, but you looked absolutely deranged,” the lawyer told him. “The prints were on all the networks the next day. Your eyes—it was really scary. I’m absolutely sure we could get impairment of faculties, maybe even crime of passion. Suspended sentence, but of course there’d be rehabilitation. I don’t see any way around that, and it could last a year or two, and you might not be as effective in your profession afterward, but considering the circumstances—”

“How’s my wife?” Frazier said. “Do you know anything about what she’s been doing?”

“Well, of course I don’t represent her, you realize. But she does get in the news. She’s said to be traveling.”

“Where?”

“I couldn’t say. Look, I can try to find out, if you’d like to call back this time tomorrow. Only I suggest that for your own good you call me at a different number, which is—”

“For my good or for yours?” Frazier said.

“I’m trying to help,” said the lawyer, sounding annoyed.

He took refresher courses in French, Italian, and German to give himself a little extra plausibility in the Andreas Schmidt identity, and cultivated a mild Teutonic accent. So long as he didn’t run up against any real Swiss who wanted to gabble with him in Romansch or Schwyzerdeutsch he suspected he’d make out all right. He kept on moving, Strasbourg, Athens, Haifa, Tunis. Even though he knew that no further fund transfers were possible, there was enough money stashed under the Schmidt accounts to keep him going nicely for ten or fifteen years, and by then he hoped to have this thing figured out.

He saw Mariannes in Tel Aviv, in Heraklion on Crete, and in Sidi bou Said, just outside Tunis. They were all clones, of course. He recognized that after just a quick queasy instant. Still, seeing that delicate high-bridged nose once again, those splendid amethyst eyes, those tight auburn ringlets, it was all he could do to keep himself from going up to them and throwing his arms around them, and he had to force himself each time to turn away, biting down hard on his lip.

In London, outside the Connaught, he saw the real thing. The Connaught was where they had spent their wedding trip back in ’07, and he winced at the sight of its familiar grand facade, and winced even more when Marianne came out, young and radiant, wearing a shimmering silver cloud. Dazzling light streamed from her. He had no doubt that this was no trendy clone but the true Marianne: she moved in that easy confident way, with that regal joy in her own beauty, that no cosmetic surgeon could ever impart even to the most intent imitator. The pavement itself seemed to do her homage. But then Frazier saw that the man on whose arm she walked was himself, young and radiant too, the Loren Frazier of that honeymoon journey of seven years back, his hair dark and thick, his love of life and success and his magnificent new wife cloaking him like an imperial mantle; and Frazier realized that he must merely be hallucinating, that the breakdown had moved on to a new and more serious stage. He stood gaping while Mr. and Mrs. Frazier swept through him like the phantoms they were and away in the direction of Grosvenor Square, and then he staggered and nearly fell. To the Connaught doorman he admitted that he was unwell, and because he was well dressed and spoke with the hint of an accent and was able to find a twenty-sovereign piece in the nick of time the doorman helped him into a cab and expressed his deepest concern. Back at his own hotel, ten minutes over on the other side of Mayfair, he had three quick gins in a row and sat shivering for an hour before the image faded from his mind.

“I advise you to give yourself up,” the lawyer said, when Frazier called him from Nairobi. “Of course you can keep on running as long as you like. But you’re wearing yourself out, and sooner or later someone will spot you, so why keep on delaying the inevitable?”

“Have you spoken to Marianne lately?”

“She wishes you’d come back. She wants to write to you, or call you, or even come and see you, wherever you are. But I’ve told her you refuse to provide me with any information about your location. Is that still your position?”

“I don’t want to see her or hear from her.”

“She loves you.”

“I’m a homicidal maniac. I might do the same thing to her that I did to Hurwitt.”

“Surely you don’t really believe—”

“No,” Frazier said. “Not really.”

“Then let me give her an address for you, at least, and she can write to you.”

“It could be a trap, couldn’t it?”

“Surely you can’t possibly believe—”

“Who knows? Anything’s possible.”

“A postal box in Caracas, say,” the lawyer suggested, “and let’s say that you’re in Rio, for the sake of the discussion, and I arrange an intermediary to pick up the letter and forward it care of American Express in Lima, and then on some day of your own choosing, known to nobody else, you make a quick trip in and out of Peru and—”

“And they grab me the moment I collect the letter,” Frazier said. “How stupid do you think I am? You could set up forty intermediaries and I’d still have to create a trail leading to myself if I want to get the letter. Besides, I’m not in South America any more. That was months ago.”

“It was only for the sake of the dis—” the lawyer said, but Frazier was gone already.

He decided to change his face and settle down somewhere. The lawyer was right: all this compulsive traveling was wearing him down. But by staying in one place longer than a week or two he was multiplying the chances of being detected, so long as he went on looking like himself. He had always wanted a longer nose anyway, and not quite so obtrusive a chin, and thicker eyebrows. He fancied that he looked too Slavic, though he had no Eastern European ancestry at all. All one long rainy evening at the mellow old Addis Ababa Hilton he sketched a face for himself that he thought looked properly Swiss: rugged, passionate, with the right mix of French elegance, German stolidity, Italian passion. Then he went downstairs and showed the printout to the bartender, a supple little Portuguese.

“Where would you say this man comes from?” Frazier asked.

“Lisbon,” the bartender replied at once. “That long jaw, those lips—unmistakably Lisbon, though perhaps his grandmother on his mother’s side is of the Algarve. A man of considerable distinction, I would say. But I do not know him, Senhor Schmidt. He is no one I know. You would like your dry martini, as usual?”

“Make it a double,” Frazier said.

He had the work done in Vienna. Everyone agreed that the best people for that sort of surgery were in Geneva, but Switzerland was the one country in the world he dared not enter, so he used his Zurich banking connections to get him the name of the second-best people, who were said to be almost as good, remarkably good, he was told. That seemed high praise indeed, Frazier thought, considering it was a Swiss talking about Austrians. The head surgeon at the Vienna clinic, though, turned out to be Swiss himself, which provided Frazier with a moment of complete terror, pretending as he was to be a native of Zurich. But the surgeon had been at his trade long enough to know that a man who wants his perfectly good face transformed into something entirely different does not wish to talk about his personal affairs. He was a big, cheerful extravert named Randegger with a distinct limp. Skiing accident, the surgeon explained. Surely getting your leg fixed must be easier than getting your face changed, Frazier thought, but he decided that Randegger was simply waiting for the off season to undergo repair. “This will be no problem at all,” Randegger told him, studying Frazier’s printout. “I have just a few small suggestions.” He went deftly to work with a light-pen, broadening the cheekbones, moving the ears downward and forward. Frazier shrugged. Whatever you want, Dr. Randegger, he thought. Whatever you want. I’m putty in your hands.

It took six weeks from first cut to final healing. The results seemed fine to him—suave, convincing, an authoritative face—though at the beginning he was afraid it would all come apart if he smiled, and it was hard to get used to looking in a mirror and seeing someone else. He stayed at the clinic the whole six weeks. One of the nurses wore the Marianne face, but the body was all wrong, wide hips, startling steatopygous rump, short muscular legs. Near the end of his stay she lured him into bed. He was sure he’d be impotent with her, but he was wrong. There was only one really bad moment, when she reared above him and he couldn’t see her body at all, only her beautiful, passionate, familiar face.

Even now, he couldn’t stop running. Belgrade, Sydney, Rabat, Barcelona, Milan: they went by in a blur of identical airports, interchangeable hotels, baffling shifts of climate. Almost everywhere he went he saw Mariannes, and sometimes was puzzled that they never recognized him, until he remembered that he had altered his face: why should they know him now, even after the seven years of their marriage? As he traveled he began to see another ubiquitous face, dark and Latin and pixyish, and realized that Marianne’s vogue must be beginning to wane. He hoped that some of the Mariannes would soon be converting themselves to this newer look. He had never really felt at ease with all these simulacra of his wife, whom he still loved beyond all measure.

That love, though, had become inextricably mixed with anger. He could not even now stop thinking about her incomprehensible, infuriating violation of the sanctity of their covenant. It had been the best of marriages, amiable, passionate, close, a true union on every level. He had never even thought of wanting another woman. She was everything he wanted; and he had every reason to think that his feelings were reciprocated. That was the worst of it, not the furtive little couplings she and Hurwitt must have enjoyed, but the deeper treason, the betrayal of their seeming harmony, her seemingly whimsical destruction of the hermetic seal that enclosed their perfect world.

He had overreacted, he knew. He wished he could call back the one absurd impulsive act that had thrust him from his smooth and agreeable existence into this frantic wearisome fugitive life. And he felt sorry for Hurwitt, who probably had been caught up in emotions beyond his depth, swept away by the astonishment of finding himself in Marianne’s arms. How could he have stopped to worry, at such a time, about what he might be doing to someone else’s marriage? How ridiculous it had been to kill him! And to stare right into Hurwitt’s eyes, incontrovertibly incriminating himself, while he did! If he needed any proof of his temporary insanity, the utter foolishness of the murder would supply it.

But there was no calling any of it back. Hurwitt was dead; he had lived on the run for—what, two years, three?—and Marianne was altogether lost to him. So much destruction achieved in a single crazy moment. He wondered what he would do if he ever saw Marianne again. Nothing violent, no, certainly not. He had a sudden image of himself in tears, hugging her knees, begging her forgiveness. For what? For killing her lover? For bringing all sorts of nasty mess and the wrong kind of publicity into her life? For disrupting the easy rhythms of their happy marriage? No, he thought, astonished, aghast. What do I have to be forgiven for? From her, nothing. She’s the one who should go down on her knees before me. I wasn’t the one who was fooling around. And then he thought, No, no, we must forgive each other. And after that he thought, Best of all, I must take care never to have anything to do with her for the rest of my life. And that thought cut through him like a blade, like Dr. Randegger’s fiery scalpel.

Six months later he was walking through the cavernous, ornate lobby of the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo when he saw a Marianne standing in front of a huge stack of suitcases against a marble pillar no more than twenty feet from him. He was inured to Mariannes by this time and at first the sight of her had no impact; but then he noticed the familiar monogram on the luggage, and recognized the intricate little bows of red plush cord with which the baggage tags were tied on, and he realized that this was the true Marianne at last. Nor was this any hallucination like the Connaught one. She was visibly older, with a vertical line in her left cheek that he had never seen before. Her hair was a darker shade and somehow more ordinary in its cut, and she was dressed simply, no radiance at all. Even so, people were staring at her and whispering. Frazier swayed, gripped a nearby pillar with his suddenly clammy hand, fought back the impulse to run. He took a deep breath and went toward her, walking slowly, impressively, his carefully cultivated distinguished-looking-Swiss-businessman walk.

“Marianne?” he said.

She turned her head slightly and stared at him without any show of recognition.

“I do look different, yes,” he said, smiling. “I’m sorry, but I don’t—”

A slender, agile-looking man five or six years younger than she, wearing sunglasses, appeared from somewhere as though conjured out of the floor. Smoothly he interpolated himself between Frazier and Marianne. A lover? A bodyguard? Simply part of her entourage? Pleasantly but forcefully he presented himself to Frazier as though saying, Let’s not have any trouble now, shall we?

“Listen to my voice,” Frazier said. “You haven’t forgotten my voice. Only the face is different.”

Sunglasses came a little closer. Looked a little less pleasant.

Marianne stared.

“You haven’t forgotten, have you, Marianne?” Frazier said.

Sunglasses began to look definitely menacing.

“Wait a minute,” Marianne said, as he glided into a nose-to-nose with Frazier. “Step back, Aurelio.” She peered through the shadows. “Loren?” she said.

Frazier nodded. He went toward her. At a gesture from Marianne, Sunglasses faded away like a genie going back into the bottle. Frazier felt strangely calm now. He could see Marianne’s upper lip trembling, her nostrils flickering a little. “I thought I never wanted to see you again,” he said. “But I was wrong about that. The moment I saw you and knew it was really you, I realized that I had never stopped thinking about you, never stopped wanting you. Wanting to put it all back together.”

Her eyes widened. “And you think you can?”

“Maybe.”

“What a damned fool you are,” she said, gently, almost lovingly, after a long moment.

“I know. I really messed myself up, doing what I did.”

“I don’t mean that,” she said. “You messed us both up with that. Not to mention him, the poor bastard. But that can’t be undone, can it? If you only knew how often I prayed to have it not have happened.” She shook her head. “It was nothing, what he and I were doing. Nothing. Just a silly fling, for Christ’s sake. How could you possibly have cared so much?”

“What?”

“To kill a man, for something like that? To wreck three lives in half a second? For that?”

“What?” he said again. “What are you telling me?”

Sunglasses suddenly was in the picture again. “We’re going to miss the car to the airport, Marianne.”

“Yes. Yes. All right, let’s go.”

Frazier watched, numb, immobile. Sunglasses beckoned and a swarm of porters materialized to carry the luggage outside. As she reached the vast doorway Marianne turned abruptly and looked back, and in the dimness of the great lobby her eyes suddenly seemed to shift in color, to take on the same strange topaz glint that he had imagined he had seen in Hurwitt’s. Then she swung around and was gone.

An hour later he went down to the Consulate to turn himself in. They had a little trouble locating him in the list of wanted fugitives, but he told them to keep looking, going back a few years, and finally they came upon his entry. He was allowed half a day to clear up his business affairs, but he said he had none to clear up, so they set about the procedure of arranging his passage to the States, while he watched like a tourist who is trying to replace a lost passport.

Coming home was like returning to a foreign country that he had visited a long time before. Everything was familiar, but in an unfamiliar way. There were endless hearings, conferences, psychological examinations. His lawyers were excessively polite, as if they feared that one wrong word would cause him to detonate, but behind their silkiness he saw the contempt that the orderly have for the self-destructive. Still, they did their job well. Eventually he drew a suspended sentence and two years of rehabilitation, after which, they told him, he’d need to move to some other city, find some appropriate line of work, and establish a stable new existence for himself. The rehabilitation people would help him. There would be a probation period of five years when he’d have to report for progress conferences every week.

At the very end one of the rehab officers came to him and told him that his lawyers had filed a petition asking the court to let him have his original face back. That startled him. For a moment Frazier felt like a fugitive again, wearily stumbling from airport to airport, from hotel to hotel.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think that’s a good idea at all. The man who had that face, he’s somebody else. I think I’m better off keeping this one. What do you say?”

“I think so too,” said the rehab man.

The Road to Nightfall

I was in my late teens, an undergraduate at Columbia University, when I began sketching out this story in the fall of 1953. I had, I remember, been reading a story by the French writer Marcel Ayme called “Crossing Paris,” in the July-August 1950 issue of Partisan Review—a literary magazine that I followed avidly in those days. This was how it opened:

“The victim, already dismembered, lay in a corner of the cellar under wrappings of stained canvas. Jamblier, a little man with graying hair, a sharp profile, and feverish eyes, his belly girded with a kitchen apron which came down to his feet, was shuffling across the concrete floor. At times he stopped short in his tracks to gaze with faintly flushed cheeks and uneasy eyes at the latch of the door. To relieve the tension of waiting, he took a mop which was soaking in an enamelled bucket, and for the third time he washed the damp surface of the concrete to efface from it any last traces of blood which his butchery might have left there. …”

It sounds like the beginning of a murder mystery, or a horror story.
But in fact “Crossing Paris” dealt with the complicated problem of transporting black-market pork by suitcase through the Nazi-occupied city.
The grim, bleak wartime atmosphere and the situational-ethics anguish of the characters affected me profoundly; almost at once I found myself
translating the story’s mood into science-fictional terms. What if, I asked myself, I were to take Ayme’s trick opening paragraph literally? Assume that the “victim” is not a pig but a man, as I had thought until the second page of the story, and the city is suffering privations far more intense
even than those of the war, so that cannibalism is being practiced and the illicit meat being smuggled by night through the streets is the most illicit meat of all.

I wrote it in odd moments stolen from class work over the next couple
of months, intending to submit it to a contest one of the science fiction
magazines was running that year, and finished it during my Christmas break from college. A thousand-dollar prize (the equivalent of at least ten thousand in today’s money) was being offered for the best story of life in twenty-first-century America written by a college undergraduate. For some reason I never entered the contest—missed the deadline, perhaps—but in the spring of 1954 I started sending my manuscript around to the science fiction magazines. I was nobody at all, then, an unpublished writer (though to my own amazement I had just had my first novel, Revolt on Alpha C, accepted for hardcover publication in 1955). Back the story came with great speed, just as all the fifteen or twenty other stories I had sent out over the previous five years had done. (I had been thirteen or fourteen when I first began sending my stories to the magazines.) When it had been to all seven or eight of the magazines that existed then, and every editor had told me how depressing, morbid, negative, and impossible to publish it was, I put it aside and wrote it off as a mistake.

A couple of years went by. By then I was selling my stories at a rapid clip and had become, before I was twenty-one, a well-known science fiction writer. I was earning a nice living from my writing while still an undergraduate at Columbia.

Meanwhile a kid from Cleveland had come to New York, moved in
next door to me, and set up shop as a writer as well. His name was Harlan Ellison. One day in 1956 I told him that I had been able to sell all my stories except one, which no editor would touch, and he demanded to see it. He read it on the spot. “Brilliant!” he said. “Magnificent!” Or words to that effect. Harlan was indignant that such a dark masterpiece would have met with universal rejection, and he vowed to find a publisher for it. Just about then, the kindly and unworldly Hans Stefan Santesson took over the editorship of a struggling magazine called Fantastic Universe, and Harlan told him I had written a story too daring for any of his rivals to print—virtually defying him not to buy it. Hans asked for the manuscript, commented in his mild way that the story was pretty strong stuff, and, after hesitating over it for nearly two years, ran it in the July 1958 issue of his magazine.

After more than half a century I find it hard to see what was so hot to handle about “Road to Nightfall.” Its theme—that the stress of life in a post-atomic society could lead even to cannibalism—seemed to upset
many of the editors who turned it down, but there was no taboo per se against that theme. (Cf. Damon Knight’s 1950 classic, “To Serve Man,” just to name one.) Most likely the protagonist’s moral collapse at the end was the problem, for most sf editors of the time preferred stories in which the central figure transcends all challenges and arrives at a triumphant conclusion to his travail. That I had never published anything at the time was a further drawback. Theodore Sturgeon or Fritz Leiber, say, might have persuaded an editor to buy a story about cannibalism, or one with a downbeat ending—but a downbeat cannibal story by an unknown author simply had too much going against it, and even after my name had become established it still needed the full force of the Harlan Ellison juggernaut to win it a home. To me it still seems like a pretty good job, especially for a writer who was still a considerable distance short of his twentieth birthday. It moves along, it creates character and action and something of a plot, it gets its point across effectively. If I had been an editor looking at this
manuscript back then, I would certainly have thought its writer showed some promise.

The dog snarled, and ran on. Katterson watched the two lean, fiery-eyed men speeding in pursuit, while a mounting horror grew in him and rooted him to the spot. The dog suddenly bounded over a heap of rubble and was gone; its pursuers sank limply down, leaning on their clubs, and tried to catch their breath.

“It’s going to get much worse than this,” said a small, grubby-looking man who appeared from nowhere next to Katterson. “I’ve heard the official announcement’s coming today, but the rumor’s been around for a long time.”

“So they say,” answered Katterson slowly. The chase he had just witnessed still held him paralyzed. “We’re all pretty hungry.”

The two men who had chased the dog got up, still winded, and wandered off. Katterson and the little man watched their slow retreat.

“That’s the first time I’ve ever seen people doing that,” said Katterson. “Out in the open like that—”

“It won’t be the last time,” said the grubby man. “Better get used to it, now that the food’s gone.”

Katterson’s stomach twinged. It was empty, and would stay that way till the evening’s food dole. Without the doles, he would have no idea of where his next bite of food would come from. He and the small man walked on through the quiet street, stepping over the rubble, walking aimlessly with no particular goal in mind.

“My name’s Paul Katterson,” he said finally. “I live on 47th Street. I was discharged from the Army last year.”

“Oh, one of those,” said the little man. They turned down 15th Street. It was a street of complete desolation; not one pre-war house was standing, and a few shabby tents were pitched at the far end of the street. “Have you had any work since your discharge?”

Katterson laughed. “Good joke. Try another.”

“I know. Things are tough. My name is Malory; I’m a merchandizer.”

“What do you merchandize?”

“Oh … useful products.”

Katterson nodded. Obviously Malory didn’t want him to pursue
the topic, and he dropped it. They walked on silently, the big man
and the little one, and Katterson could think of nothing but the emptiness in his stomach. Then his thoughts drifted to the scene of a few minutes before, the two hungry men chasing a dog. Had it come to that so soon? Katterson asked himself. What was going to happen, he
wondered, as food became scarcer and scarcer and finally there was none at all?

But the little man was pointing ahead. “Look,” he said. “Meeting at Union Square.”

Katterson squinted and saw a crowd starting to form around the platform reserved for public announcements. He quickened his pace, forcing Malory to struggle to keep up with him.

A young man in military uniform had mounted the platform and was impassively facing the crowd. Katterson looked at the jeep nearby, automatically noting it was the 2036 model, the most recent one, eighteen years old. After a minute or so the soldier raised his hand for silence, and spoke in a quiet, restrained voice.

“Fellow New Yorkers, I have an official announcement from the Government. Word has just been received from Trenton Oasis—”

The crowd began to murmur. They seemed to know what was coming.

“Word has just been received from Trenton Oasis that, due to recent emergency conditions there, all food supplies for New York City and environs will be temporarily cut off. Repeat: due to recent emergency in the Trenton Oasis, all food supplies for New York and environs will temporarily be cut off.”

The murmuring in the crowd grew to an angry, biting whisper as each man discussed this latest turn of events with the man next to him. This was hardly unexpected news; Trenton had long protested the burden of feeding helpless, bombed-out New York, and the recent flood there had given them ample opportunity to squirm out of their responsibility. Katterson stood silent, towering over the people around him, finding himself unable to believe what he was hearing. He seemed aloof, almost detached, objectively criticizing the posture of the soldier on the platform, counting his insignia, thinking of everything but
the implications of the announcement, and trying to fight back the growing hunger.

The uniformed man was speaking again. “I also have this message from the Governor of New York, General Holloway: he says that attempts at restoring New York’s food supply are being made, and that messengers have been dispatched to the Baltimore Oasis to request food supplies. In the meantime the Government food doles are to be discontinued effective tonight, until further notice. That is all.”

The soldier gingerly dismounted from the platform and made his way through the crowd to his jeep. He climbed quickly in and drove off. Obviously he was an important man, Katterson decided, because jeeps and fuel were scarce items, not used lightly by anyone and everyone.

Katterson remained where he was and turned his head slowly, looking at the people round him—thin, half-starved little skeletons, most of them, who secretly begrudged him his giant frame. An emaciated man with burning eyes and a beak of a nose had gathered a small group around himself and was shouting some sort of harangue. Katterson knew of him—his name was Emerich, and he was the leader of the colony living in the abandoned subway at 14th Street. Katterson instinctively moved closer to hear him, and Malory followed.

“It’s all a plot!” the emaciated man was shouting. “They talk of an emergency in Trenton. What emergency? I ask you, what emergency? That flood didn’t hurt them. They just want to get us off their necks by starving us out, that’s all! And what can we do about it? Nothing. Trenton knows we’ll never be able to rebuild New York, and they want to get rid of us, so they cut off our food.”

By now the crowd had gathered round him. Emerich was popular; people were shouting their agreement, punctuating his speech with applause.

“But will we starve to death? We will not!”

“That’s right, Emerich!” yelled a burly man with a beard.

“No,” Emerich continued, “we’ll show them what we can do. We’ll scrape up every bit of food we can find, every blade of grass, every wild animal, every bit of shoe-leather. And we’ll survive, just the way we survived the blockade and the famine of ’47 and everything else. And one of these days we’ll go out to Trenton and—and—roast them alive!”

Roars of approval filled the air. Katterson turned and shouldered his way through the crowd, thinking of the two men and the dog, and walked away without looking back. He headed down Fourth Avenue, until he could no longer hear the sounds of the meeting at Union Square, and sat down wearily on a pile of crushed girders that had once been the Carden Monument.

He put his head in his hands and sat there. The afternoon’s events had numbed him. Food had been scarce as far back as he could remember—the twenty-four years of war with the Spherists had just about used up every resource of the country. The war had dragged on and on. After the first rash of preliminary bombings, it had become a war of attrition, slowly grinding the opposing spheres to rubble.

Somehow Katterson had grown big and powerful on hardly any food, and he stood out wherever he went. The generation of Americans to which he belonged was not one of size or strength—the children were born under-nourished old men, weak and wrinkled. But he had been big, and he had been one of the lucky ones chosen for the Army. At least there he had been fed regularly.

Katterson kicked away a twisted bit of slag, and saw little Malory coming down Fourth Avenue in his direction. Katterson laughed to himself, remembering his Army days. His whole adult life had been spent in uniform, with soldier’s privileges. But it had been too good to last; two years before, in 2052, the war had finally dragged to a
complete standstill, with the competing hemispheres both worn to shreds, and almost the entire Army had suddenly been mustered out into the cold civilian world. He had been dumped into New York, lost and alone.

“Let’s go for a dog-hunt,” Malory said, smiling as he drew near.

“Watch your tongue, little man. I might just eat you if I get hungry enough.”

“Eh? I thought you were so shocked by two men trying to catch a dog.”

Katterson looked up. “I was,” he said. “Sit down, or get moving, but don’t play games,” he growled. Malory flung himself down on the wreckage near Katterson.

“Looks pretty bad,” Malory said.

“Check,” said Katterson. “I haven’t eaten anything all day.”

“Why not? There was a regular dole last night, and there’ll be one tonight.”

“You hope,” said Katterson. The day was drawing to a close, he saw, and evening shadows were falling fast. Ruined New York looked weird in twilight; the gnarled girders and fallen buildings seemed ghosts of long-dead giants.

“You’ll be even hungrier tomorrow,” Malory said. “There isn’t going to be any dole, any more.”

“Don’t remind me, little man.”

“I’m in the food-supplying business, myself,” said Malory, as a weak smile rippled over his lips.

Katterson picked up his head in a hurry.

“Playing games again?”

“No,” Malory said hastily. He scribbled his address on a piece of paper and handed it to Katterson. “Here. Drop in on me any time you get really hungry. And—say, you’re a pretty strong fellow, aren’t you? I might even have some work for you, since you say you’re unattached.”

The shadow of an idea began to strike Katterson. He turned so he faced the little man, and stared at him.

“What kind of work?”

Malory paled. “Oh, I need some strong men to obtain food for me. You know,” he whispered.

Katterson reached over and grasped the small man’s thin shoulders. Malory winced. “Yes, I know,” Katterson repeated slowly. “Tell me, Malory,” he said carefully. “What sort of food do you sell?”

Malory squirmed. “Why—why—now look, I just wanted to help you, and—”

“Don’t give me any of that.” Slowly Katterson stood up, not releasing his grip on the small man. Malory found himself being dragged willy-nilly to his feet. “You’re in the meat business, aren’t you, Malory? What kind of meat do you sell?”

Malory tried to break away. Katterson shoved him with a contemptuous half-open fist and sent him sprawling back into the rubble-heap. Malory twisted away, his eyes wild with fear, and dashed off down 13th Street into the gloom. Katterson stood for a long time watching him retreat, breathing hard and not daring to think. Then he folded the paper with Malory’s address on it and put it in his pocket, and walked numbly away.

Barbara was waiting for him when he pressed his thumb against the doorplate of his apartment on 47th Street an hour later.

“I suppose you’ve heard the news,” she said as he entered. “Some spic-and-span lieutenant came by and announced it down below. I’ve already picked up our dole for tonight, and that’s the last one. Hey—anything the matter?” She looked at him anxiously as he sank wordlessly into a chair.

“Nothing, kid. I’m just hungry—and a little sick to my stomach.”

“Where’d you go today? The Square again?”

“Yeah. My usual Thursday afternoon stroll, and a pleasant picnic that turned out to be. First I saw two men hunting a dog—they couldn’t have been much hungrier than I am, but they were chasing this poor scrawny thing. Then your lieutenant made his announcement about the food. And then a filthy meat pedlar tried to sell me some ‘merchandize’ and give me a job.”

The girl caught her breath. “A job? Meat? What happened? Oh, Paul—”

“Stow it,” Katterson told her. “I knocked him sprawling and he ran away with his tail between his legs. You know what he was selling? You know what kind of meat he wanted me to eat?”

She lowered her eyes. “Yes, Paul.”

“And the job he had for me—he saw I’m strong, so he would have made me his supplier. I would have gone out hunting in the evenings. Looking for stragglers to be knocked off and turned into tomorrow’s steaks.”

“But we’re so hungry, Paul—when you’re hungry that’s the most important thing.”

“What?” His voice was the bellow of an outraged bull. “What? You don’t know what you’re saying, woman. Eat before you go out of your mind completely. I’ll find some other way of getting food, but I’m not going to turn into a bloody cannibal. No longpork for Paul Katterson.”

She said nothing. The single light-glow in the ceiling flickered twice.

“Getting near shut-off time. Get the candles out, unless you’re sleepy,” he said. He had no chronometer, but the flickering was the signal that eight-thirty was approaching. At eight-thirty every night electricity was cut off in all residence apartments except those with permission to exceed normal quota.

Barbara lit a candle.

“Paul, Father Kennon was back here again today.”

“I’ve told him not to show up here again,” Katterson said from the darkness of his corner of the room.

“He thinks we ought to get married, Paul.”

“I know. I don’t.”

“Paul, why are you—”

“Let’s not go over that again. I’ve told you often enough that I don’t want the responsibility of two mouths to feed, when I can’t even manage keeping my own belly full. This is the best—each of us on our own.”

“But children, Paul—”

“Are you crazy tonight?” he retorted. “Would you dare to bring a child into this world? Especially now that we’ve even lost the food from Trenton Oasis? Would you enjoy watching him slowly starve to death in all this filth and rubble, or maybe growing up into a hollow-cheeked little skeleton? Maybe you would. I don’t think I’d care to.”

He was silent. She sat watching him, sobbing quietly.

“We’re dead, you and I,” she finally said. “We won’t admit it, but we’re dead. This whole world is dead—we’ve spent the last thirty years committing suicide. I don’t remember as far back as you do, but I’ve read some of the old books, about how clean and new and shiny this city was before the war. The war! All my life, we’ve been at war, never knowing who we were fighting and why. Just eating the world apart for no reason at all.”

“Cut it, Barbara,” Katterson said. But she went on in a dead monotone. “They tell me America once went from coast to coast, instead of being cut up into little strips bordered by radioactive no-man’s-lands. And there were farms, and food, and lakes and rivers, and men flew from place to place. Why did this have to happen? Why are we all dead? Where do we go now, Paul?”

“I don’t know, Barbara. I don’t think anyone does.” Wearily, he snuffed out the candle, and the darkness flooded in and filled the room.

Somehow he had wandered back to Union Square again, and he stood on 14th Street, rocking gently back and forth on his feet and feeling the lightheadedness which is the first sign of starvation. There were just a few people in the streets, morosely heading for whatever destinations claimed them. The sun was high overhead, and bright.

His reverie was interrupted by the sound of yells and an unaccustomed noise of running feet. His Army training stood him in good stead as he dove into a gaping trench and hid there, wondering what was happening.

After a moment he peeked out. Four men, each as big as Katterson himself, were roaming up and down the now deserted streets. One was carrying a sack.

“There’s one,” Katterson heard the man with the sack yell harshly. He watched without believing as the four men located a girl cowering near a fallen building.

She was a pale, thin, ragged-looking girl, perhaps twenty at the most, who might have been pretty in some other world. But her cheeks were sunken and coarse, her eyes dull and glassy, her arms bony and angular.

As they drew near she huddled back, cursing defiantly, and prepared to defend herself. She doesn’t understand, Katterson thought. She thinks she’s going to be attacked.

Perspiration streamed down his body, and he forced himself to watch, kept himself from leaping out of hiding. The four marauders closed in on the girl. She spat, struck out with her clawlike hand.

They chuckled and grabbed her clutching arm. Her scream was suddenly ear-piercing as they dragged her out into the open. A knife flashed; Katterson ground his teeth together, wincing, as the blade struck home.

“In the sack with her, Charlie,” a rough voice said.

Katterson’s eyes steamed with rage. It was his first view of Malory’s butchers—at least, he suspected it was Malory’s gang. Feeling the knife at his side, in its familiar sheath, he half-rose to attack the four meat-raiders, and then, regaining his sense, he sank back into the trench.

So soon? Katterson knew that cannibalism had been spreading slowly through starving New York for many years, and that few bodies of the dead ever reached their graves intact—but this was the first time, so far as he knew, that raiders had dragged a living human being from the streets and killed her for food. He shuddered. The race for life was on, then.

The four raiders disappeared in the direction of Third Avenue, and Katterson cautiously eased himself from the trench, cast a wary eye in all directions, and edged into the open. He knew he would have to be careful; a man his size carried meat for many mouths.

Other people were coming out of the buildings now, all with much the same expression of horror on their faces. Katterson watched the marching skeletons walking dazedly, a few sobbing, most of them past the stage of tears. He clenched and unclenched his fists, angry, burning to stamp out this spreading sickness and knowing hopelessly that it could not be done.

A tall thin man with chiseled features was on the speaker’s platform now. His voice was choked with anger.

“Brothers, it’s out in the open now. Men have turned from the ways of God, and Satan has led them to destruction. Just now you witnessed four of His creatures destroy a fellow mortal for food—the most terrible sin of all.

“Brothers, our time on Earth is almost done. I’m an old man—I remember the days before the war, and, while some of you won’t believe it, I remember the days when there was food for all, when everyone had a job, when these crumpled buildings were tall and shiny and streamlined, and the skies teemed with jets. In my youth I traveled all across this country, clear to the Pacific. But the War has ended all that, and it’s God’s hand upon us. Our day is done, and soon we’ll all meet our reckoning.

“Go to God without blood on your hands, brothers. Those four men you saw today will burn forever for their crime. Whoever eats the unholy meat they butchered today will join them in Hell. But listen a moment, brothers, listen! Those of you who aren’t lost yet, I beg you: save yourselves! Better to go without food at all, as most of you are doing, than to soil yourselves with this kind of new food, the most precious meat of all.”

Katterson stared at the people around him. He wanted to end all this; he had a vision of a crusade for food, a campaign against cannibalism, banners waving, drums beating, himself leading the fight. Some of the people had stopped listening to the old preacher, and some had wandered off. A few were smiling and hurtling derisive remarks at the old man, but he ignored them.

“Hear me! Hear me, before you go. We’re all doomed anyway; the Lord has made that clear. But think, people—this world will shortly pass away, and there is the greater world to come. Don’t sign away your chance for eternal life, brothers! Don’t trade your immortal soul for a bit of tainted meat!”

The crowd was melting away, Katterson noted. It was dispersing hastily, people quickly edging away and disappearing. The preacher continued talking. Katterson stood on tip-toes and craned his neck past the crowd and stared down towards the east. His eyes searched for a moment, and then he paled. Four ominous figures were coming with deliberate tread down the deserted street.

Almost everyone had seen them now. They were walking four abreast down the center of the street, the tallest holding an empty sack. People were heading hastily in all directions, and as the four figures came to the corner of 14th Street and Fourth Avenue only Katterson and the preacher still stood at the platform.

“I see you’re the only one left, young man. Have you defiled yourself, or are you still of the Kingdom of Heaven?”

Katterson ignored the question. “Old man, get down from there!” he snapped. “The raiders are coming back. Come on, let’s get out of here before they come.”

“No. I intend to talk to them when they come. But save yourself, young man, save yourself while you can.”

“They’ll kill you, you old fool,” Katterson whispered harshly.

“We’re all doomed anyway, son. If my day has come, I’m ready.”

“You’re crazy,” Katterson said. The four men were within speaking distance now. Katterson looked at the old man for one last time and then dashed across the street and into a building. He glanced back and saw he was not being followed.

The four raiders were standing under the platform, listening to the old man. Katterson couldn’t hear what the preacher was saying, but he was waving his arms as he spoke. They seemed to be listening intently. Katterson stared. He saw one of the raiders say something to the old man, and then the tall one with the sack climbed up on the platform. One of the others tossed him an unsheathed knife.

The shriek was loud and piercing. When Katterson dared to look out again, the tall man was stuffing the preacher’s body into the sack. Katterson bowed his head. The trumpets began to fade; he realized that resistance was impossible. Unstoppable currents were flowing.

Katterson plodded uptown to his apartment. The blocks flew past as he methodically pulled one foot after another, walking the two miles through the rubble and deserted, ruined buildings. He kept one hand on his knife and darted glances from right to left, noting the furtive scurryings in the side streets, the shadowy people who were not quite visible behind the ashes and the rubble. Those four figures, one with the sack, seemed to lurk behind every lamppost, waiting hungrily.

He cut into Broadway, taking a shortcut through the stump of
the Parker Building. Fifty years before, the Parker Building had
been the tallest in the Western world; its truncated stump was all
that remained. Katterson passed what had once been the most majestic lobby in the world, and stared in. A small boy sat on the step outside, gnawing a piece of meat. He was eight or ten; his stomach was
drawn tight over his ribs, which showed through like a basket. Choking down his revulsion, Katterson wondered what sort of meat the boy
was eating.

He continued on. As he passed 44th Street, a bony cat skittered past him and disappeared behind a pile of ashes. Katterson thought of the stories he had heard of the Great Plains, where giant cats were said to roam unmolested, and his mouth watered.

The sun was sinking low again, and New York was turning dull grey and black. The sun never really shone in late afternoon any more; it sneaked its way through the piles of rubble and cast a ghostly glow on the ruins of New York. Katterson crossed 47th Street and turned down towards his building.

He made the long climb to his room—the elevator’s shaft was still there, and the frozen elevator, but such luxuries were beyond dream—and stood outside for just a moment, searching in the darkness for the doorplate. There was the sound of laughter from within, a strange sound for ears not accustomed to it, and a food-smell crept out through the door and hit him squarely. His throat began to work convulsively, and he remembered the dull ball of pain that was his stomach.

Katterson opened the door. The food-odor filled the little room completely. He saw Barbara look up suddenly, white-faced, as he entered. In his chair was a man he had met once or twice, a scraggly-haired, heavily bearded man named Heydahl.

“What’s going on?” Katterson demanded.

Barbara’s voice was strangely hushed. “Paul, you know Olaf Heydahl, don’t you? Olaf, Paul?”

“What’s going on?” Katterson repeated.

“Barbara and I have just been having a little meat, Mr. Katterson,” Heydahl said, in a rich voice. “We thought you’d be hungry, so we saved a little for you.”

The smell was overpowering and Katterson felt it was all he could do to keep from foaming at the lips. Barbara was wiping her face over and over again with the napkin; Heydahl sat contentedly in Katterson’s chair.

In three quick steps Katterson crossed to the other side of the room and threw open the doors to the little enclosed kitchenette. On the stove a small piece of meat sizzled softly. Katterson looked at the meat, then at Barbara.

“Where did you get this?” he asked. “We have no money.”

“I—I—”

“I bought it,” Heydahl said quietly. “Barbara told me how little food you had, and since I had more than I wanted I brought over a little gift.”

“I see. A gift. No strings attached?”

“Why, Mr. Katterson! Remember, I’m Barbara’s guest.”

“Yes, but please remember this is my apartment, not hers. Tell me, Heydahl—what kind of payment do you expect for this—this gift? And how much payment have you had already?”

Heydahl half-rose in his chair. “Please, Paul,” Barbara said hurriedly. “No trouble, Paul. Olaf was just trying to be friendly.”

“Barbara’s right, Mr. Katterson,” Heydahl said, subsiding. “Go ahead, help yourself. You’ll do yourself some good, and you’ll make me happy too.”

Katterson stared at him for a moment. The half-light from below trickled in over Heydahl’s shoulder, illuminating his nearly bald head and his flowing beard. Katterson wondered just how Heydahl’s cheeks managed to be quite so plump.

“Go ahead,” Heydahl repeated. “We’ve had our fill.”

Katterson turned back to the meat. He pulled a plate from the shelf and plopped the piece of meat on it, and unsheathed his knife. He was about to start carving when he turned to look at the two others.

Barbara was leaning forward in her chair. Her eyes were staring wide, and fear was shining deep in them. Heydahl, on the other hand, sat comfortably in Katterson’s chair, with a complacent look on his face that Katterson had not seen on anyone’s features since leaving the Army.

A thought hit him suddenly and turned him icy-cold. “Barbara,” he said, controlling his voice, “what kind of meat is this? Roast beef or lamb?”

“I don’t know, Paul,” she said uncertainly. “Olaf didn’t say what—”

“Maybe roast dog, perhaps? Filet of alleycat? Why didn’t you ask Olaf what was on the menu. Why don’t you ask him now?”

Barbara looked at Heydahl, then back at Katterson.

“Eat it, Paul. It’s good, believe me—and I know how hungry you are.”

“I don’t eat unlabeled goods, Barbara. Ask Mr. Heydahl what kind of meat it is, first.”

She turned to Heydahl. “Olaf—”

“I don’t think you should be so fussy these days, Mr. Katterson,” Heydahl said. “After all, there are no more food doles, and you don’t know when meat will be available again.”

“I like to be fussy, Heydahl. What kind of meat is this?”

“Why are you so curious? You know what they say about looking gift-horses in the mouth, heh heh.”

“I can’t even be sure this is horse, Heydahl. What kind of meat is it?” Katterson’s voice, usually carefully modulated, became a snarl. “A choice slice of fat little boy? Maybe a steak from some poor devil who was in the wrong neighborhood one evening?”

Heydahl turned white.

Katterson took the meat from the plate and hefted it for a moment in his hand. “You can’t even spit the words out, either of you. They choke in your mouths. Here—cannibals!”

He hurled the meat hard at Barbara; it glanced off the side of her cheek and fell to the floor. His face was flaming with rage. He flung open the door, turned, and slammed it again, rushing blindly away. The last thing he saw before slamming the door was Barbara on her knees, scurrying to pick up the piece of meat.

Night was dropping fast, and Katterson knew the streets were unsafe. His apartment, he felt, was polluted; he could not go back to it. The problem was to get food. He hadn’t eaten in almost two days. He thrust his hands in his pocket and felt the folded slip of paper with Malory’s address on it, and, with a wry grimace, realized that this was his only source of food and money. But not yet—not so long as he could hold up his head.

Without thinking he wandered towards the river, towards the huge crater where, Katterson had been told, there once had been the United Nations buildings. The crater was almost a thousand feet deep; the United Nations had been obliterated in the first bombing, back in 2028. Katterson had been just one year old then, the year the War began. The actual fighting and bombing had continued for the next five or six years, until both hemispheres were scarred and burned from combat, and then the long war of attrition had begun. Katterson had turned eighteen in 2045—nine long years ago, he reflected—and his giant frame made him a natural choice for a soft Army post. In the course of his Army career he had been all over the section of the world he considered his country—the patch of land bounded by the Appalachian radioactive belt on one side, by the Atlantic on the other. The enemy had carefully constructed walls of fire partitioning America into a dozen strips, each completely isolated from the next. An airplane could cross from one to another, if there were any left. But science, industry, and technology were dead, Katterson thought wearily, as he stared without seeing at the river. He sat down on the edge of the crater and dangled his feet.

What had happened to the brave new world that had entered the twenty-first century with such proud hopes? Here he was, Paul Katterson, probably one of the strongest and tallest men in the country, swinging his legs over a great devastated area, with a gnawing pain in the pit of his stomach. The world was dead, the shiny streamlined world of chrome plating and jet planes. Someday, perhaps, there would be new life. Someday.

Katterson stared at the waters beyond the crater. Somewhere across the seas there were other countries, broken like the rest. And somewhere in the other direction were rolling plains, grass, wheat, wild animals, fenced off by hundreds of miles of radioactive mountains. The War had eaten up the fields and pastures and livestock, had ground all mankind under.

He got up and started to walk back through the lonely street. It was dark now, and the few gaslights cast a ghostly light, like little eclipsed moons. The fields were dead, and what was left of mankind huddled in the blasted cities, except for the lucky ones in the few Oases scattered by chance through the country. New York was a city of skeletons, each one scrabbling for food, cutting corners and hoping for tomorrow’s bread.

A small man bumped into Katterson as he wandered unseeing. Katterson looked down at him and caught him by the arm. A family man, he guessed, hurrying home to his hungry children.

“Excuse me, sir,” the little man said, nervously, straining to break Katterson’s grip. The fear was obvious on his face; Katterson wondered if the worried little man thought this giant was going to roast him on the spot.

“I won’t hurt you,” Katterson said. “I’m just looking for food, Citizen.”

“I have none.”

“But I’m starving,” Katterson said. “You look like you have a job, some money. Give me some food and I’ll be your bodyguard, your slave, anything you want.”

“Look, fellow, I have no food to spare. Ouch! Let go of my arm!”

Katterson let go, and watched the little man go dashing away down the street. People always ran away from other people these days, he thought. Malory had made a similar escape.

The streets were dark and empty. Katterson wondered if he would be someone’s steak by morning, and he didn’t really care. His chest itched suddenly, and he thrust a grimy hand inside his shirt to scratch. The flesh over his pectoral muscles had almost completely been absorbed, and his chest was bony to the touch. He felt his stubbly cheeks, noting how tight they were over his jaws.

He turned and headed uptown, skirting around the craters, climbing over the piles of rubble. At 50th Street a Government jeep came coasting by and drew to a stop. Two soldiers with guns got out.

“Pretty late for you to be strolling, Citizen,” one soldier said.

“Looking for some fresh air.”

“That all?”

“What’s it to you?” Katterson said.

“Not hunting some game too, maybe?”

Katterson lunged at the soldier. “Why, you little punk—”

“Easy, big boy,” the other soldier said, pulling him back. “We were just joking.”

“Fine joke,” Katterson said. “You can afford to joke—all you have to do to get food is wear a monkey suit. I know how it is with you Army guys.”

“Not any more,” the second soldier said.

“Who are you kidding?” Katterson said. “I was a Regular Army man for seven years until they broke up our outfit in ’52. I know what’s happening.”

“Hey—what regiment?”

“306th Exploratory, soldier.”

“You’re not Katterson, Paul Katterson?”

“Maybe I am,” Katterson said slowly. He moved closer to the two soldiers. “What of it?”

“You know Mark Leswick?”

“Damned well I do,” Katterson said. “But how do you know him?”

“My brother. Used to talk of you all the time—Katterson’s the biggest man alive, he’d say. Appetite like an ox.”

Katterson smiled. “What’s he doing now?”

The other coughed. “Nothing. He and some friends built a raft and tried to float to South America. They were sunk by the Shore Patrol just outside the New York Harbor.”

“Oh. Too bad. Fine man, Mark. But he was right about the appetite. I’m hungry.”

“So are we, fellow,” the soldier said. “They cut off the soldiers’ dole yesterday.”

Katterson laughed, and the echoes rang in the silent street. “Damn them anyway! Good thing they didn’t pull that when I was in the service; I’d have told them off.”

“You can come with us, if you’d like. We’ll be off-duty when this patrol is over, and we’ll be heading downtown.”

“Pretty late, isn’t it? What time is it? Where are you going?”

“It’s quarter to three,” the soldier said, looking at his chronometer. “We’re looking for a fellow named Malory; there’s a story he has some food for sale, and we just got paid yesterday.” He patted his pocket smugly.

Katterson blinked. “You know what kind of stuff Malory’s selling?”

“Yeah,” the other said. “So what? When you’re hungry, you’re hungry, and it’s better to eat than starve. I’ve seen some guys like you—too stubborn to go that low for a meal. But you’ll give in, sooner or later, I suppose. I don’t know—you look stubborn.”

“Yeah,” Katterson said, breathing a little harder than usual. “I guess I am stubborn. Or maybe I’m not hungry enough yet. Thanks for the lift, but I’m afraid I’m going uptown.”

And he turned and trudged off into the darkness.

There was only one friendly place to go.

Hal North was a quiet, bookish man who had come in contact with Katterson fairly often, even though North lived almost four miles uptown, on 114th Street.

Katterson had a standing invitation to come to North at any time of day or night, and, having no place else to go, he headed there. North was one of the few scholars who still tried to pursue knowledge at Columbia, once a citadel of learning. They huddled together in the crumbling wreck of one of the halls, treasuring moldering books and exchanging ideas. North had a tiny apartment in an undamaged building on 114th Street, and he lived surrounded by books and a tiny circle of acquaintances.

Quarter to three, the soldier said. Katterson walked swiftly and easily, hardly noticing the blocks as they flew past. He reached North’s apartment just as the sun was beginning to come up, and he knocked cautiously on the door. One knock, two, then another a little harder.

Footsteps within. “Who’s there?” in a tired, high-pitched voice.

“Paul Katterson,” Katterson whispered. “You awake?”

North slid the door open. “Katterson! Come on in. What brings you up here?”

“You said I could come whenever I needed to. I need to.” Katterson sat down on the edge of North’s bed. “I haven’t eaten in two days, pretty near.”

North chuckled. “You came to the right place, then. Wait—I’ll fix you some bread and oleo. We still have some left.”

“You sure you can spare it, Hal?”

North opened a cupboard and took out a loaf of bread, and Katterson’s mouth began to water. “Of course, Paul. I don’t eat much anyway, and I’ve been storing most of my food doles. You’re welcome to whatever’s here.”

A sudden feeling of love swept through Katterson, a strange, consuming emotion which seemed to enfold all mankind for a moment, then withered and died away. “Thanks, Hal. Thanks.”

He turned and looked at the tattered, thumb-stained book lying open on North’s bed. Katterson let his eye wander down the tiny print and read softly aloud.

“The emperor of the sorrowful realm was there,

Out of the girding ice he stood breast-high

And to his arm alone the giants were

Less comparable than to a giant I.”

North brought a little plate of food over to where Katterson was sitting. “I was reading that all night,” he said. “Somehow I thought of browsing through it again, and I started it last night and read ’till you came.”

“Dante’s Inferno,” Katterson said. “Very appropriate. Someday I’d like to look through it again too. I’ve read so little, you know; soldiers don’t get much education.”

“Whenever you want to read, Paul, the books are still here.” North smiled, a pale smile on his wan face. He pointed to the bookcase where grubby, frayed books leaned at all angles. “Look, Paul: Rabelais, Joyce, Dante, Enright, Voltaire, Aeschylus, Homer, Shakespeare. They’re all here, Paul, the most precious things of all. They’re my old friends; those books have been my breakfasts and my lunches and my suppers many times when no food was to be had for any price.”

“We may be depending on them alone, Hal. Have you been out much these days?”

“No,” North said. “I haven’t been outdoors in over a week. Henriks has been picking up my food doles and bringing them here, and borrowing books. He came by yesterday—no, two days ago—to get my volume of Greek tragedies. He’s writing a new opera, based on a play of Aeschylus.”

“Poor crazy Henriks,” Katterson said. “Why does he keep on writing music when there’s no orchestras, no records, no concerts? He can’t even hear the stuff he writes.”

North opened the window and the morning air edged in. “Oh, but he does, Paul. He hears the music in his mind, and that satisfies him. It doesn’t really matter; he’ll never live to hear it played.”

“The doles have been cut off,” Katterson said.

“I know.”

“The people out there are eating each other. I saw a woman killed for food yesterday—butchered just like a cow.”

North shook his head and straightened a tangled, whitened lock. “So soon? I thought it would take longer than that, once the food ran out.”

“They’re hungry, Hal.”

“Yes, they’re hungry. So are you. In a day or so my supply up here will be gone, and I’ll be hungry too. But it takes more than hunger to break down the taboo against eating flesh. Those people out there have given up their last shred of humanity now; they’ve suffered every degradation there is, and they can’t sink any lower. Sooner or later we’ll come to realize that, you and I, and then we’ll be out there hunting for meat too.”

“Hal!”

“Don’t look so shocked, Paul.” North smiled patiently. “Wait a couple of days, till we’ve eaten the bindings of my books, till we’re finished chewing our shoes. The thought turns my stomach, too, but it’s inevitable. Society’s doomed; the last restraints are breaking now. We’re more stubborn than the rest, or maybe we’re just fussier about our meals. But our day will come too.”

“I don’t believe it,” Katterson said, rising.

“Sit down. You’re tired, and you’re just a skeleton yourself now. What happened to my big, muscular friend Katterson? Where are his muscles now?” North reached up and squeezed the big man’s biceps. “Skin, bones, what else? You’re burning down, Paul, and when the spark is finally out you’ll give in too.”

“Maybe you’re right, Hal. As soon as I stop thinking of myself as human, as soon as I get hungry enough and dead enough, I’ll be out there hunting like the rest. But I’ll hold out as long as I can.”

He sank back on the bed and slowly turned the yellowing pages of Dante.

Henriks came back the next day, wild-eyed and haggard, to return the book of Greek plays, saying the times were not ripe for Aeschylus. He borrowed a slim volume of poems by Ezra Pound. North forced some food on Henriks, who took it gratefully and without any show of diffidence. Then he left, staring oddly at Katterson.

Others came during the day—Komar, Goldman, de Metz—all men who, like Henriks and North, remembered the old days before the long war. They were pitiful skeletons, but the flame of knowledge burned brightly in each of them. North introduced Katterson to them, and they looked wonderingly at his still-powerful frame before pouncing avidly on the books.

But soon they stopped coming. Katterson would stand at the window and watch below for hours, and the empty streets remained empty. It was now four days since the last food had arrived from Trenton Oasis. Time was running out.

A light snowfall began the next day, and continued throughout the long afternoon. At the evening meal North pulled his chair over to the cupboard, balanced precariously on its arm, and searched around in the cupboard for a few moments. Then he turned to Katterson.

“I’m even worse off than Mother Hubbard,” he said. “At least she had a dog.”

“Huh?”

“I was referring to an incident in a children’s book,” North said. “What I meant was we have no more food.”

“None?” Katterson asked dully.

“Nothing at all.” North smiled faintly. Katterson felt the emptiness stirring in his stomach, and leaned back, closing his eyes.

Neither of them ate at all the next day. The snow continued to filter lightly down. Katterson spent most of the time staring out the little window, and he saw a light, clean blanket of snow covering everything in sight. The snow was unbroken.

The next morning Katterson arose and found North busily tearing the binding from his copy of the Greek plays. With a sort of amazement Katterson watched North put the soiled red binding into a pot of boiling water.

“Oh, you’re up? I’m just preparing breakfast.”

The binding was hardly palatable, but they chewed it to a soft pulp anyway, and swallowed the pulp just to give their tortured stomachs something to work on. Katterson retched as he swallowed his final mouthful.

One day of eating bookbindings.

“The city is dead,” Katterson said from the window without turning around. “I haven’t seen anyone come down this street yet. The snow is everywhere.”

North said nothing.

“This is crazy, Hal,” Katterson said suddenly. “I’m going out to get some food.”

“Where?”

“I’ll walk down Broadway and see what I can find. Maybe there’ll be a stray dog. I’ll look. We can’t hold out forever up here.”

“Don’t go, Paul.”

Katterson turned savagely. “Why? Is it better to starve up here without trying than to go down and hunt? You’re a little man; you don’t need food as much as I do. I’ll go down to Broadway; maybe there’ll be something. At least we can’t be any worse off than now.”

North smiled. “Go ahead, then.”

“I’m going.”

He buckled on his knife, put on all the warm clothes he could find, and made his way down the stairs. He seemed to float down, so lightheaded was he from hunger. His stomach was a tight hard knot.

The streets were deserted. A light blanket of snow lay everywhere, mantling the twisted ruins of the city. Katterson headed for Broadway, leaving tracks in the unbroken snow, and began to walk downtown.

At 96th Street and Broadway he saw his first sign of life, some people at the following corner. With mounting excitement he headed for 95th Street, but pulled up short.

There was a body sprawled over the snow, newly dead. And two boys of about twelve were having a duel to the death for its possession, while a third circled warily around them. Katterson watched them for a moment, and then crossed the street and walked on.

He no longer minded the snow and the solitude of the empty city. He maintained a steady, even pace, almost the tread of a machine. The world was crumbling fast around him, and his recourse lay in his solitary trek.

He turned back for a moment and looked behind him. There were his footsteps, the long trail stretching back and out of sight, the only marks breaking the even whiteness. He ticked off the empty blocks.

90th. 87th. 85th. At 84th he saw a blotch of color on the next block, and quickened his pace. When he got to close range, he saw it was a man lying on the snow. Katterson trotted lightly to him and stood over him.

He was lying face-down. Katterson bent and carefully rolled him over. His cheeks were still red; evidently he had rounded the corner and died just a few minutes before. Katterson stood up and looked around. In the window of the house nearest him, two pale faces were pressed against the pane, watching greedily.

He whirled suddenly to face a small, swarthy man standing on the other side of the corpse. They stared for a moment, the little man and the giant. Katterson noted dimly the other’s burning eyes and set expression. Two more people appeared, a ragged woman and a boy of eight or nine. Katterson moved closer to the corpse and made a show of examining it for identification, keeping a wary eye on the little tableau facing him.

Another man joined the group, and another. Now there were five, all standing silently in a semi-circle. The first man beckoned, and from the nearest house came two women and still another man. Katterson frowned; something unpleasant was going to happen.

A trickle of snow fluttered down. The hunger bit into Katterson like a red-hot knife as he stood there uneasily waiting for something to happen. The body lay fence-like between them.

The tableau dissolved into action in an instant. The small swarthy man made a gesture and reached for the corpse; Katterson quickly bent and scooped the dead man up. Then they were all around him, screaming and pulling at the body.

The swarthy man grabbed the corpse’s arm and started to tug, and a woman reached up for Katterson’s hair. Katterson drew up his arm and swung as hard as he could, and the small man left the ground and flew a few feet, collapsing into a huddled heap in the snow.

All of them were around him now, snatching at the corpse and at Katterson. He fought them off with his one free hand, with his feet, with his shoulders. Weak as he was and outnumbered, his size remained as a powerful factor. His fist connected with someone’s jaw and there was a rewarding crack; at the same time he lashed back with his foot and felt contact with breaking ribs.

“Get away!” he shouted. “Get away! This is mine! Away!” the first woman leaped at him, and he kicked at her and sent her reeling into the snowdrifts. “Mine! This is mine!”

They were even more weakened by hunger than he was. In a few moments all of them were scattered in the snow except the little boy, who came at Katterson determinedly, made a sudden dash, and leaped on Katterson’s back.

He hung there, unable to do anything more than cling. Katterson ignored him and took a few steps, carrying both the corpse and the boy, while the heat of battle slowly cooled inside him. He would take the corpse back uptown to North; they could cut it in pieces without much trouble. They would live on it for days, he thought. They would—

He realized what had happened. He dropped the corpse and staggered a few steps away, and sank down into the snow, bowing his head. The boy slipped off his back, and the little knot of people timidly converged on the corpse and bore it off triumphantly, leaving Katterson alone.

“Forgive me,” he muttered hoarsely. He licked his lips nervously, shaking his head. He remained there kneeling for a long time, unable to get up.

“No, no forgiveness. I can’t fool myself; I’m one of them now,” he said. He arose and stared at his hands, and then began to walk. Slowly, methodically, he trudged along, fumbling with the folded piece of paper in his pocket, knowing now that he had lost everything.

The snow had frozen in his hair, and he knew his head was white from snow—the head of an old man. His face was white too. He followed Broadway for a while, then cut to Central Park West. The snow was unbroken before him. It lay covering everything, a sign of the long winter setting in.

“North was right,” he said quietly to the ocean of white that was Central Park. He looked at the heaps of rubble seeking cover beneath the snow. “I can’t hold out any longer.” He looked at the address—Malory, 218 West 42nd Street—and continued onward, almost numb with the cold.

His eyes were narrowed to slits, and lashes and head were frosted and white. Katterson’s throat throbbed in his mouth, and his lips were clamped together by hunger. 70th Street, 65th. He zigzagged and wandered, following Columbus Avenue, Amsterdam Avenue for a while. Columbus, Amsterdam—the names were echoes from a past that had never been.

What must have been an hour passed, and another. The streets were empty. Those who were left stayed safe and starving inside, and watched from their windows the strange giant stalking alone through the snow. The sun had almost dropped from the sky as he reached 50th Street. His hunger had all but abated now; he felt nothing, knew just that his goal lay ahead. He faced forward, unable to go anywhere
but ahead.

Finally 42nd Street, and he turned down towards where he knew Malory was to be found. He came to the building. Up the stairs, now, as the darkness of night came to flood the streets. Up the stairs, up another flight, another. Each step was a mountain, but he pulled himself higher and higher.

At the fifth floor Katterson reeled and sat down on the edge of the steps, gasping. A liveried footman passed, his nose in the air, his green coat shimmering in the half-light. He was carrying a roasted pig with an apple in its mouth on a silver tray. Katterson lurched forward to seize the pig. His groping hands passed through it, and pig and footman exploded like bubbles and drifted off through the silent halls.

Just one more flight. Sizzling meat on a stove, hot, juicy, tender meat filling the hole where his stomach had once been. He picked up his legs carefully and set them down, and came to the top at last.
He balanced for a moment at the top of the stairs, nearly toppled
backwards but seized the banister at the last second, and then
pressed forward.

There was the door. He saw it, heard loud noises coming from behind it. A feast was going on, a banquet, and he ached to join in. Down the hall, turn left, pound on the door.

Noise growing louder.

“Malory! Malory! It’s me, Katterson, big Katterson! I’ve come to you! Open up, Malory!”

The handle began to turn.

“Malory! Malory!”

Katterson sank to his knees in the hall and fell forward on his face when the door opened at last.

Multiples

No heartrending sagas of the torments of creation with this one. It was July of 1983; I had finished Valentine Pontifex, which had turned out to be unexpectedly difficult to write (the first half of 1983 was one of those periods of my life that I’d just as soon not repeat); a few days after the novel was done I sat down and wrote “Multiples” in what was essentially one long take, did a little minor editing, and sent it off to Ellen Datlow of Omni, who accepted it right away. They should all be that easy. But in this case I was making use of my own home turf as the setting instead of having to invent some alien world, and the theme of multiple personalities was one I had been thinking about for some time. Characters and plot fell into place in that magical way that makes writers want to get down on their knees and offer thanks.

The story felt like a winner to me right away. Ellen published it in her October 1983 issue. It was chosen for the first volume (1983) of Gardner Dozois’s annual Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies, and has had a healthy reprint existence ever since. For a dizzying moment in the late 1990s it looked as though Stephen Spielberg was going to make it into a major motion picture, too, but that deal went away as most Hollywood deals go away, leaving nothing but a conspicuous residue of cash on my doorstep. The story also gets me occasional letters from actual multiple-personality people, who want to know if I’m one myself, or married to one. (The answers are No and No—so far as I know.)

And, if you don’t mind, I’d like to append a little bragging here. Having “Multiples” chosen for one of the best-science-fiction-of-the-year anthologies completed an unusual sweep for me, one of which I’m immensely proud. There were then three such anthologies, edited by Dozois, Donald A. Wollheim, and Terry Carr. I had stories in all three of them for the year of 1983. Other writers have achieved that now and then, when some particularly strong story was picked by all three editors—but I had a different story in each book. I don’t think anyone had ever managed that trick before. (I did it again in 1989. That time, though, I managed to get five stories into the three anthologies. Go ahead, top it if you can!)

There were mirrors everywhere, making the place a crazyhouse of dizzying refraction: mirrors on the ceiling, mirrors on the walls, mirrors in the angles where the walls met the ceiling and the floor, even little eddies of mirror-dust periodically blown on gusts of air through the room, so that all the bizarre distortions, fracturings, and dislocations of image that were bouncing around the place would from time to time coalesce in a shimmering haze of chaos right before your eyes. Colored globes spun round and round overhead, creating patterns of ricocheting light. It was exactly the way Cleo had expected a multiples club to look.

She had walked up and down the whole Fillmore Street strip from Union to Chestnut and back again for half an hour, peering at this club and that, before finding the courage to go inside one that called itself Skits. Though she had been planning this night for months, she found herself paralyzed by fear at the last minute: afraid they would spot her as a fraud the moment she walked in, afraid they would drive her out with jeers and curses and cold mocking laughter. But now that she was within, she felt fine—calm, confident, ready for the time of her life.

There were more women than men in the club, something like a seven-to-three ratio. Hardly anyone seemed to be talking to anyone else: most stood alone in the middle of the floor, staring into the mirrors as though in trance. Their eyes were slits, their jaws were slack, their shoulders slumped forward, their arms dangled. Now and then as some combination of reflections sluiced across their consciousnesses with particular impact they would go taut and jerk and wince as if they had been struck. Their faces would flush, their lips would pull back, their eyes would roll, they would mutter and whisper to themselves; and then after a moment they would slip back into stillness.

Cleo knew what they were doing. They were switching and doubling. Maybe some of the adepts were tripling. Her heart rate picked up. Her throat was very dry. What was the routine here, she wondered? Did you just walk right out on to the floor and plug into the light-patterns, or were you supposed to go to the bar first for a shot or a snort?

She looked towards the bar. A dozen or so customers sitting there, mostly men, a couple of them openly studying her, giving her that new-girl-in-town stare. Cleo returned their gaze evenly, coolly, blankly. Standard-looking men, reasonably attractive, thirtyish or early fortyish, business suits, conventional hairstyles: young lawyers, executives, maybe stockbrokers, successful sorts out for a night’s fun, the kind you might run into anywhere. Look at that one, tall, athletic, curly hair, glasses. Faint ironic smile, easy inquiring eyes. Almost professorial. And yet, and yet—behind that smooth intelligent forehead, what strangenesses must teem and boil! How many hidden souls must lurk and jostle! Scary. Tempting.

Irresistible.

Cleo resisted. Take it slow, take it slow. Instead of going to the bar she moved out serenely among the switchers on the floor, found an open space, centered herself, looked towards the mirrors on the far side of the room. Legs apart, feet planted flat, shoulders forward. A turning globe splashed waves of red and violet light, splintered a thousand times over, into her face. Go. Go. Go. Go. You are Cleo. You are Judy. You are Vixen. You are Lisa. Go. Go. Go. Go. Cascades of iridescence sweeping over the rim of her soul, battering at the walls of her identity. Come, enter, drown me, split me, switch me. You are Cleo and Judy. You are Vixen and Lisa. You are Cleo and Judy and Vixen and Lisa. Go. Go. Go.

Her head was spinning. Her eyes were blurring. The room gyrated around her.

Was this it? Was she splitting? Was she switching? Maybe so. Maybe the capacity was there in everyone, even her, and all it took was the lights, the mirror, the ambience, the will. I am many. I am multiple. I am Cleo switching to Vixen. I am Judy and Lisa. I am—

No.

I am Cleo.

I am Cleo.

I am very dizzy and I am getting sick, and I am Cleo and only Cleo, as I have always been.

I am Cleo and only Cleo and I am going to fall down.

“Easy,” he said. “You OK?”

“Steadying up, I think. Whew!”

“Out-of-towner, eh?”

“Sacramento. How’d you know?”

“Too quick on the floor. Locals all know better. This place has the fastest mirrors in the west. They’ll blow you away if you’re not careful. You can’t just go out there and grab for the big one—you’ve got to phase yourself in slowly. You sure you’re going to be OK?”

“I think so.”

He was the tall man from the bar, the athletic professorial one. She supposed he had caught her before she had actually fallen, since she felt no bruises. His hand rested now against her elbow as he lightly steered her towards a table along the wall.

“What’s your now-name?” he asked.

“Judy.”

“I’m Van.”

“Hello, Van.”

“What about a brandy? Steady you up a little more.”

“I don’t drink.”

“Never?”

“Vixen does the drinking,” she said. “Not me.”

“Ah. The old story. She gets the bubbles, you get her hangovers. I have one like that too, only with him it’s Hunan food. He absolutely doesn’t give a damn what lobster in hot and sour sauce does to my digestive system. I hope you pay her back the way she deserves.”

Cleo smiled and said nothing.

He was watching her closely. Was he interested, or just being polite to someone who was obviously out of her depth in a strange milieu? Interested, she decided. He seemed to have accepted that Vixen stuff at face value.

Be careful now, Cleo warned herself. Trying to pile on convincing-sounding details when you don’t really know what you’re talking about is a sure way to give yourself away, sooner or later. The thing to do, she knew, was to establish her credentials without working too hard at it, sit back, listen, learn how things really operate among these people.

“What do you do, up there in Sacramento?”

“Nothing fascinating.”

“Poor Judy. Real-estate broker?”

“How’d you guess?”

“Every other woman I meet is a real-estate broker these days. What’s Vixen?”

“A lush.”

“Not much of a livelihood in that.”

Cleo shrugged. “She doesn’t need one. The rest of us support her.”

“Real estate and what else?”

She hadn’t been sure that multiples etiquette included talking about one’s alternate selves. But she had come prepared. “Lisa’s a landscape architect. Cleo’s into software. We all keep busy.”

“Lisa ought to meet Chuck. He’s a demon horticulturalist. Partner in a plant-rental outfit—you know, huge dracaenas and philodendrons for offices, so much per month, take them away when they start looking sickly. Lisa and Chuck could talk palms and bromeliads and cacti all night.”

“We should introduce them, then.”

“We should, yes.”

“But first we have to introduce Van and Judy.”

“And then maybe Van and Cleo,” he said.

She felt a tremor of fear. Had he found her out so soon? “Why Van and Cleo? Cleo’s not here right now. This is Judy you’re talking to.”

“Easy. Easy!”

But she was unable to halt. “I can’t deliver Cleo to you just like that, you know. She does as she pleases.”

“Easy,” he said. “All I meant was, Van and Cleo have something in common. Van’s into software too.”

Cleo relaxed. With a little laugh she said, “Oh, not you too! Isn’t everybody, nowadays? But I thought you were something in the academic world. A professor, perhaps.”

“I am. At Cal.”

“Software?”

“In a manner of speaking. Linguistics. Metalinguistics, actually. My field’s the language of language—the basic subsets, the neural co-ordinates of communication, the underlying programs our brains use, the operating systems. Mind as computer, computer as mind. I can get very boring about it.”

“I don’t find the mind a boring subject.”

“I don’t find real estate a boring subject. Talk to me about second mortgages and triple-net leases.”

“Talk to me about Chomsky and Benjamin Whorf,” she said.

His eyes widened. “You’ve heard of Whorf?”

“I majored in comparative linguistics. That was before real estate.”

“Just my lousy luck,” he said. “I get a chance to find out what’s hot in the shopping-center market and she wants to talk about Whorf and Chomsky.”

“I thought every other woman you met these days was a real-estate broker. Talk to them about shopping centers.”

“They all want to talk about Whorf and Chomsky.”

“Poor Van.”

“Yes. Poor Van.” Then he leaned forward and said, his tone softening, “You know, I shouldn’t have made that crack about Van meeting Cleo. That was very tacky of me.”

“It’s OK, Van. I didn’t take it seriously.”

“You seemed to. You were very upset.”

“Well, maybe at first. But then I saw you were just horsing around.”

“I still shouldn’t have said it. You were absolutely right: this is Judy’s time now. Cleo’s not here, and that’s just fine. It’s Judy I want to get to know.”

“You will,” she said. “But you can meet Cleo too, and Lisa, and Vixen. I’ll introduce you to the whole crew. I don’t mind.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Sure.”

“Some of us are very secretive about our alters.”

“Are you?” Cleo asked.

“Sometimes. Sometimes not.”

“I don’t mind. Maybe you’ll meet some of mine tonight.” She glanced towards the center of the floor. “I think I’ve steadied up, now. I’d like to try the mirrors again.”

“Switching?”

“Doubling,” she said. “I’d like to bring Vixen up. She can do the drinking, and I can do the talking. Will it bother you if she’s
here too?”

“Not unless she’s a sloppy drunk. Or a mean one.”

“I can keep control of her, when we’re doubling. Come on: take me through the mirrors.”

“You be careful, now. San Francisco mirrors aren’t like Sacramento ones. You’ve already discovered that.”

“I’ll watch my step this time. Shall we go out there?”

“Sure,” he said.

As they began to move out on to the floor a slender T-shirted man of about thirty came towards them. Shaven scalp, bushy moustache, medallions, boots. Very San Francisco, very gay. He frowned at Cleo and stared straightforwardly at Van.

“Ned?” he said.

Van scowled and shook his head. “No. Not now.”

“Sorry. Very sorry. I should have realized.” The shaven-headed man flushed and hurried away.

“Let’s go,” Van said to Cleo.

This time she found it easier to keep her balance. Knowing that he was nearby helped. But still the waves of refracted light came pounding in, pounding in, pounding in. The assault was total: remorseless, implacable, overwhelming. She had to struggle against the throbbing in her chest, the hammering in her temples, the wobbliness of her knees. And this was pleasure, for them? This was a supreme delight?

But they were multiples and she was only Cleo, and that, she knew, made all the difference. She seemed to be able to fake it well enough. She could make up a Judy, a Lisa, a Vixen, assign little corners of her personality to each, give them voices of their own, facial expressions, individual identities. Standing before her mirror at home, she had managed to convince herself. She might even be able to convince him. But as the swirling lights careened off the infinities of interlocking mirrors and came slaloming into the gateways of her reeling soul, the dismal fear began to rise in her that she could never truly be one of these people after all, however skillfully she imitated them in their intricacies.

Was it so? Was she doomed always to stand outside their irresistible world, hopelessly peering in? Too soon to tell—much too soon, she thought, to admit defeat—

At least she didn’t fall down. She took the punishment of the mirrors as long as she could stand it, and then, not waiting for him to leave the floor, she made her way—carefully, carefully, walking a tightrope over an abyss—to the bar. When her head had begun to stop spinning she ordered a drink, and she sipped it cautiously. She could feel the alcohol extending itself inch by inch into her bloodstream. It calmed her. On the floor, Van stood in a trance, occasionally quivering in a sudden convulsive way for a fraction of a second. He was doubling, she knew: bringing up one of his other identities. That was the main thing that multiples came to these clubs to do. No longer were all their various identities forced to dwell in rigorously separated compartments of their minds. With the aid of the mirrors, of the lights, the skilled ones were able briefly to fuse two or even three of their selves into something even more complex. When he comes back here, she thought, he will be Van plus X. And I must pretend to be Judy plus Vixen.

She readied herself for that. Judy was easy: Judy was mostly the real Cleo, the real-estate woman from Sacramento, with Cleo’s notion of what it was like to be a multiple added in. And Vixen? Cleo imagined her to be about twenty-three, a Los Angeles girl, a one-time child tennis star who had broken her ankle in a dumb prank and had never recovered her game afterwards, and who had taken up drinking to ease the pain and loss. Uninhibited, unpredictable, untidy, fiery, fierce: all the things that Cleo was not. Could she be Vixen? She took a deep gulp of her drink and put on the Vixen-face: eyes hard and glittering,
cheek-muscles clenched.

Van was leaving the floor now. His way of moving seemed to have changed: he was stiff, almost awkward, his shoulders held high, his elbows jutting oddly. He looked so different that she wondered whether he was still Van at all.

“You didn’t switch, did you?”

“Doubled. Paul’s with me now.”

“Paul?”

“Paul’s from Texas. Geologist, terrific poker game, plays the guitar.” Van smiled and it was like a shifting of gears. In a deeper, broader voice he said, “And I sing real good too, ma’am. Van’s jealous of that, because he can’t sing worth beans. Are you ready for a refill?”

“You bet,” Cleo said, sounding sloppy, sounding Vixenish.

His apartment was nearby, a cheerful airy sprawling place in the Marina district. The segmented nature of his life was immediately obvious: the prints and paintings on the walls looked as though they had been chosen by four or five different people, one of whom ran heavily towards vivid scenes of sunrise over the Grand Canyon, another to Picasso and Miró, someone else to delicate impressionist views of Parisian flower-markets. A sunroom contained the biggest and healthiest houseplants Cleo had ever seen. Another room was stacked high with technical books and scholarly journals, a third was set up as a home gymnasium equipped with three or four gleaming exercise machines. Some of the rooms were fastidiously tidy, some impossibly chaotic. Some of the furniture was stark and austere, and some was floppy and overstuffed. She kept expecting to find roommates wandering around. But there was no one here but Van. And Paul.

Paul fixed the drinks. Paul played soft guitar music and told her gaudy tales of prospecting for rare earths on the West Texas mesas. Paul sang something bawdy-sounding in Spanish, and Cleo, putting on her Vixen-voice, chimed in on the choruses, deliberately off key. But then Paul went away and it was Van who sat close beside her on the couch, talking quietly. He wanted to know things about Judy, and he told her a little about Van, and no other selves came into the conversation. She was sure that that was intentional. They stayed up very late. Paul came back, towards the end of the evening, to tell a few jokes and sing a soft late-night song, but when they went into the bedroom she was with Van. Of that she was completely certain.

And when she woke in the morning she was alone.

She felt a surge of confusion and dislocation, remembered after a moment where she was and how she had happened to be here, sat up, blinked. Went into the bathroom and scooped a handful of water over her face. Without bothering to dress, went padding around the apartment looking for Van.

She found him in the exercise room, using the rowing machine, but he wasn’t Van. He was dressed in tight jeans and a white T-shirt, and somehow he looked younger, leaner, jauntier. There were fine beads of sweat along his forehead, but he did not seem to be breathing hard. He gave her a cool, distantly appraising, wholly asexual look, as though she were a total stranger but that it was not in the least unusual for an unknown naked woman to materialize in the house and he was altogether undisturbed by it, and said, “Good morning. I’m Ned. Pleased to know you.” His voice was higher than Van’s, much higher than Paul’s, and he had an odd over-precise way of shaping each syllable.

Flustered, suddenly self-conscious and wishing she had put her clothes on before leaving the bedroom, she folded one arm over her breasts, though her nakedness did not seem to matter to him at all. “I’m—Judy. I came with Van.”

“Yes, I know. I saw the entry in our book.” Smoothly, effortlessly, he pulled on the oars of the rowing machine, leaned back, pushed forward. “Help yourself to anything in the fridge,” he said. “Make yourself entirely at home. Van left a note for you in the kitchen.”

She stared at him: his hands, his mouth, his long muscular arms. She remembered his touch, his kisses, the feel of his skin against hers. And now this complete indifference. No. Not his kisses, not his touch. Van’s. And Van was not here now. There was a different tenant in Van’s body, someone she did not know in any way and who had no memories of last night’s embraces. I saw the entry in our book. They left memos for each other. Cleo shivered. She had known what to expect, more or less, but experiencing it was very different from reading about it. She felt almost as though she had fallen in among beings from another planet.

But this is what you wanted, she thought. Isn’t it? The intricacy, the mystery, the unpredictability, the sheer weirdness? A little cruise through an alien world, because her own had become so stale, so narrow, so cramped. And here she was. Good morning, I’m Ned. Pleased to know you.

Van’s note was clipped to the refrigerator by a little yellow magnet shaped like a ladybug. Dinner tonight at Chez Michel? You and me and who knows who else. Call me.

That was the beginning. She saw him every night for the next ten days. Generally they met at some three-star restaurant, had a lingering intimate dinner, went back to his apartment. One mild clear evening they drove out to the beach and watched the waves breaking on Seal Rock until well past midnight. Another time they wandered through Fisherman’s Wharf and somehow acquired three bags of tacky souvenirs.

Van was his primary name—she saw it on his credit card at dinner one night—and that seemed to be his main identity, too, though she knew there were plenty of others. At first he was reticent about that, but on the fourth or fifth night he told her that he had nine major selves and sixteen minor ones, some of which remained submerged years at a stretch. Besides Paul, the geologist, and Chuck, who was into horticulture, and Ned, the gay one, Cleo heard about Nat the stock-market plunger—he was fifty and fat, and made a fortune every week, and liked to divide his time between Las Vegas and Miami Beach—and Henry, the poet, who was very shy and never liked anyone to read his work, and Dick, who was studying to be an actor, and Hal, who once taught law at Harvard, and Dave, the yachtsman, and Nicholas, the card-sharp—and then there were all the fragmentary ones, some of whom didn’t have names, only a funny way of speaking or a little routine they liked to act out—

She got to see very little of his other selves, though. Like all multiples, he was troubled occasionally by involuntary switching, and one night he became Hal while they were making love, and another time he turned into Dave for an hour, and there were momentary flashes of Henry and Nicholas. Cleo perceived it right away whenever one of those switches came: his voice, his movements, his entire manner and personality changed immediately. Those were startling, exciting moments for her, offering a strange exhilaration. But generally his control was very good, and he stayed Van, as if he felt some strong need to experience her as Van and Van alone. Once in a while he doubled, bringing up Paul to play the guitar for him and sing, or Dick to recite sonnets, but when he did that the Van identity always remained present and dominant. It appeared that he was able to double at will, without the aid of mirrors and lights, at least some of the time. He had been an active and functioning multiple as long as he could remember—since childhood, perhaps even since birth—and he had devoted himself through the years to the task of gaining mastery over his divided mind.

All the aspects of him that she came to meet had basically attractive personalities: they were energetic, stable, purposeful men, who enjoyed life and seemed to know how to go about getting what they wanted. Though they were very different people, she could trace them all back readily enough to the underlying Van from whom, so she thought, they had all split off. The one puzzle was Nat, the market operator. It was hard for Cleo to imagine what he was like when he was Nat—sleazy and coarse, yes, but how did he manage to make himself look fifteen years older and forty pounds heavier? Maybe it was all done with facial expressions and posture. But she never got to see Nat. And gradually she realized it was an oversimplification to think of Paul and Dick and Ned and the others as mere extensions of Van into different modes. Van by himself was just as incomplete as the others. He was just one of many that had evolved in parallel, each one autonomous, each one only a fragment of the whole. Though Van might have control of the shared body a greater portion of the time, he still had no idea what any of his alternate selves were up to while they were in command, and like them he had to depend on guesses and fancy footwork and such notes and messages as they bothered to leave behind in order to keep track of events that occurred outside his conscious awareness. “The only one who knows everything is Michael. He’s seven years old, smart as a whip, keeps in touch with all of us all the time.”

“Your memory trace,” Cleo said.

Van nodded. All multiples, she knew, had one alter with full awareness of the doings of all the other personalities—usually a child, an observer who sat back deep in the mind and played its own games and emerged only when necessary to fend off some crisis that threatened the stability of the entire group. “He’s just informed us that he’s Ethiopian,” Van said. “So every two or three weeks we go across to Oakland to an Ethiopian restaurant that he likes, and he flirts with the waitresses in Amharic.”

“That can’t be too terrible a chore. I’m told Ethiopians are very beautiful people.”

“Absolutely. But they think it’s all a big joke, and Michael doesn’t know how to pick up women, anyway. He’s only seven, you know. So Van doesn’t get anything out of it except some exercise in comparative linguistics and a case of indigestion the next day. Ethiopian food is the spiciest in the world. I can’t stand spicy food.”

“Neither can I,” she said. “But Lisa loves it. Especially hot Mexican things. But nobody ever said sharing a body is easy, did they?”

She knew she had to be careful in questioning Van about the way his life as a multiple worked. She was supposed to be a multiple herself, after all. But she made use of her Sacramento background as justification for her areas of apparent ignorance of multiple customs and the everyday mechanics of multiple life. Though she too had known she was a multiple since childhood, she said, she had grown up outside the climate of acceptance of the divided personality that prevailed in San Francisco, where an active subculture of multiples had existed openly for years. In her isolated existence, unaware that there were a great many others of her kind, she had at first regarded herself as the victim of a serious mental disorder. It was only recently, she told him, that she had come to understand the overwhelming advantages of life as a multiple: the richness, the complexity, the fullness of talents and experiences that a divided mind was free to enjoy. That was why she had come to San Francisco. That was why she listened so eagerly to all that he was telling her about himself.

She was cautious, too, in manifesting her own multiple identities. She wished she did not have to be pretending to have other selves. But they had to be brought forth now and again, Cleo felt, if only by way of maintaining his interest in her. Multiples were notoriously indifferent to singletons, she knew. They found them bland, overly simple, two-dimensional. They wanted the excitement that came with embracing one person and discovering another, or two or three. So she gave him Lisa, she gave him Vixen, she gave him the Judy-who-was-Cleo and the Cleo-who-was-someone-else, and she slipped from one to another in a seemingly involuntary and unexpected way, often when they were in bed.

Lisa was calm, controlled, strait-laced. She was totally shocked when she found herself, between one eye-blink and the next, in the arms of a strange man. “Who are you?—where am I?—” she blurted, rolling away, pulling herself into a foetal ball.

“I’m Judy’s friend,” Van said.

She stared bleakly at him. “So she’s up to her tricks again. I should have figured it out faster.”

He looked pained, embarrassed, terribly solicitous. She let him wonder for a moment or two whether he would have to take her back to her hotel right here in the middle of the night. And then she allowed a mischievous smile to cross Lisa’s face, allowed Lisa’s outraged modesty to subside, allowed Lisa to relent and relax, allowed Lisa to purr—

“Well, as long as we’re here already—what did you say your name was?”

He liked that. He liked Vixen, too—wild, sweaty, noisy, a moaner, a gasper, a kicker and thrasher who dragged him down on to the floor and went rolling over and over with him. She thought he liked Cleo, too, though that was harder to tell, because Cleo’s style was aloof, serious, baroque, inscrutable. She would switch quickly from one to another, sometimes running through all four in the course of an hour. Wine, she said, induced quick switching in her. She let him know that she had a few other identities, too, fragmentary and submerged, and hinted that they were troubled, deeply neurotic, almost self-destructive: they were under control, she said, and would not erupt to cause woe for him, but she left the possibility hovering over them, to add spice to the relationship and plausibility to her role.

It seemed to be working. His pleasure in her company was evident, and the more they were together the stronger the bond between them became. She was beginning to indulge in pleasant little fantasies of moving down here permanently from Sacramento, renting an apartment somewhere near his, perhaps even moving in with him—though that would surely be a strange and challenging life, for she would be living with Paul and Ned and Chuck and all the rest of the crew too, but how wondrous, how electrifying—

Then on the tenth day he seemed uncharacteristically tense and somber, and she asked him what was bothering him, and he evaded her, and she pressed, and finally he said, “Do you really want to know?”

“Of course.”

“It bothers me that you aren’t real, Judy.”

She caught her breath. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

“You know what I mean,” he said, quietly, sadly. “Don’t try to pretend any longer. There’s no point in it.”

It was like a jolt in the ribs. She turned away and stared at the wall and was silent a long while, wondering what to say. Just when everything was going so well, just when she was beginning to believe she had carried off the masquerade successfully—

“So you know?” she asked in a small voice.

“Of course I know. I knew right away.”

She was trembling. “How could you tell?”

“A thousand ways. When we switch, we change. The voice. The eyes. The muscular tensions. The grammatical habits. The brain waves, even. An evoked-potential test shows it. Flash a light in my eyes and I’ll give off a certain brain-wave pattern, and Ned will give off another, and Chuck still another. You and Lisa and Cleo and Vixen would all be the same. Multiples aren’t actors, Judy. Multiples are separate minds within the same brain. That’s a matter of scientific fact. You were just acting. You were doing it very well, but you couldn’t possibly have fooled me.”

“You let me make an idiot of myself, then.”

“No.”

“Why did you—how could you—”

“I saw you walk in, that first night at the club, and you caught me right away. And then I watched you go out on the floor and fall apart, and I knew you couldn’t be multiple, and I wondered, what the hell’s she doing here, and then I went over to you, and I was hooked. I felt something I haven’t ever felt before. Does that sound like the standard old malarkey? But it’s true, Judy. You’re the first singleton woman that’s ever interested me.”

“Why?”

He shook his head. “Something about you—your intensity, your alertness, maybe even your eagerness to pretend you were a multiple—I don’t know. I was caught. I was caught hard. And it’s been a wonderful week and a half. I mean that. Wonderful.”

“Until you got bored.”

“I’m not bored with you, Judy.”

“Cleo. That’s my real name, my singleton name. There is no Judy.”

“Cleo,” he said, as if measuring the word with his lips.

“So you aren’t bored with me even though there’s only one of me. That’s marvelous. That’s tremendously flattering. That’s the best thing I’ve heard all day. I guess I should go now, Van. It is Van, isn’t it?”

“Don’t talk that way.”

“How do you want me to talk? I fascinated you, you fascinated me, we played our little games with each other, and now it’s over. I wasn’t real, but you did your best. We both did our bests. But I’m only a singleton woman, and you can’t be satisfied with that. Not for long. For a night, a week, two weeks, maybe. Sooner or later you’ll want the real thing, and I can’t be the real thing for you. So long, Van.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Don’t go.”

“What’s the sense of staying?”

“I want you to stay.”

“I’m a singleton, Van.”

“You don’t have to be,” he said.

The therapist’s name was Burkhalter and his office was in one of the Embarcadero towers, and to the San Francisco multiples community he was very close to being a deity. His specialty was electrophysiological integration, with specific application to multiple-personality disorders. Those who carried within themselves dark and diabolical selves that threatened the stability of the group went to him to have those selves purged, or at least contained. Those who sought to have latent selves that were submerged beneath more outgoing personalities brought forward into healthy functional state went to him also. Those whose life as a multiple was a torment of schizoid confusions instead of a richly rewarding contrapuntal symphony gave themselves to Dr. Burkhalter to be healed, and in time they were. And in recent years he had begun to develop techniques for what he called personality augmentation. Van called it “driving the wedge.”

“He can turn a singleton into a multiple?” Cleo asked in amazement.

“If the potential is there. You know that it’s partly genetic: the structure of a multiple’s brain is fundamentally different from a singleton’s. The hardware just isn’t the same, the cerebral wiring. And then, if the right stimulus comes along, usually in childhood, usually but not necessarily traumatic, the splitting takes place, the separate identities begin to establish their territories. But much of the time multiplicity is never generated, and you walk around with the capacity to be a whole horde of selves and never know it.”

“Is there reason to think I’m like that?”

He shrugged. “It’s worth finding out. If he detects the predisposition, he has effective ways of inducing separation. Driving the wedge, you see? You do want to be a multiple, don’t you, Cleo?”

“Oh, yes, Van. Yes!”

Burkhalter wasn’t sure about her. He taped electrodes to her head, flashed bright lights in her eyes, gave her verbal association tests, ran four or five different kinds of electroencephalograph studies, and still he was uncertain. “It is not a black-and-white matter,” he said several times, frowning, scowling. He was a multiple himself, but three of his selves were psychiatrists, so there was never any real problem about his office hours. Cleo wondered if he ever went to himself for a second opinion. After a week of testing she was sure that she must he a hopeless case, an intractable singleton, but Burkhalter surprised her by concluding that it was worth the attempt. “At the very worst,” he said, “we will experience spontaneous fusing within a few days, and you will be no worse off than you are now. But if we succeed—ah, if we succeed—!”

His clinic was across the bay in a town called Moraga. She checked in on a Friday afternoon, spent two days undergoing further neurological and psychological tests, then three days taking medication, “Simply an anti-convulsant,” the nurse explained cheerily. “To build up your tolerance.”

“Tolerance for what?” Cleo asked.

“The birth trauma,” she said, “New selves will be coming forth, and it can be uncomfortable for a little while.”

The treatment began on Thursday. Electroshock drugs, electroshock again. She was heavily sedated. It felt like a long dream, but there was no pain. Van visited her every day. Chuck came too, bringing her two potted orchids in bloom, and Paul sang to her, and even Ned paid her a call. But it was hard for her to maintain a conversation with any of them. She heard voices much of the time. She felt feverish and dislocated, and at times she was sure she was floating eight or ten inches above the bed. Gradually that sensation subsided, but there were others nearly as odd. The voices remained. She learned how to hold conversations with them.

In the second week she was not allowed to have visitors. That didn’t matter. She had plenty of company even when she was alone.

Then Van came for her. “They’re going to let you go home today,” he said. “How are you doing, Cleo?”

“I’m Noreen,” she said.

There were five of her, apparently. That was what Van said. She had no way of knowing, because when they were dominant she was gone—not merely asleep, but gone, perceiving nothing. But he showed her notes that they wrote, in handwritings that she did not recognize and indeed could barely read, and he played tapes of her other voices, Noreen a deep contralto, Nanette high and breathy, Katya hard and rough New York, and the last one, who had not yet announced her name, a stagy voluptuous campy siren-voice.

She did not leave his apartment the first few days, and then began going out for short trips, always with Van or one of his alters close beside. She felt convalescent. A kind of hangover from the various drugs had dulled her reflexes and made it difficult for her to cope with the traffic, and also there was the fear that she would undergo a switching while she was out. Whenever that happened it came without warning, and when she returned to awareness afterwards she felt a sharp bewildering discontinuity of memory, not knowing how it was that she suddenly found herself in Ghiradelli Square or Golden Gate Park or wherever it was that the other self had taken their body.

But she was happy. And Van was happy with her. As they strolled hand in hand through the cool evenings she turned to him now and again and saw the warmth of his smile, the glow of his eyes. One night in the second week when they were out together he switched to Chuck—Cleo saw him change, and knew it was Chuck coming on, for now she always knew right away which identity had taken over—and he said, “You’ve had a marvelous effect on him, Cleo. None of us has ever seen him like this before—so contented, so fulfilled—”

“I hope it lasts, Chuck.”

“Of course it’ll last! Why on earth shouldn’t it last?”

It didn’t. Towards the end of the third week Cleo noticed that there hadn’t been any entries in her memo book from Noreen for several days. That in itself was nothing alarming: an alter might choose to submerge for days, weeks, even months at a time. But was it likely that Noreen, so new to the world, would remain out of sight so long? Lin-lin, the little Chinese girl who had evolved in the second week and was Cleo’s memory trace, reported that Noreen had gone away. A few days later an identity named Mattie came and went within three hours, like something bubbling up out of a troubled sea. Then Nanette disappeared, leaving Cleo with no one but her nameless breathy-voiced alter and Lin-lin. She knew she was fusing again. The wedges that Dr. Burkhalter had driven into her soul were not holding; her mind insisted on oneness, and was integrating itself; she was reverting to the singleton state.

“They’re all gone,” she told Van disconsolately.

“I know. I’ve been watching it happen.”

“Is there anything we can do? Should I go back to Burkhalter?”

She saw the pain in his eyes. “It won’t do any good,” he said. “He told me the chances were about three to one this would happen. A month, he figured—that was about the best we could hope for. And we’ve had our month.”

“I’d better go, Van.”

“Don’t say that.”

“No?”

“I love you, Cleo.”

“You won’t,” she said. “Not for much longer.”

He tried to argue with her, to tell her that it didn’t matter to him that she was a singleton, that one Cleo was worth a whole raft of alters, that he would learn to adapt to life with a singleton woman. He could not bear the thought of her leaving now. So she stayed: a week, two weeks, three. They ate at their favorite restaurants. They strolled hand in hand through the cool evenings. They talked of Chomsky and Whorf and even of shopping centers. When he was gone and Paul or Chuck or Hal or Dave was there she went places with them, if they wanted her to. Once she went to a movie with Ned, and when towards the end he felt himself starting to switch she put her arm around him and held him until he regained control, so that he could see how the movie finished.

But it was no good, really. She sensed the strain in him. He wanted something richer than she could offer him: the switching, the doubling, the complex undertones and overtones of other personalities resonating beyond the shores of consciousness. She could not give him that. And though he insisted he didn’t miss it, he was like one who has voluntarily blindfolded himself in order to keep a blind woman company. She knew she could not ask him to live like that for ever.

And so one afternoon when Van was somewhere else she packed her things and said goodbye to Paul, who gave her a hug and wept a little with her, and she went back to Sacramento. “Tell him not to call,” she said. “A clean break’s the best.” She had been in San Francisco two months, and it was as though those two months were the only months of her life that had had any color in them, and all the rest had been lived in tones of grey.

There had been a man in the real-estate office who had been telling her for a couple of years that they were meant for each other. Cleo had always been friendly enough to him—they had done a few skiing weekends in Tahoe the winter before, they had gone to Hawaii once, they had driven down to San Diego—but she had never felt anything particular when she was with him. A week after her return, she phoned him and suggested that they drive out up north to the redwood country for a few days together. When they came back, she moved into the handsome condominium he had just outside town.

It was hard to find anything wrong with him. He was good-natured and attractive, he was successful, he read books and liked good movies, he enjoyed hiking and rafting and backpacking, he even talked of driving down into the city during the opera season to take in a performance or two. He was getting towards the age where he was thinking about marriage and a family. He seemed very fond of her.

But he was flat, she thought. Flat as a cardboard cut-out: a singleton, a one-brain, a no-switch. There was only one of him, and there always would be. It was hardly his fault, she knew. But she couldn’t settle for someone who had only two dimensions. A terrible restlessness went roaring through her every evening, and she could not possibly tell him what was troubling her.

On a drizzly afternoon in early November she packed a suitcase and drove down to San Francisco. She arrived about six-thirty, and checked into one of the Lombard Street motels, and showered and changed and walked over to Fillmore Street. Cautiously she explored the strip from Chestnut down to Union, from Union back to Chestnut. The thought of running into Van terrified her. Probably she would, sooner or later, she knew: but not tonight, she prayed. Not tonight. She went past Skits, did not go in, stopped outside a club called Big Mama, shook her head, finally entered one called the Side Effect. Mostly women inside, as usual, but a few men at the bar, not too bad-looking. No sign of Van. She bought herself a drink and casually struck up a conversation with the man to her left, a short curly-haired artistic-looking type, about forty.

“You come here often?” he asked.

“First time. I’ve usually gone to Skits.”

“I think I remember seeing you there. Or maybe not.”

She smiled. “What’s your now-name?”

“Sandy. Yours?”

Cleo drew her breath down deep into her lungs. She felt a kind of lightheadedness beginning to swirl behind her eyes. Is this what you want? she asked herself. Yes. Yes. This is what you want.

“Melinda,” she said.

Many Mansions

Here’s an example of mainstream contemporary literature modes carried over into science fiction, something I’ve done now and again throughout my entire career. (A very early story called “The Songs of Summer” owed a great deal to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. I’ve channeled Joseph Conrad on a number of occasions. One passage in my novel Son of Man employs William Burroughs’s cut-up technique. And so forth.) This is another, and I think it was a successful transplantation.

Somewhere in the mid-1960s Robert Coover wrote a funny, frantic story called “The Babysitter,” in which a narrative situation is dissected and refracted in an almost Cubist fashion into dozens of short scenes, some of which are deliberately contradictory of others. I read it and admired it and saw what Coover had done as a perfect way to approach the paradoxes of the time-travel story, in which a single act of transit through time can generate a host of parallel time-tracks. I had written plenty of time-travel stories before—the theme is a particular favorite of mine—but Coover had shown me a completely new way to do it.

So off I went, killing off grandfathers and having characters meeting themselves both coming and going, in what is probably the most complex short story of temporal confusion since Robert A. Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps.” (Or Heinlein’s much later “All You Zombies—”). I had a wonderful time doing it, which was important, because in that complicated segment of my life—this was February 1972, when I was midway through the chaotic transition from a lifetime in New York to a wholly new incarnation as a Californian—writing usually was neither easy nor particularly pleasant for me. Terry Carr published the story in the third of his Universe anthologies, and it has been reprinted several times since. I can’t read it even now without chuckling over its dizzy pace and lunatic inventiveness.

The debt to Coover’s original story, I thought, was obvious. But over the past thirty-plus years a grand total of one reader has asked me whether I had had “The Babysitter” in mind when I wrote “Many Mansions.” (I never do learn. Many years later, when I wrote a story called “The Secret Sharer” that translated the plot of Conrad’s classic novella into science-fictional terms, and hung Conrad’s original title on my story just so everyone would understand what I was doing, a reader wrote an angry letter to the editor of the magazine where my story appeared, complaining that I had stolen the title of a famous story by Joseph Conrad. Maybe I should attach explanatory footnotes to these things.)

It’s been a rough day. Everything gone wrong. A tremendous tie -up on the freeway going to work, two accounts cancelled before lunch, now some inconceivable botch by the weather programmers. It’s snowing outside. Actually snowing. He’ll have to go out and clear the driveway in the morning. He can’t remember when it last snowed. And of course a fight with Alice again. She never lets him alone. She’s at her most deadly when she sees him come home exhausted from the office. Ted why don’t you this, Ted get me that. Now, waiting for0 dinner, working on his third drink in forty minutes, he feels one of his headaches coming on. Those miserable killer headaches that can destroy a whole evening. What a life! He toys with murderous fantasies. Take her out by the reservoir for a friendly little stroll, give her a quick hard shove with his shoulder. She can’t swim. Down, down, down. Glub. Goodbye, Alice. Free at last.

In the kitchen she furiously taps the keys of the console, programming dinner just the way he likes it. Cold vichyssoise, baked potato with sour cream and chives, sirloin steak blood-rare inside and charcoal-charred outside. Don’t think it isn’t work to get the meal just right, even with the autochef. All for him. The bastard. Tell me, why do I sweat so hard to please him? Has he made me happy? What’s he ever done for me except waste the best years of my life? And he thinks I don’t know about his other women. Those lunchtime quickies. Oh, I wouldn’t mind at all if he dropped dead tomorrow. I’d be a great widow—so dignified at the funeral, so strong, hardly crying at all. And everybody thinks we’re such a close couple. Married eleven years and they’re still in love. I heard someone say that only last week. If they only knew the truth about us. If they only knew.

Martin peers out the window of his third-floor apartment in Sunset Village. Snow. I’ll be damned. He can’t remember the last time he saw snow. Thirty, forty years back, maybe, when Ted was a baby. He absolutely can’t remember. White stuff on the ground when? The mind gets wobbly when you’re past eighty. He still can’t believe he’s an old man. It rocks him to realize that his grandson Ted, Martha’s boy, is almost forty. I bounced that kid on my knee and he threw up all over my suit. Four years old then. Nixon was President. Nobody talks much about Tricky Dick these days. Ancient history. McKinley, Coolidge, Nixon. Time flies. Martin thinks of Ted’s wife, Alice. What a nice tight little ass she has. What a cute pair of jugs. I’d like to get my hands on them. I really would. You know something, Martin? You’re not such an old ruin yet. Not if you can get it up for your grandson’s wife.

His dreams of drowning her fade as quickly as they came. He is not a violent man by nature. He knows he could never do it. He can’t even bring himself to step on a spider; how then could he kill his wife? If she’d die some other way, of course, without the need of his taking direct action, that would solve everything. She’s driving to the hairdresser on one of those manual-access roads she likes to use, and her car swerves on an icy spot, and she goes into a tree at eighty kilometers an hour. Good. She’s shopping on Union Boulevard, and the bank is blown up by an activist; she’s nailed by flying debris. Good. The dentist gives her a new anaesthetic and it turns out she’s fatally allergic to it. Puffs up like a blowfish and dies in five minutes. Good. The police come, long faces, snuffly noses. Terribly sorry, Mr. Porter. There’s been an awful accident. Don’t tell me it’s my wife, he cries. They nod lugubriously. He bears up bravely under the loss, though.

“You can come in for dinner now,” she says. He’s sitting slouched on the sofa with another drink in his hand. He drinks more than any man she knows, not that she knows all that many. Maybe he’ll get cirrhosis and die. Do people still die of cirrhosis, she wonders, or do they give them liver transplants now? The funny thing is that he still turns her on, after eleven years. His eyes, his face, his hands. She despises him but he still turns her on.

The snow reminds him of his young manhood, of his days long ago in the East. He was quite the ladies’ man then. And it wasn’t so easy to get some action back in those days, either. The girls were always worried about what people would say if anyone found out. What people would say! As if doing it with a boy you liked was something shameful. Or they’d worry about getting knocked up. They made you wear a rubber. How awful that was: like wearing a sock. The pill was just starting to come in, the original pill, the old one-a-day kind. Imagine a world without the pill! (“Did they have dinosaurs when you were a boy, grandpa?”) Still, Martin had made out all right. Big muscular frame, strong earnest features, warm inquisitive eyes. You’d never know it to look at me now. I wonder if Alice realizes what kind of stud I used to be. If I had the money I’d rent one of those time machines they’ve got now and send her back to visit myself around 1950 or so. A little gift to my younger self. He’d really rip into her. It gives Martin a quick riffle of excitement to think of his younger self ripping into Alice. But of course he can’t afford any such thing.

As he forks down his steak he imagines being single again. Would I get married again? Not on your life. Not until I’m good and ready, anyway, maybe when I’m fifty-five or sixty. Me for bachelorhood for the time being, just screwing around like a kid. To hell with responsibilities. I’ll wait two, three weeks after the funeral, a decent interval, and then I’ll go off for some fun. Hawaii, Tahiti, Fiji, someplace out there. With Nolie. Or Maria. Or Ellie. Yes, with Ellie. He thinks of Ellie’s pink thighs, her soft heavy breasts, her long radiant auburn hair. Two weeks in Fiji with Ellie. Two weeks in Ellie with Fiji. Yes. Yes. Yes. ‘Is the steak rare enough for you, Ted?’ Alice asks. ‘It’s fine,’ he says.

She goes upstairs to check the children’s bedroom. They’re both asleep, finally. Or else faking it so well that it makes no difference. She stands by their beds a moment, thinking, I love you, Bobby, I love you, Tink. Tink and Bobby, Bobby and Tink. I love you even though you drive me crazy sometimes. She tiptoes out. Now for a quiet evening of television. And then to bed. The same old routine. Christ. I don’t know why I go on like this. There are times when I’m ready to explode. I stay with him for the children’s sake, I guess. Is that enough of a reason?

He envisions himself running hand in hand along the beach with Ellie. Both of them naked, their skins bronzed and gleaming in the tropical sunlight. Palm trees everywhere. Grains of pink sand under foot. Soft transparent wavelets lapping the shore. A quiet cove. “No one can see us here,” Ellie murmurs. He sinks down on her firm sleek body and enters her.

A blazing band of pain tightens like a strip of hot metal across Martin’s chest. He staggers away from the window, dropping into a low crouch as he stumbles toward a chair. The heart. Oh, the heart! That’s what you get for drooling over Alice. Dirty old man. “Help,” he calls feebly. “Come on, you filthy machine, help me!” The medic, activated by the key phrase, rolls silently toward him. Its sensors are already at work scanning him, searching for the cause of the discomfort. A telescoping steel-jacketed arm slides out of the medic’s chest and, hovering above Martin, extrudes an ultrasonic injection snout. “Yes,” Martin murmurs, “that’s right, damn you, hurry up and give me the drug!” Calm. I must try to remain calm. The snout makes a gentle whirring noise as it forces the relaxant into Martin’s vein. He slumps in relief. The pain slowly ebbs. Oh, that’s much better. Saved again. Oh. Oh. Oh. Dirty old man. Ought to be ashamed of yourself.

Ted knows he won’t get to Fiji with Ellie or anybody else. Any realistic assessment of the situation brings him inevitably to the same conclusion. Alice isn’t going to die in an accident, any more than he’s likely to murder her. She’ll live forever. Unwanted wives always do. He could ask for a divorce, of course. He’d probably lose everything he owned, but he’d win his freedom. Or he could simply do away with himself. That was always a temptation for him. The easy way out, no lawyers, no hassles. So it’s that time of the evening again. It’s the same every night. Pretending to watch television, he secretly indulges in suicidal fantasies.

Bare-bodied dancers in gaudy luminous paint gyrate lasciviously on the screen, nearly large as life. Alice scowls. The things they show on TV nowadays! It used to be that you got this stuff only on the X-rated channels, but now it’s everywhere. And look at him, just lapping it up! Actually she knows she wouldn’t be so stuffy about the sex shows except that Ted’s fascination with them is a measure of his lack of interest in her. Let them show screwing and all the rest on TV, if that’s what people want. I just wish Ted had as much enthusiasm for me as he does for the television stuff. So far as sexual permissiveness in general goes, she’s no prude. She used to wear nothing but trunks at the beach, until Tink was born and she started to feel a little less proud of her figure. But she still dresses as revealingly as anyone in their crowd. And gets stared at by everyone but her own husband. He watches the TV cuties. His other women must use him up. Maybe I ought to step out a bit myself, Alice thinks. She’s had her little affairs along the way. Not many, nothing very serious, but she’s had some. Three lovers in eleven years, that’s not a great many, but it’s a sign that she’s no puritan. She wonders if she ought to get involved with somebody now. It might move her life off dead center while she still has the chance, before boredom destroys her entirely. “I’m going up to wash my hair,” she announces. “Will you be staying down here till bedtime?”

There are so many ways he could do it. Slit his wrists. Drive his car off the bridge. Swallow Alice’s whole box of sleeping tabs. Of course those are all old-fashioned ways of killing yourself. Something more modern would be appropriate. Go into one of the black taverns and start making loud racial insults? No, nothing modern about that. It’s very 1975. But something genuinely contemporary does occur to him. Those time machines they’ve got now: suppose he rented one and went back, say, sixty years, to a time when one of his parents hadn’t yet been born. And killed his grandfather. Find old Martin as a young man and slip a knife into him. If I do that, Ted figures, I should instantly and painlessly cease to exist. I would never have existed, because my mother wouldn’t ever have existed. Poof. Out like a light. Then he realizes he’s fantasizing a murder again. Stupid: if he could ever murder anyone, he’d murder Alice and be done with it. So the whole fantasy is foolish. Back to the starting point is where he is.

She is sitting under the hair-dryer when he comes upstairs. He has a peculiarly smug expression on his face, and as soon as she turns the dryer off she asks him what he’s thinking about. ‘I may have just invented a perfect murder method,’ he tells her. “Oh?” she says. He says, “You rent a time machine. Then you go back a couple of generations and murder one of the ancestors of your intended victim. That way you’re murdering the victim too, because he won’t ever have been born if you kill off one of his immediate progenitors. Then you return to your own time. Nobody can trace you because you don’t have any fingerprints on file in an era before your own birth. What do you think of it?” Alice shrugs. “It’s an old one,” she says. “It’s been done on television a dozen times. Anyway, I don’t like it. Why should an innocent person have to die just because he’s the grandparent of somebody you want to kill?”

They’re probably in bed together right now, Martin thinks gloomily. Stark naked side by side. The lights are out. The house is quiet. Maybe they’re smoking a little grass. Do they still call it grass, he wonders, or is there some new nickname now? Anyway the two of them turn on. Yes. And then he reaches for her. His hands slide over her cool, smooth skin. He cups her breasts. Plays with the hard little nipples. Sucks on them. The other hand wandering down to her parted thighs. And then she. And then he. And then they. And then they. Oh, Alice, he murmurs. Oh, Ted, Ted, she cries. And then they. Go to it. Up and down, in and out. Oh. Oh. Oh. She claws his back. She pumps her hips. Ted! Ted! Ted! The big moment is arriving now. For her, for him. Jackpot! Afterward they lie close for a few minutes, basking in the afterglow. And then they roll apart. Goodnight, Ted. Goodnight, Alice. Oh, Jesus. They do it every night, I bet. They’re so young and full of juice. And I’m all dried up. Christ, I hate being old. When I think of the man I once was. When I think of the women I once had. Jesus. Jesus. God, let me have the strength to do it just once more before I die. And leave me alone for two hours with Alice.

She has trouble falling asleep. A strange scene keeps playing itself out obsessively in her mind. She sees herself stepping out of an upright coffin-size box of dark grey metal, festooned with dials and levers. The time machine. It delivers her into a dark, dirty alleyway, and when she walks forward to the street she sees scores of little antique automobiles buzzing around. Only they aren’t antiques, they’re the current models. This is the year 1947. New York City. Will she be conspicuous in her futuristic clothes? She has her breasts covered, at any rate. That’s essential back here. She hurries to the proper address, resisting the temptation to browse in shop windows along the way. How quaint and ancient everything looks. And how dirty the streets are. She comes to a tall building of red brick. This is the place. No scanners study her as she enters. They don’t have annunciators yet or any other automatic home-protection equipment. She goes upstairs in an elevator so creaky and unstable that she fears for her life. Fifth floor. Apartment 5-J. She rings the doorbell. He answers. He’s terribly young, only twenty-four, but she can pick out signs of the Martin of the future in his face, the strong cheekbones, the searching blue eyes. “Are you Martin Jamieson?” she asks. “That’s right,” he says. She smiles. “May I come in?” “Of course,” he says. He bows her into the apartment. As he momentarily turns his back on her to open the coat closet she takes the heavy steel pipe from her purse and lifts it high and brings it down on the back of his head. Thwock. She takes the heavy steel pipe from her purse and lifts it high and brings it down on the back of his head. Thwock. She takes the heavy steel pipe from her purse and lifts it high and brings it down on the back of his head. Thwock.

Ted and Alice visit him at Sunset Village two or three times a month. He can’t complain about that; it’s as much as he can expect. He’s an old, old man and no doubt a boring one, but they come dutifully, sometimes with the kids, sometimes without. He’s never gotten used to the idea that he’s a great-grandfather. Alice always gives him a kiss when she arrives and another when she leaves. He plays a private little game with her, copping a feel at each kiss. His hand quickly stroking her butt. Or sometimes when he’s really rambunctious it travels lightly over her breast. Does she notice? Probably. She never lets on, though. Pretends it’s an accidental touch. Most likely she thinks it’s charming that a man of his age would still have at least a vestige of sexual desire left. Unless she thinks it’s disgusting, that is.

The time-machine gimmick, Ted tells himself, can be used in ways that don’t quite amount to murder. For instance. “What’s that box?” Alice asks. He smiles cunningly. “It’s called a panchronicon,” he says. “It gives you a kind of televised reconstruction of ancient times. The salesman loaned me a demonstration sample.” She says, “How does it work?” “Just step inside,” he tells her. “It’s all ready for you.” She starts to enter the machine, but then, suddenly suspicious, she hesitates on the threshold. He pushes her in and slams the door shut behind her. Wham! The controls are set. Off goes Alice on a one-way journey to the Pleistocene. The machine is primed to return as soon as it drops her off. That isn’t murder, is it? She’s still alive, wherever she may be, unless the sabre-tooth tigers have caught up with her. So long, Alice.

In the morning she drives Bobby and Tink to school. Then she stops at the bank and post office. From ten to eleven she has her regular session at the identity-reinforcement parlor. Ordinarily she would go right home after that, but this morning she strolls across the shopping center plaza to the office that the time -machine people have just opened. TEMPONAUTICS, LTD, the sign over the door says. The place is empty except for two machines, no doubt demonstration models, and a bland-faced, smiling salesman. “Hello,” Alice says nervously. “I just wanted to pick up some information about the rental costs of one of your machines.”

Martin likes to imagine Alice coming to visit him by herself some rainy Saturday afternoon. “Ted isn’t able to make it today,” she explains. “Something came up at the office. But I knew you were expecting us, and I didn’t want you to be disappointed. Poor Martin, you must lead such a lonely life.” She comes close to him. She is trembling. So is he. Her face is flushed and her eyes are bright with the unmistakable glossiness of desire. He feels a sense of sexual excitement too, for the first time in ten or twenty years, that tension in the loins, that throbbing of the pulse. Electricity. Chemistry. His eyes lock on hers. Her nostrils flare, her mouth goes taut. “Martin,” she whispers huskily. “Do you feel what I feel?” “You know I do,” he tells her. She says, “If only I could have known you when you were in your prime!” He chuckles. “I’m not altogether senile yet,” he cries exultantly. Then she is in his arms and his lips are seeking her fragrant breasts.

“Yes, it came as a terrible shock to me,” Ted tells Ellie. “Having her disappear like that. She simply vanished from the face of the earth, as far as anyone can determine. They’ve tried every possible way of tracing her and there hasn’t been a clue.” Ellie’s flawless forehead furrows in a fitful frown. “Was she unhappy?” she asks, “Do you think she may have done away with herself?” Ted shakes his head. “I don’t know. You live with a person for eleven years and you think you know her pretty well, and then one day something absolutely incomprehensible occurs and you realize how impossible it is ever to know another human being at all. Don’t you agree?” Ellie nods gravely. “Yes, oh, yes, certainly!” she says. He smiles down at her and takes her hands in his. Softly he says, “Let’s not talk about Alice any more, shall we? She’s gone and that’s all I’ll ever know.” He hears a pulsing symphonic crescendo of shimmering angelic choirs as he embraces her and murmurs, “I love you, Ellie. I love you.”

She takes the heavy steel pipe from her purse and lifts it high and brings it down on the back of his head. Thwock. Young Martin drops instantly, twitches once, lies still. Dark blood begins to seep through the dense blond curls of his hair. How strange to see Martin with golden hair, she thinks, as she kneels beside his body. She puts her hand to the bloody place, probes timidly, feels the deep indentation. Is he dead? She isn’t sure how to tell. He isn’t moving. He doesn’t seem to be breathing. She wonders if she ought to hit him again, just to make certain. Then she remembers something she’s seen on television, and takes her mirror from her purse. Holds it in front of his face. No cloud forms. That’s pretty conclusive: you’re dead, Martin. R.I.P. Martin Jamieson, 1923-1947. Which means that Martha Jamieson Porter (1948- ) will never now be conceived, and that automatically obliterates the existence of her son Theodore Porter (1968- ). Not bad going, Alice, getting rid of unloved husband and miserable shrewish mother-in-law all in one shot. Sorry, Martin. Bye-bye, Ted. (R.I.P. Theodore Porter, 1968-1947. Eh?) She rises, goes into the bathroom with the steel pipe and carefully rinses it off. Then she puts it back into her purse. Now to go back to the machine and return to 2006, she thinks. To start my new life. But as she leaves the apartment, a tall, lean man steps out of the hallway shadows and clamps his hand powerfully around her wrist. “Time Patrol,” he says crisply, flashing an identification badge. “You’re under arrest for temponautic murder, Mrs. Porter.”

Today has been a better day than yesterday, low on crises and depressions, but he still feels a headache coming on as he lets himself into the house. He is braced for whatever bitchiness Alice may have in store for him this evening. But, oddly, she seems relaxed and amiable. “Can I get you a drink, Ted?” she asks. “How did your day go?” He smiles and says, “Well, I think we may have salvaged the Hammond account after all. Otherwise nothing special happened. And you? What did you do today, love?” She shrugs. “Oh, the usual stuff,” she says. “The bank, the post office, my identity-reinforcement session.”

If you had the money, Martin asks himself, how far back would you send her? 1947, that would be the year, I guess. My last year as a single man. No sense complicating things. Off you go, Alice baby, to 1947. Let’s make it March. By June I was engaged and by September Martha was on the way, though I didn’t find that out until later. Yes: March, 1947. So Young Martin answers the doorbell and sees an attractive girl in the hall, a woman, really, older than he is, maybe thirty or thirty-two. Slender, dark-haired, nicely constructed. Odd clothing: a clinging grey tunic, very short, made of some strange fabric that flows over her body like a stream. How it achieves that liquid effect around the pleats is beyond him. “Are you Martin Jamieson?” she asks. And quickly answers herself. “Yes, of course, you must be. I recognize you. How handsome you were!” He is baffled. He knows nothing, naturally, about this gift from his aged future self. “Who are you?” he asks. “May I come in first?” she says. He is embarrassed by his lack of courtesy and waves her inside. Her eyes glitter with mischief. “You aren’t going to believe this,” she tells him,” but I’m your grandson’s wife.”

“Would you like to try out one of our demonstration models?” the salesman asks pleasantly. “There’s absolutely no cost or obligation.” Ted looks at Alice. Alice looks at Ted. Her frown mirrors his inner uncertainty. She also must be wishing that they had never come to the Temponautics showroom. The salesman, pattering smoothly onward, says, “In these demonstrations we usually send our potential customers fifteen or twenty minutes into the past. I’m sure you’ll find it fascinating. While remaining in the machine, you’ll be able to look through a viewer and observe your own selves actually entering this very showroom a short while ago. Well? Will you give it a try? You go first, Mrs. Porter. I assure you it’s going to be the most unique experience you’ve ever had.” Alice, uneasy, tries to back off, but the salesman prods her in a way that is at once gentle and unyielding, and she steps reluctantly into the time machine. He closes the door. A great business of adjusting fine controls ensues. Then the salesman throws a master switch. A green glow envelopes the machine and it disappears, although something transparent and vague—retinal after-image? the ghost of the machine?—remains dimly visible. The salesman says, “She’s now gone a short distance into her own past. I’ve programmed the machine to take her back eighteen minutes and keep her there for a total elapsed interval of six minutes, so she can see the entire opening moments of your visit here. But when I return her to Now Level, there’s no need to match the amount of elapsed time in the past, so that from our point of view she’ll have been absent only some thirty seconds. Isn’t that remarkable, Mr. Porter? It’s one of the many extra ordinary paradoxes we encounter in the strange new realm of time travel.” He throws another switch. The time machine once more assumes solid form. “Voila!” cries the salesman. “Here is Mrs. Porter, returned safe and sound from her voyage into the past.” He flings open the door of the time machine. The passenger compartment is empty. The salesman’s face crumbles. “Mrs. Porter?” he shrieks in consternation. “Mrs. Porter? I don’t understand! How could there have been a malfunction? This is impossible! Mrs. Porter? Mrs. Porter?”

She hurries down the dirty street toward the tall brick building. This is the place. Upstairs. Fifth floor, apartment 5-J. As she starts to ring the doorbell, a tall, lean man steps out of the shadows and clamps his hand powerfully around her wrist. “Time Patrol,” he says crisply, flashing an identification badge. “You’re under arrest for contemplated temponautic murder, Mrs. Porter.”

“But I haven’t any grandson,” he sputters. “I’m not even mar—” She laughs. “Don’t worry about it!” she tells him. “You’re going to have a daughter named Martha and she’ll have a son named Ted and I’m going to marry Ted and we’ll have two children named Bobby, and Tink. And you’re going to live to be an old, old man. And that’s all you need to know. Now let’s have a little fun.” She touches a catch at the side of her tunic and the garment falls away in a single fluid cascade. Beneath it she is naked. Her nipples stare up at him like blind pink eyes. She beckons to him. “Come on!” she says hoarsely. “Get undressed, Martin! You’re wasting time!”

Alice giggles nervously. “Well, as a matter of fact,” she says to the salesman, “I think I’m willing to let my husband be the guinea pig. How about it, Ted?” She turns toward him. So does the salesman. “Certainly, Mr. Porter. I know you’re eager to give our machine a test run, yes?” No, Ted thinks, but he feels the pressure of events propelling him willy-nilly. He gets into the machine. As the door closes on him he fears that claustrophobic panic will overwhelm him; he is reassured by the sight of a handle on the door’s inner face. He pushes on it and the door opens, and he steps out of the machine just in time to see his earlier self coming into the Temponautics showroom with Alice. The salesman is going forward to greet them. Ted is now eighteen minutes into his own past. Alice and the other Ted stare at him, aghast. The salesman whirls and exclaims, “Wait a second, you aren’t supposed to get out of—” How stupid they all look! How bewildered! Ted laughs in their faces. Then he rushes past them, nearly knocking his other self down, and erupts into the shopping-center plaza. He sprints in a wild frenzy of exhilaration toward the parking area. Free, he thinks. I’m free at last. And I didn’t have to kill anybody.

Suppose I rent a machine, Alice thinks, and go back to 1947 and kill Martin? Suppose I really do it? What if there’s some way of tracing the crime to me? After all, a crime committed by a person from 2006 who goes back to 1947 will have consequences in our present day. It might change all sorts of things. So they’d want to catch the criminal and punish him, or better yet prevent the crime from being committed in the first place. And the time machine company is bound to know what year I asked them to send me to. So maybe it isn’t such an easy way of committing a perfect crime. I don’t know. God, I can’t understand any of this. But perhaps I can get away with it. Anyway, I’m going to give it a try. I’ll show Ted he can’t go on treating me like dirt.

They lie peacefully side by side, sweaty, drowsy, exhausted in the good exhaustion that comes after a first-rate screw. Martin tenderly strokes her belly and thighs. How smooth her skin is, how pale, how transparent! The little blue veins so clearly visible. “Hey,” he says suddenly. “I just thought of something. I wasn’t wearing a rubber or anything. What if I made you pregnant? And if you’re really who you say you are. Then you’ll go back to the year 2006 and you’ll have a kid and he’ll be his own grandfather, won’t he?” She laughs. “Don’t worry much about it,” she says.

A wave of timidity comes over her as she enters the Temponautics office. This is crazy, she tells herself. I’m getting out of here. But before she can turn around, the salesman she spoke to the day before materializes from a side room and gives her a big hello. Mr. Friesling. He’s practically rubbing his hands together in anticipation of landing a contract. “So nice to see you again, Mrs. Porter.” She nods and glances worriedly at the demonstration models. “How much would it cost,” she asks, “to spend a few hours in the spring of 1947?”

Sunday is the big family day. Four generations sitting down to dinner together: Martin, Martha, Ted and Alice, Bobby and Tink. Ted rather enjoys these reunions, but he knows Alice loathes them, mainly because of Martha. Alice hates her mother-in-law. Martha has never cared much for Alice, either. He watches them glaring at each other across the table. Meanwhile old Martin stares lecherously at the gulf between Alice’s breasts. You have to hand it to the old man, Ted thinks. He’s never lost the old urge. Even though there’s not a hell of a lot he can do about gratifying it, not at his age. Martha says sweetly, “You’d look ever so much better, Alice dear, if you’d let your hair grow out to its natural color.” A sugary smile from Martha. A sour scowl from Alice. She glowers at the older woman. “This is its natural color,” she snaps.

Mr. Friesling hands her the standard contract form. Eight pages of densely packed type. “Don’t be frightened by it, Mrs. Porter. It looks formidable but actually it’s just a lot of empty legal rhetoric. You can show it to your lawyer, if you like. I can tell you, though, that most of our customers find no need for that.” She leafs through it. So far as she can tell, the contract is mainly a disclaimer of responsibility. Temponautics, Ltd, agrees to bear the brunt of any malfunction caused by its own demonstrable negligence, but wants no truck with acts of God or with accidents brought about by clients who won’t obey the safety regulations. On the fourth page Alice finds a clause warning the prospective renter that the company cannot be held liable for any consequences of actions by the renter which wantonly or willfully interfere with the already determined course of history. She translates that for herself: If you kill your husband’s grandfather, don’t blame us if you get in trouble. She skims the remaining pages. “It looks harmless enough,” she says. “Where do I sign?”

As Martin comes out of the bathroom he finds Martha blocking his way. “Excuse me,” he says mildly, but she remains in his path. She is a big fleshy woman. At fifty-eight she affects the fashions of the very young, with grotesque results; he hates that aspect of her. He can see why Alice dislikes her so much. “Just a moment,” Martha says. “I want to talk to you, Father.” “About what?” he asks. “About those looks you give Alice. Don’t you think that’s a little too much? How tasteless can you get?” “Tasteless? Are you anybody to talk about taste, with your face painted green like a fifteen-year old?” She looks angry: he’s scored a direct hit. She replies, “I just think that at the age of eighty-two you ought to have a greater regard for decency than to go staring down your own grandson’s wife’s front.” Martin sighs. “Let me have the staring, Martha. It’s all I’ve got left.”

He is at the office, deep in complicated negotiations, when his autosecretary bleeps him and announces that a call has come in from a Mr. Friesling, of the Union Boulevard Plaza office of Temponautics, Ltd. Ted is puzzled by that: what do the time machine people want with him? Trying to line him up as a customer? “Tell him I’m not interested in time trips,” Ted says. But the autosecretary bleeps again a few moments later. Mr. Friesling, it declares, is calling in reference to Mr. Porter’s credit standing. More baffled than before, Ted orders the call switched over to him. Mr. Friesling appears on the desk screen. He is small -featured and bright-eyed, rather like a chipmunk. “I apologize for troubling you, Mr. Porter,” he begins. “This is strictly a routine credit check, but it’s altogether necessary. As you surely know, your wife has requested rental of our equipment for a fifty-nine- year time jaunt, and inasmuch as the service fee for such a trip exceeds the level at which we extend automatic credit, our policy requires us to ask you if you’ll confirm the payment schedule that she has requested us to—” Ted coughs violently. “Hold on,” he says. “My wife’s going on a time jaunt? What the hell, this is the first time I’ve heard of that!”

She is surprised by the extensiveness of the preparations. No wonder they charge so much. Getting her ready for the jaunt takes hours. They inoculate her to protect her against certain extinct diseases. They provide her with clothing in the style of the mid -twentieth century, ill-fitting and uncomfortable. They give her contemporary currency, but warn her that she would do well not to spend any except in an emergency, since she will be billed for it at its present-day numismatic value, which is high. They make her study a pamphlet describing the customs and historical background of the era and quiz her in detail. She learns that she is not under any circumstances to expose her breasts or genitals in public while she is in 1947. She must not attempt to obtain any mind-stimulating drugs other than alcohol. She should not say anything that might be construed as praise of the Soviet Union or of Marxist philosophy. She must bear in mind that she is entering the past solely as an observer, and should engage in minimal social interaction with the citizens of the era she is visiting. And so forth. At last they decide it’s safe to let her go. “Please come this way, Mrs. Porter,” Friesling says.

After staring at the telephone a long while, Martin punches out Alice’s number. Before the second ring he loses his nerve and disconnects. Immediately he calls her again. His heart pounds so furiously that the medic, registering alarm on its delicate sensing apparatus, starts toward him. He waves the robot away and clings to the phone. Two rings. Three. Ah. “Hello?” Alice says. Her voice is warm and rich and feminine. He has his screen switched off. “Hello? Who’s there?” Martin breathes heavily into the mouthpiece. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. “Hello? Hello? Hello? Listen, you pervert, if you phone me once more—” Ah. Ah. Ah. A smile of bliss appears on Martin’s withered features. Alice hangs up. Trembling, Martin sags in his chair. Oh, that was good! He signals fiercely to the medic. “Let’s have the injection now, you metal monster!” He laughs. Dirty old man.

Ted realizes that it isn’t necessary to kill a person’s grandfather in order to get rid of that person. Just interfere with some crucial event in that person’s past, is all. Go back and break up the marriage of Alice’s grandparents, for example. (How? Seduce the grandmother when she’s eighteen? “I’m terribly sorry to inform you that your intended bride is no virgin, and here’s the documentary evidence.” They were very grim about virginity back then, weren’t they?) Nobody would have to die. But Alice wouldn’t ever be born.

Martin still can’t believe any of this, even after she’s slept with him. It’s some crazy practical joke, most likely. Although he wishes all practical jokes were as sexy as this one. “Are you really from the year 2006?” he asks her. She laughs prettily. “How can I prove it to you?” Then she leaps from the bed. He tracks her with his eyes as she crosses the room, breasts jiggling gaily. What a sweet little body. How thoughtful of my older self to ship her back here to me. If that’s what really happened. She fumbles in her purse and extracts a handful of coins. “Look here,” she says. “Money from the future. Here’s a dime from 1993. And this is a two-dollar piece from 2001. And here’s an old one, a 1979 Kennedy half-dollar.” He studies the unfamiliar coins. They have a greasy look, not silvery at all. Counterfeits? They won’t necessarily be striking coins out of silver forever. And the engraving job is very professional. A two-dollar piece, eh? Well, you never can tell. And this. The half-dollar. A handsome young man in profile. “Kennedy?” he says. “Who’s Kennedy?”

So this is it at last. Two technicians in grey smocks watch her, sober-faced, as she clambers into the machine. It’s very much like a coffin, just as she imagined it would be. She can’t sit down in it; it’s too narrow. Gives her the creeps, shut up in here. Of course, they’ve told her the trip won’t take any apparent subjective time, only a couple of seconds. Woosh! and she’ll be there. All right. They close the door. She hears the lock clicking shut. Mr. Friesling’s voice comes to her over a loud speaker. “We wish you a happy voyage, Mrs. Porter. Keep calm and you won’t get into any difficulties.” Suddenly the red light over the door is glowing. That means the jaunt has begun: she’s traveling backward in time. No sense of acceleration, no sense of motion. One, two, three. The light goes off. That’s it. I’m in 1947, she tells herself. Before she opens the door, she closes her eyes and runs through her history lessons. World War II has just ended. Europe is in ruins. There are forty-eight states. Nobody has been to the moon yet or even thinks much about going there. Harry Truman is President. Stalin runs Russia, and Churchill—is Churchill still Prime Minister of England? She isn’t sure. Well, no matter. I didn’t come here to talk about prime ministers. She touches the latch and the door of the time machine swings outward.

He steps from the machine into the year 2006. Nothing has changed in the showroom. Friesling, the two poker-faced technicians, the sleek desks, the thick carpeting, all the same as before. He moves bouncily. His mind is still back there with Alice’s grandmother. The taste of her lips, the soft urgent cries of her fulfillment. Who ever said all women were frigid in the old days? They ought to go back and find out. Friesling smiles at him. “I hope you had a very enjoyable journey, Mr.—ah—” Ted nods. “Enjoyable and useful,” he says. He goes out. Never to see Alice again—how beautiful! The car isn’t where he remembers leaving it in the parking area. You have to expect certain small peripheral changes, I guess. He hails a cab, gives the driver his address. His key does not fit the front door. Troubled, he thumbs the annunciator. A woman’s voice, not Alice’s, asks him what he wants. “Is this the Ted Porter residence?” he asks. “No, it isn’t,” the woman says, suspicious and irritated. The name on the doorplate, he notices now, is McKenzie. So the changes are not all so small. Where do I go now? If I don’t live here, then where? “Wait!” he yells to the taxi, just pulling away. It takes him to a downtown cafe, where he phones Ellie. Her face, peering out of the tiny screen, wears an odd frowning expression. “Listen, something very strange has happened,” he begins, “and I need to see you as soon as—” “I don’t think I know you,” she says. “I’m Ted,” he tells her. “Ted who?” she asks.

How peculiar this is, Alice thinks. Like walking into a museum diorama and having it come to life. The noisy little automobiles. The ugly clothing. The squat, dilapidated twentieth-century buildings. The chaos. The oily, smoky smell of the polluted air. Wisps of dirty snow in the streets. Cans of garbage just sitting around as if nobody’s ever heard of the plague. Well, I won’t stay here long. In her purse she carries her kitchen carver, a tiny nickel-jacketed laser-powered implement. Steel pipes are all right for dream fantasies, but this is the real thing, and she wants the killing to be quick and efficient. Criss, cross, with the laser beam, and Martin goes. At the street corner she pauses to check the address. There’s no central info number to ring for all sorts of useful data, not in these primitive times; she must use a printed telephone directory, a thick tattered book with small smeary type. Here he is: Martin Jamieson, 504 West Forty-fifth. That’s not far. In ten minutes she’s there. A dark brick structure, five or six stories high, with spidery metal fire escapes running down its face. Even for its day it appears unusually run-down. She goes inside. A list of tenants is posted just within the front door. Jamieson, 3-A. There’s no elevator and of course no liftshaft. Up the stairs. A musty hallway lit by a single dim incandescent bulb. This is Apartment 3-A. Jamieson. She rings the bell.

Ten minutes later Friesling calls back, sounding abashed and looking dismayed: “I’m sorry to have to tell you that there’s been some sort of error, Mr. Porter. The technicians were apparently unaware that a credit check was in process, and they sent Mrs. Porter off on her trip while we were still talking.” Ted is shaken. He clutches the edge of the desk. Controlling himself with an effort, he says, “How far back was it that she wanted to go?” Friesling says, “It was fifty-nine years. To 1947.” Ted nods grimly. A horrible idea has occurred to him. 1947 was the year that his mother’s parents met and got married. What is Alice up to?

The doorbell rings. Martin, freshly showered, is sprawled out naked on his bed, leafing through the new issue of Esquire and thinking vaguely of going out for dinner. He isn’t expecting any company. Slipping into his bathrobe, he goes toward the door. “Who’s there?” he calls. A youthful, pleasant female voice replies, “I’m looking for Martin Jamieson.” Well, okay. He opens the door. She’s perhaps twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old, very sexy, on the slender side but well built. Dark hair, worn in a strangely boyish short cut. He’s never seen her before. “Hi,” he says tentatively. She grins warmly at him. “You don’t know me,” she tells him, “but I’m a friend of an old friend of yours. Mary Chambers? Mary and I grew up together in—ah—Ohio. I’m visiting New York for the first time, and Mary once told me that if I ever come to New York I should be sure to look up Martin Jamieson, and so—may I come in?” “You bet,” he says. He doesn’t remember any Mary Chambers from Ohio. But what the hell, sometimes you forget a few. What the hell.

He’s much more attractive than she expected him to be. She has always known Martin only as an old man, made unattractive as much by his coarse lechery as by what age has done to him. Hollow-chested, stoop-shouldered, pleated jowly face, sparse strands of white hair, beady eyes of faded blue—a wreck of a man. But this Martin in the doorway is sturdy, handsome, untouched by time, brimming with life and vigor and virility. She thinks of the carver in her purse and feels a genuine pang of regret at having to cut this robust boy off in his prime. But there isn’t such a great hurry, is there? First we can enjoy each other, Martin. And then the laser.

“When is she due back?” Ted demands. Friesling explains that all concepts of time are relative and flexible; so far as elapsed time at Now Level goes, she’s already returned. “What?” Ted yells. “Where is she?” Friesling does not know. She stepped out of the machine, bade the Temponautics staff a pleasant goodbye, and left the showroom. Ted puts his hand to his throat. What if she’s already killed Martin? Will I just wink out of existence? Or is there some sort of lag, so that I’ll fade gradually into unreality over the next few days? “Listen,” he says raggedly, “I’m leaving my office right now and I’ll be down at your place in less than an hour. I want you to have your machinery set up so that you can transport me to the exact point in space and time where you just sent my wife.” “But that won’t be possible,” Friesling protests. “It takes hours to prepare a client properly for—” Ted cuts him off. “Get everything set up, and to hell with preparing me properly,” he snaps. “Unless you feel like getting slammed with the biggest negligence suit since this time-machine thing got started, you better have everything ready when I get there.”

He opens the door. The girl in the hallway is young and good-looking, with close-cropped dark hair and full lips. Thank you, Mary Chambers, whoever you may be. “Pardon the bathrobe,” he says, “but I wasn’t expecting company.” She steps into his apartment. Suddenly he notices how strained and tense her face is. Country girl from Ohio, suddenly having second thoughts about visiting a strange man in a strange city? He tries to put her at her ease. “Can I get you a drink?” he asks. “Not much of a selection, I’m afraid, but I have scotch, gin, some blackberry cordial—” She reaches into her purse and takes something out. He frowns. Not a gun, exactly, but it does seem like a weapon of some sort, a little glittering metal device that fits neatly in her hand. “Hey,” he says, “what’s—” “I’m so awfully sorry, Martin,” she whispers, and a bolt of terrible fire slams into his chest.

She sips the drink. It relaxes her. The glass isn’t very clean, but she isn’t worried about picking up a disease, not after all the injections Friesling gave her. Martin looks as if he can stand some relaxing too. “Aren’t you drinking?” she asks. “I suppose I will,” he says. He pours himself some gin. She comes up behind him and slips her hand into the front of his bathrobe. His body is cool, smooth, hard. “Oh, Martin,” she murmurs. “Oh! Martin!”

Ted takes a room in one of the commercial hotels downtown. The first thing he does is try to put a call through to Alice’s mother in Chillicothe. He still isn’t really convinced that his little time- jaunt flirtation has retroactively eliminated Alice from existence. But the call convinces him, all right. The middle-aged woman who answers is definitely not Alice’s mother. Right phone number, right address—he badgers her for the information—but wrong woman. “You don’t have a daughter named Alice Porter?” he asks three or four times. “You don’t know anyone in the neighborhood who does? It’s important.” All right. Cancel the old lady, ergo cancel Alice. But now he has a different problem. How much of the universe has he altered by removing Alice and her mother? Does he live in some other city, now, and hold some other job? What has happened to Bobby and Tink? Frantically he begins phoning people. Friends, fellow workers, the man at the bank. The same response from all of them: blank stares, shakings of the head. We don’t know you, fellow. He looks at himself in the mirror. Okay, he asks himself. Who am I?

Martin moves swiftly and purposefully, the way they taught him to do in the army when it’s necessary to disarm a dangerous opponent. He lunges forward and catches the girl’s arm, pushing it upward before she can fire the shiny whatzis she’s aiming at him. She turns out to be stronger than he anticipated, and they struggle fiercely for the weapon. Suddenly it fires. Something like a lightning bolt explodes between them and knocks him to the floor, stunned. When he picks himself up he sees her lying near the door with a charred hole in her throat.

The telephone’s jangling clatter brings Martin up out of a dream in which he is ravishing Alice’s luscious young body. Dry-throated, gummy-eyed, he reaches a palsied hand toward the receiver. “Yes?” he says. Ted’s face blossoms on the screen. “Grandfather!” he blurts. “Are you all right?” “Of course I’m all right,” Martin says testily. “Can’t you tell? What’s the matter with you, boy?” Ted shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he mutters. “Maybe it was only a bad dream. I imagined that Alice rented one of those time machines and went back to 1947. And tried to kill you so that I wouldn’t ever have existed.” Martin snorts. “What idiotic nonsense! How can she have killed me in 1947 when I’m here alive in 2006?”

Naked, Alice sinks into Martin’s arms. His strong hands sweep eagerly over her breasts and shoulders and his mouth descends to hers. She shivers with desire. “Yes,” she murmurs tenderly, pressing herself against him. “Oh, yes, yes, yes!” They’ll do it and it’ll be fantastic. And afterward she’ll kill him with the kitchen carver while he’s lying there savoring the event. But a troublesome thought occurs. If Martin dies in 1947, Ted doesn’t get to be born in 1968. Okay. But what about Tink and Bobby? They won’t get born either, not if I don’t marry Ted. I’ll be married to someone else when I get back to 2006, and I suppose I’ll have different children. Bobby? Tink? What am I doing to you? Sudden fear congeals her, and she pulls back from the vigorous young man nuzzling her throat. “Wait,” she says. “Listen, I’m sorry. It’s all a big mistake. I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get out of here right away!”

So this is the year 1947. Well, well, well. Everything looks so cluttered and grimy and ancient. He hurries through the chilly streets toward his grandfather’s place. If his luck is good and if Friesling’s technicians have calculated things accurately, he’ll be able to head Alice off. That might even be her now, that slender woman walking briskly half a block ahead of him. He steps up his pace. Yes, it’s Alice, on her way to Martin’s. Well done, Friesling! Ted approaches her warily, suspecting that she’s armed. If she’s capable of coming back to 1947 to kill Martin, she’d kill him just as readily. Especially back here where neither one of them has any legal existence. When he’s close to her he says in a low, hard, intense voice, “Don’t turn around, Alice. Just keep walking as if everything’s perfectly normal.” She stiffens. “Ted?” she cries, astonished. “Is that you, Ted?” “Damned right it is.” He laughs harshly. “Come on. Walk to the corner and turn to your left around the block. You’re going back to your machine and you’re going to get the hell out of the twentieth century without harming anybody. I know what you were trying to do, Alice. But I caught you in time, didn’t I?”

Martin is just getting down to real business when the door of his apartment bursts open and a man rushes in. He’s middle-aged, stocky, with weird clothes—the ultimate in zoot suits, a maze of vividly contrasting colors and conflicting patterns, shoulders padded to resemble shelves—and a wild look in his eyes. Alice leaps up from the bed. “Ted!” she screams. “My God, what are you doing here?” “You murderous bitch,” the intruder yells. Martin, naked and feeling vulnerable, his nervous system stunned by the interruption, looks on in amazement as the stranger grabs her and begins throttling her. “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!” he roars, shaking her in a mad frenzy. The girl’s face is turning black. Her eyes are bugging. After a long moment Martin breaks finally from his freeze. He stumbles forward, seizes the man’s fingers, peels them away from the girl’s throat. Too late. She falls limply and lies motionless. “Alice!” the intruder moans. “Alice, Alice, what have I done?” He drops to his knees beside her body, sobbing. Martin blinks. “You killed her,” he says, not believing that any of this can really be happening. “You actually killed her?”

Alice’s face appears on the telephone screen. Christ, how beautiful she is, Martin thinks, and his decrepit body quivers with lust. “There you are,” he says. “I’ve been trying to reach you for hours. I had such a strange dream that something awful had happened to Ted—and then your phone didn’t answer, and I began to think maybe the dream was a premonition of some kind, an omen, you know—” Alice looks puzzled. “I’m afraid you have the wrong number, sir,” she says sweetly, and hangs up.

She draws the laser and the naked man cowers back against the wall in bewilderment. “What the hell is this?” he asks, trembling. “Put that thing down, lady. You’ve got the wrong guy.” “No,” she says. “You’re the one I’m after. I hate to do this to you, Martin, but I’ve got no choice. You have to die.” “Why?” he demands. “Why?” “You wouldn’t understand it even if I told you,” she says. She moves her finger toward the discharge stud. Abruptly there is a frightening sound of cracking wood and collapsing plaster behind her, as though an earthquake has struck. She whirls and is appalled to see her husband breaking down the door of Martin’s apartment. “I’m just in time!” Ted exclaims. “Don’t move, Alice!” He reaches for her. In panic she fires without thinking. The dazzling beam catches Ted in the pit of the stomach and he goes down, gurgling in agony, clutching at his belly as he dies.

The door falls with a crash and this character in peculiar clothing materializes in a cloud of debris, looking crazier than Napoleon. It’s incredible, Martin thinks. First an unknown broad rings his bell and invites herself in and takes her clothes off, and then, just as he’s about to screw her, this happens. It’s pure Marx Brothers, only dirty. But Martin’s not going to take any crap. He pulls himself away from the panting, gasping girl on the bed, crosses the room in three quick strides, and seizes the newcomer. “Who the hell are you?” Martin demands, slamming him hard against the wall. The girl is dancing around behind him. “Don’t hurt him!” she wails. “Oh, please, don’t hurt him!”

Ted certainly hadn’t expected to find them in bed together. He understood why she might have wanted to go back in time to murder Martin, but simply to have an affair with him, no, it didn’t make sense. Of course, it was altogether likely that she had come here to kill and had paused for a little dalliance first. You never could tell about women, even your own wife. Alley cats, all of them. Well, a lucky thing for him that she had given him these few extra minutes to get here. “Okay,” he says. “Get your clothes on, Alice. You’re coming with me.” “Just a second, mister,” Martin growls. “You’ve got your goddamned nerve, busting in like this.” Ted tries to explain, but the words won’t come. It’s all too complicated. He gestures mutely at Alice, at himself, at Martin. The next moment Martin jumps him and they go tumbling together to the floor.

“Who are you?” Martin yells, banging the intruder repeatedly against the wall. “You some kind of detective? You trying to work a badger game on me?” Slam. Slam. Slam. He feels the girl’s small fists pounding on his own back. “Stop it!” she screams. “Let him alone, will you? He’s my husband!” “Husband!” Martin cries. Astounded, he lets go of the stranger and swings around to face the girl. A moment later he realizes his mistake. Out of the corner of his eye he sees that the intruder has raised his fists high above his head like clubs. Martin tries to get out of the way, but no time, no time, and the fists descend with awful force against his skull.

Alice doesn’t know what to do. They’re rolling around on the floor, fighting like wildcats, now Martin on top, now Ted. Martin is younger and bigger and stronger, but Ted seems possessed by the strength of the insane; he’s gone berserk. Both men are bloody-faced, and furniture is crashing over everywhere. Her first impulse is to get between them and stop this crazy fight somehow. But then she remembers that she has come here as a killer, not as a peacemaker. She gets the laser from her purse and aims it at Martin, but then the combatants do a flip-flop and it is Ted who is in the line of fire. She hesitates. It doesn’t matter which one she shoots, she realizes after a moment. They both have to die, one way or another. She takes aim. Maybe she can get them both with one bolt. But as her finger starts to tighten on the discharge stud, Martin suddenly gets Ted in a bearhug and, half lifting him, throws him five feet across the room. The back of Ted’s neck hits the wall and there is a loud crack. Ted slumps and is still. Martin gets shakily to his feet. “I think I killed him,” he says. “Christ, who the hell was he?” “He was your grandson,” Alice says and begins to shriek hysterically.

Ted stares in horror at the crumpled body at his feet. His hands still tingle from the impact. The left side of Martin’s head looks as though a pile-driver has crushed it. “Good God in heaven,” Ted says thickly, “what have I done? I came here to protect him and I’ve killed him! I’ve killed my own grandfather!” Alice, wide-eyed, futilely trying to cover her nakedness by folding one arm across her breasts and spreading her other hand over her loins, says, “If he’s dead, why are you still here? Shouldn’t you have disappeared?” Ted shrugs. “Maybe I’m safe as long as I remain here in the past. But the moment I try to go back to 2006, I’ll vanish as though I’ve never been. I don’t know. I don’t understand any of this. What do you think?”

Alice steps uncertainly from the machine into the Temponautics showroom. There’s Friesling. There are the technicians. Friesling says, smiling, “I hope you had a very enjoyable journey, Mrs.—ah—uh’ He falters. “I’m sorry,” he says, reddening, “but your name seems to have escaped me.” Alice says, “It’s, ah, Alice—uh—do you know, the second name escapes me too?”

The whole clan has gathered to celebrate Martin’s eighty-third birthday. He cuts the cake, and then one by one they go to him to kiss him. When it’s Alice’s turn, he deftly spins her around so that he screens her from the others and gives her rump a good hearty pinch. “Oh, if I were only fifty years younger!” he sighs.

It’s a warm springlike day. Everything has been lovely at the office—three new accounts all at once—and the trip home on the freeway was a breeze. Alice is waiting for him, dressed in her finest and most sexy outfit, all ready to go out. It’s a special day. Their eleventh anniversary. How beautiful she looks! He kisses her, she kisses him, he takes the tickets from his pocket with a grand flourish. “Surprise,” he says. “Two weeks in Hawaii, starting next Tuesday! Happy anniversary!” “Oh, Ted!” she cries. “How marvelous! I love you, Ted darling!” He pulls her close to him again. “I love you, Alice dear.”

(Now+n, Now–n)

I am a dour and unsmiling sort of man who actually has a lively if dry sense of humor: no one survives decade after decade of professional writing, as I have, without a sense of humor. A lot of the things I find amusing, though, evidently don’t seem funny to other people, as I found out when I compiled an anthology of humorous science fiction and a number of startled reviewers commented on the dark tone of many of the stories.

So be it. Perhaps what I mistake for humor is actually irony, wit, or some other species of controlled and understated playfulness. I serve notice here that I think “(Now + n, Now – n)” is a comic story. Perhaps its comedy is one of tone rather than of situation; perhaps it’s really no funnier than Macbeth, and my perceptions of what humor is are all cockeyed. At least grant me that it’s a cleverly done time-paradox story, even if you don’t get any laughs out of it. I may not know what funny is, but I defy anyone to tell me that I don’t know my way around the twists and turns of time-travel.

I wrote this one in June of 1969, but it foreshadows the tone and sardonic approach I would be taking in the many stories I did in 1971, 1972, and 1973. It was written at the request of my old friend Harry Harrison for his anthology Nova, and appeared in the second volume of that series.

All had been so simple, so elegant, so profitable for ourselves. And then we met the lovely Selene and nearly were undone. She came into our lives during our regular transmission hour on Wednesday, October 7, 1987, between six and seven p.m. Central European Time. The moneymaking hour. I was in satisfactory contact with myself and also with myself. (Now – n) was due on the line first, and then I would hear from (now + n).

I was primed for some kind of trouble. I knew trouble was coming, because on Monday, while I was receiving messages from the me of Wednesday, there came an inexplicable and unexplained break in communications. As a result I did not get data from (now + n) concerning the prices of the stocks in our carryover portfolio from last week, and I was unable to take action. Two days have passed, and I am the me of Wednesday who failed to send the news to me of Monday, and I have no idea what will happen to interrupt contact. Least of all did I anticipate Selene.

In such dealings as ours no distractions are needed, sexual or otherwise. We must concentrate wholly. At any time there is steady low-level contact among ourselves; we feel one another’s reassuring presence. But transmission of data from self to self requires close attention.

I tell you my method. Then maybe you understand my trouble.

My business is investments. I do all my work at this same hour. At this hour it is midday in New York; the Big Board is still open. I can put through quick calls to my brokers when my time comes to buy or sell.

My office at the moment is the cocktail lounge known as the Celestial Room in the Henry VIII Hotel, south of the Thames. My office may be anywhere. All I need is a telephone. The Celestial Room is aptly named. The room orbits endlessly on a silent oiled track. Twittering sculptures in the so-called galactic mode drift through the air, scattering cascades of polychromed light upon those who sip drinks. Beyond the great picture windows of this supreme room lies the foggy darkness of the London evening, which I ignore. It is all the same to me, wherever I am: London, Nairobi, Karachi, Istanbul, Pittsburgh. I look only for an adequately comfortable environment, air that is safe to admit to one’s lungs, service in the style I demand, and a telephone line. The individual characteristics of an individual place do not move me. I am like the ten planets of our solar family: a perpetual traveler, but not a sightseer.

Myself who is (now – n) is ready to receive transmission from myself who is (now). “Go ahead, (now + n).” he tells me. ((To him I am (now + n). To myself I am (now). Everything is relative; n is exactly forty-eight hours these days.))

“Here we go, (now – n).” I say to him.

I summon my strength by sipping at my drink. Chateau d’Yquem ’79 in a sleek Czech goblet. Sickly sweet stuff; the waiter was aghast when I ordered it before dinner. Horreurs! Quel aperitif! But the wine makes transmission easier. It greases the conduit, somehow. I am ready.

My table is a single elegant block of glittering irradiated crystal, iridescent, cunningly emitting shifting moire patterns. On the table, unfolded, lies today’s European edition of the Herald Tribune. I lean forward. I take from my breast pocket a sheet of paper, the printout listing the securities I bought on Monday afternoon. Now I allow my eyes to roam the close-packed type of the market quotations in my newspaper. I linger for a long moment on the heading, so there will be no mistake: Closing New York Prices, Tuesday, October 6. To me they are yesterday’s prices. To (now – n) they are tomorrow’s prices. (Now – n) acknowledges that he is receiving a sharp image.

I am about to transmit these prices to the me of Monday. You follow the machination, now?

I scan and I select.

I search only for the stocks that move five percent or more in a single day. Whether they move up or move down is immaterial; motion is the only criterion, and we go short or long as the case demands. We need fast action because our maximum survey span is only ninety-six hours at present, counting the relay from (now + n) back to (now – n) by way of (now). We cannot afford to wait for leisurely capital gains to mature; we must cut our risks by going for the quick, violent swings, seizing our profits as they emerge. The swings have to be violent. Otherwise brokerage costs will eat up our gross.

I have no difficulty choosing the stocks whose prices I will transmit to Monday’s me. They are the stocks on the broker’s printout, the ones we have already bought; obviously (now – n) would not have bought them unless Wednesday’s me had told him about them, and now that I am Wednesday’s me, I must follow through. So I send:

Arizona Agrochemical, 79?, + 6?

Canadian Transmutation, 116, + 4?

Commonwealth Dispersals, 12, – 1?

Eastern Electric Energy, 41, + 2

Great Lakes Bionics, 66, + 3 ?

And so on through Western Offshore Corp., 99, – 8. Now I have transmitted to (now – n) a list of Tuesday’s top twenty high-percentage swingers. From his vantage-point in Monday, (now – n) will begin to place orders, taking positions in all twenty stocks on Monday afternoon. I know that he has been successful, because the printout from my broker gives confirmations of all twenty purchases at what now are highly favorable prices.

(Now – n) then signs off for a while and (now + n) comes on. He is transmitting from Friday, October 9. He gives me Thursday’s closing prices on the same twenty stocks, from Arizona Agrochemical to Western Offshore. He already knows which of the twenty I will have chosen to sell today, but he pays me the compliment of not telling me; he merely gives me the prices. He signs off, and, in my role as (now), I make my decisions. I sell Canadian Transmutation, Great Lakes Bionics, and five others; I cover our short sale on Commonwealth Dispersals. The rest of the positions I leave undisturbed for the time being, since they will sell at better prices tomorrow, according to the word from (now + n). I can handle those when I am Friday’s me.

Today’s sequence is over.

In any given sequence—and we have been running about three a week—we commit no more than five or six million dollars. We wish to stay inconspicuous. Our pre-tax profit runs at about nine percent a week. Despite our network of tax havens in Ghana, Fiji, Grand Cayman, Liechtenstein, and Bolivia, through which our profits are funneled, we can bring down to net only about five percent a week on our entire capital. This keeps all three of us in a decent style and compounds prettily. Starting with $5,000 six years ago at the age of twenty-five, I have become one of the world’s wealthiest men, with no other advantages than intelligence, persistence, and extrasensory access to tomorrow’s stock prices.

It is time to deal with the next sequence. I must transmit to (now – n) the Tuesday prices of the stocks in the portfolio carried over from last week, so that he can make his decisions on what to sell. I know what he has sold, but it would spoil his sport to tip my hand. We treat ourselves fairly. After I have finished sending (now – n) those prices, (now + n) will come online again and will transmit to me an entirely new list of stocks in which I must take positions before Thursday morning’s New York opening. He will be able to realize profits in those on Friday. Thus we go from day to day, playing our shifting roles.

But this was the day on which Selene intersected our lives.

I had emptied my glass. I looked up to signal the waiter, and at that moment a slender, dark-haired girl, alone, entered the Celestial Room. She was tall, graceful, glorious. She was expensively clad in a clinging monomolecular wrap that shuttled through a complex program of wavelength shifts, including a microsecond sweep of total transparency that dazzled the eye while still maintaining a degree of modesty. Her features were a match for her garment: wide-set glossy eyes, delicate nose, firm lips lightly outlined in green. Her skin was extraordinarily pale. I could see no jewelry on her (why gild refined gold, why paint the lily?) but on her lovely left cheekbone I observed a small decorative band of ultraviolet paint, obviously chosen for visibility in the high-spectrum lighting of this unique room.

She conquered me. There was a mingling of traits in her that I found instantly irresistible: she seemed both shy and steel-strong, passionate and vulnerable, confident and ill at ease. She scanned the room, evidently looking for someone, not finding him. Her eyes met mine and lingered.

Somewhere in my cerebrum (now – n) said shrilly, as I had said on Monday, “I don’t read you, (now + n). I don’t read you!”

I paid no heed. I rose. I smiled to the girl, and beckoned her toward the empty chair at my table. I swept my Herald Tribune to the floor. At certain times there are more important things than compounding one’s capital at five percent per week. She glowed gratefully at me, nodding, accepting my invitation.

When she was about twenty feet from me, I lost all contact with (now – n) and (now + n).

I don’t mean simply that there was an interruption in the transmission of words and data among us. I mean that I lost all sense of the presence of my earlier and later selves. That warm, wordless companionship, that ourselvesness, that harmony that I had known constantly since we had established our linkage five years ago, vanished as if switched off. On Monday, when contact with (now + n) broke, I still had had (now – n). Now I had no one.

I was terrifyingly alone, even as ordinary men are alone, but more alone than that, for I had known a fellowship beyond the reach of other mortals. The shock of separation was intense.

Then Selene was sitting beside me, and the nearness of her made me forget my new solitude entirely.

She said, “I don’t know where he is and I don’t care. He’s been late once too often. Finito for him. Hello, you. I’m Selene Hughes.”

“Aram Kevorkian. What do you drink?”

“Chartreuse on the rocks. Green. I knew you were Armenian from halfway across the room.”

I am Bulgarian, thirteen generations. It suits me to wear an Armenian name. I did not correct her. The waiter hurried over; I ordered chartreuse for her, a sake martini for self. I trembled like an adolescent. Her beauty was disturbing, overwhelming, astonishing. As we raised
glasses I reached out experimentally for (now – n) or (now + n). Silence. Silence. But there was Selene.

I said, “You’re not from London.”

“I travel a lot. I stay here a while, there a while. Originally Dallas. You must be able to hear the Texas in my voice. Most recent port of call, Lima. For the July skiing. Now London.”

“And the next stop?”

“Who knows? What do you do, Aram?”

“I invest.”

“For a living?”

“So to speak. I struggle along. Free for dinner?”

“Of course. Shall we eat in the hotel?”

“There’s the beastly fog outside,” I said.

“Exactly.”

Simpatico. Perfectly. I guessed her for twenty-four, twenty-five at most. Perhaps a brief marriage three or four years in the past. A private income, not colossal but nice. An experienced woman of the world, and yet also somehow still retaining a core of innocence, a magical softness of the soul. I loved her instantly. She did not care for a second cocktail. “I’ll make dinner reservations,” I said, as she went off to the powder room. I watched her walk away. A supple walk, flawless posture, supreme shoulderblades. When she was about twenty feet from me I felt my other selves suddenly return. “What’s happening?” (now – n) demanded furiously. “Where did you go? Why aren’t you sending?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Where the hell are the Tuesday prices on last week’s carryover stocks?”

“Later,” I told him.

“Now. Before you blank out again.”

“The prices can wait,” I said, and shut him off. To (now + n) I said, “All right. What do you know that I ought to know?”

Myself of forty-eight hours hence said, “We have fallen in love.”

“I’m aware of that. But what blanked us out?”

“She’s psi-suppressant. She absorbs all the transmission energy we put out.”

“Impossible! I’ve never heard of any such thing.”

“No?” said (now + n). “Brother, this past hour has been the first chance I’ve had to get through to you since Wednesday, when we got into this mess. It’s no coincidence that I’ve been with her just about one hundred percent of the time since Wednesday evening, except for a few two-minute breaks, and then I couldn’t reach you because you must have been with her in your time sequence. And so—”

“How can this be?” I cried. “What’ll happen to us if? No. No, you bastard, you’re rolling me over. I don’t believe you. There’s no way that she could be causing it.”

“I think I know how she does it,” said (now + n). “There’s a—”

At that moment Selene returned, looking even more radiantly beautiful, and silence descended once more.

We dined well. Chilled Mombasa oysters, salade niçoise, filet of Kobe beef rare, washed down by Richebourg ‘77. Occasionally I tried to reach myselves. Nothing. I worried a little about how I was going to get the Tuesday prices to (now – n) on the carryover stuff, and decided to forget about it. Obviously I hadn’t managed to get them to him, since I hadn’t received any printout on sales out of that portfolio this evening, and if I hadn’t reached him, there was no sense in fretting about reaching him. The wonderful thing about this telepathy across time is the sense of stability it gives you: whatever has been, must be, and so forth.

After dinner we went down one level to the casino for our brandies and a bit of gamblerage. “Two thousand pounds’ worth,” I said to the robot cashier, and put my thumb to his charge plate, and the chips came skittering out of the slot in his chest. I gave half the stake to Selene. She played high-grav-low-grav, and I played roulette; we shifted from one table to the other according to whim and the run of our luck. In two hours she tripled her stake and I lost all of mine. I never was good at games of chance. I even used to get hurt in the market before the market ceased being a game of chance for me. Naturally, I let her thumb her winnings into her own account, and when she offered to return the original stake I just laughed.

Where next? Too early for bed.

“The swimming pool?” she suggested.

“Fine idea,” I said. But the hotel had two, as usual. “Nude pool or suit pool?”

“Who owns a suit?” she asked, and we laughed and took the dropshaft to the pool.

There were separate dressing rooms, M and W. No one frets about showing flesh, but shedding clothes still has lingering taboos. I peeled fast and waited for her by the pool. During this interval I felt the familiar presence of another self impinge on me: (now – n). He wasn’t transmitting, but I knew he was there. I couldn’t feel (now + n) at all. Grudgingly I began to admit that Selene must be responsible for my communications problem. Whenever she went more than twenty feet away, I could get through to myselves. How did she do it, though? And could it be stopped? Mao help me, would I have to choose between my livelihood and my new beloved?

The pool was a vast octagon with a trampoline diving web and a set of underwater psych-lights making rippling patterns of color. Maybe fifty people were swimming and a few dozen more were lounging beside the pool, improving their tans. No one person can possibly stand out in such a mass of flesh, and yet when Selene emerged from the women’s dressing room and began the long saunter across the tiles toward me, the heads began to turn by the dozens. Her figure was not notably lush, yet she had the automatic magnetism that only true beauty exercises. She was definitely slender, but everything was in perfect proportion, as though she had been shaped by the hand of Phidias himself. Long legs, long arms, narrow wrists, narrow waist, small high breasts, miraculously outcurving hips. The Primavera of Botticelli. The Leda of Leonardo. She carried herself with ultimate grace. My heart thundered.

Between her breasts she wore some sort of amulet: a disk of red metal in which geometrical symbols were engraved. I hadn’t noticed it when she was clothed.

“My good-luck piece,” she explained. “I’m never without it.” And she sprinted laughing to the trampoline, and bounded, and hovered, and soared, and cut magnificently through the surface of the water. I followed her in. We raced from angle to angle of the pool, testing each other, searching for limits and not finding them. We dived and met far below, and locked hands, and bobbed happily upward. Then we lay under the warm quartz lamps. Then we tried the sauna. Then we dressed.

We went to her room.

She kept the amulet on even when we made love. I felt it cold against my chest as I embraced her.

But what of the making of money? What of the compounding of capital? What of my sweaty little secret, the joker in the Wall Street pack, the messages from beyond by which I milked the market of millions? On Thursday no contact with my other selves was scheduled, but I could not have made it even if it had been. It was amply clear: Selene blanked my psi field. The critical range was twenty feet. When we were farther apart than that, I could get through; otherwise, not. How did it happen? How? How? How? An accidental incompatibility of psionic vibrations? A tragic canceling out of my powers through proximity to her splendid self? No. No. No. No.

On Thursday we roared through London like a conflagration, doing the galleries, the boutiques, the museums, the sniffer palaces, the pubs, the sparkle houses. I had never been so much in love. For hours at a time I forgot my dilemma. The absence of myself from myself, the separation that had seemed so shattering in its first instant, seemed trivial. What did I need them for, when I had her?

I needed them for the moneymaking. The moneymaking was a disease that love might alleviate but could not cure. And if I did not resume contact soon, there would be calamities in store.

Late Thursday afternoon, as we came reeling giddily out of a sniffer palace on High Holborn, our nostrils quivering, I felt contact again. (Now + n) broke through briefly, during a moment when I waited for a traffic light and Selene plunged wildly across to the far side of the street.

“The amulet’s what does it,” he said. “That’s the word I get from—”

Selene rushed back to my side of the street. “Come on, silly! Why’d you wait?”

Two hours later, as she lay in my arms, I swept my hand up from her satiny haunch to her silken breast and caught the plaque of red metal between two fingers. “Love, won’t you take this off?” I said innocently. “I hate the feel of a piece of cold slithery metal coming between us when—”

There was terror in her dark eyes. “I couldn’t, Aram! I couldn’t!”

“For me, love?”

“Please. Let me have my little superstition.” Her lips found mine. Cleverly she changed the subject. I wondered at her tremor of shock, her frightened refusal.

Later we strolled along the Thames, and watched Friday coming to life in fogbound dawn. Today I would have to escape from her for at least an hour, I knew. The laws of time dictated it. For on Wednesday, between six and seven p.m. Central European Time, I had accepted a transmission from myself of (now + n), speaking out of Friday, and Friday had come and I was that very same (now + n), who must reach out at the proper time toward his counterpart at (now – n) on Wednesday. What would happen if I failed to make my rendezvous with time in time, I did not know. Nor wanted to discover. The universe, I suspected, would continue regardless. But my own sanity—my grasp on that universe—might not.

It was narrowness. All glorious Friday I had to plot how to separate myself from radiant Selene during the cocktail hour, when she would certainly want to be with me. But in the end it was simplicity. I told the concierge, “At seven minutes after six send a message to me in the Celestial Room. I am wanted on urgent business must come instantly to computer room for intercontinental data patch, person to person. So?” Concierge replied, “We can give you the patch right at your table in the Celestial Room.” I shook my head firmly. “Do it as I say. Please.” I put thumb to gratuity account of concierge and signaled an account transfer of five pounds. Concierge smiled.

Seven minutes after six, message-robot scuttles into Celestial Room, comes homing in on table where I sit with Selene. “Intercontinental data patch, Mr. Kevorkian,” says robot. “Wanted immediately. Computer room.” I turn to Selene. “Forgive me, love. Desolated, but must go. Urgent business. Just a few minutes.”

She grasps my arm fondly. “Darling, no! Let the call wait. It’s our anniversary now. Forty-eight hours since we met!”

Gently I pull arm free. I extend arm, show jewelled timepiece. “Not yet, not yet! We didn’t meet until half past six Wednesday. I’ll be back in time to celebrate.” I kiss tip of supreme nose. “Don’t smile at strangers while I’m gone,” I say, and rush off with robot.

I do not go to computer room. I hurriedly buy a Friday Herald Tribune in the lobby and lock myself in men’s washroom cubicle. Contact now is made on schedule with (now – n), living in Wednesday, all innocent of what will befall him that miraculous evening. I read stock prices, twenty securities, from Arizona Agrochemical to Western Offshore Corp. I sign off and study my watch. (Now – n) is currently closing out seven long positions and the short sale on Commonwealth Dispersals. During the interval I seek to make contact with (now + n) ahead of me on Sunday evening. No response. Nothing.

Presently I lose contact also with (now – n). As expected; for this is the moment when the me of Wednesday has for the first time come within Selene’s psi-suppressant field. I wait patiently. In a while (Selene – n) goes to powder room. Contact returns.

(Now – n) says to me, “All right. What do you know that I ought to know?”

“We have fallen in love,” I say.

Rest of conversation follows as per. What has been, must be. I debate slipping in the tidbit I have received from (now + n) concerning the alleged powers of Selene’s amulet. Should I say it quickly, before contact breaks? Impossible. It was not said to me. The conversation proceeds until at the proper moment I am able to say, “I think I know how she does it. There’s a—”

Wall of silence descends. (Selene – n) has returned to the table of (now – n). Therefore I (now) will return to the table of Selene (now). I rush back to the Celestial Room. Selene, looking glum, sits alone, sipping drink. She brightens as I approach.

“See?” I cry. “Back just in time. Happy anniversary, darling. Happy, happy, happy, happy!”

When we woke Saturday morning we decided to share the same room thereafter. Selene showered while I went downstairs to arrange the transfer. I could have arranged everything by telephone without getting out of bed, but I chose to go in person to the desk, leaving Selene behind. You understand why.

In the lobby I received a transmission from (now + n), speaking out of Monday, October 12. “It’s definitely the amulet,” he said. “I can’t tell you how it works, but it’s some kind of mechanical psi-suppressant device. God knows why she wears it, but if I could only manage to have her lose it we’d be all right. It’s the amulet. Pass it on.”

I was reminded, by this, of the flash of contact I had received on Thursday outside the sniffer palace in High Holborn. I realized that I had another message to send, a rendezvous to keep with him who has become (now – n).

Late Saturday afternoon, I made contact with (now – n) once more, only momentarily. Again I resorted to a ruse in order to fulfill the necessary unfolding of destiny. Selene and I stood in the hallway, waiting for a dropshaft. There were other people. The dropshaft gate raised open and Selene went in, followed by others. With an excess of chivalry I let all the others enter before me, and “accidentally” missed the closing of the gate. The dropshaft descended with Selene. I remained alone in the hall. My timing was good; after a moment I felt the inner warmth that told me of proximity to the mind of (now – n). “The amulet’s what does it,” I said. “That’s the word I get from—” Aloneness intervened.

During the week beginning Monday, October 12, I received no advance information on the fluctuations of the stock market at all. Not in five years had I been so deprived of data. My linkings with (now – n) and (now + n) were fleeting and unsatisfactory. We exchanged a sentence here, a blurt of hasty words there, no more. Of course, there were moments every day when I was apart from the fair Selene long enough to get a message out. Though we were utterly consumed by our passion for one another, nevertheless I did get opportunities to elude the twenty-foot radius of her psi-suppressant field. The trouble was that my opportunities to send did not always coincide with the opportunities of (now – n) or (now + n) to receive. We remained linked in a 48-hour spacing, and to alter that spacing would require extensive discipline and infinitely careful coordination, which none of ourselves were able to provide in such a time. So any contact with myselves had to depend on a coincidence of apartnesses from Selene.

I regretted this keenly. Yet there was Selene to comfort me. We reveled all day and reveled all night. When fatigue overcame us we grabbed a two-hour deepsleep wire and caught up with ourselves, and then we started over. I plumbed the limits of ecstasy. I believe it was like that for her.

Though lacking my unique advantage, I also played the market that week. Partly it was compulsion: my plungings had become obsessive. Partly, too, it was at Selene’s urgings. “Don’t you neglect your work for me,” she purred. “I don’t want to stand in the way of making money.”

Money, I was discovering, fascinated her nearly as intensely as it did me. Another evidence of compatibility. She knew a good deal about the market herself and looked on, an excited spectator, as I each day shuffled my portfolio.

The market was closed Monday: Columbus Day. Tuesday, queasily operating in the dark, I sold Arizona Agrochemical, Consolidated Luna, Eastern Electric Energy, and Western Offshore, reinvesting the proceeds in large blocks of Meccano Leasing and Holoscan Dynamics. Wednesday’s Tribune, to my chagrin, brought me the news that Consolidated Luna had received the Copernicus franchise and had risen 9 points in the final hour of Tuesday’s trading. Meccano Leasing, though, had been rebuffed in the Robomation takeover bid and was off 4 since I had bought it. I got through to my broker in a hurry and sold Meccano, which was down even further that morning. My loss was $125 000—plus $250,000 more that I had dropped by selling Consolidated Luna too soon. After the market closed on Wednesday, the directors of Meccano Leasing unexpectedly declared a five-for-two split and a special dividend in the form of a one-for-ten distribution of cumulative participating high-depreciation warrants. Meccano regained its entire Tuesday-Wednesday loss and tacked on 5 points beyond.

I concealed the details of this from Selene. She saw only the glamor of my speculations: the telephone calls, the quick computations, the movements of hundreds of thousands of dollars. I hid the hideous botch from her, knowing it might damage my prestige.

On Thursday, feeling battered and looking for the safety of a utility, I picked up 10,000 Southwest Power and Fusion at 38, only hours before the explosion of SPF’s magnetohydrodynamic generating station in Las Cruces which destroyed half a county and neatly peeled $90,000 off the value of my investment when the stock finally traded after a delayed opening, on Friday. I sold. Later came news that SPF’s insurance would cover everything. SPF recovered, whereas Holoscan Dynamics plummeted 11, costing me $140,000 more. I had not known that Holoscan’s insurance subsidiary was the chief underwriter for SPF’s disaster coverage.

All told, that week I shed more than $500,000. My brokers were stunned. I had a reputation for infallibility among them. Most of them had become wealthy simply by duplicating my own transactions for their own accounts.

“Sweetheart, what happened?” they asked me.

My losses the following week came to $1,250,000. Still no news from (now + n). My brokers felt I needed a vacation. Even Selene knew I was losing heavily, by now. Curiously, my run of bad luck seemed to intensify her passion for me. Perhaps it made me look tragic and Byronic to be getting hit so hard.

We spent wild days and wilder nights. I lived in a throbbing haze of sensuality. Wherever we went we were the center of all attention. We had that burnished sheen that only great lovers have. We radiated a glow of delight all up and down the spectrum.

I was losing millions.

The more I lost, the more reckless my plunges became, and the deeper my losses became.

I was in real danger of being wiped out, if this went on.

I had to get away from her.

Monday, October 26. Selene has taken the deepsleep wire and in
the next two hours will flush away the fatigue of three riotous days
and nights without rest. I have only pretended to take the wire. When she goes under, I rise. I dress. I pack. I scrawl a note for her. “Business trip. Back soon. Love, love, love, love.” I catch noon rocket for Istanbul.

Minarets, mosques, Byzantine temples. Shunning the sleep wire, I spend next day and a half in bed in ordinary repose. I wake and it is forty-eight hours since parting from Selene. Desolation! Bitter solitude! But I feel (now + n) invading my mind.

“Take this down,” he says brusquely. “Buy 5,000 FSP, 800 CCG, 150 LC, 200 T, 1,000 TXN, 100 BVI. Go short 200 BA, 500 UCM, 200 LOC. Clear? Read back to me.”

I read back. Then I phone in my orders. I hardly care what the ticker symbols stand for. If (now + n) says to do, I do.

An hour and a half later the switchboard tells me, “A Miss Hughes to see you, sir.”

She has traced me! Calamitas calamitatum! “Tell her I’m not here,” I say. I flee to the roofport. By copter I get away. Commercial jet shortly brings me to Tel Aviv. I take a room at the Hilton and give absolute instructions am not to be disturbed. Meals only to room, also Herald Trib every day, otherwise no interruptions.

I study the market action. On Friday I am able to reach (now – n). “Take this down,” I say brusquely. “Buy 5,000 FSP, 800 CCG, 140 LC, 200 T—”

Then I call brokers. I close out Wednesday’s longs and cover Wednesday’s shorts. My profit is over a million. I am recouping. But I miss her terribly.

I spend agonizing weekend of loneliness in hotel room.

Monday. Comes voice of (now + n) out of Wednesday, with new instructions. I obey. At lunchtime, under lid of my barley soup, floats note from her. “Darling, why are you running away from me? I love you to the ninth power. S.”

I get out of hotel disguised as bellhop and take El Al jet to Cairo. Tense, jittery, I join tourist group sightseeing pyramids, much out of character. Tour is conducted in Hebrew; serves me right. I lock self in hotel. Herald Tribune available. On Wednesday I send instructions to me of Monday, (now – n). I await instructions from me of Friday, (now + n). Instead I get muddled transmissions, noise, confusions. What is wrong? Where to flee now? Brasilia, McMurdo Sound, Anchorage, Irkutsk, Maograd? She will find me. She has her resources. There are few secrets to one who has the will to surmount them. How does she find me?

She finds me.

Note comes: “I am at Abu Simbel to wait for you. Meet me there on Friday afternoon or I throw myself from Rameses’ leftmost head at sundown. Love. Desperate. S.”

I am defeated. She will bankrupt me, but I must have her.

On Friday I go to Abu Simbel.

She stood atop the monument, luscious in windswept white cotton.

“I knew you’d come,” she said.

“What else could I do?”

We kissed. Her suppleness inflamed me. The sun blazed toward a descent into the western desert.

“Why have you been running away from me?” she asked. “What did I do wrong? Why did you stop loving me?”

“I never stopped loving you,” I said.

“Then—why?”

“I will tell you,” I said, “a secret I have shared with no human being other than myselves.”

Words tumbled out. I told all. The discovery of my gift, the early chaos of sensory bombardment from other times, the bafflement of living one hour ahead of time and one hour behind time as well as in the present. The months of discipline needed to develop my gift. The fierce struggle to extend the range of extrasensory perception to five hours, ten, twenty-four, forty-eight. The joy of playing the market and never losing. The intricate systems of speculation; the self-imposed limits to keep me from ending up with all the assets in the world; the pleasures of immense wealth. The loneliness, too. And the supremacy of the night when I met her.

Then I said, “When I’m with you it doesn’t work. I can’t communicate with myselves. I lost millions in the last couple of weeks, playing the market the regular way. You were breaking me.”

“The amulet,” she said. “It does it. It absorbs psionic energy. It suppresses the psi field.”

“I thought it was that. But who ever heard of such a thing? Where did you get it, Selene? Why do you wear it?”

“I got it far, far from here,” said Selene. “I wear it to protect myself.”

“Against what?”

“Against my own gift. My terrible gift, my nightmare gift, my curse of a gift. But if I must choose between my amulet and my love it is no choice. I love you, Aram, I love you, I love you!”

She seized the metal disk, ripped it from the chain around her neck, hurled it over the brink of the monument. It fluttered through the twilight sky and was gone.

I felt (now – n) and (now + n) return.

Selene vanished.

For an hour I stood alone atop Abu Simbel, motionless, baffled, stunned. Suddenly Selene was back. She clutched my arm and whispered, “Quick! Let’s go to the hotel!”

“Where have you been?”

“Next Tuesday,” she said. “I oscillate in time.”

“What?”

“The amulet damped my oscillations. It anchored me to the timeline in the present. I got it in 2459 A.D. Someone I knew there, someone who cared very deeply for me. It was his parting gift, and he gave it knowing we could never meet again. But now—”

She vanished. Gone eighteen minutes.

“I was back in last Tuesday,” she said, returning. “I phoned myself and said I should follow you to Istanbul, and then to Tel Aviv, and then to Egypt. You see how I found you?”

We hurried to her hotel overlooking the Nile. We made love, and an instant before the climax I found myself alone in bed. (Now + n) spoke to me and said, “She’s been here with me. She should be on her way back to you.” Selene returned. “I went to—”

“—this coming Sunday,” I said. “I know. Can’t you control the oscillations at all?”

“No. I’m swinging free. When the momentum really builds up, I cover centuries. It’s torture, Aram. Life has no sequence, no structure. Hold me tight!”

In a frenzy we finished what we could not finish before. We lay clasped close, exhausted. “What will we do?” I cried. “I can’t let you oscillate like this!”

“You must. I can’t let you sacrifice your livelihood!”

“But—”

She was gone.

I rose and dressed and hurried back to Abu Simbel. In the hours before dawn I searched the sands beside the Nile, crawling, sifting, probing. As the sun’s rays crested the mountain I found the amulet. I rushed to the hotel. Selene had reappeared.

“Put it on,” I commanded.

“I won’t. I can’t deprive you of—”

“Put it on.”

She disappeared. (Now + n) said, “Never fear. All will work out wondrous well.”

Selene came back. “I was in the Friday after next,” she said. “I had an idea that will save everything.”

“No ideas. Put the amulet on.”

She shook her head. “I brought you a present,” she said, and handed me a copy of the Herald Tribune, dated the Friday after next. Oscillation seized her. She went and came and handed me November 19’s newspaper. Her eyes were bright with excitement. She vanished. She brought me the Herald Tribune of November 8. Of December 4. Of November 11. Of January 18, 1988. Of December 11. Of March 5, 1988. Of December 22. Of June 16, 1997. Of December 14. Of September 8, 1990. “Enough!” I said. “Enough!” She continued to swing through time. The stack of papers grew. “I love you,” she gasped, and handed me a transparent cube one inch high. “The Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2206,” she explained. “I couldn’t get the machine that reads it. Sorry.” She was gone. She brought me more Herald Tribunes, many dates, 1988-2002. Then a whole microreel. At last she sank down, dazed, exhausted, and said, “Give me the amulet. It must be within twelve inches of my body to neutralize my field.” I slipped the disk into her palm. “Kiss me,” Selene murmured.

And so. She wears her amulet; we are inseparable; I have no contact with my other selves. In handling my investments I merely consult my file of newspapers, which I have reduced to minicap size and carry in the bezel of a ring I wear. For safety’s sake Selene carries a duplicate.

We are very happy. We are very wealthy.

Is only one dilemma. Neither of us use the special gift with which we were born. Evolution would not have produced such things in us if they were not to be used. What risks do we run by thwarting evolution’s design?

I bitterly miss the use of my power, which her amulet negates. Even the company of supreme Selene does not wholly compensate for the loss of the harmoniousness that was

(now – n)

(now)

(now + n)

I could, of course, simply arrange to be away from Selene for an hour here, an hour there, and reopen that contact. I could even have continued playing the market that way, setting aside a transmission hour every forty-eight hours outside of amulet range. But it is the continuous contact that I miss. The always presence of my other selves. If I have that contact, Selene is condemned to oscillate, or else we must part.

I wish also to find some way that her gift will be not terror but joy for her.

Is maybe a solution. Can extrasensory gifts be induced by proximity? Can Selene’s oscillation pass to me? I struggle to acquire it. We work together to give me her gift. Just today I felt myself move, perhaps a microsecond into the future, then a microsecond into the past. Selene said I definitely seemed to blur.

Who knows? Will success be ours?

I think yes. I think love will triumph. I think I will learn the secret, and we will coordinate our vanishings, Selene and I, and we will oscillate as one, we will swing together through time, we will soar, we will speed hand in hand across the millennia. She can discard her amulet once I am able to go with her on her journeys.

Pray for us, (now + n), my brother, my other self, and one day soon perhaps I will come to you and shake you by the hand.

Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another

A curious phenomenon of American science fiction publishing in the late 1980s, one which will probably not be dealt with in a kindly way by future historians of the field, was the “shared world” anthology. I use the past tense for it because the notion of assembling a group of writers to produce stories set in a common background defined by someone else has largely gone out of fashion today. But for a time in 1987 and thereabouts it began to seem as though everything in science fiction was becoming part of some shared-world project.

I will concede that some excellent fiction came out of the various shared-world enterprises, though mainly they produced a mountain of junk. The idea itself was far from new in the 1980s; it goes back at least to 1952 and The Petrified Planet, a book in which the scientist John D. Clark devised specifications for an unusual planet and the writers Fletcher Pratt, H. Beam Piper, and Judith Merril produced superb novellas set on that world. Several similar books followed in the next few years.

In the late 1960s I revived the idea with a book called Three for Tomorrow—fiction by James Blish, Roger Zelazny, and myself, based on a theme proposed by Arthur C. Clarke—and I did three or four others later on. In 1975 came Harlan Ellison’s Medea, an elaborate and brilliantly conceived colossus of a book that made use of the talents of Frank Herbert, Theodore Sturgeon, Poul Anderson, and a whole galaxy of other writers of that stature. But the real deluge of shared-world projects began a few years afterward, in the wake of the vast commercial success of Robert Asprin’s fantasy series, Thieves’ World. Suddenly, every publisher in the business wanted to duplicate the Thieves’ World bonanza, and from all sides appeared platoons of hastily conceived imitators.

I dabbled in a couple of these books myself—“Gilgamesh in the Outback,” a story that I wrote for one of them, won a Hugo, in fact—but my enthusiasm for the shared-world whirl cooled quickly once I perceived how shapeless and incoherent most of the books were. The writers tended not to pay much attention to the specifications, and simply went off in their own directions; the editors, generally, were too lazy or too cynical or simply too incompetent to do anything about it; and the books became formless jumbles of incompatible work.

Before I became fully aware of that, though, I let myself be seduced into editing one shared-world series myself. The initiator of this was Jim Baen, the publisher of Baen Books, whose idea centered around pitting computer-generated simulacra of historical figures against each other in intellectual conflict. That appealed to me considerably, and I agreed to work out the concept in detail and serve as the series’ general editor.

I produced an elaborate prospectus outlining the historical background of the near-future world in which these simulacra would hold forth; I rounded up a group of capable writers; and to ensure that the book would unfold with consistency to my underlying vision, I wrote the first story myself in October of 1987, a 15,000-word opus for which I chose Francisco Pizarro and Socrates as my protagonists.

The whole thing was, I have to admit, a matter of commerce rather than art: just a job of work, to fill somebody’s current publishing need. But a writer’s intention and the ultimate result of his work don’t bear any necessary relationship. In this case I was surprised and delighted to find the story taking on unanticipated life as I wrote, and what might have been a routine job of word-spinning turned out, unexpectedly, to be rather more than that when I was done with it.

Gardner Dozois published it in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and then I used it as the lead story in the shared-world anthology, Time Gate. Dozois picked it for his 1989 Year’s Best Science Fiction Collection, and in 1990 it was a finalist on both the Nebula and Hugo ballots—one of my most widely liked stories in a long time. The Nebula eluded me, but at the World Science Fiction Convention in Holland in Augus, 1990, “Enter a Soldier” brought me a Hugo Award, my fourth, as the year’s best novelette.

Even so, I decided soon after to avoid further involvement in the shared-world milieu, and have done no work of that sort in many years. Perhaps it was always unrealistic to think that any team of gifted, independent-minded writers could produce what is in essence a successful collaborative novel that has been designed by someone else. But my brief sojourn as editor of Time Gate did, at least, produce a story that I now see was one of the major achievements of my career.

It might be heaven. Certainly it wasn’t Spain and he doubted it could be Peru. He seemed to be floating, suspended midway between nothing and nothing. There was a shimmering golden sky far above him and a misty, turbulent sea of white clouds boiling far below. When he looked down he saw his legs and his feet dangling like child’s toys above an unfathomable abyss, and the sight of it made him want to puke, but there was nothing in him for the puking. He was hollow. He was made of air. Even the old ache in his knee was gone, and so was the everlasting dull burning in the fleshy part of his arm where the Indian’s little arrow had taken him, long ago on the shore of that island of pearls, up by Panama.

It was as if he had been born again, sixty years old but freed of all the harm that his body had experienced and all its myriad accumulated
injuries: freed, one might almost say, of his body itself.

“Gonzalo?” he called. “Hernando?”

Blurred dreamy echoes answered him. And then silence.

“Mother of God, am I dead?”

No. No. He had never been able to imagine death. An end to all striving? A place where nothing moved? A great emptiness, a pit without a bottom? Was this place the place of death, then? He had no way of knowing. He needed to ask the holy fathers about this.

“Boy, where are my priests? Boy?”

He looked about for his page. But all he saw was blinding whorls of light coiling off to infinity on all sides. The sight was beautiful but troublesome. It was hard for him to deny that he had died, seeing himself afloat like this in a realm of air and light. Died and gone to heaven. This is heaven, yes, surely, surely. What else could it be?

So it was true, that if you took the Mass and took the Christ faithfully into yourself and served Him well you would be saved from your sins, you would be forgiven, you would be cleansed. He had wondered about that. But he wasn’t ready yet to be dead, all the same. The thought of it was sickening and infuriating. There was so much yet to be done. And he had no memory even of being ill. He searched his body for wounds. No, no wounds. Not anywhere. Strange. Again he looked around. He was alone here. No one to be seen, not his page, nor his brother, nor De Soto, nor the priests, nor anyone. “Fray Marcos! Fray Vicente! Can’t you hear me? Damn you, where are you? Mother of God! Holy Mother, blessed among women! Damn you, Fray Vicente, tell me—tell me—”

His voice sounded all wrong: too thick, too deep, a stranger’s voice. The words fought with his tongue and came from his lips malformed and lame, not the good crisp Spanish of Estremadura but something shameful and odd. What he heard was like the spluttering foppishness of Madrid or even the furry babble that they spoke in Barcelona; why, he might almost be a Portuguese, so coarse and clownish was his way of shaping his speech.

He said carefully and slowly, “I am the Governor and Captain-General of New Castile.”

That came out no better, a laughable noise.

“Adelantado—Alguacil Mayor—Marques de la Conquista—”

The strangeness of his new way of speech made insults of his own titles. It was like being tongue-tied. He felt streams of hot sweat breaking out on his skin from the effort of trying to frame his words properly; but when he put his hand to his forehead to brush the sweat away before it could run into his eyes he seemed dry to the touch, and he was not entirely sure he could feel himself at all.

He took a deep breath. “I am Francisco Pizarro!” he roared, letting the name burst desperately from him like water breaching a rotten dam.

The echo came back, deep, rumbling, mocking. Frantheethco. Peetharro.

That too. Even his own name, idiotically garbled.

“O great God!” he cried. “Saints and angels!”

More garbled noises. Nothing would come out as it should. He had never known the arts of reading or writing; now it seemed that true speech itself was being taken from him. He began to wonder whether he had been right about this being heaven, supernal radiance or no. There was a curse on his tongue; a demon, perhaps, held it pinched in his claws. Was this hell, then? A very beautiful place, but hell nevertheless?

He shrugged. Heaven or hell, it made no difference. He was beginning to grow more calm, beginning to accept and take stock. He knew—had learned, long ago—that there was nothing to gain from raging against that which could not be helped, even less from panic in the face of the unknown. He was here, that was all there was to it—wherever here was—and he must find a place for himself, and not this place, floating here between nothing and nothing. He had been in hells before, small hells, hells on Earth. That barren isle called Gallo, where the sun cooked you in your own skin and there was nothing to eat but crabs that had the taste of dog-dung. And that dismal swamp at the mouth of the Rio Biru, where the rain fell in rivers and the trees reached down to cut you like swords. And the mountains he had crossed with his army, where the snow was so cold that it burned, and the air went into your throat like a dagger at every breath. He had come forth from those, and they had been worse than this. Here there was no pain and no danger; here there was only soothing light and a strange absence of all discomfort. He began to move forward. He was walking on air. Look, look, he thought, I am walking on air! Then he said it out loud. “I am walking on air,” he announced, and laughed at the way the words emerged from him. “Santiago! Walking on air! But why not? I am Pizarro!” He shouted it with all his might, “Pizarro! Pizarro!” and waited for it to come back to him.

Peetharro. Peetharro.

He laughed. He kept on walking.

Tanner sat hunched forward in the vast sparkling sphere that was the ninth-floor imaging lab, watching the little figure at the distant center of the holotank strut and preen. Lew Richardson, crouching beside him with both hands thrust into the data gloves so that he could feed instructions to the permutation network, seemed almost not to be breathing—seemed to be just one more part of the network, in fact.

But that was Richardson’s way, Tanner thought: total absorption in the task at hand. Tanner envied him that. They were very different sorts of men. Richardson lived for his programming and nothing but his programming. It was his grand passion. Tanner had never quite been able to understand people who were driven by grand passions. Richardson was like some throwback to an earlier age, an age when things had really mattered, an age when you were able to have some faith in the significance of your own endeavors.

“How do you like the armor?” Richardson asked. “The armor’s very fine, I think. We got it from old engravings. It has real flair.”

“Just the thing for tropical climates,” said Tanner. “A nice tin suit with matching helmet.”

He coughed and shifted about irritably in his seat. The demonstration had been going on for half an hour without anything that seemed to be of any importance happening—just the minuscule image of the bearded man in Spanish armor tramping back and forth across the glowing field—and he was beginning to get impatient.

Richardson didn’t seem to notice the harshness in Tanner’s voice or the restlessness of his movements. He went on making small adjustments. He was a small man himself, neat and precise in dress and appearance, with faded blond hair and pale blue eyes and a thin, straight mouth. Tanner felt huge and shambling beside him. In theory Tanner had authority over Richardson’s research projects, but in fact he always had simply permitted Richardson to do as he pleased. This time, though, it might be necessary finally to rein him in a little.

This was the twelfth or thirteenth demonstration that Richardson had subjected him to since he had begun fooling around with this historical-simulation business. The others all had been disasters of one kind or another, and Tanner expected that this one would finish the same way. And basically Tanner was growing uneasy about the project that he once had given his stamp of approval to, so long ago. It was getting harder and harder to go on believing that all this work served any useful purpose. Why had it been allowed to absorb so much of Richardson’s group’s time and so much of the lab’s research budget for so many months? What possible value was it going to have for anybody? What possible use?

It’s just a game, Tanner thought. One more desperate meaningless technological stunt, one more pointless pirouette in a meaningless ballet. The expenditure of vast resources on a display of ingenuity for ingenuity’s sake and nothing else: now there’s decadence for you.

The tiny image in the holotank suddenly began to lose color and definition.

“Uh-oh,” Tanner said. “There it goes. Like all the others.”

But Richardson shook his head. “This time it’s different, Harry.”

“You think?”

“We aren’t losing him. He’s simply moving around in there of his own volition, getting beyond our tracking parameters. Which means that we’ve achieved the high level of autonomy that we were shooting for.”

“Volition, Lew? Autonomy?”

“You know that those are our goals.”

“Yes, I know what our goals are supposed to be,” said Tanner, with some annoyance. “I’m simply not convinced that a loss of focus is a proof that you’ve got volition.”

“Here,” Richardson said. “I’ll cut in the stochastic tracking program. He moves freely, we freely follow him.” Into the computer ear in his lapel he said, “Give me a gain boost, will you?” He made a quick flicking gesture with his left middle finger to indicate the quantitative level.

The little figure in ornate armor and pointed boots grew sharp again. Tanner could see fine details on the armor, the plumed helmet, the tapering shoulder-pieces, the joints at the elbows, the intricate pommel of his sword. He was marching from left to right in a steady hip-rolling way, like a man who was climbing the tallest mountain in the world and didn’t mean to break his stride until he was across the summit. The fact that he was
walking in what appeared to be mid-air seemed not to trouble him at all.

“There he is,” Richardson said grandly. “We’ve got him back, all right? The conqueror of Peru, before your very eyes, in the flesh. So to speak.”

Tanner nodded. Pizarro, yes, before his very eyes. And he had to admit that what he saw was impressive and even, somehow, moving. Something about the dogged way with which that small armored figure was moving across the gleaming pearly field of the holotank aroused a kind of sympathy in him. That little man was entirely imaginary, but he didn’t seem to know that, or if he did he wasn’t letting it stop him for a moment: he went plugging on, and on and on, as if he intended actually to get somewhere. Watching that, Tanner was oddly captivated by it, and found himself surprised suddenly to discover that his interest in the entire project was beginning to rekindle.

“Can you make him any bigger?” he asked. “I want to see his face.”

“I can make him big as life,” Richardson said. “Bigger. Any size you like. Here.”

He flicked a finger and the hologram of Pizarro expanded instantaneously to a height of about two meters. The Spaniard halted in mid-stride as though he might actually be aware of the imaging change.

That can’t be possible, Tanner thought. That isn’t a living consciousness out there. Or is it?

Pizarro stood poised easily in mid-air, glowering, shading his eyes as if staring into a dazzling glow. There were brilliant streaks of color in the air all around him, like an aurora. He was a tall, lean man in late middle age with a grizzled beard and a hard, angular face. His lips were thin, his nose was sharp, his eyes were cold, shrewd, keen. It seemed to Tanner that those eyes had come to rest on him, and he felt a chill.

My God, Tanner thought, he’s real.

It had been a French program to begin with, something developed at the Centre Mondiale de la Computation in Lyons about the year 2119. The French had some truly splendid minds working in software in those days. They worked up astounding programs, and then nobody did anything with them. That was their version of Century Twenty-Two Malaise.

The French programmers’ idea was to use holograms of actual historical personages to dress up the son et lumiere tourist events at the great monuments of their national history. Not just preprogrammed robot mockups of the old Disneyland kind, which would stand around in front of Notre Dame or the Arc de Triomphe or the Eiffel Tower and deliver canned spiels, but apparent reincarnations of the genuine great ones, who could freely walk and talk and answer questions and make little quips. Imagine Louis XIV demonstrating the fountains of Versailles, they said, or Picasso leading a tour of Paris museums, or Sartre sitting in his Left Bank cafe exchanging existential bons mots with passersby! Napoleon! Joan of Arc! Alexandre Dumas! Perhaps the simulations could do even more than that: perhaps they could be designed so well that they would be able to extend and embellish the achievements of their original lifetimes with new accomplishments, a fresh spate of paintings and novels and works of philosophy and great architectural visions by vanished masters.

The concept was simple enough in essence. Write an intelligencing program that could absorb data, digest it, correlate it, and generate further programs based on what you had given it. No real difficulty there. Then start feeding your program with the collected written works—if any—of the person to be simulated: that would provide not only a general sense of his ideas and positions but also of his underlying pattern of approach to situations, his style of thinking—for le style, after all, est l’homme meme. If no collected works happened to be available, why, find works about the subject by his contemporaries, and use those. Next, toss in the totality of the historical record of the subject’s deeds, including all significant subsequent scholarly analyses, making appropriate allowances for conflicts in interpretation—indeed, taking advantages of such conflicts to generate a richer portrait, full of the ambiguities and contradictions that are the inescapable hallmarks of any human being. Now build in substrata of general cultural data of the proper period so that the subject has a loam of references and vocabulary out of which to create thoughts that are appropriate to his place in time and space. Stir. Et voila! Apply a little sophisticated imaging technology and you had a simulation capable of thinking and conversing and behaving as though it is the actual self after which it was patterned.

Of course, this would require a significant chunk of computer power. But that was no problem, in a world where 150-gigaflops networks were standard laboratory items and ten-year-olds carried pencil-sized computers with capacities far beyond the ponderous mainframes of their great-great-grandparents’ day. No, there was no theoretical reason why the French project could not have succeeded. Once the Lyons programmers had worked out the basic intelligencing scheme that was needed to write the rest of the programs, it all should have followed smoothly enough.

Two things went wrong: one rooted in an excess of ambition that may have been a product of the peculiarly French personalities of the original programmers, and the other having to do with an abhorrence of failure typical of the major nations of the mid twenty-second century, of which France was one.

The first was a fatal change of direction that the project underwent in its early phases. The King of Spain was coming to Paris on a visit of state; and the programmers decided that in his honor they would synthesize Don Quixote for him as their initial project. Though the intelligencing program had been designed to simulate only individuals who had actually existed, there seemed no inherent reason why a fictional character as well documented as Don Quixote could not be produced instead. There was Cervantes’ lengthy novel; there was ample background data available on the milieu in which Don Quixote supposedly had lived; there was a vast library of critical analysis of the book and of the Don’s distinctive and flamboyant personality. Why should bringing Don Quixote to life out of a computer be any different from simulating Louis XIV, say, or Moliere, or Cardinal Richelieu? True, they had all existed once, and the knight of La Mancha was a mere figment; but had Cervantes not provided far more detail about Don Quixote’s mind and soul than was known of Richelieu, or Moliere, or Louis XIV?

Indeed he had. The Don—like Oedipus, like Odysseus, like Othello, like David Copperfield—had come to have a reality far more profound and tangible than that of most people who had indeed actually lived. Such characters as those had transcended their fictional origins. But not so far as the computer was concerned. It was able to produce a convincing fabrication of Don Quixote, all right—a gaunt bizarre holographic figure that had all the right mannerisms, that ranted and raved in the expectable way, that referred knowledgeably to Dulcinea and Rosinante and Mambrino’s helmet. The Spanish king was amused and impressed. But to the French the experiment was a failure. They had produced a Don Quixote who was hopelessly locked to the Spain of the late sixteenth century and to the book from which he had sprung. He had no capacity for independent life and thought—no way to perceive the world that had brought him into being, or to comment on it, or to interact with it. There was nothing new or interesting about that. Any actor could dress up in armor and put on a scraggly beard and recite snatches of Cervantes. What had come forth from the computer, after three years of work, was no more than a predictable reprocessing of what had gone into it, sterile, stale.

Which led the Centre Mondial de la Computation to its next fatal step: abandoning the whole thing. Zut! and the project was cancelled without any further attempts. No simulated Picassos, no simulated Napoleons, no Joans of Arc. The Quixote event had soured everyone and no one had the heart to proceed with the work from there. Suddenly it had the taint of failure about it, and France—like Germany, like Australia, like the Han Commercial Sphere, like Brazil, like any of the dynamic centers of the modern world, had a horror of failure. Failure was something to be left to the backward nations or the decadent ones—to the Islamic Socialist Union, say, or the Soviet People’s Republic, or to that slumbering giant, the United States of America. So the historic-personage simulation scheme was put aside.

The French thought so little of it, as a matter of fact, that after letting it lie fallow for a few years they licensed it to a bunch of Americans, who had heard about it somehow and felt it might be amusing to play with.

“You may really have done it this time,” Tanner said.

“Yes. I think we have. After all those false starts.”

Tanner nodded. How often had he come into this room with hopes high, only to see some botch, some inanity, some depressing bungle? Richardson had always had an explanation. Sherlock Holmes hadn’t worked because he was fictional: that was a necessary recheck of the French Quixote project, demonstrating that fictional characters didn’t have the right sort of reality texture to take proper advantage of the program, not enough ambiguity, not enough contradiction. King Arthur had failed for the same reason. Julius Caesar? Too far in the past, maybe: unreliable data, bordering on fiction. Moses? Ditto. Einstein? Too complex, perhaps, for the project in its present level of development: they needed more experience first. Queen Elizabeth I? George Washington? Mozart? We’re learning more each time, Richardson insisted after each failure. This isn’t black magic we’re doing, you know. We aren’t necromancers, we’re programmers, and we have to figure out how to give the program what it needs.

And now Pizarro?

“Why do you want to work with him?” Tanner had asked, five or six months earlier. “A ruthless medieval Spanish imperialist, is what I remember from school. A bloodthirsty despoiler of a great culture. A man without morals, honor, faith—”

“You may be doing him an injustice,” said Richardson. “He’s had a bad press for centuries. And there are things about him that fascinate me.”

“Such as?”

“His drive. His courage. His absolute confidence. The other side of ruthlessness, the good side of it, is a total concentration on your task, an utter unwillingness to be stopped by any obstacle. Whether or not you approve of the things he accomplished, you have to admire a man who—”

“All right,” Tanner said, abruptly growing weary of the whole
enterprise. “Do Pizarro. Whatever you want.”

The months had passed. Richardson gave him vague progress reports, nothing to arouse much hope. But now Tanner stared at the tiny strutting figure in the holotank and the conviction began to grow in him that Richardson finally had figured out how to use the simulation program as it was meant to be used.

“So you’ve actually recreated him, you think? Someone who lived—what, five hundred years ago?”

“He died in 1541,” said Richardson.

“Almost six hundred, then.”

“And he’s not like the others—not simply a recreation of a great figure out of the past who can run through a set of pre-programmed speeches. What we’ve got here, if I’m right, is an artificially generated intelligence which can think for itself in modes other than the ones its programmers think in. Which has more information available to itself, in other words, than we’ve provided it with. That would be the real accomplishment. That’s the fundamental philosophical leap that we were going for when we first got involved with this project. To use the program to give us new programs that are capable of true autonomous thought—a program that can think like Pizarro, instead of like Lew Richardson’s idea of some historian’s idea of how Pizarro might have thought.”

“Yes,” Tanner said.

“Which means we won’t just get back the expectable, the predictable. There’ll be surprises. There’s no way to learn anything, you know, except through surprises. The sudden combination of known components into something brand new. And that’s what I think we’ve managed to bring off here, at long last. Harry, it may be the biggest artificial-intelligence breakthrough ever achieved.”

Tanner pondered that. Was it so? Had they truly done it?

And if they had—

Something new and troubling was beginning to occur to him, much later in the game than it should have. Tanner stared at the holographic figure floating in the center of the tank, that fierce old man with the harsh face and the cold, cruel eyes. He thought about what sort of man he must have been—the man after whom this image had been modeled. A man who was willing to land in South America at age fifty or sixty or whatever he had been, an ignorant illiterate Spanish peasant wearing a suit of ill-fitting armor and waving a rusty sword, and set out to conquer a great empire of millions of people spreading over thousands of miles. Tanner wondered what sort of man would be capable of carrying out a thing like that. Now that man’s eyes were staring into his own and it was a struggle to meet so implacable a gaze.

After a moment he looked away. His left leg began to quiver. He glanced uneasily at Richardson.

“Look at those eyes, Lew. Christ, they’re scary!”

“I know. I designed them myself, from the old prints.”

“Do you think he’s seeing us right now? Can he do that?”

“All he is is software, Harry.”

“He seemed to know it when you expanded the image.”

Richardson shrugged. “He’s very good software. I tell you, he’s got autonomy, he’s got volition. He’s got an electronic mind, is what I’m saying. He may have perceived a transient voltage kick. But there are limits to his perceptions, all the same. I don’t think there’s any way that he can see anything that’s outside the holotank unless it’s fed to him in the form of data he can process, which hasn’t been done.”

“You don’t think? You aren’t sure?”

“Harry. Please.”

“This man conquered the entire enormous Incan empire with fifty soldiers, didn’t he?”

“In fact I believe it was more like a hundred and fifty.”

“Fifty, a hundred fifty, what’s the difference? Who knows what you’ve actually got here? What if you did an even better job than you suspect?”

“What are you saying?”

“What I’m saying is, I’m uneasy all of a sudden. For a long time I didn’t think this project was going to produce anything at all. Suddenly I’m starting to think that maybe it’s going to produce more than we can handle. I don’t want any of your goddamned simulations walking out of the tank and conquering us.”

Richardson turned to him. His face was flushed, but he was grinning. “Harry, Harry! For God’s sake! Five minutes ago you didn’t think we had anything at all here except a tiny picture that wasn’t even in focus. Now you’ve gone so far the other way that you’re imagining the worst kind of—”

“I see his eyes, Lew. I’m worried that his eyes see me.”

“Those aren’t real eyes you’re looking at. What you see is nothing but a graphics program projected into a holotank. There’s no visual capacity there as you understand the concept. His eyes will see you only if I want them to. Right now they don’t.”

“But you can make them see me?”

“I can make them see anything I want them to see. I created him, Harry.”

“With volition. With autonomy.”

“After all this time you start worrying now about these things?”

“It’s my neck on the line if something that you guys on the technical side make runs amok. This autonomy thing suddenly troubles me.”

“I’m still the one with the data gloves,” Richardson said. “I twitch my fingers and he dances. That’s not really Pizarro down there, remember. And that’s no Frankenstein monster either. It’s just a simulation. It’s just so much data, just a bunch of electromagnetic impulses that I can shut off with one movement of my pinkie.”

“Do it, then.”

“Shut him off? But I haven’t begun to show you—”

“Shut him off, and then turn him on,” Tanner said.

Richardson looked bothered. “If you say so, Harry.”

He moved a finger. The image of Pizarro vanished from the holotank. Swirling gray mists moved in it for a moment, and then all was white wool. Tanner felt a quick jolt of guilt, as though he had just ordered the execution of the man in the medieval armor. Richardson gestured again, and color flashed across the tank, and then Pizarro reappeared.

“I just wanted to see how much autonomy your little guy really has,” said Tanner. “Whether he was quick enough to head you off and escape into some other channel before you could cut his power.”

“You really don’t understand how this works at all, do you, Harry?”

“I just wanted to see,” said Tanner again, sullenly. After a moment’s silence he said, “Do you ever feel like God?”

“Like God?”

“You breathed life in. Life of a sort, anyway. But you breathed free will in, too. That’s what this experiment is all about, isn’t it? All your talk about volition and autonomy? You’re trying to recreate a human mind—which means to create it all over again—a mind that can think in its own special way, and come up with its own unique responses to situations, which will not necessarily be the responses that its programmers might anticipate, in fact almost certainly will not be, and which not might be all that desirable or beneficial, either, and you simply have to allow for that risk, just as God, once he gave free will to mankind, knew that He was likely to see all manner of evil deeds being performed by His creations as they exercised that free will—”

“Please, Harry—”

“Listen, is it possible for me to talk with your Pizarro?”

“Why?”

“By way of finding out what you’ve got there. To get some first-hand knowledge of what the project has accomplished. Or you could say I just want to test the quality of the simulation. Whatever. I’d feel more a part of this thing, more aware of what it’s all about in here, if I could have some direct contact with him. Would it be all right if I did that?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Do I have to talk to him in Spanish?”

“In any language you like. There’s an interface, after all. He’ll think it’s his own language coming in, no matter what, sixteenth-century Spanish. And he’ll answer you in what seems like Spanish to him, but you’ll hear it in English.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course.”

“And you don’t mind if I make contact with him?”

“Whatever you like.”

“It won’t upset his calibration, or anything?”

“It won’t do any harm at all, Harry.”

“Fine. Let me talk to him, then.”

There was a disturbance in the air ahead, a shifting, a swirling, like a little whirlwind. Pizarro halted and watched it for a moment, wondering what was coming next. A demon arriving to torment him, maybe. Or an angel. Whatever it was, he was ready for it.

Then a voice out of the whirlwind said, in that same comically exaggerated Castilian Spanish that Pizarro himself had found himself speaking a little while before, “Can you hear me?”

“I hear you, yes. I don’t see you. Where are you?”

“Right in front of you. Wait a second. I’ll show you.” Out of the whirlwind came a strange face that hovered in the middle of nowhere, a face without a body, a lean face, close-shaven, no beard at all, no mustache, the hair cut very short, dark eyes set close together. He had never seen a face like that before.

“What are you?” Pizarro asked. “A demon or an angel?”

“Neither one.” Indeed he didn’t sound very demonic. “A man, just like you.”

“Not much like me, I think. Is a face all there is to you, or do you have a body too?”

“All you see of me is a face?”

“Yes.”

“Wait a second.”

“I will wait as long as I have to. I have plenty of time.”

The face disappeared. Then it returned, attached to the body of a big, wide-shouldered man who was wearing a long loose gray robe, something like a priest’s cassock, but much more ornate, with points of glowing light gleaming on it everywhere. Then the body vanished and Pizarro could see only the face again. He could make no sense out of any of this. He began to understand how the Indians must have felt when the first Spaniards came over the horizon, riding horses, carrying guns, wearing armor.

“You are very strange. Are you an Englishman, maybe?”

“American.”

“Ah,” Pizarro said, as though that made things better. “An American. And what is that?”

The face wavered and blurred for a moment. There was mysterious new agitation in the thick white clouds surrounding it. Then the face grew steady and said, “America is a country north of Peru. A very large country, where many people live.”

“You mean New Spain, which was Mexico, where my kinsman Cortes is Captain-General?”

“North of Mexico. Far to the north of it.”

Pizarro shrugged. “I know nothing of those places. Or not very much. There is an island called Florida, yes? And stories of cities of gold, but I think they are only stories. I found the gold, in Peru. Enough to choke on, I found. Tell me this, am I in heaven now?”

“No.”

“Then this is hell?”

“Not that, either. Where you are—it’s very difficult to explain, actually—”

“I am in America.”

“Yes. In America, yes.”

“And am I dead?”

There was silence for a moment.

“No, not dead,” the voice said uneasily.

“You are lying to me, I think.”

“How could we be speaking with each other, if you were dead?”

Pizarro laughed hoarsely. “Are you asking me? I understand nothing of what is happening to me in this place. Where are my priests? Where is my page? Send me my brother!” He glared. “Well? Why don’t you get them for me?”

“They aren’t here. You’re here all by yourself, Don Francisco.”

“In America. All by myself in your America. Show me your America, then. Is there such a place? Is America all clouds and whorls of light? Where is America? Let me see America. Prove to me that I am in America.”

There was another silence, longer than the last. Then the face disappeared and the wall of white cloud began to boil and churn more fiercely than before. Pizarro stared into the midst of it, feeling a mingled sense of curiosity and annoyance. The face did not reappear. He saw nothing at all. He was being toyed with. He was a prisoner in some strange place and they were treating him like a child, like a dog, like—like an Indian. Perhaps this was the retribution for what he had done to King Atahuallpa, then, that fine noble foolish man who had given himself up to him in all innocence, and whom he had put to death so that he might have the gold of Atahuallpa’s kingdom.

Well, so be it, Pizarro thought. Atahuallpa accepted all that befell him without complaint and without fear, and so will I. Christ will be my guardian, and if there is no Christ, well, then I will have no guardian, and so be it. So be it.

The voice out of the whirlwind said suddenly, “Look, Don Francisco. This is America.”

A picture appeared on the wall of cloud. It was a kind of picture Pizarro had never before encountered or even imagined, one that seemed to open before him like a gate and sweep him in and carry him along through a vista of changing scenes depicted in brilliant, vivid bursts of color. It was like flying high above the land, looking down on an infinite scroll of miracles. He saw vast cities without walls, roadways that unrolled like endless skeins of white ribbon, huge lakes, mighty rivers, gigantic mountains, everything speeding past him so swiftly that he could scarcely absorb any of it. In moments it all became chaotic in his mind: the buildings taller than the highest cathedral spire, the swarming masses of people, the shining metal chariots without beasts to draw them, the stupendous landscapes, the close-packed complexity of it all. Watching all this, he felt the fine old hunger taking possession of him again: he wanted to grasp this strange vast place, and seize it, and clutch it close, and ransack it for all it was worth. But the thought of that was overwhelming. His eyes grew glassy and his heart began to pound so terrifyingly that he supposed he would be able to feel it thumping if he put his hand to the front of his armor. He turned away, muttering, “Enough. Enough.”

The terrifying picture vanished. Gradually the clamor of his heart subsided.

Then he began to laugh.

“Peru!” he cried. “Peru was nothing, next to your America! Peru was a hole! Peru was mud! How ignorant I was! I went to Peru, when there was America, ten thousand times as grand! I wonder what I could find, in America.” He smacked his lips and winked. Then, chuckling, he said, “But don’t be afraid. I won’t try to conquer your America. I’m too old for that now. And perhaps America would have been too much for me, even before. Perhaps.” He grinned savagely at the troubled staring face of the short-haired beardless man, the American. “I really am dead, is this not so? I feel no hunger, I feel no pain, no thirst, when I put my hand to my body I do not feel even my body. I am like one who lies dreaming. But this is no dream. Am I a ghost?”

“Not—exactly.”

“Not exactly a ghost! Not exactly! No one with half the brains of a pig would talk like that. What is that supposed to mean?”

“It’s not easy explaining it in words you would understand, Don Francisco.”

“No, of course not. I am very stupid, as everyone knows, and that is why I conquered Peru, because I was so very stupid. But let it pass. I am not exactly a ghost, but I am dead all the same, right?”

“Well—”

“I am dead, yes. But somehow I have not gone to hell or even to purgatory but I am still in the world, only it is much later now. I have slept as the dead sleep, and now I have awakened in some year that is far beyond my time, and it is the time of America. Is this not so? Who is king now? Who is pope? What year is this? 1750? 1800?”

“The year 2130,” the face said, after some hesitation.

“Ah.” Pizarro tugged thoughtfully at his lower lip. “And the king? Who is king?”

A long pause. “Alfonso is his name,” said the face.

“Alfonso? The kings of Aragon were called Alfonso. The father of Ferdinand, he was Alfonso. Alfonso V, he was.”

“Alfonso XIX is King of Spain now.”

“Ah. Ah. And the pope? Who is pope?”

A pause again. Not to know the name of the pope, immediately upon being asked? How strange. Demon or no, this was a fool.

“Pius,” said the voice, when some time had passed. “Pius XVI.”

“The sixteenth Pius,” said Pizarro somberly. “Jesus and Mary, the sixteenth Pius! What has become of me? Long dead, is what I am. Still unwashed of all my sins. I can feel them clinging to my skin like mud, still. And you are a sorcerer, you American, and you have brought me to life again. Eh? Eh? Is that not so?”

“It is something like that, Don Francisco,” the face admitted.

“So you speak your Spanish strangely because you no longer understand the right way of speaking it. Eh? Even I speak Spanish in a strange way, and I speak it in a voice that does not sound like my own. No one speaks Spanish any more, eh? Eh? Only American, they speak. Eh? But you try to speak Spanish, only it comes out stupidly. And you have caused me to speak the same way, thinking it is the way I spoke, though you are wrong. Well, you can do miracles, but I suppose you can’t do everything perfectly, even in this land of miracles of the year 2130. Eh? Eh?” Pizarro leaned forward intently. “What do you say? You thought I was a fool, because I don’t have reading and writing? I am not so ignorant, eh? I understand things quickly.”

“You understand very quickly indeed.”

“But you have knowledge of many things that are unknown to me. You must know the manner of my death, for example. How strange that is, talking to you of the manner of my death, but you must know it, eh? When did it come to me? And how? Did it come in my sleep? No, no, how could that be? They die in their sleep in Spain, but not in Peru. How was it, then? I was set upon by cowards, was I? Some brother of Atahuallpa, falling upon me as I stepped out of my house? A slave sent by the Inca Manco, or one of those others? No. No. The Indians would not harm me, for all that I did to them. It was the young Almagro who took me down, was it not, in vengeance for his father, or Juan de Herrada, eh? or perhaps even Picado, my own secretary—no, not Picado, he was my man, always—but maybe Alvarado, the young one, Diego—well, one of those, and it would have been sudden, very sudden or I would have been able to stop them—am I right, am I speaking the truth? Tell me. You know these things. Tell me of the manner of my dying.” There was no answer. Pizarro shaded his eyes and peered into the dazzling pearly whiteness. He was no longer able to see the face of the American. “Are you there?” Pizarro said. “Where have you gone? Were you only a dream? American! American! Where have you gone?”

The break in contact was jolting. Tanner sat rigid, hands trembling, lips tightly clamped. Pizarro, in the holotank, was no more than a distant little streak of color now, no larger than his thumb, gesticulating amid the swirling clouds. The vitality of him, the arrogance, the fierce probing curiosity, the powerful hatreds and jealousies, the strength that had come from vast ventures recklessly conceived and desperately seen through to triumph, all the things that were Francisco Pizarro, all that Tanner had felt an instant before—all that had vanished at the flick of a finger.

After a moment or two Tanner felt the shock beginning to ease. He turned toward Richardson.

“What happened?”

“I had to pull you out of there. I didn’t want you telling him anything about how he died.”

“I don’t know how he died.”

“Well, neither does he, and I didn’t want to chance it that you did. There’s no predicting what sort of psychological impact that kind of knowledge might have on him.”

“You talk about him as though he’s alive.”

“Isn’t he?” Richardson said.

“If I said a thing like that, you’d tell me that I was being ignorant and unscientific.”

Richardson smiled faintly. “You’re right. But somehow I trust myself to know what I’m saying when I say that he’s alive. I know I don’t mean it literally and I’m not sure about you. What did you think of him, anyway?”

“He’s amazing,” Tanner said. “Really amazing. The strength of him—I could feel it pouring out at me in waves. And his mind! So quick, the way he picked up on everything. Guessing that he must be in the future. Wanting to know what number pope was in office. Wanting to see what America looked like. And the cockiness of him! Telling me that he’s not up to the conquest of America, that he might have tried for it instead of Peru a few years earlier, but not now, now he’s a little too old for that. Incredible! Nothing could faze him for long, even when he realized that he must have been dead for a long time. Wanting to know how he died, even!” Tanner frowned. “What age did you make him, anyway, when you put this program together?”

“About sixty. Five or six years after the conquest, and a year or two before he died. At the height of his power, that is.”

“I suppose you couldn’t have let him have any knowledge of his actual death. That way he’d be too much like some kind of a ghost.”

“That’s what we thought. We set the cutoff at a time when he had done everything that he had set out to do, when he was the complete Pizarro. But before the end. He didn’t need to know about that. Nobody does. That’s why I had to yank you, you see? In case you knew. And started to tell him.”

Tanner shook his head. “If I ever knew, I’ve forgotten it. How did it happen?”

“Exactly as he guessed: at the hands of his own comrades.”

“So he saw it coming.”

“At the age we made him, he already knew that a civil war had started in South America, that the conquistadores were quarreling over the division of the spoils. We built that much into him. He knows that his partner Almagro has turned against him and been beaten in battle, and that they’ve executed him. What he doesn’t know, but obviously can expect, is that Almagro’s friends are going to break into his house and try to kill him. He’s got it all figured out pretty much as it’s going to happen. As it did happen, I should say.”

“Incredible. To be that shrewd.”

“He was a son of a bitch, yes. But he was a genius too.”

“Was he, really? Or is it that you made him one when you set up the program for him?”

“All we put in were the objective details of his life, patterns of event and response. Plus an overlay of commentary by others, his contemporaries and later historians familiar with the record, providing an extra dimension of character density. Put in enough of that kind of stuff and apparently they add up to the whole personality. It isn’t my personality or that of anybody else who worked on this project, Harry. When you put in Pizarro’s set of events and responses you wind up getting Pizarro. You get the ruthlessness and you get the brilliance. Put in a different set, you get someone else. And what we’ve finally seen, this time, is that when we do our work right we get something out of the computer that’s bigger than the sum of what we put in.”

“Are you sure?”

Richardson said, “Did you notice that he complained about the Spanish that he thought you were speaking?”

“Yes. He said that it sounded strange, that nobody seemed to know how to speak proper Spanish any more. I didn’t quite follow that. Does the interface you built speak lousy Spanish?”

“Evidently it speaks lousy sixteenth-century Spanish,” Richardson said. “Nobody knows what sixteenth-century Spanish actually sounded like. We can only guess. Apparently we didn’t guess very well.”

“But how would he know? You synthesized him in the first place! If you don’t know how Spanish sounded in his time, how would he? All he should know about Spanish, or about anything, is what you put into him.”

“Exactly,” Richardson said.

“But that doesn’t make any sense, Lew!”

“He also said that the Spanish he heard himself speaking was no good, and that his own voice didn’t sound right to him either. That we had caused him to speak this way, thinking that was how he actually spoke, but we were wrong.”

“How could he possibly know what his voice really sounded like, if all he is is a simulation put together by people who don’t have the slightest notion of what his voice really—”

“I don’t have any idea,” said Richardson quietly. “But he does know.”

“Does he? Or is this just some diabolical Pizarro-like game that he’s playing to unsettle us, because that’s in his character as you devised it?”

“I think he does know,” Richardson said.

“Where’s he finding it out, then?”

“It’s there. We don’t know where, but he does. It’s somewhere in the data that we put through the permutation network, even if we don’t know it and even though we couldn’t find it now if we set out to look for it. He can find it. He can’t manufacture that kind of knowledge by magic, but he can assemble what look to us like seemingly irrelevant bits and come up with new information leading to a conclusion which is meaningful to him. That’s what we mean by artificial intelligence, Harry. We’ve finally got a program that works something like the human brain: by leaps of intuition so sudden and broad that they seem inexplicable and non-quantifiable, even if they really aren’t. We’ve fed in enough stuff so that he can assimilate a whole stew of ostensibly unrelated data and come up with new information. We don’t just have a ventriloquist’s dummy in that tank. We’ve got something that thinks it’s Pizarro and thinks like Pizarro and knows things that Pizarro knew and we don’t. Which means we’ve accomplished the qualitative jump in artificial intelligence capacity that we set out to achieve with this project. It’s awesome. I get shivers down my back when I think about it.”

“I do too,” Tanner said. “But not so much from awe as fear.”

“Fear?”

“Knowing now that he has capabilities beyond those he was programm-ed for, how can you be so absolutely certain that he can’t commandeer your network somehow and get himself loose?”

“It’s technically impossible. All he is is electromagnetic impulses. I can pull the plug on him any time I like. There’s nothing to panic over here. Believe me, Harry.”

“I’m trying to.”

“I can show you the schematics. We’ve got a phenomenal simulation in that computer, yes. But it’s still only a simulation. It isn’t a vampire, it isn’t a werewolf, it isn’t anything supernatural. It’s just the best damned computer simulation anyone’s ever made.”

“It makes me uneasy. He makes me uneasy.”

“He should. The power of the man, the indomitable nature of him—why do you think I summoned him up, Harry? He’s got something that we don’t understand in this country any more. I want us to study him. I want us to try to learn what that kind of drive and determination is really like. Now that you’ve talked to him, now that you’ve touched his spirit, of course you’re shaken up by him. He radiates tremendous confidence. He radiates fantastic faith in himself. That kind of man can achieve anything he wants—even conquer the whole Inca empire with a hundred fifty men, or however many it was. But I’m not frightened of what we’ve put together here. And you shouldn’t be either. We should all be damned proud of it. You as well as the people on the technical side. And you will be, too.”

“I hope you’re right,” Tanner said.

“You’ll see.”

For a long moment Tanner stared in silence at the holotank, where the image of Pizarro had been.

“Okay,” said Tanner finally. “Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe I’m sounding like the ignoramus layman that I am. I’ll take it on faith that you’ll be able to keep your phantoms in their boxes.”

“We will,” Richardson said.

“Let’s hope so. All right,” said Tanner. “So what’s your next move?”

Richardson looked puzzled. “My next move?”

“With this project? Where does it go from here?”

Hesitantly Richardson said, “There’s no formal proposal yet. We thought we’d wait until we had approval from you on the initial phase of the work, and then—”

“How does this sound?” Tanner asked. “I’d like to see you start in on another simulation right away.”

“Well—yes, yes, of course—”

“And when you’ve got him worked up, Lew, would it be feasible for you to put him right there in the tank with Pizarro?”

Richardson looked startled. “To have a sort of dialog with him,
you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose we could do that,” Richardson said cautiously. “Should do that. Yes. Yes. A very interesting suggestion, as a matter of fact.” He ventured an uneasy smile. Up till now Tanner had kept in the background of this project, a mere management functionary, an observer, virtually an outsider. This was something new, his interjecting himself into the planning process, and plainly Richardson didn’t know what to make of it. Tanner watched him fidget. After a little pause Richardson said, “Was there anyone particular you had in mind for us to try next?”

“Is that new parallax thing of yours ready to try?” Tanner asked. “The one that’s supposed to compensate for time distortion and myth contamination?”

“Just about. But we haven’t tested—”

“Good,” Tanner said. “Here’s your chance. What about trying for Socrates?”

There was billowing whiteness below him, and on every side, as though all the world were made of fleece. He wondered if it might be snow. That was not something he was really familiar with. It snowed once in a great while in Athens, yes, but usually only a light dusting that melted in the morning sun. Of course he had seen snow aplenty when he had been up north in the war, at Potidaea, in the time of Pericles. But that had been long ago; and that stuff, as best he remembered it, had not been much like this. There was no quality of coldness about the whiteness that surrounded him now. It could just as readily be great banks of clouds.

But what would clouds be doing below him? Clouds, he thought, are mere vapor, air and water, no substance to them at all. Their natural place was overhead. Clouds that gathered at one’s feet had no true quality of cloudness about them.

Snow that had no coldness? Clouds that had no buoyancy? Nothing in this place seemed to possess any quality that was proper to itself in this place, including himself. He seemed to be walking, but his feet touched nothing at all. It was more like moving through air. But how could one move in the air? Aristophanes, in that mercilessly mocking play of his, had sent him floating through the clouds suspended in a basket, and made him say things like, “I am traversing the air and contemplating the sun.” That was Aristophanes’ way of playing with him, and he had not been seriously upset, though his friends had been very hurt on his behalf. Still, that was only a play.

This felt real, insofar as it felt like anything at all.

Perhaps he was dreaming, and the nature of his dream was that he thought he was really doing the things he had done in Aristophanes’ play. What was that lovely line? “I have to suspend my brain and mingle the subtle essence of my mind with this air, which is of the same nature, in order clearly to penetrate the things of heaven.” Good old Aristophanes! Nothing was sacred to him! Except, of course, those things that were truly sacred, such as wisdom, truth, virtue. “I would have discovered nothing if I had remained on the ground and pondered from below the things that are above: for the earth by its force attracts the sap of the mind to itself. It’s the same way with watercress.” And Socrates began to laugh.

He held his hands before him and studied them, the short sturdy fingers, the thick powerful wrists. His hands, yes. His old plain hands that had stood him in good stead all his life, when he had worked as a stonemason as his father had, when he had fought in his city’s wars, when he had trained at the gymnasium. But now when he touched them to his face he felt nothing. There should be a chin here, a forehead, yes, a blunt stubby nose, thick lips; but there was nothing. He was touching air. He could put his hand right through the place where his face should be. He could put one hand against the other, and press with all his might, and feel nothing.

This is a very strange place indeed, he thought.

Perhaps it is that place of pure forms that young Plato liked to speculate about, where everything is perfect and nothing is quite real. Those are ideal clouds all around me, not real ones. This is ideal air upon which I walk. I myself am the ideal Socrates, liberated from my coarse ordinary body. Could it be? Well, maybe so. He stood for a while, considering that possibility. The thought came to him that this might be the life after life, in which case he might meet some of the gods, if there were any gods in the first place, and if he could manage to find them. I would like that, he thought. Perhaps they would be willing to speak with me. Athena would discourse with me on wisdom, or Hermes on speed, or Ares on the nature of courage, or Zeus on—well, whatever Zeus cared to speak on. Of course I would seem to be the merest fool to them, but that would be all right: anyone who expects to hold discourse with the gods as though he were their equal is a fool. I have no such illusion. If there are gods at all, surely they are far superior to me in all respects, for otherwise why would men regard them as gods?

Of course he had serious doubts that the gods existed at all. But if they did, it was reasonable to think that they might be found in a place such as this.

He looked up. The sky was radiant with brilliant golden light. He took a deep breath and smiled and set out across the fleecy nothingness of this airy world to see if he could find the gods.

Tanner said, “What do you think now? Still so pessimistic?”

“It’s too early to say,” said Richardson, looking glum.

“He looks like Socrates, doesn’t he?”

“That was the easy part. We’ve got plenty of descriptions of Socrates that came down from people who knew him, the flat wide nose, the bald head, the thick lips, the short neck. A standard Socrates face that everybody recognizes, just as they do Sherlock Holmes, or Don Quixote. So that’s how we made him look. It doesn’t signify anything important. It’s what’s going on inside his head that’ll determine whether we really have Socrates.”

“He seems calm and good-humored as he wanders around in there. The way a philosopher should.”

“Pizarro seemed just as much of a philosopher when we turned him loose in the tank.”

“Pizarro may be just as much of a philosopher,” Tanner said. “Neither man’s the sort who’d be likely to panic if he found himself in some mysterious place.” Richardson’s negativism was beginning to bother him. It was as if the two men had exchanged places: Richardson now uncertain of the range and power of his own program, Tanner pushing the way on and on toward bigger and better things.

Bleakly Richardson said, “I’m still pretty skeptical. We’ve tried the new parallax filters, yes. But I’m afraid we’re going to run into the same problem the French did with Don Quixote, and that we did with Holmes and Moses and Caesar. There’s too much contamination of the data by myth and fantasy. The Socrates who has come down to us is as much fictional as real, or maybe all fictional. For all we know, Plato made up everything we think we know about him, the same way Conan Doyle made up Holmes. And what we’re going to get, I’m afraid, will be something second-hand, something lifeless, something lacking in the spark of self-directed intelligence that we’re after.”

“But the new filters—”

“Perhaps. Perhaps.”

Tanner shook his head stubbornly. “Holmes and Don Quixote are fiction through and through. They exist in only one dimension, constructed for us by their authors. You cut through the distortions and fantasies of later readers and commentators and all you find underneath is a made-up character. A lot of Socrates may have been invented by Plato for his own purposes, but a lot wasn’t. He really existed. He took an actual part in civic activities in fifth-century Athens. He figures in books by a lot of other contemporaries of his besides Plato’s dialogues. That gives us the parallax you’re looking for, doesn’t it—the view of him from more than one viewpoint?”

“Maybe it does. Maybe not. We got nowhere with Moses. Was he fictional?”

“Who can say? All you had to go by was the Bible. And a ton of Biblical commentary, for whatever that was worth. Not much, apparently.”

“And Caesar? You’re not going to tell me that Caesar wasn’t real,” said Richardson. “But what we have of him is evidently contaminated with myth. When we synthesized him we got nothing but a caricature, and I don’t have to remind you how fast even that broke down into sheer gibberish.”

“Not relevant,” Tanner said. “Caesar was early in the project. You know much more about what you’re doing now. I think this is going to work.”

Richardson’s dogged pessimism, Tanner decided, must be a defense mechanism, designed to insulate himself against the possibility of a new failure. Socrates, after all, hadn’t been Richardson’s own choice. And this was the first time he had used these new enhancement methods, the parallax program that was the latest refinement of the process.

Tanner looked at him. Richardson remained silent.

“Go on,” Tanner said. “Bring up Pizarro and let the two of them talk to each other. Then we’ll find out what sort of Socrates you’ve conjured up here.”

Once again there was a disturbance in the distance, a little dark blur on the pearly horizon, a blotch, a flaw in the gleaming whiteness. Another demon is arriving, Pizarro thought. Or perhaps it is the same one as before, the American, the one who liked to show himself only as a face, with short hair and no beard.

But as this one drew closer Pizarro saw that he was different from the last, short and stocky, with broad shoulders and a deep chest. He was nearly bald and his thick beard was coarse and unkempt. He looked old, at least sixty, maybe sixty-five. He looked very ugly, too, with bulging eyes and a flat nose that had wide, flaring nostrils, and a neck so short that his oversized head seemed to sprout straight from his trunk. All he wore was a thin, ragged brown robe. His feet were bare.

“You, there,” Pizarro called out. “You! Demon! Are you also an American, demon?”

“Your pardon. An Athenian, did you say?”

“American is what I said. That’s what the last one was. Is that where you come from too, demon? America?”

A shrug. “No, I think not. I am of Athens.” There was a curious
mocking twinkle in the demon’s eyes.

“A Greek? This demon is a Greek?”

“I am of Athens,” the ugly one said again. “My name is Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus. I could not tell you what a Greek is, so perhaps I may be one, but I think not, unless a Greek is what you call a man of Athens.” He spoke in a slow, plodding way, like one who was exceedingly stupid. Pizarro had sometimes met men like this before, and in his experience they were generally not as stupid as they wanted to be taken for. He felt caution rising in him. “And I am no demon, but just a plain man: very plain, as you can easily see.”

Pizarro snorted. “You like to chop words, do you?”

“It is not the worst of amusements, my friend,” said the other, and put his hands together behind his back in the most casual way, and stood there calmly, smiling, looking off into the distance, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet.

“Well?” Tanner said. “Do we have Socrates or not? I say that’s the genuine article there.”

Richardson looked up and nodded. He seemed relieved and quizzical both at once. “So far so good, I have to say. He’s coming through real and true.”

“Yes.”

“We may actually have worked past the problem of information contamination that ruined some of the earlier simulations. We’re not getting any of the signal degradation we encountered then.”

“He’s some character, isn’t he?” Tanner said. “I liked the way he just walked right up to Pizarro without the slightest sign of uneasiness. He’s not at all afraid of him.”

“Why should he be?” Richardson asked.

“Wouldn’t you? If you were walking along through God knows what kind of unearthly place, not knowing where you were or how you got there, and suddenly you saw a ferocious-looking bastard like Pizarro standing in front of you wearing full armor and carrying a sword—” Tanner shook his head. “Well, maybe not. He’s Socrates, after all, and Socrates wasn’t afraid of anything except boredom.”

“And Pizarro’s just a simulation. Nothing but software.”

“So you’ve been telling me all along. But Socrates doesn’t know that.”

“True,” Richardson said. He seemed lost in thought a moment. “Perhaps there is some risk.”

“Huh?”

“If our Socrates is anything like the one in Plato, and he surely ought to be, then he’s capable of making a considerable pest of himself. Pizarro may not care for Socrates’ little verbal games. If he doesn’t feel like playing, I suppose there’s a theoretical possibility that he’ll engage in some sort of aggressive response.”

That took Tanner by surprise. He swung around and said, “Are you telling me that there’s some way he can harm Socrates?”

“Who knows?” said Richardson. “In the real world one program can certainly crash another one. Maybe one simulation can be dangerous to another one. This is all new territory for all of us, Harry. Including the people in the tank.”

The tall grizzled-looking man, said, scowling,”You tell me you’re an Athenian, but not a Greek. What sense am I supposed to make of that? I could ask Pedro de Candia, I guess, who is a Greek but not an Athenian. But he’s not here. Perhaps you’re just a fool, eh? Or you think I am.”

“I have no idea what you are. Could it be that you are a god?”

“A god?”

“Yes,” Socrates said. He studied the other impassively. His face was harsh, his gaze was cold. “Perhaps you are Ares. You have a fierce warlike look about you, and you wear armor, but not such armor as I have ever seen. This place is so strange that it might well be the abode of the gods, and that could be a god’s armor you wear, I suppose. If you are Ares, then I salute you with the respect that is due you. I am Socrates of Athens, the stonemason’s son.”

“You talk a lot of nonsense. I don’t know your Ares.”

“Why, the god of war, of course! Everyone knows that. Except barbarians, that is. Are you a barbarian, then? You sound like one, I must say—but then, I seem to sound like a barbarian myself, and I’ve spoken the tongue of Hellas all my life. There are many mysteries here, indeed.”

“Your language problem again,” Tanner said. “Couldn’t you even get classical Greek to come out right? Or are they both speaking Spanish to each other?”

“Pizarro thinks they’re speaking Spanish. Socrates thinks they’re speaking Greek. And of course the Greek is off. We don’t know how anything that was spoken before the age of recordings sounded. All we can do is guess.”

“But can’t you—”

“Shhh,” Richardson said.

Pizarro said, “I may be a bastard, but I’m no barbarian, fellow, so curb your tongue. And let’s have no more blasphemy out of you either.”

“If I blaspheme, forgive me. It is in innocence. Tell me where I trespass, and I will not do it again.”

“This crazy talk of gods. Of my being a god. I’d expect a heathen to talk like that, but not a Greek. But maybe you’re a heathen kind of Greek, and not to be blamed. It’s heathens who see gods everywhere. Do I look like a god to you? I am Francisco Pizarro, of Trujillo in Estremadura, the son of the famous soldier Gonzalo Pizarro, colonel of infantry, who served in the wars of Gonzalo de Cordova whom men call the Great Captain. I have fought some wars myself.”

“Then you are not a god but simply a soldier? Good. I too have been a soldier. I am more at ease with soldiers than with gods, as most people are, I would think.”

“A soldier? You?” Pizarro smiled. This shabby ordinary little man, more bedraggled-looking than any self-respecting groom would be, a soldier? “In which wars?”

“The wars of Athens. I fought at Potidaea, where the Corinthians were making trouble, and withholding the tribute that was due us. It was very cold there, and the siege was long and bleak, but we did our duty. I fought again some years later at Delium against the Boeotians. Laches was our general then, but it went badly for us, and we did our best fighting in retreat. And then,” Socrates said, “when Brasidas was in Amphipolis, and they sent Cleon to drive him out, I—”

“Enough,” said Pizarro with an impatient wave of his hand. “These wars are unknown to me.” A private soldier, a man of the ranks, no doubt. “Well, then this is the place where they send dead soldiers, I suppose.”

“Are we dead, then?”

“Long ago. There’s an Alfonso who’s king, and a Pius who’s pope, and you wouldn’t believe their numbers. Pius the Sixteenth, I think the demon said. And the American said also that it is the year 2130. The last year that I can remember was 1539. What about you?”

The one who called himself Socrates shrugged again. “In Athens we use a different reckoning. But let us say, for argument’s sake, that we are dead. I think that is very likely, considering what sort of place this seems to be, and how airy I find my body to be. So we have died, and this is the life after life. I wonder: is this a place where virtuous men are sent, or those who were not virtuous? Or do all men go to the same place after death, whether they were virtuous or not? What would you say?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet,” said Pizarro.

“Well, were you virtuous in your life, or not?”

“Did I sin, you mean?”

“Yes, we could use that word.”

“Did I sin, he wants to know,” said Pizarro, amazed. “He asks, Was I a sinner? Did I live a virtuous life? What business is that of his?”

“Humor me,” said Socrates. “For the sake of the argument, if you will, allow me a few small questions—”

“So it’s starting,” Tanner said. “You see? You really did do it! Socrates is drawing him into a dialog!”

Richardson’s eyes were glowing. “He is, yes. How marvelous this
is, Harry!”

“Socrates is going to talk rings around him.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” Richardson said.

“I gave as good as I got,” said Pizarro. “If I was injured, I gave injury back. There’s no sin in that. It’s only common sense. A man does what is necessary to survive and to protect his place in the world. Sometimes I might forget a fast day, yes, or use the Lord’s name in vain—those are sins, I suppose, Fray Vicente was always after me for things like that—but does that make me a sinner? I did my penances as soon as I could find time for them. It’s a sinful world and I’m no different from anyone else, so why be harsh on me? Eh? God made me as I am. I’m done in His image. And I have faith in His Son.”

“So you are a virtuous man, then?”

“I’m not a sinner, at any rate. As I told you, if ever I sinned I did my contrition, which made it the same as if the sin hadn’t ever happened.”

“Indeed,” said Socrates. “Then you are a virtuous man and I have come to a good place. But I want to be absolutely sure. Tell me again: is your conscience completely clear?”

“What are you, a confessor?”

“Only an ignorant man seeking understanding. Which you can provide, by taking part with me in the exploration. If I have come to the place of virtuous men, then I must have been virtuous myself when I lived. Ease my mind, therefore, and let me know whether there is anything on your soul that you regret having done.”

Pizarro stirred uneasily. “Well,” he said, “I killed a king.”

“A wicked one? An enemy of your city?”

“No. He was wise and kind.”

“Then you have reason for regret indeed. For surely that is a sin, to kill a wise king.”

“But he was a heathen.”

“A what?”

“He denied God.”

“He denied his own god?” said Socrates. “Then perhaps it was not so wrong to kill him.”

“No. He denied mine. He preferred his own. And so he was a heathen. And all his people were heathens, since they followed his way. That could not be. They were at risk of eternal damnation because they followed him. I killed him for the sake of his people’s souls. I killed him out of the love of God.”

“But would you not say that all gods are the reflection of the one God?”

Pizarro considered that. “In a way, that’s true, I suppose.”

“And is the service of God not itself godly?”

“How could it be anything but godly, Socrates?”

“And you would say that one who serves his god faithfully according to the teachings of his god is behaving in a godly way?”

Frowning, Pizarro said, “Well—if you look at it that way, yes—”

“Then I think the king you killed was a godly man, and by killing him you sinned against God.”

“Wait a minute!”

“But think of it: by serving his god he must also have served yours, for any servant of a god is a servant of the true God who encompasses all our imagined gods.”

“No,” said Pizarro sullenly. “How could he have been a servant of God? He knew nothing of Jesus. He had no understanding of the Trinity. When the priest offered him the Bible, he threw it to the ground in scorn. He was a heathen, Socrates. And so are you. You don’t know anything of these matters at all, if you think that Atahuallpa was godly. Or if you think you’re going to get me to think so.”

“Indeed I have very little knowledge of anything. But you say he was a wise man, and kind?”

“In his heathen way.”

“And a good king to his people?”

“So it seemed. They were a thriving people when I found them.”

“Yet he was not godly.”

“I told you. He had never had the sacraments, and in fact he spurned them right up until the moment of his death, when he accepted baptism. Then he came to be godly. But by then the sentence of death was upon him and it was too late for anything to save him.”

“Baptism? Tell me what that is, Pizarro.”

“A sacrament.”

“And that is?”

“A holy rite. Done with holy water, by a priest. It admits one to Holy Mother Church, and brings forgiveness from sin both original and actual, and gives the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

“You must tell me more about these things another time. So you made this good king godly by this baptism? And then you killed him?”

“Yes.”

“But he was godly when you killed him. Surely, then, to kill him was a sin.”

“He had to die, Socrates!”

“And why was that?” asked the Athenian.

“Socrates is closing in for the kill,” Tanner said. “Watch this!”

“I’m watching. But there isn’t going to be any kill,” said Richardson. “Their basic assumptions are too far apart.”

“You’ll see.”

“Will I?”

Pizarro said, “I’ve already told you why he had to die. It was because his people followed him in all things. And so they worshipped the sun, because he said the sun was God. Their souls would have gone to hell if we had allowed them to continue that way.”

“But if they followed him in all things,” said Socrates, “then surely they would have followed him into baptism, and become godly, and thus done that which was pleasing to you and to your god! Is that not so?”

“No,” said Pizarro, twisting his fingers in his beard.

“Why do you think that?”

“Because the king agreed to be baptized only after we had sentenced him to death. He was in the way, don’t you see? He was an obstacle to our power! So we had to get rid of him. He would never have led his people to the truth of his own free will. That was why we had to kill him. But we didn’t want to kill his soul as well as his body, so we said to him, Look, Atahuallpa, we’re going to put you to death, but if you let us baptize you we’ll strangle you quickly, and if you don’t we’ll burn you alive and it’ll be very slow. So of course he agreed to be baptized, and we strangled him. What choice was there for anybody? He had to die. He still didn’t believe the true faith, as we all well knew. Inside his head he was as big a heathen as ever. But he died a Christian all the same.”

“A what?”

“A Christian! A Christian! One who believes in Jesus Christ the Son of God!”

“The son of God,” Socrates said, sounding puzzled. “And do Christians believe in God too, or only his son?”

“What a fool you are!”

“I would not deny that.”

“There is God the Father, and God the Son, and then there is the
Holy Spirit.”

“Ah,” said Socrates. “And which one did your Atahuallpa believe in, then, when the strangler came for him?”

“None of them.”

“And yet he died a Christian? Without believing in any of your three gods? How is that?”

“Because of the baptism,” said Pizarro in rising annoyance. “What does it matter what he believed? The priest sprinkled the water on him! The priest said the words! If the rite is properly performed, the soul is saved regardless of what the man understands or believes! How else could you baptize an infant? An infant understands nothing and believes nothing—but he becomes a Christian when the water touches him!”

“Much of this is mysterious to me,” said Socrates. “But I see that you regard the king you killed as godly as well as wise, because he was washed by the water your gods require, and so you killed a good king who now lived in the embrace of your gods because of the baptism. Which seems wicked to me; and so this cannot be the place where the virtuous are sent after death, so it must be that I too was not virtuous, or else that I have misunderstood everything about this place and why we are in it.”

“Damn you, are you trying to drive me crazy?” Pizarro roared, fumbling at the hilt of his sword. He drew it and waved it around in fury. “If you don’t shut your mouth I’ll cut you in thirds!”

“Uh-oh,” Tanner said. “So much for the dialectical method.”

Socrates said mildly, “It isn’t my intention to cause you any annoyance, my friend. I’m only trying to learn a few things.”

“You are a fool!”

“That is certainly true, as I have already acknowledged several times. Well, if you mean to strike me with your sword, go ahead. But I don’t think it’ll accomplish very much.”

“Damn you,” Pizarro muttered. He stared at his sword and shook his head. “No. No, it won’t do any good, will it? It would go through you like air. But you’d just stand there and let me try to cut you down, and not even blink, right? Right?” He shook his head. “And yet you aren’t stupid. You argue like the shrewdest priest I’ve ever known.”

“In truth I am stupid,” said Socrates. “I know very little at all. But I strive constantly to attain some understanding of the world, or at least to understand something of myself.”

Pizarro glared at him. “No,” he said. “I won’t buy this false pride of yours. I have a little understanding of people myself, old man. I’m on to your game.”

“What game is that, Pizarro?”

“I can see your arrogance. I see that you believe you’re the wisest man in the world, and that it’s your mission to go around educating poor sword-waving fools like me. And you pose as a fool to disarm your adversaries before you humiliate them.”

“Score one for Pizarro,” Richardson said. “He’s wise to Socrates’ little tricks, all right.”

“Maybe he’s read some Plato,” Tanner suggested.

“He was illiterate.”

“That was then. This is now.”

“Not guilty,” said Richardson. “He’s operating on peasant shrewdness alone, and you damned well know it.”

“I wasn’t being serious,” Tanner said. He leaned forward, peering toward the holotank. “God, what an astonishing thing this is, listening to them going at it. They seem absolutely real.”

“They are,” said Richardson.

“No, Pizarro, I am not wise at all,” Socrates said. “But, stupid as I am, it may be that I am not the least wise man who ever lived.”

“You think you’re wiser than I am, don’t you?”

“How can I say? First tell me how wise you are.”

“Wise enough to begin my life as a bastard tending pigs and finish it as Captain-General of Peru.”

“Ah, then you must be very wise.”

“I think so, yes.”

“Yet you killed a wise king because he wasn’t wise enough to worship God the way you wished him to. Was that so wise of you, Pizarro? How did his people take it, when they found out that their king had been killed?”

“They rose in rebellion against us. They destroyed their own temples and palaces, and hid their gold and silver from us, and burned their bridges, and fought us bitterly.”

“Perhaps you could have made some better use of him by not killing him, do you think?”

“In the long run we conquered them and made them Christians. It was what we intended to accomplish.”

“But the same thing might have been accomplished in a wiser way?”

“Perhaps,” said Pizarro grudgingly. “Still, we accomplished it. That’s the main thing, isn’t it? We did what we set out to do. If there was a better way, so be it. Angels do things perfectly. We were no angels, but we achieved what we came for, and so be it, Socrates. So be it.”

“I’d call that one a draw,” said Tanner.

“Agreed.”

“It’s a terrific game they’re playing.”

“I wonder who we can use to play it next,” said Richardson.

“I wonder what we can do with this besides using it to play games,” said Tanner.

“Let me tell you a story,” said Socrates. “The oracle at Delphi once said to a friend of mine, ‘There is no man wiser than Socrates,’ but I doubted that very much, and it troubled me to hear the oracle saying something that I knew was so far from the truth. So I decided to look for a man who was obviously wiser than I was. There was a politician in Athens who was famous for his wisdom, and I went to him and questioned him about many things. After I had listened to him for a time, I came to see that though many people, and most of all he himself, thought that he was wise, yet he was not wise. He only imagined that he was wise. So I realized that I must be wiser than he. Neither of us knew anything that was really worthwhile, but he knew nothing and thought that he knew, whereas I neither knew anything nor thought that I did. At least on one point, then, I was wiser than he: I didn’t think that I knew what I didn’t know.”

“Is this intended to mock me, Socrates?”

“I feel only the deepest respect for you, friend Pizarro. But let me continue. I went to other wise men, and they too, though sure of their wisdom, could never give me a clear answer to anything. Those whose reputations for wisdom were the highest seemed to have the least of it. I went to the great poets and playwrights. There was wisdom in their works, for the gods had inspired them, but that did not make them wise, though they thought that it had. I went to the stonemasons and potters and other craftsmen. They were wise in their own skills, but most of them seemed to think that that made them wise in everything, which did not appear to be the case. And so it went. I was unable to find anyone who showed true wisdom. So perhaps the oracle was right: that although I am an ignorant man, there is no man wiser than I am. But oracles often are right without their being much value in it, for I think that all she was saying was that no man is wise at all, that wisdom is reserved for the gods. What do you say, Pizarro?”

“I say that you are a great fool, and very ugly besides.”

“You speak the truth. So, then, you are wise after all. And honest.”

“Honest, you say? I won’t lay claim to that. Honesty’s a game for fools. I lied whenever I needed to. I cheated. I went back on my word. I’m not proud of that, mind you. It’s simply what you have to do to get on in the world. You think I wanted to tend pigs all my life? I wanted gold, Socrates! I wanted power over men! I wanted fame!”

“And did you get those things?”

“I got them all.”

“And were they gratifying, Pizarro?”

Pizarro gave Socrates a long look. Then he pursed his lips and spat.

“They were worthless.”

“Were they, do you think?”

“Worthless, yes. I have no illusions about that. But still it was better to have had them than not. In the long run nothing has any meaning, old man. In the long run we’re all dead, the honest man and the villain, the king and the fool. Life’s a cheat. They tell us to strive, to conquer, to gain—and for what? What? For a few years of strutting around. Then it’s taken away, as if it had never been. A cheat, I say.” Pizarro paused. He stared at his hands as though he had never seen them before. “Did I say all that just now? Did I mean it?” He laughed. “Well, I suppose I did. Still, life is all there is, so you want as much of it as you can. Which means getting gold, and power, and fame.”

“Which you had. And apparently have no longer. Friend Pizarro, where are we now?”

“I wish I knew.”

“So do I,” said Socrates soberly.

“He’s real,” Richardson said. “They both are. The bugs are out of the system and we’ve got something spectacular here. Not only is this going to be of value to scholars, I think it’s also going to be a tremendous
entertainment gimmick, Harry.”

“It’s going to be much more than that,” said Tanner in a strange voice.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Tanner said. “But I’m definitely on to something big. It just began to hit me a couple of minutes ago, and it hasn’t really taken shape yet. But it’s something that might change the whole goddamned world.”

Richardson looked amazed and bewildered.

“What the hell are you talking about, Harry?”

Tanner said, “A new way of settling political disputes, maybe. What would you say to a kind of combat-at-arms between one nation and another? Like a medieval tournament, so to speak. With each side using champions that we simulate for them—the greatest minds of all the past, brought back and placed in competition—” He shook his head. “Something like that. It needs a lot of working out, I know. But it’s got possibilities.”

“A medieval tournament—combat-at-arms, using simulations? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Verbal combat. Not actual jousts, for Christ’s sake.”

“I don’t see how—” Richardson began.

“Neither do I, not yet. I wish I hadn’t even spoken of it.”

“But—”

“Later, Lew. Later. Let me think about it a little while more.”

“You don’t have any idea what this place is?” Pizarro said.

“Not at all. But I certainly think this is no longer the world where we once dwelled. Are we dead, then? How can we say? You look alive to me.”

“And you to me.”

“Yet I think we are living some other kind of life. Here, give me your hand. Can you feel mine against yours?”

“No. I can’t feel anything.”

“Nor I. Yet I see two hands clasping. Two old men standing on a cloud, clasping hands.” Socrates laughed. “What a great rogue you are, Pizarro!”

“Yes, of course. But do you know something, Socrates? You are too. A windy old rogue. I like you. There were moments when you were driving me crazy with all your chatter, but you amused me too. Were you really a soldier?”

“When my city asked me, yes.”

“For a soldier, you’re damned innocent about the way the world works, I have to say. But I guess I can teach you a thing or too.”

“Will you?”

“Gladly,” said Pizarro.

“I would be in your debt,” Socrates said.

“Take Atahuallpa,” Pizarro said. “How can I make you understand why I had to kill him? There weren’t even two hundred of us, and twenty-four millions of them, and his word was law, and once he was gone they’d have no one to command them. So of course we had to get rid of him if we wanted to conquer them. And so we did, and then they fell.”

“How simple you make it seem.”

“Simple is what it was. Listen, old man, he would have died sooner or later anyway, wouldn’t he? This way I made his death useful: to God, to the Church, to Spain. And to Francisco Pizarro. Can you understand that?”

“I think so,” said Socrates. “But do you think King Atahuallpa did?”

“Any king would understand such things.”

“Then he should have killed you the moment you set foot in his land.”

“Unless God meant us to conquer him, and allowed him to understand that. Yes. Yes, that must have been what happened.”

“Perhaps he is in this place too, and we could ask him,” said Socrates.

Pizarro’s eyes brightened. “Mother of God, yes! A good idea! And if he didn’t understand, why, I’ll try to explain it to him. Maybe you’ll help me. You know how to talk, how to move words around and around. What do you say? Would you help me?”

“If we meet him, I would like to talk with him,” Socrates said. “I would indeed like to know if he agrees with you on the subject of the usefulness of his being killed by you.”

Grinning, Pizarro said, “Slippery, you are! But I like you. I like you very much. Come. Let’s go look for Atahuallpa.”

The Reality Trip

This one also dates from January 1970. I was thirty-five years old and had spent just about half my life thus far intensely involved with the craft of writing; I had moved from an early apprenticeship as a tireless producer of prefabricated literary merchandise into a maturity of some literary distinction, and the rewards were arriving steadily now, not just financial ones but awards (the Nebula in 1969 for “Passengers,” a Hugo later that year for the novella version of “Nightwings,” and more to come) and accolades (I was named to the presidency of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1967-68, and I was asked to be the Guest of Honor at the World Science Fiction Convention in Heidelberg in 1970). I was about as well established as a writer could be; virtually everything I wrote was on commission now, and my writing time was committed well into the future while my agent fended off additional requests for contributions.

I should have been happy with what I had accomplished, and I suppose that much of the time I was. But there was trouble ahead as I edged into the dreaded mid-life years. Already my extraordinary output of words was slackening from the legendary millions and millions of my youth: I managed only a trifling (for me) 668,000 words in 1969 and there was a further drop in production to 571,000 the next year. This was in part due to the increasing care I was devoting to my work, but also I was encountering mysterious resistances to writing at all—as is shown by the steep drop from 1970’s already reduced output to 1971’s even more sharply reduced 269,000 words, not much more than I would have been able to turn out in a single month in a wild year like 1963. In another few years I would find myself unable to write at all. There was a move to California in my future, too, and a marital breakup, and a host of other complexities were looming on the horizon for me as well. In 1970 I had only an inkling of what lay ahead, but it was enough to make me apprehensive and to intensify the already apparent darkening of the tone of my fiction, a development that would culminate in 1971’s The Book of Skulls and Dying Inside and the dramatic changes in my life that would follow later that year.

Some of that, perhaps, is already evident in “The Reality Trip,” which I wrote for Ejler Jakobsson, the new editor of Galaxy and If. Ejler published it, with amazing swiftness, in the May 1970 issue of If. It’s a lighthearted story with some very dark corners; and certainly it demonstrates that I had come a long way indeed from the simplicities of “Gorgon Planet” and “The Silent Colony” of nearly twenty years earlier, and even from the somber “Road to Nightfall” that stands as a strange beacon almost at the very beginning of my writing career. I see in it a foreshadowing of the volatility to come in my life. A time of changes lay ahead for me; and when it was done I would be a very different person living in a very different place.

I am a reclamation project for her. She lives on my floor of the hotel, a dozen rooms down the hall: a lady poet, private income. No, that makes her sound too old, a middle-aged eccentric. Actually she is no more than thirty. Taller than I am, with long kinky brown hair and a sharp, bony nose that has a bump on the bridge. Eyes are very glossy. A studied raggedness about her dress; carefully chosen shabby clothes. I am in no position really to judge the sexual attractiveness of Earthfolk but I gather from remarks made by men living here that she is not considered good-looking. I pass her often on my way to my room. She smiles fiercely at me. Saying to herself, no doubt, You poor lonely man. Let me help you bear the burden of your unhappy life. Let me show you the meaning of love, for I too know what it is like to be alone.

Or words to that effect. She’s never actually said any such thing. But her intentions are transparent. When she sees me, a kind of hunger comes into her eyes, part maternal, part (I guess) sexual, and her face takes on a wild crazy intensity. Burning with emotion. Her name is Elizabeth Cooke. “Are you fond of poetry, Mr. Knecht?” she asked me this morning, as we creaked upward together in the ancient elevator. And an hour later she knocked at my door. “Something for you to read,” she said. “I wrote them.” A sheaf of large yellow sheets, stapled at the top; poems printed in smeary blue mimeography. The Reality Trip, the collection was headed. Limited Edition: 125 Copies. “You can keep it if you like,” she explained. “I’ve got lots more.” She was wearing bright corduroy slacks and a flimsy pink shawl , through which her breasts plainly showed. Small tapering breasts, not very functional-looking. When she saw me studying them her nostrils flared momentarily and she blinked her eyes three times swiftly. Tokens of lust?

I read the poems. Is it fair for me to offer judgment on them? Even though I’ve lived on this planet eleven of its years, even though my command of colloquial English is quite good, do I really comprehend the inner life of poetry? I thought they were all quite bad. Earnest, plodding poems, capturing what they call slices of life. The world around her, the cruel, brutal, unloving city. Lamenting failure of people to open to one another. The title poem began this way:

He was on the reality trip. Big black man,
bloodshot eyes, bad teeth. Eisenhower jacket,
frayed. Smell of cheap wine. I guess a knife
in his pocket. Looked at me mean. Criminal
record. Rape, child-beating, possession of drugs.

In his head saying, slavemistress bitch, and me in
my head saying, black brother, let’s freak in together,
let’s trip on love—

And so forth. Warm, direct emotion; but is the urge to love all wounded things a sufficient center for poetry? I don’t know. I did put her poems through the scanner and transmit them to Homeworld, although I doubt they’ll learn much from them about Earth. It would flatter Elizabeth to know that while she has few readers here, she has acquired some ninety light-years away. But of course I can’t tell her that.

She came back a short while ago. “Did you like them?” she asked.

“Very much. You have such sympathy for those who suffer.”

I think she expected me to invite her in. I was careful not to look at her breasts this time.

The hotel is on West 23rd Street. It must be over a hundred years old; the façade is practically baroque and the interior shows a kind of genteel decay. The place has a bohemian tradition. Most of its guests are permanent residents and many of them are artists, novelists, playwrights, and such. I have lived here nine years. I know a number of the residents by name, and they me, but I have discouraged any real intimacy, naturally, and everyone has respected that choice. I do not invite others into my room. Sometimes I let myself be invited to visit theirs, since one of my responsibilities on this world is to get to know something of the way Earthfolk live and think. Elizabeth is the first to attempt to cross the invisible barrier of privacy I surround myself with. I’m not sure how I’ll handle that. She moved in about three years ago; her attentions became noticeable perhaps ten months back, and for the last five or six weeks she’s been a great nuisance. Some kind of confrontation is inevitable: either I must tell her to leave me alone, or I will find myself drawn into a situation impossible to tolerate. Perhaps she’ll find someone else to feel even sorrier for, before it comes to that.

My daily routine rarely varies. I rise at seven. First Feeding. Then I clean my skin (my outer one, the Earth-skin, I mean) and dress. From eight to ten I transmit data to Homeworld. Then I go out for the morning field trip: talking to people, buying newspapers, often some library research. At one I return to my room. Second Feeding. I transmit data from two to five. Out again, perhaps to the theater, to a motion picture, to a political meeting. I must soak up the flavor of this planet. Often to saloons; I am equipped for ingesting alcohol, though of course I must get rid of it before it has been in my body very long, and I drink and listen and sometimes argue. At midnight back to my room. Third Feeding. Transmit data from one to four in the morning. Then three hours of sleep, and at seven the cycle begins anew. It is a comforting schedule. I don’t know how many agents Homeworld has on Earth, but I like to think that I’m one of the most diligent and useful. I miss very little. I’ve done good service, and, as they say here, hard work is its own reward. I won’t deny that I hate the physical discomfort of it and frequently give way to real despair over my isolation from my own kind. Sometimes I even think of asking for a transfer to Homeworld. But what would become of me there? What services could I perform? I have shaped my life to one end: that of dwelling among the Earthfolk and reporting on their ways. If I give that up, I am nothing.

Of course there is the physical pain. Which is considerable.

The gravitational pull of Earth is almost twice that of Homeworld. It makes for a leaden life for me. My inner organs always sagging against the lower rim of my carapace. My muscles cracking with strain. Every movement a willed effort. My heart in constant protest. In my eleven years I have as one might expect adapted somewhat to the conditions; I have toughened, I have thickened. I suspect if I were transported instantly to Homeworld now I would be quite giddy, baffled by the lightness of everything. I would leap and soar and stumble, and might even miss this crushing pull of Earth. Yet I doubt that. I suffer here; at all times the weight oppresses me. Not to sound too self-pitying about it. I knew the conditions in advance. I was placed in simulated Earth gravity when I volunteered, and was given a chance to withdraw, and I decided to go anyway. Not realizing that a week under double gravity is not the same thing as a lifetime. I could always have stepped out of the simulation chamber. Not here. The eternal drag on every molecule of me. The pressure. My flesh is always in mourning.

And the outer body I must wear. This cunning disguise. Forever to be swaddled in thick masses of synthetic flesh, smothering me, engulfing me. The soft slippery slap of it against the self within. The elaborate framework that holds it erect, by which I make it move; a forest of struts and braces and servoactuators and cables, in the midst of which I must unendingly huddle, atop my little platform in the gut. Adopting one or another of various uncomfortable positions, constantly shifting and squirming, now jabbing myself on some awkwardly placed projection, now trying to make my inflexible body flexibly to bend. Seeing the world by periscope through mechanical eyes. Enwombed in this mountain of meat. It is a clever thing; it must look convincingly human, since no one has ever doubted me, and it ages ever so slightly from year to year, graying a bit at the temples, thickening a bit at the paunch. It walks. It talks. It takes in food and drink, when it has to. (And deposits them in a removable pouch near my leftmost arm.) And I within it. The hidden chess player; the invisible rider. If I dared, I would periodically strip myself of this cloak of flesh and crawl around my room in my own guise. But it is forbidden. Eleven years now and I have not been outside my protoplasmic housing. I feel sometimes that it has come to adhere to me, that it is no longer merely around me but by now a part of me.

In order to eat I must unseal it at the middle, a process that takes many minutes. Three times a day I unbutton myself so that I can stuff the food concentrates into my true gullet. Faulty design, I call that. They could just as easily have arranged it so I could pop the food into my Earthmouth and have it land in my own digestive tract. I suppose the newer models have that. Excretion is just as troublesome for me; I unseal, reach in, remove the cubes of waste, seal my skin again. Down the toilet with them. A nuisance.

And the loneliness! To look at the stars and know Homeworld is out there somewhere! To think of all the others, mating, chanting, dividing, abstracting, while I live out my days in this crumbling hotel on an alien planet, tugged down by gravity and locked within a cramped counterfeit body—always alone, always pretending that I am not what I am and that I am what I am not, spying, questioning, recording, reporting, coping with the misery of solitude, hunting for the comforts of philosophy—

In all of this there is only one real consolation, aside, that is, from the pleasure of knowing that I am of service to Homeworld. The atmosphere of New York City grows grimier every year. The streets are full of crude vehicles belching undigested hydrocarbons. To the Earthfolk, this stuff is pollution, and they mutter worriedly about it. To me it is joy. It is the only touch of Homeworld here: that sweet soup of organic compounds adrift in the air. It intoxicates me. I walk down the street breathing deeply, sucking the good molecules through my false nostrils to my authentic lungs. The natives must think I’m insane. Tripping on auto exhaust! Can I get arrested for over-enthusiastic public breathing? Will they pull me in for a mental checkup?

Elizabeth Cooke continues to waft wistful attentions at me. Smiles in the hallway. Hopeful gleam of the eyes. “Perhaps we can have dinner together some night soon, Mr. Knecht. I know we’d have so much to talk about. And maybe you’d like to see the new poems I’ve been doing.” She is trembling. Eyelids flickering tensely; head held rigid on long neck. I know she sometimes has men in her room, so it can’t be out of loneliness or frustration that she’s cultivating me. And I doubt that she’s sexually attracted to my outer self. I believe I’m being accurate when I say that women don’t consider me sexually magnetic. No, she loves me because she pities me. The sad shy bachelor at the end of the hall, dear unhappy Mr. Knecht; can I bring some brightness into his dreary life? And so forth. I think that’s how it is. Will I be able to go on avoiding her? Perhaps I should move to another part of the city. But I’ve lived here so long I’ve grown accustomed to this hotel. Its easy ways do much to compensate for the hardships of my post. And my familiar room, The huge many-paned window; the cracked green floor tiles in the bathroom; the lumpy patterns of replastering on the wall above my bed. The high ceiling; the funny chandelier. Things that I love. But of course I can’t let her try to start an affair with me. We are supposed to observe Earthfolk, not to get involved with them. Our disguise is not that difficult to penetrate at close range. I must keep her away somehow. Or flee.

Incredible! There is another of us in this very hotel! As I learned through accident. At one this afternoon, returning from my morning travels: Elizabeth in the lobby, as though lying in wait for me, chatting with the manager. Rides up with me in the elevator. Her eyes looking into mine. “Sometimes I think you’re afraid of me,” she begins. “You mustn’t be. That’s the great tragedy of human life, that people shut themselves up behind walls of fear and never let anyone through, anyone who might care about them and be warm to them. You’ve got no reason to be afraid of me.” I do, but how to explain that to her? To sidestep prolonged conversation and possible entanglement I get off the elevator one floor below the right one. Let her think I’m visiting a friend. Or a mistress. I walk slowly down the hall to the stairs, using up time, waiting so she will be in her room before I go up. A maid bustles by me. She thrusts her key into a door on the left: a rare faux pas for the usually competent help here, she forgets to knock before going in to make up the room. The door opens and the occupant, inside, stands revealed. A stocky, muscular man, naked to the waist. “Oh, excuse me,” the maid gasps, and backs out, shutting the door. But I have seen. My eyes are quick. The hairy chest is split, a dark gash three inches wide and some eleven inches long, beginning between the nipples and going past the navel. Visible within is the black shiny surface of a Homeworld carapace. My countryman, opening up for Second Feeding. Dazed, numbed, I stagger to the stairs and pull myself step by leaden step to my floor. No sign of Elizabeth. I stumble into my room and throw the bolt. Another of us here? Well, why not? I’m not the only one. There may be hundreds in New York alone. But in the same hotel? I remember, now, I’ve seen him occasionally: a silent, dour man, tense, hunted-looking, unsociable. No doubt I appear the same way to others. Keep the world at a distance. I don’t know his name or what he is supposed to do for a living.

We are forbidden to make contact with fellow Homeworlders except in case of extreme emergency. Isolation is a necessary condition of our employment. I may not introduce myself to him; I may not seek his friendship. It is worse now for me, knowing that he is here, than when I was entirely alone. The things we could reminisce about! The friends we might have in common! We could reinforce one another’s endurance of the gravity, the discomfort of our disguises, the vile climate. But no. I must pretend I know nothing. The rules. The harsh, unbending rules. I to go about my business, he his; if we meet, no hint of my knowledge must pass.

So be it. I will honor my vows. But it may be difficult.

He goes by the name of Swanson. Been living in the hotel eighteen months; a musician of some sort, according to the manager. “A very peculiar man. Keeps to himself; no small talk, never smiles. Defends his privacy. The other day a maid barged into his room without knocking and I thought he’d sue. Well, we get all sorts here.” The manager thinks he may actually be a member of one of the old European royal families, living in exile, or something similarly romantic. The manager would be surprised.

I defend my privacy too. From Elizabeth, another assault on it.

In the hall outside my room. “My new poems,” she said. “In case you’re interested.” And then: “Can I come in? I’d read them to you. I love reading out loud.” And: “Please don’t always seem so terribly afraid of me. I don’t bite, David. Really I don’t. I’m quite gentle.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I.” Anger, now, lurking in her shiny eyes, her thin taut lips. “If you want me to leave you alone, say so, I will. But I want you to know how cruel you’re being. I don’t demand anything from you. I’m just offering some friendship. And you’re refusing. Do I have a bad smell? Am I so ugly? Is it my poems you hate and you’re afraid to tell me?”

“Elizabeth—”

“We’re only on this world such a short time. Why can’t we be kinder to each other while we are? To love, to share, to open up, Communication, soul to soul.” Her tone changed, an artful shading. “For all I know, women turn you off. I wouldn’t put anybody down for that. We’ve all got our ways. But it doesn’t have to be a sexual thing, you and me. Just talk. Like, opening the channels. Please? Say no and I’ll never bother you again, but don’t say no, please. That’s like shutting a door on life, David. And when you do that, you start to die a little.”

Persistent. I should tell her to go to hell. But there is the loneliness. There is her obvious sincerity. Her warmth, her eagerness to pull me from my lunar isolation. Can there be harm in it? Knowing that Swanson is nearby, so close yet sealed from me by iron commandments, has intensified my sense of being alone. I can risk letting Elizabeth get closer to me. It will make her happy; it may make me happy; it could even yield information valuable to Homeworld. Of course I must still maintain certain barriers.

“I don’t mean to be unfriendly. I think you’ve misunderstood, Elizabeth. I haven’t really been rejecting you. Come in. Do come in.” Stunned, she enters my room. The first guest ever. My few books;
my modest furnishings; the ultrawave transmitter, impenetrably disguised as a piece of sculpture. She sits. Skirt far above the knees. Good legs, if I understand the criteria of quality correctly. I am determined to allow no sexual overtures. If she tries anything, I’ll resort to—I don’t know—hysteria. “Read me your new poems,” I say. She opens her portfolio. Reads.

In the midst of the hipster night of doubt and

Emptiness, when the bad-trip god came to me with

Cold hands, I looked up and shouted yes at the

Stars. And yes and yes again. I groove on yes;

The devil grooves on no. And I waited for you to

Say yes, and at last you did. And the world said

The stars said the trees said the grass said the

Sky said the streets said yes and yes and yes—

She is ecstatic. Her face is flushed; her eyes are joyous. She has broken through to me. After two hours, when it becomes obvious that I am not going to ask her to go to bed with me, she leaves. Not to wear out her welcome. “I’m so glad I was wrong about you, David,” she whispers. “I couldn’t believe you were really a life-denier. And you’re not.” Ecstatic.

I am getting into very deep water.

We spend an hour or two together every night. Sometimes in my room, sometimes in hers. Usually she comes to me, but now and then, to be polite, I seek her out after Third Feeding. By now I’ve read all her poetry; we talk instead of the arts in general, politics, racial problems. She has a lively, well-stocked, disorderly mind. Though she probes constantly for information about me, she realizes how sensitive I am, and quickly withdraws when I parry her. Asking about my work; I reply vaguely that I’m doing research for a book, and when I don’t amplify she drops it, though she tries again, gently, a few nights later. She drinks a lot of wine, and offers it to me. I nurse one glass through a whole visit. Often she suggests we go out together for dinner; I explain that I have digestive problems and prefer to eat alone, and she takes this in good grace but immediately resolves to help me overcome those problems, for soon she is asking me to eat with her again. There is an excellent Spanish restaurant right in the hotel, she says. She drops troublesome questions. Where was I born? Did I go to college? Do I have family somewhere? Have I ever been married? Have I published any of my writings? I improvise evasions. Nothing difficult about that, except that never before have I allowed anyone on Earth such sustained contact with me, so prolonged an opportunity to find inconsistencies in my pretended identity. What if she sees through?

And sex. Her invitations grow less subtle. She seems to think that we ought to be having a sexual relationship, simply because we’ve become such good friends. Not a matter of passion so much as one of communication: we talk, sometimes we take walks together, we should do that together too. But of course it’s impossible. I have the external organs but not the capacity to use them. Wouldn’t want her touching my false skin in any case. How to deflect her? If I declare myself impotent she’ll demand a chance to try to cure me. If I pretend homosexuality she’ll start some kind of straightening therapy. If I simply say she doesn’t turn me on physically she’ll be hurt. The sexual thing is a challenge to her, the way merely getting me to talk with her once was. She often wears the transparent pink shawl that reveals her breasts. Her skirts are hip-high. She doses herself with aphrodisiac perfumes. She grazes my body with hers whenever opportunity arises. The tension mounts; she is determined to have me.

I have said nothing about her in my reports to Homeworld. Though I do transmit some of the psychological data I have gathered by observing her.

“Could you ever admit you were in love with me?” she asked tonight.

And she asked, “Doesn’t it hurt you to repress your feelings all the time? To sit there locked up inside yourself like a prisoner?”

And, “There’s a physical side of life too, David. I don’t mind so much the damage you’re doing to me by ignoring it. But I worry about the damage you’re doing to you.”

Crossing her legs. Hiking her skirt even higher.

We are heading toward a crisis. I should never have let this begin. A torrid summer has descended on the city, and in hot weather my nervous system is always at the edge of eruption. She may push me too far. I might ruin everything. I should apply for transfer to Homeworld before I cause trouble. Maybe I should confer with Swanson. I think what is happening now qualifies as an emergency.

Elizabeth stayed past midnight tonight. I had to ask her finally to leave: work to do. An hour later she pushed an envelope under my door. Newest poems. Love poems. In a shaky hand: “David you mean so much to me. You mean the stars and nebulas. Cant you let me show my love? Cant you accept happiness? Think about it. I adore you.”

What have I started?

103° F. today. The fourth successive day of intolerable heat. Met Swanson in the elevator at lunch time; nearly blurted the truth about myself to him. I must be more careful. But my control is slipping. Last night, in the worst of the heat, I was tempted to strip off my disguise. I could no longer stand being locked in here, pivoting and ducking to avoid all the machinery festooned about me. Resisted the temptation; just barely. Somehow I am more sensitive to the gravity too. I have the illusion that my carapace is developing cracks. Almost collapsed in the street this afternoon. All I need: heat exhaustion, whisked off to the hospital, routine fluoroscope exam. “You have a very odd skeletal structure, Mr. Knecht.” Indeed. Dissecting me, next, with three thousand medical students looking on. And then the United Nations called in. Menace from outer space. Yes. I must be more careful. I must be more careful. I must be more—

Now I’ve done it. Eleven years of faithful service destroyed in a single wild moment. Violation of the Fundamental Rule. I hardly believe it. How was it possible that I—that I—with my respect for my responsibilities—that I could have—even considered, let alone actually done—

But the weather was terribly hot. The third week of the heat wave. I was stifling inside my false body. And the gravity: was New York
having a gravity wave too? That terrible pull, worse than ever. Bending my internal organs out of shape. Elizabeth a tremendous annoyance: passionate, emotional, teary, poetic, giving me no rest, pleading for me to burn with a brighter flame. Declaring her love in sonnets, in rambling hip epics, in haiku. Spending two hours in my room, crouched at my feet, murmuring about the hidden beauty of my soul. “Open yourself and let love come in,” she whispered. “It’s like giving yourself to God. Making a commitment; breaking down all walls. Why not? For love’s sake, David, why not?” I couldn’t tell her why not, and she went away, but about midnight she was back knocking at my door. I let her in. She wore an ankle-length silk housecoat, gleaming, threadbare. “I’m stoned,” she said hoarsely, voice an octave too deep. “I had to bust three joints to get up the nerve. But here I am. David, I’m sick of making the turnoff trip. We’ve been so wonderfully close, and then you won’t go the last stretch of the way.” A cascade of giggles. “Tonight you will. Don’t fail me. Darling.” Drops the housecoat. Naked underneath it: narrow waist, bony hips, long legs, thin thighs, blue veins crossing her breasts. Her hair wild and kinky. A sorceress. A seeress. Berserk. Approaching me, eyes slit-wide, mouth open, tongue flickering snakily. How fleshless she is! Beads of sweat glistening on her flat chest. Seizes my wrists; tugs me roughly toward the bed. We tussle a little. Within my false body I throw switches, nudge levers. I am stronger than she is. I pull free, breaking her hold with an effort. She stands flat-footed in front of me, glaring, eyes fiery. So vulnerable, so sad in her nudity. And yet so fierce. “David! David! David!” Sobbing. Breathless. Pleading with her eyes and the tips of her breasts. Gathering her strength; now she makes the next lunge, but I see it coming and let her topple past me. She lands on the bed, burying her face in the pillow, clawing at the sheet. “Why? Why why why WHY?” she screams.

In a minute we will have the manager in here. With the police.

“Am I so hideous? I love you, David, do you know what that word means? Love. Love.” Sits up. Turns to me. Imploring. “Don’t reject me,” she whispers. “I couldn’t take that. You know, I just wanted to make you happy, I figured I could be the one, only I didn’t realize how unhappy you’d make me. And you just stand there. And you don’t say anything. What are you, some kind of machine?”

“I’ll tell you what I am,” I said.

That was when I went sliding into the abyss. All control lost; all prudence gone. My mind so slathered with raw emotion that survival itself means nothing. I must make things clear to her, is all. I must show her. At whatever expense. I strip off my shirt. She glows, no doubt thinking I will let myself be seduced. My hands slide up and down my bare chest, seeking the catches and snaps. I go through the intricate, cumbersome process of opening my body. Deep within myself something is shouting NO NO NO NO NO, but I pay no attention. The heart has its reasons.

Hoarsely: “Look, Elizabeth. Look at me. This is what I am. Look at me and freak out. The reality trip.”

My chest opens wide.

I push myself forward, stepping between the levers and struts, emerging halfway from the human shell I wear. I have not been this far out of it since the day they sealed me in, on Homeworld. I let her see my gleaming carapace. I wave my eyestalks around. I allow some of my claws to show. “See? See? Big black crab from outer space. That’s what you love, Elizabeth. That’s what I am. David Knecht’s just a costume, and this is what’s inside it.” I have gone insane. “You want reality? Here’s reality, Elizabeth. What good is the Knecht body to you? It’s a fraud. It’s a machine. Come on, come closer. Do you want to kiss me? Should I get on you and make love?”

During this episode her face has displayed an amazing range of reactions. Open-mouthed disbelief at first, of course. And frozen horror: gagging sounds in throat, jaws agape, eyes wide and rigid. Hands fanned across breasts. Sudden modesty in front of the alien monster? But then, as the familiar Knecht-voice, now bitter and impassioned, continues to flow from the black thing within the sundered chest, a softening of her response. Curiosity. The poetic sensibility taking over. Nothing human is alien to me: Terence, quoted by Cicero. Nothing alien is alien to me. Eh? She will accept the evidence of her eyes. “What are you? Where did you come from?” And I say, “I’ve violated the Fundamental Rule. I deserve to be plucked and thinned. We’re not supposed to reveal ourselves. If we get into some kind of accident that might lead to exposure, we’re supposed to blow ourselves up. The switch is right here.” She comes close and peers around me, into the cavern of David Knecht’s chest. “From some other planet? Living here in disguise?” She understands the picture. Her shock is fading. She even laughs. “I’ve seen worse than you on acid,” she says. “You don’t frighten me now, David. David? Shall I go on calling you David?”

This is unreal and dreamlike to me. I have revealed myself, thinking to drive her away in terror; she is no longer aghast, and smiles at my strangeness. She kneels to get a better look. I move back a short way. Eyestalks fluttering: I am uneasy, I have somehow lost the upper hand in this encounter.

She says, “I knew you were unusual, but not like this. But it’s all right. I can cope. I mean, the essential personality, that’s what I fell in love with. Who cares that you’re a crab-man from the Green Galaxy? Who cares that we can’t ever be real lovers? I can make that sacrifice. It’s your soul I dig, David. Go on. Close yourself up again. You don’t look comfortable this way.” The triumph of love. She will not abandon me, even now. Disaster. I crawl back into Knecht and lift his arms to his chest to seal it. Shock is glazing my consciousness: the enormity, the audacity. What have I done? Elizabeth watches, awed, even delighted. At last I am together again. She nods. “Listen,” she tells me. “You can trust me. I mean, if you’re some kind of spy, checking out the Earth, I don’t care. I don’t care. I won’t tell anybody. Pour it all out, David. Tell me about yourself. Don’t you see, this is the biggest thing that ever happened to me. A chance to show that love isn’t just physical, isn’t just chemistry, that it’s a soul trip, that it crosses not just racial lines but the lines of the whole damned species, the planet itself—”

It took several hours to get rid of her. A soaring, intense conversation, Elizabeth doing most of the talking. She putting forth theories of why I had come to Earth, me nodding, denying, amplifying, mostly lost in horror at my own perfidy and barely listening to her monologue. And the humidity turning me into rotting rags. Finally: “I’m down from the pot, David. And all wound up. I’m going out for a walk. Then back to my room to write for a while. To put this night into a poem before I lose the power of it. But I’ll come to you again by dawn, all right? That’s maybe five hours from now. You’ll be here? You won’t do anything foolish? Oh, I love you so much, David! Do you believe me? Do you?”

When she was gone I stood a long while by the window, trying to reassemble myself. Shattered. Drained. Remembering her kisses, her lips running along the ridge marking the place where my chest opens. The fascination of the abomination. She will love me even if I am crustaceous beneath.

I had to have help.

I went to Swanson’s room. He was slow to respond to my knock; busy transmitting, no doubt. I could hear him within, but he didn’t answer. “Swanson?” I called. “Swanson?” Then I added the distress signal in the Homeworld tongue. He rushed to the door. Blinking, suspicious. “It’s all right,” I said. “Look, let me in. I’m in big trouble.” Speaking English, but I gave him the distress signal again.

“How did you know about me?” he asked.

“The day the maid blundered into your room while you were eating, I was going by. I saw.”

“But you aren’t supposed to—”

“Except in emergencies. This is an emergency.” He shut off his ultrawave and listened intently to my story. Scowling. He didn’t approve. But he wouldn’t spurn me. I had been criminally foolish, but I was of his kind, prey to the same pains, the same lonelinesses, and he would help me.

“What do you plan to do now?” he asked. “You can’t harm her. It isn’t allowed.”

“I don’t want to harm her. Just to get free of her. To make her fall out of love with me.”

“How? If showing yourself to her didn’t—”

“Infidelity,” I said. “Making her see that I love someone else. No room in my life for her. That’ll drive her away. Afterwards it won’t
matter that she knows: who’d believe her story? The FBI would laugh and tell her to lay off the LSD. But if I don’t break her attachment to me I’m finished.”

“Love someone else? Who?”

“When she comes back to my room at dawn,” I said, “she’ll find
the two of us together, dividing and abstracting. I think that’ll do it, don’t you?”

So I deceived Elizabeth with Swanson.

The fact that we both wore male human identities was irrelevant, of course. We went to my room and stepped out of our disguises—a bold, dizzying sensation!—and suddenly we were just two Homeworlders again, receptive to one another’s needs. I left the door unlocked. Swanson and I crawled up on my bed and began the chanting. How strange it was, after these years of solitude, to feel those vibrations again! And how beautiful. Swanson’s vibrissae touching mine. The interplay of harmonies. An underlying sternness to his technique—he was contemptuous of me for my idiocy, and rightly so—but once we passed from the chanting to the dividing all was forgiven, and as we moved into the abstracting it was truly sublime. We climbed through an infinity of climactic emptyings. Dawn crept upon us and found us unwilling to halt even for rest.

A knock at the door. Elizabeth.

“Come in,” I said.

A dreamy, ecstatic look on her face. Fading instantly when she saw the two of us entangled on the bed. A questioning frown. “We’ve been mating,” I explained. “Did you think I was a complete hermit?” She looked from Swanson to me, from me to Swanson. Hand over her mouth. Eyes anguished. I turned the screw a little tighter. “I couldn’t stop you from falling in love with me, Elizabeth. But I really do prefer my own kind. As should have been obvious.”

“To have her here now, though—when you knew I was coming back—”

“Not her, exactly. Not him exactly either, though.”

“—so cruel, David! To ruin such a beautiful experience.” Holding forth sheets of paper with shaking hands. “A whole sonnet cycle,” she said. “About tonight. How beautiful it was, and all. And now—and now—” Crumpling the pages. Hurling them across the room. Turning. Running out, sobbing furiously. Hell hath no fury like. “David!” A smothered cry. And slamming the door.

She was back in ten minutes. Swanson and I hadn’t quite finished donning our bodies yet; we were both still unsealed. As we worked, we discussed further steps to take: he felt honor demanded that I request a transfer back to Homeworld, having terminated my usefulness here through tonight’s indiscreet revelation. I agreed with him to some degree but was reluctant to leave. Despite the bodily torment of life on Earth I had come to feel I belonged here. Then Elizabeth entered, radiant.

“I mustn’t be so possessive,” she announced. “So bourgeois. So conventional. I’m willing to share my love.” Embracing Swanson. Embracing me. “A menage a trois,” she said. “I won’t mind that you two are having a physical relationship. As long as you don’t shut me out of your lives completely. I mean, David, we could never have been physical anyway, right, but we can have the other aspects of love, and we’ll open ourselves to your friend also. Yes? Yes? Yes?”

Swanson and I both put in applications for transfer, he to Africa, me to Homeworld. It would be some time before we received a reply. Until then we were at her mercy. He was blazingly angry with me for involving him in this, but what choice had I had? Nor could either of us avoid Elizabeth. We were at her mercy. She bathed both of us in shimmering waves of tender emotion; wherever we turned, there she was, incandescent with love. Lighting up the darkness of our lives. You poor lonely creatures. Do you suffer much in our gravity? What about the heat? And the winters. Is there a custom of marriage on your planet? Do you have poetry?

A happy threesome. We went to the theater together. To concerts. Even to parties in Greenwich Village. “My friends,” Elizabeth said, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind that she was living with both of us. Faintly scandalous doings; she loved to seem daring. Swanson was sullenly obliging, putting up with her antics but privately haranguing me for subjecting him to all this. Elizabeth got out another mimeographed booklet of poems, dedicated to both of us. Triple Tripping, she called it. Flagrantly erotic. I quoted a few of the poems in one of my reports of Homeworld, then lost heart and hid the booklet in the closet. “Have you heard about your transfer yet?” I asked Swanson at least twice a week. He hadn’t. Neither had I.

Autumn came. Elizabeth, burning her candle at both ends, looked gaunt and feverish. “I have never known such happiness,” she announced frequently, one hand clasping Swanson, the other me. “I never think about the strangeness of you any more. I think of you only as people. Sweet, wonderful, lonely people. Here in the darkness of this horrid city.” And she once said, “What if everybody here is like you, and I’m the only one who’s really human? But that’s silly. You must be the only ones of your kind here. The advance scouts. Will your planet invade ours? I do hope so! Set everything to rights. The reign of love and reason at last!”

“How long will this go on?” Swanson muttered.

At the end of October his transfer came through. He left without saying goodbye to either of us and without leaving a forwarding address. Nairobi? Addis Ababa? Kinshasa?

I had grown accustomed to having him around to share the burden of Elizabeth. Now the full brunt of her affection fell on me. My work was suffering; I had no time to file my reports properly. And I lived in fear of her gossiping. What was she telling her Village friends? (“You know David? He’s not really a man, you know. Actually inside him there’s a kind of crab-thing from another solar system. But what does that matter? Love’s a universal phenomenon. The truly loving person doesn’t draw limits around the planet.”) I longed for my release. To go home; to accept my punishment; to shed my false skin. To empty my mind of Elizabeth.

My reply came through the ultrawave on November 13. Application denied. I was to remain on Earth and continue my work as before. Transfers to Homeworld were granted only for reasons of health.

I debated sending a full account of my treason to Homeworld and thus bringing about my certain recall. But I hesitated, overwhelmed with despair. Dark brooding seized me. “Why so sad?” Elizabeth asked. What could I say? That my attempt at escaping from her had failed? “I love you,” she said. “I’ve never felt so real before.” Nuzzling against my cheek. Fingers knotted in my hair. A seductive whisper. “David, open yourself up again. Your chest, I mean. I want to see the inner you. To make sure I’m not frightened of it. Please? You’ve only let me see you once.” And then, when I had: “May I kiss you, David?” I was appalled. But I let her. She was unafraid. Transfigured by happiness. She is a cosmic nuisance, but I fear I’m getting to like her.

Can I leave her? I wish Swanson had not vanished. I need advice.

Either I break with Elizabeth or I break with Homeworld. This is absurd. I find new chasms of despondency every day. I am unable to do my work. I have requested a transfer once again, without giving details. The first snow of the winter today.

Application denied.

“When I found you with Swanson,” she said, “it was a terrible shock. An even bigger blow than when you first came out of your chest. I mean, it was startling to find out you weren’t human, but it didn’t hit me in any emotional way, it didn’t threaten me. But then, to come back a few hours later and find you with one of your own kind, to know that you wanted to shut me out, that I had no place in your life—Only we worked it out, didn’t we?” Kissing me. Tears of joy in her eyes. How did this happen? Where did it all begin? Existence was once so simple. I have tried to trace the chain of events that brought me from there to here, and I cannot. I was outside of my false body for eight hours today. The longest spell so far. Elizabeth is talking of going to the islands with me for the winter. A secluded cottage that her friends will make available. Of course, I must not leave my post without permission. And it takes months simply to get a reply.

Let me admit the truth: I love her.

January 1. The new year begins. I have sent my resignation to Homeworld and have destroyed my ultrawave equipment. The links are broken. Tomorrow, when the city offices are open, Elizabeth and I will go to get the marriage license.

Chip Runner

In the summer of 1987 the energetic publisher and book packager Byron Preiss, having produced a pair of magnificent illustrated anthologies to which I had been a contributor—The Planets and The Universe—now turned his attention the other way, to the world of the infinitely small. The Microverse was his new project, and Byron asked me to write something for this one too.

The scientific part of the story was easy enough to put together: required by the theme of the book to deal with the universe on the subatomic level, I rummaged about in my file of Scientific American to see what the current state of thinking about electrons and protons and such might be. In the course of my rummaging I stumbled upon something about microchip technology, and that led me to the fictional component of the story. All about me in the San Francisco Bay area where I live are bright boys and girls with a deep, all-consuming, and spooky passion for computers. I happen to know something, also, about the prevalence of such eating disorders as anorexia and bulimia in Bay Area adolescents—disorders mainly involving girls, but not exclusively so. Everything fit together swiftly: an anorexic computer kid who has conceived the wild idea of entering the subatomic world by starving down to it. The rest was a matter of orchestrating theme and plot and style—of writing the story, that is. Byron had Ralph McQuarrie illustrate it with a fine, terrifying painting when he published it in The Microverse in 1989. Gardner Dozois bought the story also for the November 1989 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and Donald A. Wollheim selected it for his annual World’s Best SF anthology.

He was fifteen, and looked about ninety, and a frail ninety at that. I knew his mother and his father, separately—they were Silicon Valley people, divorced, very important in their respective companies—and separately they had asked me to try to work with him. His skin was blue-gray and tight, drawn cruelly close over the jutting bones of his face. His eyes were gray too, and huge, and they lay deep within their sockets. His arms were like sticks. His thin lips were set in an angry grimace.

The chart before me on my desk told me that he was five feet eight inches tall and weighed 71 pounds. He was in his third year at one of the best private schools in the Palo Alto district. His I.Q. was 161. He crackled with intelligence and intensity. That was a novelty for me right at the outset. Most of my patients are depressed, withdrawn, uncertain of themselves, elusive, shy: virtual zombies. He wasn’t anything like that. There would be other surprises ahead.

“So you’re planning to go into the hardware end of the computer industry, your parents tell me,” I began. The usual let’s-build-a-
relationship procedure.

He blew it away instantly with a single sour glare. “Is that your standard opening? ‘Tell me all about your favorite hobby, my boy’? If you don’t mind I’d rather skip all the bullshit, doctor, and then we can both get out of here faster. You’re supposed to ask me about my eating habits.”

It amazed me to see him taking control of the session this way within the first thirty seconds. I marveled at how different he was from most of the others, the poor sad wispy creatures who force me to fish for every word.

“Actually I do enjoy talking about the latest developments in the world of computers, too,” I said, still working hard at being genial.

“But my guess is you don’t talk about them very often, or you wouldn’t call it ‘the hardware end.’ Or ‘the computer industry.’ We don’t use mondo phrases like those any more.” His high thin voice sizzled with barely suppressed rage. “Come on, doctor. Let’s get right down to it. You think I’m anorexic, don’t you?”

“Well—”

“I know about anorexia. It’s a mental disease of girls, a vanity thing. They starve themselves because they want to look beautiful and they can’t bring themselves to realize that they’re not too fat. Vanity isn’t the issue for me. And I’m not a girl, doctor. Even you ought to be able to see that right away.”

“Timothy—”

“I want to let you know right out front that I don’t have an eating disorder and I don’t belong in a shrink’s office. I know exactly what I’m doing all the time. The only reason I came today is to get my mother off my back, because she’s taken it into her head that I’m trying to starve myself to death. She said I had to come here and see you. So I’m here. All right?”

“All right,” I said, and stood up. I am a tall man, deep-chested, very broad through the shoulders. I can loom when necessary. A flicker of fear crossed Timothy’s face, which was the effect I wanted to produce. When it’s appropriate for the therapist to assert authority, simpleminded methods are often the most effective. “Let’s talk about eating, Timothy. What did you have for lunch today?”

He shrugged. “A piece of bread. Some lettuce.”

“That’s all?”

“A glass of water.”

“And for breakfast?”

“I don’t eat breakfast.”

“But you’ll have a substantial dinner, won’t you?”

“Maybe some fish. Maybe not. I think food is pretty gross.”

I nodded. “Could you operate your computer with the power turned off, Timothy?”

“Isn’t that a pretty condescending sort of question, doctor?”

“I suppose it is. Okay, I’ll be more direct. Do you think you can run your body without giving it any fuel?”

“My body runs just fine,” he said, with a defiant edge.

“Does it? What sports do you play?”

“Sports?” It might have been a Martian word.

“You know, the normal weight for someone of your age and height ought to be—”

“There’s nothing normal about me, doctor. Why should my weight be any more normal than the rest of me?”

“It was until last year, apparently. Then you stopped eating. Your family is worried about you, you know.”

“I’ll be okay,” he said sullenly.

“You want to stay healthy, don’t you?”

He stared at me for a long chilly moment. There was something close to hatred in his eyes, or so I imagined.

“What I want is to disappear,” he said.

That night I dreamed I was disappearing. I stood naked and alone on a slab of gray metal in the middle of a vast empty plain under a sinister coppery sky and I began steadily to shrink. There is often some carryover from the office to a therapist’s own unconscious life: we call it counter-transference. I grew smaller and smaller. Pores appeared on the surface of the metal slab and widened into jagged craters, and then into great crevices and gullies. A cloud of luminous dust shimmered about my head. Grains of sand, specks, mere motes, now took on the aspect of immense boulders. Down I drifted, gliding into the darkness of a fathomless chasm. Creatures I had not noticed before hovered about me, astonishing monsters, hairy, many-legged. They made menacing gestures, but I slipped away, downward, downward, and they were gone. The air was alive now with vibrating particles, inanimate, furious, that danced in frantic zigzag patterns, veering wildly past me, now and again crashing into me, knocking my breath from me, sending me ricocheting for what seemed like miles. I was floating, spinning, tumbling with no control. Pulsating waves of blinding light pounded me. I was falling into the infinitely small, and there was no halting my descent. I would shrink and shrink and shrink until I slipped through the realm of matter entirely and was lost. A mob of contemptuous glowing things—electrons and protons, maybe, but how could I tell?—crowded close around me, emitting fizzy sparks that seemed to me like jeers and laughter. They told me to keep moving along, to get myself out of their kingdom, or I would meet a terrible death. “To see a world in a grain of sand,” Blake wrote. Yes. And Eliot wrote, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” I went on downward, and downward still. And then I awoke gasping, drenched in sweat, terrified, alone.

Normally the patient is uncommunicative. You interview parents, siblings, teachers, friends, anyone who might provide a clue or an opening wedge. Anorexia is a life-threatening matter. The patients—girls, almost always, or young women in their twenties—have lost all sense of normal body-image and feel none of the food-deprivation prompts that a normal body gives its owner. Food is the enemy. Food must be resisted. They eat only when forced to, and then as little as possible. They are unaware that they are frighteningly gaunt. Strip them and put them in front of a mirror and they will pinch their sagging empty skin to show you imaginary fatty bulges. Sometimes the process of self-skeletonization is impossible to halt, even by therapy. When it reaches a certain point the degree of organic damage becomes irreversible and the death-spiral begins.

“He was always tremendously bright,” Timothy’s mother said. She was fifty, a striking woman, trim, elegant, almost radiant, vice president for finance at one of the biggest Valley companies. I knew her in that familiarly involuted California way: her present husband used to be married to my first wife. “A genius, his teachers all said. But strange, you know? Moody. Dreamy. I used to think he was on drugs, though of course none of the kids do that any more.” Timothy was her only child by her first marriage. “It scares me to death to watch him wasting away like that. When I see him I want to take him and shake him and force ice cream down his throat, pasta, milkshakes, anything. And then I want to hold him, and I want to cry.”

“You’d think he’d be starting to shave by now,” his father said. Technical man, working on nanoengineering projects at the Stanford AI lab. We often played racquetball together. “I was. You too, probably. I got a look at him in the shower, three or four months ago. Hasn’t even reached puberty yet. Fifteen and not a hair on him. It’s the starvation, isn’t it? It’s retarding his physical development, right?”

“I keep trying to get him to like eat something, anything,” his step-brother Mick said. “He lives with us, you know, on the weekends, and most of the time he’s downstairs playing with his computers, but sometimes I can get him to go out with us, and we buy like a chili dog for him, or, you know, a burrito, and he goes, Thank you, thank you, and pretends to eat it, but then he throws it away when he thinks we’re not looking. He is so weird, you know? And scary. You look at him with those ribs and all and he’s like something out of a horror movie.”

“What I want is to disappear,” Timothy said.

He came every Tuesday and Thursday for one-hour sessions. There was at the beginning an undertone of hostility and suspicion to everything he said. I asked him, in my layman way, a few things about the latest developments in computers, and he answered me in monosyllables at first, not at all bothering to hide his disdain for my ignorance and my innocence. But now and again some question of mine would catch his interest and he would forget to be irritated, and reply at length, going on and on into realms I could not even pretend to understand. Trying to find things of that sort to ask him seemed my best avenue of approach. But of course I knew I was unlikely to achieve anything of therapeutic value if we simply talked about computers for the whole hour.

He was very guarded, as was only to be expected, when I would bring the conversation around to the topic of eating. He made it clear that his eating habits were his own business and he would rather not discuss them with me, or anyone. Yet there was an aggressive glow on his face whenever we spoke of the way he ate that called Kafka’s hunger artist to my mind: he seemed proud of his achievements in starvation, even eager to be admired for his skill at shunning food.

Too much directness in the early stages of therapy is generally counterproductive where anorexia is the problem. The patient loves her syndrome and resists any therapeutic approach that might deprive her of it. Timothy and I talked mainly of his studies, his classmates, his step-brothers. Progress was slow, circuitous, agonizing. What was most agonizing was my realization that I didn’t have much time. According to the report from his school physician he was already running at dangerously low levels, bones weakening, muscles degenerating, electrolyte balance cockeyed, hormonal systems in disarray. The necessary treatment before long would be hospitalization, not psychotherapy, and it might almost be too late even for that.

He was aware that he was wasting away and in danger. He didn’t seem to care.

I let him see that I wasn’t going to force anything on him. So far as I was concerned, I told him, he was basically free to starve himself to death if that was what he was really after. But as a psychologist whose role it is to help people, I said, I had some scientific interest in finding out what made him tick—not particularly for his sake, but for the sake of other patients who might be more interested in being helped. He could relate to that. His facial expressions changed. He became less hostile. It was the fifth session now, and I sensed that his armor might be ready to crack. He was starting to think of me not as a member of the enemy but as a neutral observer, a dispassionate investigator. The next step was to make him see me as an ally. You and me, Timothy, standing together against them. I told him a few things about myself, my childhood, my troubled adolescence: little nuggets of confidence, offered by way of trade.

“When you disappear,” I said finally, “where is it that you want to go?”

The moment was ripe and the breakthrough went beyond my highest expectations.

“You know what a microchip is?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“I go down into them.”

Not I want to go down into them. But I do go down into them.

“Tell me about that,” I said.

“The only way you can understand the nature of reality,” he said, “is to take a close look at it. To really and truly take a look, you know? Here we have these fantastic chips, a whole processing unit smaller than your little toenail with fifty times the data-handling capacity of the old mainframes. What goes on inside them? I mean, what really goes on? I go into them and I look. It’s like a trance, you know? You sharpen your concentration and you sharpen it and sharpen it and then you’re moving downward, inward, deeper and deeper.” He laughed harshly. “You think this is all mystical ka-ka, don’t you? Half of you thinks I’m just a crazy kid mouthing off, and the other half thinks here’s a kid who’s smart as hell, feeding you a line of malarkey to keep you away from the real topic. Right, doctor? Right?”

“I had a dream a couple of weeks ago about shrinking down into the infinitely small,” I said. “A nightmare, really. But a fascinating one. Fascinating and frightening both. I went all the way down to the molecular level, past grains of sand, past bacteria, down to electrons and protons, or what I suppose were electrons and protons.”

“What was the light like, where you were?”

“Blinding. It came in pulsing waves.”

“What color?”

“Every color all at once,” I said.

He stared at me. “No shit!”

“Is that the way it looks for you?”

“Yes. No.” He shifted uneasily. “How can I tell if you saw what I saw? But it’s a stream of colors, yes. Pulsing. And—all the colors at once, yes, that’s how you could describe it—”

“Tell me more.”

“More what?”

“When you go downward—tell me what it’s like, Timothy.”

He gave me his lofty look, his pedagogic look. “You know how small a chip is? A MOSFET, say?”

“MOSFET?”

“Metal-oxide-silicon field-effect-transistor,” he said. “The newest ones have a minimum feature size of about a micrometer. Ten to the minus sixth meters. That’s a millionth of a meter, all right? Small. It isn’t down there on the molecular level, no. You could fit 200 amoebas into a MOSFET channel one micrometer long. Okay? Okay? Or a whole army of viruses. But it’s still plenty small. That’s where I go. And run, down the corridors of the chips, with electrons whizzing by me all the time. Of course I can’t see them. Even a lot smaller, you can’t see electrons, you can only compute the probabilities of their paths. But you can feel them. I can feel them. And I run among them, everywhere, through the corridors, through the channels, past the gates, past the open spaces in the lattice. Getting to know the territory. Feeling at home in it.”

“What’s an electron like, when you feel it?”

“You dreamed it, you said. You tell me.”

“Sparks,” I said. “Something fizzy, going by in a blur.”

“You read about that somewhere, in one of your journals?”

“It’s what I saw,” I said. “What I felt, when I had that dream.”

“But that’s it! That’s it exactly!” He was perspiring. His face was flushed. His hands were trembling. His whole body was ablaze with a metabolic fervor I had not previously seen in him. He looked like a skeleton who had just trotted off a basketball court after a hard game. He leaned toward me and said, looking suddenly vulnerable in a way that he had never allowed himself to seem with me before, “Are you sure it was only a dream? Or do you go there too?”

Kafka had the right idea. What the anorexic wants is to demonstrate a supreme ability. “Look,” she says. “I am a special person. I have an extraordinary gift. I am capable of exerting total control over my body. By refusing food I take command of my destiny. I display supreme force of will. Can you achieve that sort of discipline? Can you even begin to understand it? Of course you can’t. But I can.” The issue isn’t really one of worrying about being too fat. That’s just a superficial problem. The real issue is one of exhibiting strength of purpose, of proving that you can accomplish something remarkable, of showing the world what a superior person you really are. So what we’re dealing with isn’t merely a perversely extreme form of dieting. The deeper issue is one of gaining control—
over your body, over your life, even over the physical world itself.

He began to look healthier. There was some color in his cheeks now, and he seemed more relaxed, less twitchy. I had the feeling that he was putting on a little weight, although the medical reports I was getting from his school physician didn’t confirm that in any significant way—some weeks he’d be up a pound or two, some weeks down, and there was never any net gain. His mother reported that he went through periods when he appeared to be showing a little interest in food, but these were usually followed by periods of rigorous fasting or at best his typical sort of reluctant nibbling. There was nothing in any of this that I could find tremendously encouraging, but I had the definite feeling that I was starting to reach him, that I was beginning to win him back from the brink.

Timothy said, “I have to be weightless in order to get there. I mean, literally weightless. Where I am now, it’s only a beginning. I need to lose all the rest.”

“Only a beginning,” I said, appalled, and jotted a few quick notes.

“I’ve attained takeoff capability. But I can never get far enough. I run into a barrier on the way down, just as I’m entering the truly structural regions of the chip.”

“Yet you do get right into the interior of the chip.”

“Into it, yes. But I don’t attain the real understanding that I’m after. Perhaps the problem’s in the chip itself, not in me. Maybe if I tried a quantum-well chip instead of a MOSFET I’d get where I want to go, but they aren’t ready yet, or if they are I don’t have any way of getting my hands on one. I want to ride the probability waves, do you see? I want to be small enough to grab hold of an electron and stay with it as it zooms through the lattice.” His eyes were blazing. “Try talking about this stuff with my brother. Or anyone. The ones who don’t understand think I’m crazy. So do the ones who do.”

“You can talk here, Timothy.”

“The chip, the integrated circuit—what we’re really talking about is transistors, microscopic ones, maybe a billion of them arranged side by side. Silicon or germanium, doped with impurities like boron, arsenic, sometimes other things. On one side are the N-type charge carriers, and the P-type ones are on the other, with an insulating layer between; and when the voltage comes through the gate, the electrons migrate to the P-type side, because it’s positively charged, and the holes, the zones of positive charge, go to the N-type side. So your basic logic circuit—” He paused. “You following this?”

“More or less. Tell me about what you feel as you start to go downward into a chip.”

It begins, he said, with a rush, an upward surge of almost ecstatic force: he is not descending but floating. The floor falls away beneath him as he dwindles. Then comes the intensifying of perception, dust-motes quivering and twinkling in what had a moment before seemed nothing but empty air, and the light taking on strange new refractions and shimmerings. The solid world begins to alter. Familiar shapes—the table, a chair, the computer before him—vanish as he comes closer to their essence. What he sees now is detailed structure, the intricacy of surfaces: no longer a forest, only trees. Everything is texture and there is no solidity. Wood and metal become strands and webs and mazes. Canyons yawn. Abysses open. He goes inward, drifting, tossed like a feather on the molecular breeze.

It is no simple journey. The world grows grainy. He fights his way through a dust-storm of swirling granules of oxygen and nitrogen, an invisible blizzard battering him at every step. Ahead lies the chip he seeks, a magnificent thing, a gleaming radiant Valhalla. He begins to run toward it, heedless of obstacles. Giant rainbows sweep the sky: dizzying floods of pure color, hammering down with a force capable of deflecting the wandering atoms. And then—then— The chip stands before him like some temple of Zeus rising on the Athenian plain. Giant glowing columns—yawning gateways—dark beckoning corridors—hidden sanctuaries, beyond access, beyond comprehension. It glimmers with light of many colors. A strange swelling music fills the air. He feels like an explorer taking the first stumbling steps into a lost world. And he is still shrinking. The intricacies of the chip swell, surging like metal fungi filling with water after a rain: they spring higher and higher, darkening the sky, concealing it entirely. Another level downward and he is barely large enough to manage the passage across the threshold, but he does, and enters. Here he can move freely.

He is in a strange canyon whose silvery walls, riven with vast fissures, rise farther than he can see. He runs. He runs. He has infinite energy; his legs move like springs. Behind him the gates open, close, open, close. Rivers of torrential current surge through, lifting him, carrying him along. He senses, does not see, the vibrating of the atoms of silicon or boron; he senses, does not see, the electrons and the not-electrons flooding past, streaming toward the sides, positive or negative, to which they are inexorably drawn.

But there is more. He runs on and on and on. There is infinitely more, a world within this world, a world that lies at his feet and mocks him with its inaccessibility. It swirls before him, a whirlpool, a maelstrom. He would throw himself into it if he could, but some invisible barrier keeps him from it. This is as far as he can go. This is as much as he can achieve. He yearns to reach out as an electron goes careening past, and pluck it from its path, and stare into its heart. He wants to step inside the atoms and breathe the mysterious air within their boundaries. He longs to look upon their hidden nuclei. He hungers for the sight of mesons, quarks, neutrinos. There is more, always more, an unending series of worlds within worlds, and he is huge, he is impossibly clumsy, he is a lurching reeling mountainous titan, incapable of penetrating beyond this point—

So far, and no farther— No farther—

He looked up at me from the far side of the desk. Sweat was streaming down his face and his light shirt was clinging to his skin. That sallow cadaverous look was gone from him entirely. He looked transfigured, aflame, throbbing with life: more alive than anyone I had ever seen, or so it seemed to me in that moment. There was a Faustian fire in his look, a world-swallowing urgency. Magellan must have looked that way sometimes, or Newton, or Galileo. And then in a moment more it was gone, and all I saw before me was a miserable scrawny boy, shrunken, feeble, pitifully frail.

I went to talk to a physicist I knew, a friend of Timothy’s father who did advanced research at the university. I said nothing about Timothy to him.

“What’s a quantum well?” I asked him.

He looked puzzled. “Where’d you hear of those?”

“Someone I know. But I couldn’t follow much of what he was saying.”

“Extremely small switching device,” he said. “Experimental, maybe five, ten years away. Less if we’re very lucky. The idea is that you use two different semiconductive materials in a single crystal lattice, a superlattice, something like a three-dimensional checkerboard. Electrons tunneling between squares could be made to perform digital operations at tremendous speeds.”

“And how small would this thing be, compared with the sort of transistors they have on chips now?”

“It would be down in the nanometer range,” he told me. “That’s a billionth of a meter. Smaller than a virus. Getting right down there close to the theoretical limits for semiconductivity. Any smaller and you’ll be measuring things in angstroms.”

“Angstroms?”

“One ten-billionth of a meter. We measure the diameter of atoms in angstrom units.”

“Ah,” I said. “All right. Can I ask you something else?”

He looked amused, patient, tolerant.

“Does anyone know much about what an electron looks like?”

“Looks like?”

“Its physical appearance. I mean, has any sort of work been done on examining them, maybe even photographing them—”

“You know about the Uncertainty Principle?” he asked.

“Well—not much, really—”

“Electrons are very damned tiny. They’ve got a mass of—ah—about nine times ten to the minus twenty-eighth grams. We need light in order to see, in any sense of the word. We see by receiving light radiated by an object, or by hitting it with light and getting a reflection. The smallest unit of light we can use, which is the photon, has such a long wavelength that it would completely hide an electron from view, so to speak. And we can’t use radiation of shorter wavelength—gammas, let’s say, or x-rays—for making our measurements, either, because the shorter the wavelength the greater the energy, and so a gamma ray would simply kick any electron we were going to inspect to hell and gone. So we can’t “see” electrons. The very act of determining their position imparts new velocity to them, which alters their position. The best we can do by way of examining electrons is make an enlightened guess, a probabilistic determination, of where they are and how fast they’re moving. In a very rough way that’s what we mean by the Uncertainty Principle.”

“You mean, in order to look an electron in the eye, you’d virtually have to be the size of an electron yourself? Or even smaller?”

He gave me a strange look. “I suppose that question makes sense,” he said. “And I suppose I could answer yes to it. But what the hell are we talking about, now?”

I dreamed again that night: a feverish, disjointed dream of gigantic grotesque creatures shining with a fluorescent glow against a sky blacker than any night. They had claws, tentacles, eyes by the dozens. Their swollen asymmetrical bodies were bristling with thick red hairs. Some were clad in thick armor, others were equipped with ugly shining spikes that jutted in rows of ten or twenty from their quivering skins. They were pursuing me through the airless void. Wherever I ran there were more of them, crowding close. Behind them I saw the walls of the cosmos beginning to shiver and flow. The sky itself was dancing. Color was breaking through the blackness: eddying bands of every hue at once, interwoven like great chains. I ran, and I ran, and I ran, but there were monsters on every side, and no escape.

Timothy missed an appointment. For some days now he had been growing more distant, often simply sitting silently, staring at me for the whole hour out of some hermetic sphere of unapproachability. That struck me as nothing more than predictable passive-aggressive resistance, but when he failed to show up at all I was startled: such blatant rebellion wasn’t his expectable mode. Some new therapeutic strategies seemed in order: more direct intervention, with me playing the role of a gruff, loving older brother, or perhaps family therapy, or some meetings with his teachers and even classmates. Despite his recent aloofness I still felt I could get to him in time. But this business of skipping appointments was unacceptable. I phoned his mother the next day, only to learn that he was in the hospital; and after my last patient of the morning I drove across town to see him. The attending physician, a chunky-faced resident, turned frosty when I told him that I was Timothy’s therapist, that I had been treating him for anorexia. I didn’t need to be telepathic to know that he was thinking, You didn’t do much of a job with him, did you? “His parents are with him now,” he told me. “Let me find out if they want you to go in. It looks pretty bad.”

Actually they were all there, parents, step-parents, the various children by the various second marriages. Timothy seemed to be no more than a waxen doll. They had brought him books, tapes, even a lap-top computer, but everything was pushed to the corners of the bed. The shrunken figure in the middle barely raised the level of the coverlet a few inches. They had him on an IV unit and a whole webwork of other lines and cables ran to him from the array of medical machines surrounding him. His eyes were open, but he seemed to be staring into some other world, perhaps that same world of rampaging bacteria and quivering molecules that had haunted my sleep a few nights before. He seemed perhaps to be smiling.

“He collapsed at school,” his mother whispered.

“In the computer lab, no less,” said his father, with a nervous ratcheting laugh. “He was last conscious about two hours ago, but he wasn’t talking coherently.”

“He wants to go inside his computer,” one of the little boys said. “That’s crazy, isn’t it?” He might have been seven.

“Timothy’s going to die, Timothy’s going to die,” chanted somebody’s daughter, about seven.

“Christopher! Bree! Shhh, both of you!” said about three of the various parents, all at once.

I said, “Has he started to respond to the IV?”

“They don’t think so. It’s not at all good,” his mother said. “He’s right on the edge. He lost three pounds this week. We thought he was eating, but he must have been sliding the food into his pocket, or
something like that.” She shook her head. “You can’t be a policeman.”

Her eyes were cold. So were her husband’s, and even those of the step-parents. Telling me, This is your fault, we counted on you to make him stop starving himself. What could I say? You can only heal the ones you can reach. Timothy had been determined to keep himself beyond my grasp. Still, I felt the keenness of their reproachful anger, and it hurt.

“I’ve seen worse cases than this come back under medical treatment,” I told them. “They’ll build up his strength until he’s capable of talking with me again. And then I’m certain I’ll be able to lick this thing. I was just beginning to break through his defenses when—when he—”

Sure. It costs no more to give them a little optimism. I gave them what I could: experience with other cases of severe food deprivation, positive results following a severe crisis of this nature, et cetera, et cetera, the man of science dipping into his reservoir of experience. They all began to brighten as I spoke. They even managed to convince themselves that a little color was coming into Timothy’s cheeks, that he was stirring, that he might soon be regaining consciousness as the machinery surrounding him pumped the nutrients into him that he had so conscientiously forbidden himself to have.

“Look,” this one said, or that one. “Look how he’s moving his hands! Look how he’s breathing. It’s better, isn’t it!”

I actually began to believe it myself.

But then I heard his dry thin voice echoing in the caverns of my mind. I can never get far enough. I have to be weightless in order to get there. Where I am now, it’s only a beginning. I need to lose all the rest.

I want to disappear.

That night, a third dream, vivid, precise, concrete. I was falling and running at the same time, my legs pistoning like those of a marathon runner in the twenty-sixth mile, while simultaneously I dropped in free fall through airless dark toward the silver-black surface of some distant world. And fell and fell and fell, in utter weightlessness, and hit the surface easily and kept on running, moving not forward but downward, the atoms of the ground parting for me as I ran. I became smaller as I descended, and smaller yet, and even smaller, until I was a mere phantom, a running ghost, the bodiless idea of myself. And still I went downward toward the dazzling heart of things, shorn now of all impediments of the flesh.

I phoned the hospital the next morning. Timothy had died a little after dawn.

Did I fail with him? Well, then, I failed. But I think no one could possibly have succeeded. He went where he wanted to go; and so great was the force of his will that any attempts at impeding him must have seemed to him like the mere buz0zings of insects, meaningless, insignificant.

So now his purpose is achieved. He has shed his useless husk. He has gone on, floating, running, descending: downward, inward, toward the core, where knowledge is absolute and uncertainty is unknown. He is running among the shining electrons, now. He is down there among the angstrom units at last.

Call Me Titan

Roger Zelazny jumped into the science fiction arena midway through the 1960s, scattering masterpieces right and left with joyous abandon: “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” This Immortal, “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth,” The Dream Master, Lord of Light, and many, many more, all appearing within a few years of each other and gathering him wide acclaim and a shelf full of Hugo and Nebula Awards.

Something else that Roger gathered during those years was an assortment of friends who loved him greatly—for, though he was a shy man, he was a sweet and gracious one, and everyone who came in contact with him liked him on first meeting and liked him more and more as acquaintance deepened. I met Roger somewhere around 1966 and, like everybody else, I found him immediately congenial: we became close friends, visited each other frequently, exchanged bits of professional helpfulness. I found him a man of high good humor, warm good will, and great patience, as I learned when the inordinately punctual Robert Silverberg showed up an hour late for dinner with him two times running in consecutive years, for a different silly reason each time. (Both had something to do with the time-zone difference separating California and New Mexico.) It was a somber moment when I discovered in the autumn of 1994 that Roger was seriously ill, and a stunning one when I learned of his death from cancer the following June at the age of 58.

A memorial anthology soon was in the works, under the aegis of that master anthologist, Martin H. Greenberg. Marty called it Lord of the Fantastic: Stories in Honor of Roger Zelazny and rounded up a group of Roger’s friends to contribute stories. Mine was “Call Me Titan,” and in it I attempted to mimic not only Roger’s inimitable style but also some of his thematic concerns (the Mediterranean world, the ancient gods, the comic possibilities of the survival of those gods into our own day.) For the few days in January 1996 that it took me to do it I was able to masquerade in my own mind as Roger Zelazny, and for that reason it was an easy and enjoyable story to write—except for the ugly realization that would surface from time to time that the only reason I was writing it was as a memorial to my dead friend.

The stories in Lord of the Fantastic were supposed to be previously unpublished ones. Through an error somewhat akin to the time-zone slip-up that had made me late for dinner with Roger (and George R. R. Martin also) twice running, I sold the story to editor Gardner Dozois of Asimov’s Science Fiction, where it made its first appearance in the world in the February 1997 issue, many months ahead of the Greenberg anthology. I could do nothing but apologize. Luckily, Marty Greenberg, like Roger Zelazny, was a sweet, lovable, and patient man, and he forgave me for my malfeasance. Would that all my sins were so readily forgiven.

In Memoriam: RZ

“How did you get loose?” the woman who was Aphrodite asked me.

“It happened. Here I am.”

“Yes,” she said. “You. Of all of them, you. In this lovely place.” She waved at the shining sun-bright sea, the glittering white stripe of the beach, the whitewashed houses, the bare brown hills. A lovely place, yes, this isle of Mykonos. “And what are you going to do now?”

“What I was created to do,” I told her. “You know.”

She considered that. We were drinking ouzo on the rocks, on the hotel patio, beneath a hanging array of fishermen’s nets. After a moment she laughed, that irresistible tinkling laugh of hers, and clinked her glass against mine.

“Lots of luck,” she said.

That was Greece. Before that was Sicily, and the mountain, and the eruption. …

The mountain had trembled and shaken and belched, and the red streams of molten fire began to flow downward from the ashen top, and in the first ten minutes of the eruption six little towns around the slopes were wiped out. It happened just that fast. They shouldn’t have been there, but they were, and then they weren’t. Too bad for them. But it’s always a mistake to buy real estate on Mount Etna.

The lava was really rolling. It would reach the city of Catania in a couple of hours and take out its whole northeastern quarter, and all of Sicily would be in mourning the next day. Some eruption. The biggest of all time, on this island where big eruptions have been making the news since the dinosaur days.

As for me, I couldn’t be sure what was happening up there at the summit, not yet. I was still down deep, way down, three miles from sunlight.

But in my jail cell down there beneath the roots of the giant volcano that is called Mount Etna I could tell from the shaking and the noise and the heat that this one was something special. That the prophesied Hour of Liberation had come round at last for me, after five hundred centuries as the prisoner of Zeus.

I stretched and turned and rolled over, and sat up for the first time in fifty thousand years.

Nothing was pressing down on me.

Ugly limping Hephaestus, my jailer, had set up his forge right on top of me long ago, his heavy anvils on my back. And had merrily hammered bronze and iron all day and all night for all he was worth, that clomp-legged old master craftsman. Where was Hephaestus now? Where were his anvils?

Not on me. Not any longer.

That was good, that feeling of nothing pressing down.

I wriggled my shoulders. That took time. You have a lot of shoulders to wriggle, when you have a hundred heads, give or take three or four.

“Hephaestus?” I yelled, yelling it out of a hundred mouths at once. I felt the mountain shivering and convulsing above me, and I knew that my voice alone was enough to make great slabs of it fall off and go tumbling down, down, down.

No answer from Hephaestus. No clangor of his forge, either. He just wasn’t there any more.

I tried again, a different, greater name.

“Zeus?”

Silence.

“You hear me, Zeus?”

No reply.

“Where the hell are you? Where is everybody?”

All was silence, except for the hellish roaring of the volcano.

Well, okay, don’t answer me. Slowly I got to my feet, extending myself to my full considerable height. The fabric of the mountain gave way for me. I have that little trick.

Another good feeling, that was, rising to an upright position. Do you know what it’s like, not being allowed to stand, not even once, for fifty thousand years? But of course you don’t, little ones. How could you?

One more try. “ZEUS???”

All my hundred voices crying his name at once, fortissimo fortissimo. A chorus of booming echoes. Every one of my heads had grown back, over the years. I was healed of all that Zeus had done to me. That was especially good, knowing that I was healed. Things had looked really bad, for a while.

Well, no sense just standing there and caterwauling, if nobody was going to answer me back. This was the Hour of Liberation, after all. I was free—my chains fallen magically away, my heads all sprouted again. Time to get out of here. I started to move.

Upward. Outward.

I moved up through the mountain’s bulk as though it was so much air. The rock was nothing to me. Unimpeded I rose past the coiling internal chambers through which the lava was racing up toward the summit vent, and came out into the sunlight, and clambered up the snow-kissed slopes of the mountain to the ash-choked summit itself, and stood there right in the very center of the eruption as the volcano puked its blazing guts out. I grinned a hundred big grins on my hundred faces, with hot fierce winds swirling like swords around my head and torrents of lava flowing down all around me. The view from up there was terrific. And what a fine feeling that was, just looking around at the world again after all that time underground.

There below me off to the east was the fish-swarming sea. Over there behind me, the serried tree-thickened hills. Above me, the fire-hearted sun.

What beautiful sights they all were!

“Hoo-ha!” I cried.

My jubilant roar went forth from that lofty mountaintop in Sicily like a hundred hurricanes at once. The noise of it broke windows in Rome and flattened farmhouses in Sardinia and knocked over ten mosques deep in the Tunisian Sahara. But the real blast was aimed eastward across the water, over toward Greece, and it went across that peninsula like a scythe, taking out half the treetops from Agios Nikolaus on the Ionian side to Athens over on the Aegean, and kept on going clear into Turkey.

It was a little signal, so to speak. I was heading that way myself, with some very ancient scores to settle.

I started down the mountainside, fast. The lava surging all around my thudding feet meant nothing to me.

Call me Typhoeus. Call me Titan.

I suppose I might have attracted a bit of attention as I made my way down those fiery slopes and past all the elegant seaside resorts that now were going crazy with hysteria over the eruption, and went striding into the sea midway between Fiumefreddo and Taormina. I am, after all, something of a monster, by your standards: four hundred feet high, let us say, with all those heads, dragon heads at that, and eyes that spurt flame, and thick black bristles everywhere on my body and swarms of coiling vipers sprouting from my thighs. The gods themselves have been known to turn and run at the mere sight of me. Some of them, once upon a time, fled all the way to Egypt when I yelled “Boo!”

But perhaps the eruption and the associated earthquakes kept the people of eastern Sicily so very preoccupied just then that they didn’t take time to notice what sort of being it was that was walking down the side of Mount Etna and perambulating off toward the sea. Or maybe they didn’t believe their eyes. Or it could be that they simply nodded and said, “Sure. Why not?”

I hit the water running and put my heads down and swam swiftly Greeceward across the cool blue sea without even bothering to come up for breath. What would have been the point? The air behind me smelled of fire and brimstone. And I was in a hurry.

Zeus, I thought. I’m coming to get you, you bastard!

As I said, I’m a Titan. It’s the family name, not a description. We Titans were the race of Elder Gods—the first drafts, so to speak, for the deities that you people would eventually worship—the ones that Zeus walloped into oblivion long before Bill Gates came down from Mount Sinai with MS-DOS. Long before Homer sang. Long before the Flood. Long before, as a matter of fact, anything that might mean anything to you.

Gaea was our mother. The Earth, in other words. The mother of us all, really.

In the early days of the world broad-bosomed Gaea brought forth all sorts of gods and giants and monsters. Out of her came far-seeing Uranus, the sky, and then he and Gaea created the first dozen Titans, Oceanus and Cronus and Rhea and that bunch.

The original twelve Titans spawned a lot of others: Atlas, who now holds up the world, and tricky Prometheus, who taught humans how to use fire and got himself the world’s worst case of cirrhosis for his trouble, and silly scatterbrained Epimetheus, who had that thing with Pandora, and so on. There were snake-limbed giants like Porphyrion and Alcyoneus, and hundred-armed fifteen-headed beauties like Briareus and Cottus and Gyes, and other oversized folk like the three one-eyed Cyclopes, Arges of the storms and Brontes of the thunder and Steropes of the lightning, and so on. Oh, what a crowd we were!

The universe was our oyster, so I’m told. It must have been good times for all and sundry. I hadn’t been born yet, in that era when Uranus was king.

But very early on there was that nasty business between Uranus and his son Cronus, which ended very badly for Uranus, the bloody little deal with the sharp sickle, and Cronus became the top god for a while, until he made the mistake of letting Zeus get born. That was it, for Cronus. In this business you have to watch out for overambitious sons. Cronus tried—he swallowed each of his children as they were born, to keep them from doing to him what he had done to Uranus—but Zeus, the last-born, eluded him. Very unfortunate for Cronus.

Family history. Dirty linen.

As for Zeus, who as you can see showed up on the scene quite late but eventually came to be in charge of things, he’s my half-sister Rhea’s son, so I suppose you’d call him my nephew. I call him my nemesis.

After Zeus had finished off Cronus he mopped up the rest of the Titans in a series of wild wars, thunderbolts ricocheting all over the place, the seas boiling, whole continents going up in flame. Some of us stayed neutral and some of us, I understand, actually allied themselves with him, but none of that made any difference. When all the shouting was over the whole pack of Titans were all prisoners in various disagreeable places, such as, for example, deep down underneath Mount Etna with the forge of Hephaestus sitting on your back; and Zeus and his outfit, Hades and Poseidon and Apollo and Aphrodite and the rest, ruled the roost.

I was Gaea’s final experiment in maternity, the youngest of the Titans, born very late in the war with Zeus. Her final monster, some would say, because of my unusual looks and size. Tartarus was my father: the Underworld, he is. I was born restless. Dangerous, too. My job was to avenge the family against the outrages Zeus had perpetrated on the rest of us. I came pretty close, too.

And now I was looking for my second chance.

Greece had changed a lot since I last had seen it. Something called civilization had happened in the meanwhile. Highways, gas stations, telephone poles, billboards, high-rise hotels, all those nice things.

Still and all, it didn’t look so very bad. That killer blue sky with the golden blink in it, the bright sparkle of the low rolling surf, the white-walled cubes of houses climbing up the brown knife-blade hillsides: a handsome land, all things considered.

I came ashore at the island of Zakynthos on the Peloponnesian coast. There was a pleasant waterfront town there with an old fortress on a hilltop and groves of olives and cypresses all around. The geological disturbances connected with my escape from my prison cell beneath Mount Etna did not appear to have done much damage here.

I decided that it was probably not a great idea to let myself be seen in my actual form, considering how monstrous I would look to mortal eyes and the complications that that would create for me. And so, as I approached the land, I acquired a human body that I found swimming a short way off shore at one of the beachfront hotels.

It was a serviceable, athletic he-body, a lean, trim one, not young but full of energy, craggy-faced, a long jaw and a long sharp nose and a high forehead. I checked out his mind. Bright, sharp, observant. And packed with data, both standard and quirkily esoteric. All that stuff about Bill Gates and Homer and high-rises and telephone poles: I got that from him. And how to behave like a human being. And a whole lot more, all of which I suspected would be useful to acquire.

A questing, creative mind. A good person. I liked him. I decided to use him.

In half a wink I transformed myself into a simulacrum of him and went on up the beach into town, leaving him behind just as he had been, all unknowing. The duplication wouldn’t matter. Nobody was likely to care that there were two of him wandering around Greece at the same time, unless they saw both of us at the same moment, which wasn’t going to happen.

I did a little further prowling behind his forehead and learned that he was a foreigner in Greece, a tourist. Married, three children, a house on a hillside in a dry country that looked a little like Greece, but was far away. Spoke a language called English, knew a smattering of other tongues. Not much Greek. That would be okay: I have my ways of communicating.

To get around the countryside properly, I discovered, I was going to need land-clothing, money, and a passport. I took care of these matters. Details like those don’t pose problems for such as we.

Then I went rummaging in his mind to see whether he had any information in there about the present whereabouts of Zeus.

It was a very orderly mind. He had Zeus filed under “Greek Mythology.”

Mythology?

Yes. Yes! He knew about Gaea, and Uranus, and the overthrow of Uranus by Cronus. He knew about the other Titans, at any rate some of them—Prometheus, Rhea, Hyperion, Iapetus. He knew some details about a few of the giants and miscellaneous hundred-armed monsters, and about the war between Zeus and the Titans and the Titans’ total downfall, and the takeover by the big guy and his associates, Poseidon and Apollo and Ares & Company. But these were all stories to him. Fables. Mythology.

I confess I looked in his well-stocked mental archives for myself, Typhoeus—even a Titan has some vanity, you know—but all I found was a reference that said, “Typhon, child of Hera, is often confused with the earlier Titan Typhoeus, son of Gaea and Tartarus.”

Well, yes. The names are similar; but Typhon was the bloated she-dragon that Apollo slew at Delphi, and what does that have to do with me?

That was bad, very bad, to show up in this copiously furnished mind only as a correction of an erroneous reference to someone else. Humiliating, you might actually say. I am not as important as Cronus or Uranus in the scheme of things, I suppose, but I did have my hour of glory, that time I went up against Zeus single-handed and came very close to defeating him. But what was even worse than such neglect, far worse, was to have the whole splendid swaggering tribe of us, from the great mother Gaea and her heavenly consort down to the merest satyr and wood-nymph, tucked away in there as so much mythology.

What had happened to the world, and to its gods, while I lay writhing under Etna?

Mount Olympus seemed a reasonable first place for me to go to look for some answers.

I was at the absolute wrong end of Greece for that: down in the southwestern corner, whereas Olympus is far up in the northeast. All decked out in my new human body and its new human clothes, I caught a hydrofoil ferry to Patra, on the mainland, and another ferry across the Gulf of Corinth to Nafpaktos, and then, by train and bus, made my way up toward Thessaly, where Olympus is. None of these places except Olympus itself had been there last time I was in Greece, nor were there such things as trains or ferries or buses then. But I’m adaptable. I am, after all, an immortal god. A sort of a god, anyway.

It was interesting, sitting among you mortals in those buses and trains. I had never paid much attention to you in the old days, any more than I would give close attention to ants or bumblebees or cockroaches. Back there in the early ages of the world, humans were few and far between, inconsequential experimental wildlife. Prometheus made you, you know, for some obscure reason of his own: made you out of assorted dirt and slime, and breathed life into you, and turned you loose to decorate the landscape. You certainly did a job of decorating it, didn’t you?

Sitting there among you in those crowded garlicky trains, breathing your exhalations and smelling your sweat, I couldn’t help admiring the persistence and zeal with which you people had covered so much of the world with your houses, your highways, your shopping malls, your amusement parks, your stadiums, your power-transmission lines, and your garbage. Especially your garbage. Very few of these things could be considered any sort of an improvement over the basic virgin terrain, but I had to give you credit for effort, anyway. Prometheus, wherever he might be now, would surely be proud of you.

But where was Prometheus? Still chained up on that mountaintop, with Zeus’s eagle gnawing away on his liver?

I roamed the minds of my traveling companions, but they weren’t educated people like the one I had chanced upon at that beach, and they knew zero about Prometheus. Or anybody else of my own era, for that matter, with the exception of Zeus and Apollo and Athena and a few of the other latecomer gods. Who also were mere mythology to them. Greece had different gods these days, it seemed. Someone called Christos had taken over here. Along with his father and his mother, and assorted lesser deities whose relation to the top ones was hard to figure out.

Who were these new gods? Where had they come from? I was pleased by the thought that Zeus had been pushed aside by this Christos the way he had nudged old Cronus off the throne, but how had it happened? When?

Would I find Christos living on top of Mount Olympus in Zeus’s old palace?

Well, no. I very shortly discovered that nobody was living on top of Olympus at all.

The place had lost none of its beauty, infested though modern-day Greece is by you and your kind. The enormous plateau on which the mountain stands is still unspoiled; and Olympus itself rises as ever in that great soaring sweep above the wild, desolate valley, the various summits forming a spectacular natural amphitheater and the upper tiers of rock splendidly shrouded by veils of cloud.

There are some roads going up, now. In the foothills I hired a car and a driver to take me through the forests of chestnut and fir to a refuge hut two thirds of the way up that is used by climbers, and there I left my driver, telling him I would go the rest of the way myself. He gave me a peculiar look, I suppose because I was wearing the wrong kind of clothing for climbing, and had no mountaineering equipment with me.

When he was gone, I shed my borrowed human form and rose up once again taller than the tallest tree in the world, and gave myself a set of gorgeous black-feathered wings as well, and went wafting up into that region of clean, pure air where Zeus had once had his throne.

No throne. No Zeus.

My cousins the giants Otus and Ephialtes had piled Mount Pelion on top of Mount Ossa to get up here during the war of the gods, and were flung right back down again. But I had the place to myself, unchallenged. I hovered over the jagged fleece-kissed peaks of the ultimate summit, spiraling down through the puffs of white cloud, ready for battle, but no battle was offered me.

“Zeus? Zeus?”

Once I had stood against him hissing terror from my grim jaws, and my eyes flaring gorgon lightning that had sent his fellow gods packing in piss-pants terror. But Zeus had withstood me, then. He blasted me with sizzling thunderbolts and seared me to an ash, and hurled me to rack and ruin; and jammed what was left of me down under Mount Etna amid rivers of fire, with the craftsman god Hephaestus piling the tools of his workshop all over me to hold me down, and there I lay for those fifty thousand years, muttering to myself, until I had healed enough to come forth.

I was forth now, all right, and looking for a rematch. Etna had vomited rivers of fire all over the fair plains of Sicily, and I was loose upon the world; but where was my adversary?

“Zeus!” I cried, into the emptiness.

I tried the name of Christos, too, just to see if the new god would answer. No go. He wasn’t there either. Olympus was as stunning as ever, but nobody godly seemed to have any use for it these days.

I flew back down to the Alpine Club shelter and turned myself back into the lean-shanked American tourist with the high forehead and the long nose. I think three hikers may have seen me make the transformation, for as I started down the slope I came upon them standing slackjawed and goggle-eyed, as motionless as though Medusa had
smitten them into stone.

“Hi, there, fellas,” I called to them. “Have a nice day!”

They just gaped. I descended the fir-darkened mountainside to the deep-breasted valley, and just like any hungry mortal I ate dolmades and keftedes and moussaka in a little taverna I found down there, washing it down with a few kilos of retsina. And then, not so much like any mortal, I walked halfway across the country to Athens. It took me a goodly number of days, resting only a few hours every night. The body I had copied was a fundamentally sturdy one, and of course I had bolstered it a little.

A long walk, yes. But I was beginning to comprehend that there was no need for me to hurry, and I wanted to see the sights.

Athens was a horror. It was the kingdom of Hades risen up to the surface of the world. Noise, congestion, all-around general grittiness, indescribable ugliness, everything in a miserable state of disrepair, and the air so thick with foul vapor that you could scratch your initials in it with your fingernails, if you had initials, if you had fingernails.

I knew right away I wasn’t going to find any members of the old pantheon in this town. No deity in his right mind would want to spend ten minutes here. But Athens is the city of Athena, and Athena is the goddess of knowledge, and I thought there might be a possibility that somewhere here in her city that I would be able to learn how and why and when the assorted divinities of Greece had made the transition from omnipotence to mythology, and where I might find them (or at least the one I was looking for) now.

I prowled the nightmare streets. Dust and sand and random blocks of concrete everywhere, rusting metal girders standing piled for no particular reason by the side of the road, crumbling buildings. Traffic, frantic and fierce: what a mistake giving up the ox-cart had been! Cheap, tacky shops. Skinny long-legged cats hissed at me. They knew what I was. I hissed right back. We understood each other, at least.

Up on a hilltop in the middle of everything, a bunch of ruined marble temples. The Acropolis, that hilltop is, the highest and holiest place in town. The temples aren’t bad, as mortal buildings go, but in terrible shape, fallen columns scattered hither and yon, caryatids eroded to blurs by the air pollution. Why are you people such dreadful custodians of your own best works?

I went up there to look around, thinking I might find some lurking god or demigod in town on a visit. I stood by the best of the tumbledown temples, the one called the Parthenon, and listened to a little man with big eyeglasses who was telling a group of people who looked exactly like him how the building had looked when it was new and Athena was still in town. He spoke a language that my host body didn’t understand at all, but I made a few adjustments and comprehended. So many languages, you mortals! We all spoke the same language, and that was good enough for us; but we were only gods, I suppose.

When he was through lecturing them about the Parthenon, the tour guide said, “Now we will visit the Sanctuary of Zeus. This way, please.”

The Sanctuary of Zeus was just back of the Parthenon, but there really wasn’t very much left of it. The tour guide did a little routine about Zeus as father of the gods, getting six facts out of every five wrong.

“Let me tell you a few things about Zeus,” I wanted to say, but I didn’t. “How he used to cheat at cards, for instance. And the way he couldn’t keep his hands off young girls. Or, maybe, the way he bellowed and moaned the first time he and I fought, when I tangled him in the coils of my snakes and laid him low, and cut the tendons of his hands and feet to keep him from getting rambunctious, and locked him up in that cave in Cilicia.”

I kept all that to myself. These people didn’t look like they’d care to hear any commentary from a stranger. Anyway, if I told that story I’d feel honor bound to go on and explain how that miserable sneak Hermes crept into the cave when I wasn’t looking and patched Zeus up—and then how, once Zeus was on his feet again, he came after me and let me have it with such a blast of lightning-bolts that I was fried halfway to a crisp and wound up spending the next few epochs as a prisoner down there under Etna.

A dispiriting place, the Acropolis.

I went slinking down and over to the Plaka, which is the neighborhood in back of it, for some lunch. Human bodies need to be fed again and again, all day long. Swordfish grilled on skewers with onions and tomatoes; more retsina; fruit and cheese. All right. Not bad. Then to the National Museum, a two-hour walk, sweat-sticky and dusty. Where I looked at broken statues and bought a guidebook that told me about the gods whose statues these were. Not even close to the actualities, any of them. Did they seriously think that brawny guy with the beard was Poseidon? And the woman with the tin hat, Athena? And that blowhard—Zeus? Don’t make me laugh. Please. My laughter destroys whole cities.

Nowhere in the whole museum were there any representations of Titans. Just Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite, Poseidon, and the rest of them, the junior varsity, the whole mob of supplanters, over and over and over. It was as if we didn’t count at all in the historical record.

That hurt. I was in one hell of a sour mood when I left the museum.

There was a Temple of Olympian Zeus in town, the guidebook said, somewhere back in the vicinity of the Acropolis. I kept hoping that I would find some clue to Zeus’s present place of residence at one of the sites that once had been sacred to him. A vestige, a lingering whiff of divinity.

But the Temple of Olympian Zeus was nothing but an incomplete set of ruined columns, and the only whiff I picked up there was the whiff of mortality and decay. And now it was getting dark and the body I was inhabiting was hungry again. Back to the Plaka; grilled meat, wine, a sweet pudding.

Afterwards, as I roamed the winding streets leading down to the newer part of the city with no special purpose in mind, a feeble voice out of a narrow alley said, in the native language of my host body, “Help! Oh, please, help!”

I was not put into this world for the purpose of helping anyone. But the body that I had duplicated in order to get around in modern Greece was evidently the body of a kindly and responsible person, because his reflexes took over instantly, and I found myself heading into that alleyway to see what aid I could render the person who was so piteously crying out.

Deep in the shadows I saw someone—a woman, I realized—lying on the ground in what looked like a pool of blood. I went to her side and knelt by her, and she began to mutter something in a bleary way about being attacked and robbed.

“Can you sit up?” I said, slipping my arm around her back. “It’ll be easier for me to carry you if—”

Then I felt a pair of hands grasping me by the shoulders, not gently, and something hard and sharp pressing against the middle of my back, and the supposedly bloodied and battered woman I was trying to help rolled deftly out of my grasp and stepped back without any trouble at all, and a disagreeable rasping voice at my left ear said quietly, “Just give us your wristwatch and your wallet and you won’t get hurt at all.”

I was puzzled for a moment. I was still far from accustomed to human ways, and it was often necessary to peer into my host-mind to find out what was going on.

Quickly, though, I came to understand that there was such a thing as crime in your world, and that some of it was being tried on me at this very moment. The woman in the alley was bait; I was the prey; two accomplices had been lurking in the shadows.

I suppose I could have given them my wristwatch and wallet without protest, and let them make their escape. What did a wristwatch mean to me? And I could create a thousand new wallets just like the one I had, which I had created also, after all. As for harm, they could do me none with their little knife. I had survived even the lightnings of Zeus. Perhaps I should have reacted with godlike indifference to their little attempt at mugging me.

But it had been a long dreary discouraging day, and a hot one, too. The air was close and vile-smelling. Maybe I had allowed my host body to drink a little too much retsina with dinner. In any event, godlike indifference was not what I displayed just then. Mortal petulance was more like the appropriate term.

“Behold me, fools,” I said.

I let them see my true form.

There I was before them, sky-high, mountainous, a horrendous gigantic figure of many heads and fiery eyes and thick black bristles and writhing viperish excrescences, a sight to make even gods quail.

Of course, inasmuch as I’m taller than the tallest tree and appropriately wide, manifesting myself in such a narrow alleyway might have posed certain operational problems. But I have access to dimensions unavailable to you, and I made room for myself there with the proper interpenetrational configurations. Not that it mattered to the three muggers, because they were dead of shock the moment they saw me towering before them.

I raised my foot and ground them into the pavement like noxious vermin.

Then, in the twinkling of an eye, I was once more a slender, lithe middle-aged American tourist with thinning hair and a kindly smile, and there were three dark spots on the pavement of the alley, and that was that.

It was, I admit, overkill.

But I had had a trying day. In fact, I had had a trying fifty thousand years.

Athens had been so hellish that it put me in mind of the authentic kingdom of Hades, and so that was my next destination, for I thought I might get some answers down there among the dead. It wasn’t much of a trip, not for me. I opened a vortex for myself and slipped downward and there right in front of me were the black poplars and willows of the Grove of Persephone, with Hades’ Gate just behind it.

“Cerberus?” I called. “Here, doggy doggy doggy! Good Cerberus! Come say hello to Daddy!”

Where was he, my lovely dog, my own sweet child? For I myself was the progenitor of the three-headed guardian of the gate of Hell, by virtue of my mating with my sister, Tartarus and Gaea’s scaly-tailed daughter Echidna. We made the Harpies too, did Echidna and I, and the Chimera, and Scylla, and also the Hydra, a whole gaudy gorgeous brood of monsters. But of all my children I was always most fond of Cerberus, for his loyalty. How I loved to see him come running toward me when I called! What pleasure I took in his serpent-bristled body, his voice like clanging bronze, his slavering jaws that dripped black venom!

This day, though, I wandered dogless through the Underworld. There was no sign of Cerberus anywhere, no trace even of his glittering turds. Hell’s Gate stood open and the place was deserted. I saw nothing of Charon the boatman of the Styx, nor Hades and Queen Persephone, nor any members of their court, nor the spirits of the dead who should have been in residence here. An abandoned warehouse, dusty and empty. Quickly I fled toward the sunshine.

The island of Delos was where I went next, looking for Apollo. Delos is, or was, his special island, and Apollo had always struck me as the coolest, most level-headed member of the Zeus bunch. Perhaps he had survived whatever astounding debacle it was that had swept the Olympian gods away. And, if so, maybe he could give me a clue to Zeus’s current location.

Big surprise! I went to Delos, but no Apollo.

It was yet another dismal disillusioning journey through the tumbledown sadness that is Greece. This time I flew; not on handsome black-feathered wings, but on a clever machine, a metal tube called an airplane, full of travelers looking more or less like me in my present form. It rose up out of Athens in a welter of sound and fury and took up a course high above the good old wine-dark sea, speckled with tawny archipelagos, and in very short order came down on a small dry island to the south. This island was called Mykonos, and there I could buy myself passage in one of the boats that made outings several times a day to nearby Delos.

Delos was a dry rubble-field, strewn with fragments of temples, their columns mostly broken off close to the ground. Some marble lions were still intact, lean and vigilant, crouching on their hind legs. They looked hungry. But there wasn’t much else to see. The place had the parched gloom of death about it, the bleak aura of extinction.

I returned to Mykonos on the lunchtime boat, and found myself lodgings in a hillside hotel a short distance outside the pretty little narrow-streeted shorefront town. I ordered me some more mortal food and drank mortal drink. My borrowed body needed such things.

It was on Mykonos that I met Aphrodite.

Or, rather, she met me.

I was sitting by myself, minding my own business, in the hotel’s outdoor bar, which was situated on a cobblestoned patio bedecked with mosaics and hung with nets and oars and other purported fishing artifacts. I was on my third ouzo of the hour, which possibly was a bit much for the capacities of the body I was using, and I was staring down the hillside pensively at, well, what I have to call the wine-dark sea. (Greece brings out the cliches in anyone. Why should I resist?)

A magnificent long-legged full-bodied blonde woman came over to me and said, in a wonderfully throaty, husky voice, “New in town, sailor?”

I stared at her, astounded.

There was the unmistakable radiance of divinity about her. My Geiger counter of godliness was going clickity-clack, full blast. How could I have failed to pick up her emanations the moment I arrived on Mykonos? But I hadn’t, not until she was standing right next to me. She had picked up mine, though.

“Who are you?” I blurted.

“Won’t you ask a lady to sit down, even?”

I jumped to my feet like a nervous schoolboy, hauled a deck chair scrapingly across and positioned it next to mine, and bowed her into it. Then I wigwagged for a waiter. “What do you want to drink?” I rasped. My throat was dry. Nervous schoolboy, yes, indeed.

“I’ll have what you’re having.”

“Parakalo, ouzo on the rocks,” I told the waiter.

She had showers of golden hair tumbling to shoulder length, and catlike yellow eyes, and full ripe lips that broke naturally into the warmest of smiles. The aroma that came from her was one of young wine and green fields at sunrise and swift-coursing streams, but also of lavender and summer heat, of night rain, of surging waves, of midnight winds.

I knew I was consorting with the enemy. I didn’t care.

“Which one are you?” I said again.

“Guess.”

“Aphrodite would be too obvious. You’re probably Ares, or Hephaestus, or Poseidon.”

She laughed, a melodic cadenza of merriment that ran right through the scale and into the infra-voluptuous. “You give me too much credit for deviousness. But I like your way of thinking. Ares in drag, really? Poseidon with a close shave? Hephaestus with a blonde wig?” She leaned close. The fragrance of her took on hurricane intensity. “You were right the first time.”

“Aphrodite.”

“None other. I live in Los Angeles now. Taking a little holiday in the mother country. And you? You’re one of the old ones, aren’t you?”

“How can you tell?”

“The archaic emanation you give off. Something out of the pre-Olympian past.” She clinked the ice-cubes thoughtfully in her glass, took a long pull of the ouzo, stared me straight in the eyes. “Prometheus? Tethys?” I shook my head. “Someone of that clan, though. I thought all of you old ones were done for a long time ago. But there’s definitely a Titan vibe about you. Which one, I wonder? Most likely one of the really strange ones. Thaumas? Phorcys?”

“Stranger than those,” I said.

She took a few more guesses. Not even close.

“Typhoeus,” I told her finally.

We walked into town for dinner. People turned to look at us in the narrow streets. At her, I mean. She was wearing a filmy orange sun-dress with nothing under it and when you were east of her on a westbound street you got quite a show.

“You really don’t think that I’m going to find Zeus?” I asked her.

“Let’s say you have your work cut out for you.”

“Well, so be it. I have to find him.”

“Why is that?”

“It’s my job,” I said. “There’s nothing personal about it. I’m the designated avenger. It’s my sole purpose in existence: to punish Zeus for his war against the children of Gaea. You know that.”

“The war’s been over a long time, Typhoeus. You might as well let bygones be bygones. Anyway, it’s not as though Zeus got to enjoy his victory for long.” We were in the middle of the maze of narrow winding streets that is Mykonos Town. She pointed to a cheerful little restaurant called Catherine’s. “Let’s go in here. I ate here last night and it was pretty good.”

We ordered a bottle of white wine. “I like the body you found for yourself,” she said. “Not particularly handsome, no, but pleasing. The eyes are especially nice. Warm and trustworthy, but also keen, penetrating.”

I would not be drawn away from the main theme. “What happened to the Olympians?” I asked.

“Died off, most of them. One by one. Of neglect. Starvation.”

“Immortal gods don’t die.”

“Some do, some don’t. You know that. Didn’t Argus of the Hundred Eyes kill your very own Echidna? And did she come back to life?”

“But the major gods—”

“Even if they don’t die, they can be forgotten, and the effect’s pretty much the same. While you were locked up under Etna, new gods came in. There wasn’t even a battle. They just moved in, and we had to move along. We disappeared entirely.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

“Yes. Totally out of business. You’ve seen the shape our temples are in? Have you seen anybody putting out burnt offerings to us? No, no, it’s all over for us, the worship, the sacrifices. Has been for a long time. We went into exile, the whole kit and kaboodle of us, scattered across the world. I’m sure a lot of us simply died, despite that theoretical immortality of ours. Some hung on, I suppose. But it’s a thousand years since the last time I saw any of them.”

“Which ones did you see then?”

“Apollo—he was getting gray and paunchy. And I caught sight of Hermes, once—I think it was Hermes—slow and short-winded, and limping like Hephaestus.”

“And Zeus?” I asked. “You never ran into him anywhere, after you all left Olympus?”

“No. Never even once.”

I pondered that. “So how did you manage to stay so healthy?”

“I’m Aphrodite. The life-force. Beauty. Passion. Those things don’t go out of fashion for long. I’ve done all right for myself, over the years.”

“Ah. Yes. Obviously you have.”

The waitress fluttered around us. I was boiling with questions to ask Aphrodite, but it was time to order, and that was what we did. The usual Greek things, stuffed grape leaves, grilled fish, overcooked vegetables. Another bottle of wine. My head was pulsating. The restaurant was small, crowded, a whirlpool of noise. The nearness of Aphrodite was overwhelming. I felt dizzy. It was a surprisingly pleasant sensation.

I said, after a time, “I’m convinced that Zeus is still around somewhere. I’m going to find him and this time I’m going to whip his ass and put him under Mount Etna.”

“It’s amazing how much like a small boy an immortal being can be. Even one as huge and frightful as you.”

My face turned hot. I said nothing.

“Forget Zeus,” she urged. “Forget Typhoeus, too. Stay human. Eat, drink, be merry.” Her eyes were glistening. I felt as if I were falling forward, tumbling into the sweet chasm between her breasts. “We could take a trip together. I’d teach you how to enjoy yourself. How to enjoy me, too. Tell me: have you ever been in love?”

“Echidna and I—”

“Echidna! Yes! You and she got together and made a bunch of hideous monsters like yourselves, with too many heads and drooling fangs. I don’t mean Echidna. This is Earth, here and now. I’m a woman now and you’re a man.”

“But Zeus—”

“Zeus,” she said scornfully. She made the name of the Lord of Olympus sound like an obscenity.

We finished eating and I paid the check and we went outside into the mild, breezy Mykonos night, strolling for fifteen or twenty minutes, winding up finally in a dark, deserted part of the town, a warehouse district down by the water, where the street was no more than five feet wide and empty shuttered buildings with whitewashed walls bordered us on both sides.

She turned to me there and pulled me abruptly up against her. Her eyes were bright with mischief. Her lips sought mine. With a little hissing sound she nudged me backward until I was leaning against a wall, and she was pressing me tight, and currents of energy that could have fried a continent were passing between us. I think there could have been no one, not man nor god, who would not have wanted to trade places with me just then.

“Quickly! The hotel!” she whispered.

“The hotel, yes.”

We didn’t bother to walk. That would have taken too long. In a flash we vanished ourselves from that incomprehensible tangle of maze-like streets and reappeared in her room at our hotel, and from then to dawn she and I generated such a delirium of erotic force that the entire island shook and shivered with the glorious sturm and drang of it. We heaved and thrust and moaned and groaned, and rivers of sweat ran from our bodies and our hearts pounded and thundered and our eyes rolled in our heads from giddy exhaustion, for we allowed ourselves the luxury of mortal limitations for the sake of the mortal joy of transcending those limitations. But because we weren’t mortal we also had the option of renewing our strength whenever we had depleted it, and we exercised that option many a time before rosy-fingered dawn came tiptoeing up over the high-palisaded eastern walls.

Naked, invisible to prying eyes, Aphrodite and I walked then hand in hand along the morning-shimmering strand of the fish-swarming sea, and she murmured to me of the places we would go, the things we would experience.

“The Taj Mahal,” she said. “And the summer palace at Udaipur. Persepolis and Isfahan in springtime. Baalbek. Paris, of course. Carcassonne. Iguazu Falls, and the Blue Mosque, and the Fountains of the Blue Nile. We’ll make love in the Villa of Tiberius on Capri—and between the paws of the Sphinx—and in the snow on top of Mount Everest—”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

And what I was thinking was, Zeus. Zeus. Zeus. Zeus.

And so we travel about the world together, Aphrodite and I, seeing the things in it that are beautiful, and there are many of those; and so she distracts me from my true task. For the time being. It is very pleasant, traveling with Aphrodite; and so I permit myself to be distracted this way.

But I have not forgotten my purpose. And this is my warning to the world.

I am a restless being, a mighty thrusting force. I was created that way. My adversary doesn’t seem currently to be around. But Zeus is here somewhere. I know he is. He wears a mask. He disguises himself as a mortal, either because it amuses him to do so, or because he has no choice, for there is something in the world of which he is afraid, something from which he must hide himself, some god greater even than Zeus, as Zeus was greater than Cronus and Cronus was greater than Uranus.

But I will find him. And when I do, I will drop this body and take on my own form again. I will stand mountain-high, and you will see my hundred heads, and my fires will flash and range. And Zeus and I will enter into combat once more, and this time I will surely win.

It will happen.

I promise you that, O small ones. I warn you. It will happen.

You will tremble then. I’m sorry for that. The mind that came with this body I wear now has taught me something about compassion; and so I regret the destruction I will inevitably visit upon you, because it cannot be avoided, when Zeus and I enter into our struggle. You have my sincerest apologies, in advance. Protect yourselves as best you can. But for me there can be no turning away from my task.

Zeus? This is Typhoeus the Titan who calls you!

Zeus, where are you?

Defenders of the Frontier

The editorial team of Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin was assembling an anthology called Warriors and they wanted me to do something for it. This was in 2007, when I had been writing science fiction for more than fifty years and was getting very tired of it, and of writing in general. But Gardner and George were very old friends of mine and I couldn’t say no.

This wasn’t specifically a science fiction anthology. Ultimately it would include some sf stories by Joe Haldeman, David Weber, S. M. Stirling, editor Dozois, and other stalwarts of the genre, but it was intended to cut across genre lines to take in stories of all sorts that were linked only by the theme of warfare, and the contributors represented a broad range of fields and a stellar conglomeration of writers, Lawrence Block and Peter S. Beagle and Robin Hobb and Cecelia Holland and many more.

As George R. R. Martin says in his introduction, “We asked each of them for the same thing—a story about a warrior. Some chose to write in the genre they’re best known for. Some decided to try something different. You will find warriors of every shape, size, and color in these pages, warriors from every epoch in human history, from yesterday and today and tomorrow, and worlds that never were. …”

I am no warrior myself. I am a quiet, somewhat reserved man who dislikes confrontation and violence, and I have had no experience with military service, having been born too late for World War II, having spent the time of the Korean War in college, and being too old for Vietnam and all the wars that have followed. But I haven’t visited the worlds of Alpha Centauri, either, nor have I been an android, a time traveler, the monarch of a gigantic planet of the far future, or a telepath, and that hasn’t stopped me from writing about them with, I think, some conviction and plausibility. So, although “Defenders of the Frontier” has no battle scenes in it, no technical descriptions of armaments and the way to use them, no elaborate demonstrations of the strategy of warfare, it is quite definitely a story about warriors and the stresses they face on a distant frontier, to which I applied the same sort of imaginative thinking that produced Dying Inside, Lord Valentine’s Castle, and “Sailing to Byzantium.” I wrote the story relatively quickly and with considerable pleasure in December, 2007 and George and Gardner published it in their anthology in March 2010.

Seeker has returned to the fort looking flushed and exhilarated. “I was right,” he announces. “There is one of them hiding quite close by. I was certain of it, and now I know where he is. I can definitely feel directionality this time.”

Stablemaster, skeptical as always, lifts one eyebrow. “You were wrong the last time. You’re always too eager these days to find them out there.”

Seeker merely shrugs. “There can be no doubt,” he says.

For three weeks now Seeker has been searching for an enemy spy—or straggler, or renegade, or whatever he may be—that he believes is camped in the vicinity of the fort. He has gone up to this hilltop and that one, to this watchtower and that, making his solitary vigil, casting forth his mind’s net in that mysterious way of his that none of us can begin to fathom. And each time he has come back convinced that he feels enemy emanations, but he has never achieved a strong enough sense of directionality to warrant our sending out a search party. This time he has the look of conviction about him. Seeker is a small, flimsy sort of man, as his kind often tends to be, and much of the time in recent months he has worn the slump-shouldered look of dejection and disappointment. His trade is in finding enemies for us to kill. Enemies have been few and far between of late. But now he is plainly elated. There is an aura of triumph about him, of vindication.

Captain comes into the room. Instantly he sizes up the situation. “What have we here?” he says brusquely. “Have you sniffed out something at last, Seeker?”

“Come. I’ll show you.”

He leads us all out onto the flat roof adjacent to our barracks. To the right and left, the huge turreted masses of the eastern and western redoubts, now unoccupied, rise above us like vast pillars, and before us lies the great central courtyard, with the massive wall of tawny brick that guards us on the north beyond it. The fort is immense, an enormous sprawling edifice designed to hold ten thousand men. I remember very clearly the gigantic effort we expended in the building of it, twenty years before. Today just eleven occupants remain, and we rattle about it like tiny pebbles in a colossal jug.

Seeker gestures outward, into the gritty yellow wasteland that stretches before us like an endless ocean on the far side of the wall. That flat plain of twisted useless shrubs marks the one gap in the line of precipitous cliffs that forms the border here between Imperial territory and the enemy lands. It has been our task these twenty years past—we were born to it; it is an obligation of our caste—to guard that gap against the eventual incursion of the enemy army. For two full decades we have inhabited these lonely lands. We have fortified that gap, we have patrolled it, we have dedicated our lives to guarding it. In the old days entire brigades of enemy troops would attempt to breach our line, appearing suddenly like clouds of angry insects out of the dusty plain, and with great loss of life on both sides we would drive them back. Now things are quieter on this frontier, very much quieter indeed, but we are still here, watching for and intercepting the occasional spies that periodically attempt to slip past our defenses.

“There,” says Seeker. “Do you see those three little humps over to the northeast? He’s dug in not very far behind them. I know he is. I can feel him the way you’d feel a boil on the back of your neck.”

“Just one man?” Captain asks.

“One. Only one.”

Weaponsmaster says, “What would one man hope to accomplish? Do you think he expects to come tiptoeing into the fort and kill us one by one?”

“There’s no need for us to try to understand them,” Sergeant says. “Our job is to find them and kill them. We can leave understanding them to the wiser heads back home.”

“Ah,” says Armorer sardonically. “Back home, yes. Wiser heads.”

Captain has walked to the rim of the roof and stands there with his back to us, clutching the rail and leaning forward into the dry, crisp wind that eternally blows across our courtyard. A sphere of impenetrable chilly silence seems to surround him. Captain has always been an enigmatic man, solitary and brooding, but he has become stranger than ever since the death of Colonel, three years past, left him the ranking officer of the fort. No one knows his mind now, and no one dares to attempt any sort of intimacy with it.

“Very well,” he says, after an interval that has become intolerably long. “A four-man search party: Sergeant to lead, accompanied by Seeker, Provisioner, and Surveyor. Set out in the morning. Take three days’ food. Search, find, and kill.”

It has been eleven weeks since the last successful search mission. That one ended in the killing of three enemies, but since then, despite Seeker’s constant efforts, there have been no signs of any hostile presence in our territory. Once, six or seven weeks back, Seeker managed to convince himself that he felt emanations coming from a site along the river, a strange place for an enemy to have settled because it was well within our defense perimeter, and a five-man party led by Stablemaster hastened out to look. But they found no one there except a little band of the Fisherfolk, who swore that they had seen nothing unusual thereabouts, and the Fisherfolk do not lie. Upon their return Seeker himself had to admit that he no longer felt the emanations and that he was now none too certain he had felt any in the first place.

There is substantial feeling among us that we have outlived our mission here, that few if any enemies still occupy the territory north of the gap, that quite possibly the war has long since been over. Sergeant, Quartermaster, Weaponsmaster, and Armorer are the chief proponents of this belief. They note that we have heard nothing whatsoever from the capital in years—no messengers have come, let alone reinforcements or fresh supplies—and that we have had no sign from the enemy, either, that any significant force of them is gathered anywhere nearby. Once, long ago, war seemed imminent, and indeed real battles often took place. But it has been terribly quiet here for a long time. There has been nothing like a real battle for six years, only a few infrequent skirmishes with small enemy platoons, and during the past two years we have detected just a few isolated outliers, usually no more than two or three men at a time, whom we catch relatively easily as they try to infiltrate our territory. Armorer insists that they are not spies but stragglers, the last remnants of whatever enemy force once occupied the region to our north, who have been driven by hunger or loneliness or who knows what other compulsion to take up positions close to our fort. He argues that in the twenty years we have been here, our own numbers have dwindled from ten thousand men to a mere eleven, at first by losses in battle but later by the attrition of age and ill health, and he thinks it is reasonable that the same dwindling has occurred on the other side of the border, so that we few defenders now confront an enemy that may be even fewer in number than ourselves.

I myself see much to concur with in Armorer’s position. I think it might very well be the case that we are a lost platoon, that the war is over and the Empire has forgotten us, and that there is no purpose at all in our continued vigilance. But if the Empire has forgotten us, who can give the order that withdraws us from our post? That is a decision that only Captain can make, and Captain has not given us the slightest impression of where he stands on the issue. And so we remain, and may remain to the end of our days. What folly that would be, says Armorer, to languish out here forever defending this forlorn frontier country against invaders that no longer choose to invade! And I half agree with him, but only half. I would not want to spend such time as remains to me working at a fool’s task; but equally I do not wish to be guilty of dereliction of duty, after having served so long and so honorably on this frontier. Thus I am of two minds on the issue.

There is, of course, the opposite theory that holds that the enemy is simply biding its time, waiting for us to abandon the fort, after which a great army will come pouring through the gap at long last and strike at the Empire from one of its most vulnerable sides. Engineer and Signalman are the most vocal proponents of this viewpoint. They think it would be an act of profound treason to withdraw, the negation of all that we have dedicated our lives to, and they become irate when the idea is merely suggested. When they propound this position I find it hard to disagree.

Seeker is the one who works hardest to keep our mission alive, constantly striving to pick up threatening emanations. That has been his life’s work, after all. He knows no other vocation, that sad little man. So day by day Seeker climbs his hilltops and haunts his watchtowers and uses his one gift to detect the presence of hostile minds, and now and then he returns and sounds the alarm, and off we go on yet another search foray. More often than not they prove to be futile, nowadays: either Seeker’s powers are failing or he is excessively anxious to interpret his inputs as the mental output from nearby enemies.

I confess I feel a certain excitement at being part of this latest search party. Our days are spent in such terrible empty routine, normally. We tend our little vegetable patch, we look after our animals, we fish and hunt, we do our regular maintenance jobs, we read the same few books over and again, we have the same conversations, chiefly reminiscing about the time when there were more than eleven of us here, recalling as well as we can the robust and earthy characters who once dwelled among us but are long since gone to dust. Tonight, therefore, I feel a quickening of the pulse. I pack my gear for the morning, I eat my dinner with unusual gusto, I couple passionately with my little Fisherfolk companion. Each of us, all but Seeker, who seems to know no needs of that sort, has taken a female companion from among the band of simple people who live along our one feeble river. Even Captain takes one sometimes into his bed, I understand, although unlike the rest of us he has no regular woman. Mine is called Wendrit. She is a pale and slender creature, surprisingly skillful in the arts of love. The Fisherfolk are not quite human—we and they are unable to conceive children together, for example—but they are close enough to human to serve most purposes, and they are pleasant, unassuming, uncomplaining companions. So I embrace Wendrit vigorously this night, and in the dawn the four of us gather, Sergeant, Provisioner, Seeker, and I, by the northern portcullis.

It is a bright, clear morning, the sun a hard, sharp-edged disk in the eastern sky. The sun is the only thing that comes to us from the Empire, visiting us each day after it has done its work back there, uncountable thousands of miles to the east. Probably the capital is already in darkness by now, just as we are beginning our day. The world is so large, after all, and we are so very far from home.

Once there would have been trumpeters to celebrate our departure as we rode through the portcullis, hurling a brassy fanfare for us into the quiet air. But the last of our trumpeters died years ago, and though we still have the instruments, none of us knows how to play them. I tried once, and made a harsh squeaking sound like the grinding of metal against metal, nothing more. So the only sound we hear as we ride out into the desert is the soft steady thudding of our mounts’ hooves against the brittle sandy soil.

In truth this is the bleakest of places, but we are used to it. I still have memories from my childhood of the floral splendor of the capital, great trees thick with juicy leaves, and shrubs clad in clusters of flowers, red and yellow and orange and purple, and the dense green lawns of the grand boulevards. But I have grown accustomed to the desert, which has become the norm for me, and such lush abundance as I remember out of my earlier life strikes me now as discomfortingly vulgar and excessive, a wasteful riot of energy and resources. All that we have here in the plain that runs out to the north between the wall of hills is dry yellow soil sparkling with the doleful sparkle of overabundant quartz, small gnarled shrubs and equally gnarled miniature trees, and occasional tussocks of tough, sharp-edged grass. On the south side of the fort the land is not quite so harsh, for our little river runs past us there, a weak strand of some much mightier one that must pour out of one of the big lakes in the center of the continent. Our river must be looking for the sea, as rivers do, but of course we are nowhere near the sea, and doubtless it exhausts itself in some distant reach of the desert. But as it passes our outpost it brings greenery to its flanks, and some actual trees, and enough fish to support the tribe of primitive folk who are our only companions here.

Our route lies to the northeast, toward those three rounded hillocks behind which, so Seeker staunchly asserts, we will find the campsite of our solitary enemy. The little hills had seemed close enough when we viewed them from the barracks roof, but that was only an illusion, and we ride all day without visibly diminishing the span between them and us. It is a difficult trek. The ground, which is merely pebbly close by the fort, becomes rocky and hard to traverse farther out, and our steeds pick their way with care, heedful of their fragile legs. But this is familiar territory for us. Everywhere we see traces of hoofprints or tire tracks, five years old, ten, even twenty, the scars of ancient forays, the debris of half-forgotten battles of a decade and more ago. Rain comes perhaps twice a year here at best. Make a mark on the desert floor and it remains forever.

We camp as the first lengthening of the shadows begins, gather some scrubby wood for our fire, pitch our tent. There is not much in the way of conversation. Sergeant is a crude, inarticulate man at best; Seeker is too tense and fretful to be pleasant company; Provisioner, who has grown burly and red-faced with the years, can be jovial enough after a drink or two, but he seems uncharacteristically moody and aloof tonight. So I am left to my own resources, and once we have finished our meal I walk out a short way into the night and stare, as I often do, at the glittering array of stars in this western sky of ours, wondering, as ever, whether each has its own collection of worlds, and whether those worlds are peopled, and what sort of lives the peoples of those worlds might lead. It is a perverse sort of amusement, I suppose: I who have spent half my life guarding a grim brick fort in this parched isolated outpost stare at the night sky and imagine the gleaming palaces and fragrant gardens of faraway worlds.

We rise early, make a simple breakfast, ride on through a cutting wind toward those three far-off hills. This morning, though, the perspective changes quickly: suddenly the hills are much closer, and then they are upon us, and Seeker, excited now, guides us toward the pass between the southernmost hill and its neighbor. “I feel him just beyond!” he cries. For Seeker, the sense that he calls directionality is like a compass, pointing the way toward our foes. “Come! This is the way! Hurry! Hurry!”

Nor has he led us wrongly this time. On the far side of the southernmost hill someone has built a little lean-to of twisted branches covered with a heaping of grass, no simple project in these stony ungenerous wastes. We draw our weapons and take up positions surrounding it, and Sergeant goes up to it and says, “You! Come out of there, and keep your hands in the air!”

There is a sound of stirring from within. In a moment or two a man emerges.

He has the classic enemy physiognomy: a short, stumpy body, sallow waxen skin, and heavy features with jutting cheekbones and icy blue eyes. At the sight of those eyes I feel an involuntary surge of anger, even hatred, for we of the Empire are a brown-eyed people and I have trained myself through many years to feel nothing but hostility for those whose eyes are blue.

But these are not threatening eyes. Obviously the man had been asleep, and he is still making the journey back into wakefulness as he comes forth from his shelter, blinking, shaking his head. He is trembling, too. He is one man and we are four, and we have weapons drawn and he is unarmed, and he has been taken by surprise. It is an unfortunate way to start one’s day. I am amazed to find my anger giving way to something like pity.

He is given little time to comprehend the gravity of his situation. “Bastard!” Sergeant says, and takes three strides forward. Swiftly he thrusts his knife into the man’s belly, withdraws it, strikes again, again.

The blue eyes go wide with shock. I am shocked myself, in a different way, and the sudden cruel attack leaves me gasping with amazement.

The stricken enemy staggers, clutches at his abdomen as though trying to hold back the torrent of blood, takes three or four tottering steps, and falls in a series of folding ripples. There is a convulsion or two, and then he is still, lying face downward.

Sergeant kicks the entrance of the shelter open and peers within. “See if there’s anything useful in there,” he tells us.

Still astounded, I say, “Why did you kill him so quickly?”

“We came here to kill him.”

“Perhaps. But he was unarmed. He probably would have given himself up peacefully.”

“We came here to kill him,” Sergeant says again.

“We might have interrogated him first, at least. That’s the usual procedure, isn’t it? Perhaps there are others of his kind somewhere close at hand.”

“If there were any more of them around here,” Sergeant says scornfully, “Seeker would have told us, wouldn’t he have? Wouldn’t he have, Surveyor?”

There is more that I would like to say, about how it might have been useful or at any rate interesting to discover why this man had chosen to make this risky pilgrimage to the edge of our territory. But there is no point in continuing the discussion, because Sergeant is too stupid to care what I have to say, and the man is already dead, besides.

We knock the shelter apart and search it. Nothing much there: a few tools and weapons, a copper-plated religious emblem of the kind that our enemies worship, a portrait of a flat-faced blue-eyed woman who is, I suppose, the enemy’s wife or mother. It does not seem like the equipment of a spy. Even to an old soldier like me it is all very sad. He was a man like us, enemy though he was, and he died far from home. Yes, it has long been our task to kill these people before they can kill us. Certainly I have killed more than a few of them myself. But dying in battle is one thing; being slaughtered like a pig while still half asleep is something else again. Especially if your only purpose had been to surrender. Why else had this solitary man, this lonely and probably desperate man, crossed this unrelenting desert, if not to give himself up to us at the fort?

I am softening with age, I suppose. Sergeant is right that it was our assignment to kill him: Captain had given us that order in the most explicit way. Bringing him back with us had never been part of the plan. We have no way of keeping prisoners at the fort. We have little enough food for ourselves, and guarding him would have posed a problem. He had had to die; his life was forfeit from the moment he ventured within the zone bordering on the fort. That he might have been lonely or desperate, that he had suffered in crossing this terrible desert and perhaps had hoped to win shelter at our fort, that he had had a wife or perhaps a mother whom he loved, all of that was irrelevant. It did not come as news to me that our enemies are human beings not all that different from us except in the color of their eyes and the texture of their skins. They are, nevertheless, our enemies. Long ago they set their hands against us in warfare, and until the day arrives when they put aside their dream of destroying what we of the Empire have built for ourselves, it is the duty of people like us to slay men like him. Sergeant had not been kind or gentle about it. But there is no kind or gentle way, really, to kill.

The days that followed were extremely quiet ones. Without so much as a discussion of what had taken place in the desert we fell back into our routines: clean and polish this and that, repair whatever needs repair and still can be repaired, take our turns working in the fields alongside the river, wade in that shallow stream in quest of water-pigs for our table, tend the vats where we store the mash that becomes our beer, and so on, so forth, day in, day out. Of course I read a good deal, also. I have ever been a man for reading.

We have nineteen books; all the others have been read to pieces, or their bindings have fallen apart in the dry air, or the volumes have simply been misplaced somewhere about the fort and never recovered. I have read all nineteen again and again, even though five of them are technical manuals covering areas that never were part of my skills and which are irrelevant now anyway. (There is no point in knowing how to repair our vehicles when the last of our fuel supply was exhausted five years ago.) One of my favorite books is The Saga of the Kings, which I have known since childhood, the familiar account, probably wholly mythical, of the Empire’s early history, the great charismatic leaders who built it, their heroic deeds, their inordinately long lifespans. There is a religious text too that I value, though I have grave doubts about the existence of the gods. But for me the choice volume of our library is the one called The Register of Strange Things Beyond the Ranges, a thousand-year-old account of the natural wonders to be found in the outer reaches of the Empire’s great expanse. Only half the book remains to us now—perhaps one of my comrades ripped pages out to use as kindling, once upon a time—but I cherish that half, and read it constantly, even though I know it virtually by heart by this time.

Wendrit likes me to read to her. How much of what she hears she is capable of understanding, I have no idea: she is a simple soul, as all her people are. But I love the way she turns her big violet-hued eyes toward me as I read, and sits in total attention.

I read to her of the Gate of Ghosts, telling her of the customs shed there that spectral phantoms guard: “Ten men go out, nine men return.” I read to her of the Stones of Shao, two flat-sided slabs flanking a main highway that on a certain day every ten years would come crashing together, crushing any wayfarers who happened to be passing through just then, and of the bronze Pillars of King Mai, which hold the two stones by an incantation that forbids them ever to move again. I read to her of the Mountain of a Thousand Eyes, the granite face of which is pockmarked with glossy onyx boulders that gleam down upon passersby like stern black eyes. I tell her of the Forest of Cinnamon, and of the Grotto of Dreams, and of the Place of Galloping Clouds. Were such places real, or simply the fantasies of some ancient spinner of tall tales? How would I know, I who spent my childhood and youth at the capital, and have passed the rest of my years here at this remote desert fort, where there is nothing to be seen but sandy yellow soil, and twisted shrubs, and little scuttering scorpions that run before our feet? But the strange places described in The Register of Strange Things Beyond the Ranges have grown more real to me in these latter days than the capital itself, which has become in my mind a mere handful of vague and fragmentary impressions. So I read with conviction, and Wendrit listens in awe, and when I weary of the wonders of the Register I put it aside and take her hand and lead her to my bed, and caress her soft pale-green skin and kiss the tips of her small round breasts, and so we pass another night.

In those quiet days that followed our foray I thought often of the man Sergeant had killed. In the days when we fought battles here I killed without compunction, five, ten, twenty men at a time, not exactly taking pleasure in it but certainly feeling no guilt. But the killing in those days was done at a decent distance, with rifles or heavy guns, for we still had ammunition then and our rifles and guns were still in good repair. It was necessary now in our forays against the occasional spies who approached the fort to kill with spears or knives, and to kill at close range feels less like a deed of warfare to me and more like murder.

My mind went back easily to those battles of yesteryear: the sound of the sentry’s alarm, the first view of the dark line of enemy troops on the horizon, the rush to gather our weapons and start our vehicles. And out we would race through the portcullis to repel the invaders, rushing to take up our primary defensive formation, then advancing in even ranks that filled the entire gap in the hills, so that when the enemy entered that deadly funnel we could fall upon them and slaughter them. It was the same thing every time. They came; we responded; they perished. How far they must have traveled to meet their dismal deaths in our dreary desert! None of us had any real idea how far away the country of the enemy actually was, but we knew it had to be a great distance to the north and west, just as our own country is a great distance to the south and east. The frontier that our own outpost defends lies on the midpoint between one desert and another. Behind us is the almost infinite terrain of sparse settlements that eventually culminates in the glorious cities of the Empire. Before us are equally interminable wastes that gives way, eventually, to the enemy homeland itself. For one nation to attack the other, it must send its armies far across an uncharted and unfriendly nothingness. Which our enemy was willing to do, the gods only knew why, and again and again their armies came, and again and again we destroyed them in the fine frenzy of battle. That was a long time ago. We were not much more than boys then. But finally the marching armies came no more, and the only enemies we had to deal with were those few infrequent spies or perhaps stragglers whom Seeker pinpointed for us, and whom we went out and slew at close range with our knives and spears, looking into their frosty blue eyes as we robbed them of their lives.

Seeker is in a bad way. He can go from one day to the next without saying a word. He still heads up to his watchtowers almost every morning, but he returns from his vigils in a black cloak of gloom and moves through our midst in complete silence. We know better than to approach him at such times, because, though he is a man of no great size and strength, he can break out in savage fury sometimes when his depressions are intruded upon. So we let him be; but as the days pass and his mood grows ever darker, we fear some sort of explosion.

One afternoon I saw him speaking with Captain out on the rooftop terrace. It appeared that Captain had initiated the conversation, and that Seeker was answering Captain’s questions with the greatest reluctance, staring down at his boots as he spoke. But then Captain said something that caused Seeker to react with surprising animation, looking up, gesticulating. Captain shook his head. Seeker pounded his fists together. Captain made a gesture of dismissal and walked away.

What they were saying to each other was beyond all guessing. And beyond all asking, too, for if anyone is more opaque than Seeker, it is Captain, and while it is at least possible at certain times to ask Seeker what is on his mind, making such an inquiry of Captain is inconceivable.

In recent days Seeker has taken to drinking with us after dinner. That is a new thing for him. He has always disliked drinking. He says he despises the stuff we make that we call beer and wine and brandy. That is reasonable enough, because we make our beer from the niggardly sour grain of a weed that grows by the river, and we wrest our thin wine and our rough brandy from the bitter gray fruits of a different weed, and they are pitiful products indeed to anyone who remembers the foaming beers of the capital and the sweet vintages of our finest wine-producing districts. But we have long since exhausted the supplies of such things that we brought with us, and, of course, no replenishments from home ever come, and, since in this somber landscape there is comfort to be had from drinking, we drink what we can make. Not Seeker, no. Not until this week.

Now he drinks, though, showing no sign of pleasure, but often extending his glass for another round. And at last one night when he has come back with his glass more than once, he breaks his long silence.

“They are all gone,” he says, in a voice like the tolling of a cracked bell.

“Who are?” Provisioner asks. “The scorpions? I saw three scorpions only yesterday.” Provisioner is well along in his cups, as usual. His reddened, jowly face creases in a broad toothy smile, as if he has uttered the cleverest of witticisms.

“The enemy,” says Seeker. “The one we killed—he was the last one. There’s nobody left. Do you know how empty I feel, going up to the towers to listen, and hearing nothing? As if I’ve been hollowed out inside. Can you understand what sort of feeling that is? Can you? No, of course you can’t. What would any of you know?”

He stares at us in agony. “The silence … the silence. …”

Nobody seems to know how quite to respond to that, so we say nothing. And Seeker helps himself to yet another jigger of brandy, and full measure at that. This is alarming. The sight of Seeker drinking like this is as strange as the sight of a torrential downpour of rain would be.

Engineer, who is probably the calmest and most reasonable of us, says, “Ah, man, can you not be a bit patient? I know you want to do your task. But more of them will come. Sooner or later, there’ll be another, and another after that. Two weeks, three, six, who knows? But they’ll come. You’ve been through spells like this before.”

“No. This is different,” says Seeker sullenly. “But what would you know?”

“Easy,” Engineer says, laying his strong hand across the back of Seeker’s frail wrist. “Go easy, man. What do you mean, ‘this is different?’”

Carefully, making a visible effort at self-control, Seeker says, “All the other times when we’ve gone several weeks between incursions, I’ve always felt a low inner hum, a kind of subliminal static, a barely perceptible mental pressure, that tells me there are at least a few enemies out there somewhere, a hundred miles away, five hundred, a thousand. It’s just a kind of quiet buzz. It doesn’t give me any directionality. But it’s there, and sooner or later the signal becomes stronger, and then I know that a couple of them are getting close to us, and then I get directionality and I can lead us to them, and we go out and kill them. It’s been that way for years, ever since the real battles stopped. But now I don’t get anything. Not a thing. It’s absolutely silent in my head. Which means that either I’ve lost my power entirely, or else there aren’t any enemies left within a thousand miles or more.”

“And which is it that you think is so?”

Seeker scans us all with a haggard look. “That there are no enemies out there any more. Which means that it is pointless to remain here. We should pack up, go home, make some sort of new lives for ourselves within the Empire itself. And yet we have to stay, in case they come. I must stay, because this is the only task that I know how to perform. What sort of new life could I make for myself back there? I never had a life. This is my life. So my choice is to stay here to no purpose, performing a task that does not need to be performed any longer, or to return home to no existence. Do you see my predicament?” He is shivering. He reaches for the brandy, pours yet another drink with a trembling hand, hastily downs it, coughs, shudders, lets his head drop to the tabletop. We can hear him sobbing.

That night marks the beginning of the debate among us. Seeker’s breakdown has brought into the open something that has been on my own mind for some weeks now, and which Armorer, Weaponsmaster, Quartermaster, and even dull-witted Sergeant have been pondering also, each in his own very different way.

The fact is unanswerable that the frequency of enemy incursions has lessened greatly in the past two years, and when they do come, every five or six or ten weeks apart, they no longer come in bands of a dozen or so, but in twos or threes. This last man whom Sergeant slew by the three little hills had come alone. Armorer has voiced quite openly his notion that just as our own numbers have dwindled to next to nothing over the years, the enemy confronting us in this desert must have suffered great attrition too, and, like us, has had no reinforcement from the home country, so that only a handful of our foes remain—or, perhaps, as Seeker now believes, none at all. If that is true, says Armorer, who is a wry and practical man, why do we not close up shop and seek some new occupation for ourselves in some happier region of the Empire?

Sergeant, who loves the excitement of warfare, for whom combat is not an ugly necessity but an act of passionate devotion, shares Armorer’s view that we ought to move along. It is not so much that inactivity makes him restless—restlessness is not a word that really applies to a wooden block of a man like Sergeant—but that, like Seeker, he lives only to perform his military function. Seeker’s function is to seek and Sergeant’s function is to kill, and Seeker now feels that he will seek forever here and nevermore find, and Sergeant, in his dim way, believes that for him to stay here any longer would be a waste of his capability. He too wants to leave.

As does Weaponsmaster, who has had no weapons other than knives and spears to care for since our ammunition ran out and thus passes his days in a stupefying round of makework, and Quartermaster, who once presided over the material needs of ten thousand men and now, in his grizzled old age, lives the daily mockery of looking after the needs of just eleven. Thus we have four men—Armorer, Sergeant, Weaponsmaster, Quartermaster—fairly well committed to bringing the life of this outpost to an end, and one more, Seeker, who wants both to go and to stay. I am more or less of Seeker’s persuasion here myself, aware that we are living idle and futile lives at the fort but burdened at the same time with a sense of obligation to my profession that leads me to regard an abandonment of the fort as a shameful act. So I sway back and forth. When Armorer speaks, I am inclined to join his faction. But when one of the others advocates remaining here, I drift back in that direction.

Gradually it emerges in our circular nightly discussion that the other four of us are strongly committed to staying. Engineer enjoys his life here: there are always technical challenges for him, a new canal to design, a parapet in need of repair, a harness to mend. He also is driven by a strong sense of duty and believes it is necessary to the welfare of the Empire that we remain here. Stablemaster, less concerned about duty, is fond of his beasts and similarly has no wish to leave. Provisioner, who is rarely given to doubts of any sort, would be content to remain so long as our supply of food and drink remains ample, and that appears to be the case. And Signalman still believes, Seeker’s anguish to the contrary, that the desert beyond the wall is full of patient foes who will swarm through the gap and march against the capital like ravening beasts the moment we relinquish the fort.

Engineer, who is surely the most rational of us, has raised another strong point in favor of staying. We have scarcely any idea of how to get home. Twenty years ago we were brought here in a great convoy, and who among us bothered to take note of the route we traversed? Even those who might have paid attention to it then have forgotten almost every detail of the journey. But we do have a vague general idea of the challenge that confronts us. Between us and the capital lies, first of all, a great span of trackless dry wasteland and then forested districts occupied by autonomous savage tribes. Uncharted and, probably, well-nigh impenetrable tropical jungles are beyond those, and no doubt we would encounter a myriad other hazards. We have no maps of the route. We have no working communications devices. “If we leave here, we might spend the rest of our lives wandering around hopelessly lost in the wilderness,” Engineer says. “At least here we have a home, women, something to eat and a place to sleep.”

I raise another objection. “You all speak as though this is something we could just put to a vote. ‘Raise hands, all in favor of abandoning the fort.’”

“If we did take a vote,” Armorer says, “We’d have a majority in favor of getting out of here. You, me, Sergeant, Quartermaster, Weaponsmaster, Seeker—that’s six out of eleven, even if Captain votes the other way.”

“No. I’m not so sure I’m with you. I don’t think Seeker is, either. Neither of us has really made up his mind.” We all looked toward Seeker; but Seeker was asleep at the table, lost in winy stupor. “So at best we’re equally divided right now, four for leaving, four for staying, and two undecided. But in any case this place isn’t a democracy and how we vote doesn’t matter. Whether we leave the fort is something for Captain to decide, and Captain alone. And we don’t have any idea what his feelings are.”

“We could ask him,” Armorer suggests.

“Ask my elbow,” Provisioner says, guffawing. “Who wants to ask Captain anything? The man who does will get a riding crop across the face.”

There is general nodding around the table. We all have tasted Captain’s unpredictable ferocity.

Quartermaster says, “If we had a majority in favor of going home, we could all go to him and tell him how we feel. He won’t try to whip us all. For all we know, he might even tell us that he agrees with us.”

“But you don’t have a majority,” Engineer points out.

Quartermaster looks toward me. “Come over to our side, Surveyor. Surely you see there’s more merit in our position than in theirs. That would make it five to four for leaving.”

“And Seeker?” Engineer asks. “When he sobers up, what if he votes the other way? That would make it a tie vote again.”

“We could ask Captain to break the tie, and that would settle the whole thing,” Armorer says.

That brings laughter from us all. Captain is very sensitive to anything that smacks of insubordination. Even the dullest of us can see that he will not react well to hearing that we are trying to determine a serious matter of policy by majority vote.

I lie awake for hours that night, replaying our discussion in my mind. There are strong points on both sides. The idea of giving up the fort and going home has great appeal. We are all getting along in years; at best each of us has ten or fifteen years left to him, and do I want to spend those years doing nothing but hunting water-pigs in the river and toiling over our scrawny crops and rereading the same handful of books? I believe Seeker when he says that the man we killed a few weeks ago was the last of the enemy in our territory.

On the other hand there is the question of duty. What are we to say when we show up in the capital? Simply announce that by our own authority we have abandoned the outpost to which we have devoted our lives, merely because in our opinion there is no further need for us to stay on at it? Soldiers are not entitled to opinions. Soldiers who are sent to defend a frontier outpost have no option but to defend that outpost until orders to the contrary are received.

To this argument I oppose another one, which is that duty travels both ways. We might be abandoning our fort, an improper thing for soldiers to be doing, but is it not true that the Empire has long ago abandoned us? There has been no word from home for ages. Not only have we had no reinforcements or fresh supplies from the Empire, there has not been so much as an inquiry. They have forgotten we exist. What if the war ended years ago and nobody at the capital has bothered to tell us that? How much do we owe an Empire that does not remember our existence?

And, finally, there is Engineer’s point that going home might be impossible anyway, for we have no maps, no vehicles, no clear idea of the route we must follow, and we know that we are an almost unimaginable distance from any civilized district of the Empire. The journey will be a terrible struggle, and we may very well perish in the course of it. For me, in the middle of the night, that is perhaps the most telling point of all.

I realize, as I lie there contemplating these things, that Wendrit is awake beside me, and that she is weeping.

“What is it?” I asked. “Why are you crying?”

She is slow to answer. I can sense the troubled gropings of her mind. But at length she says, between sobs, “You are going to leave me. I heard things. I know. You will leave and I will be alone.”

“No,” I tell her, before I have even considered what I am saying. “No, that isn’t true. I won’t leave. And if I do, I’ll take you with me. I promise you that, Wendrit.” And I pull her into my arms and hold her until she is no longer sobbing.

I awaken knowing that I have made my decision, and it is the decision to go home. Along with Armorer, Sergeant, Weaponsmaster, and Stablemaster, I believe now that we should assemble whatever provisions we can, choose the strongest of our beasts to draw our carts, and, taking our women with us, set out into the unknown. If the gods favor our cause we will reach the Empire eventually, request retirement from active duty, and try to form some sort of new lives for ourselves in what no doubt is a nation very much altered from the one we left behind more than twenty years ago.

That night, when we gather over our brandy, I announce my conversion to Armorer’s faction. But Seeker reveals that he, too, has had an epiphany in the night, which has swung him to the other side: weak and old as he is, he fears the journey home more than he does living out the rest of his life in futility at the fort. So we still are stalemated, now five to five, and there is no point in approaching Captain, even assuming that Captain would pay the slightest attention to our wishes.

Then there is an event that changes everything. It is the day of our weekly pig-hunt, when four or five of us don our high boots and go down to the river with spears to refresh our stock of fresh meat. The water-pigs that dwell in the river are beasts about the size of cattle, big sleek purple things with great yellow tusks, very dangerous when angered but also very stupid. They tend to congregate just upriver from us, where a bend in the flow creates a broad pool thick with water-plants, on which they like to forage. Our hunting technique involves cutting one beast out of the herd with proddings of our spears and moving him downriver, well apart from the others, so that we can kill him in isolation, without fear of finding ourselves involved in a chaotic melee with seven or eight furious pigs snapping at us from all sides at once. The meat from a single pig will last the eleven of us a full week, sometimes more.

Today the hunting party is made up of Provisioner, Signalman, Weaponsmaster, Armorer, and me. We are all skilled hunters and work well together. As soon as the night’s chill has left the air we go down to the river and march along its banks to the water-pig pool, choose the pig that is to be our prey, and arrange ourselves along the bank so that we will be in a semicircular formation when we enter the water. We will slip between the lone pig and the rest of his fellows and urge him away from them, and when we think it is safe to attack, we will move in for the kill.

At first everything goes smoothly. The river is hip-deep here. We form our arc, we surround our pig, we nudge him lightly with the tips of our spears. His little red-rimmed eyes glower at us in fury and we can hear the low rumblings of his annoyance, but the half-submerged animal pulls back from the pricking without attempting to fight, and we prod him twenty, thirty, forty feet downstream, toward the killing-place. As usual, a few Fisherfolk have gathered on the bank to watch us, though there is, as ever, a paradoxical incuriosity about their bland stares.

And then, catastrophe. “Look out!” cries Armorer, and in the same moment I become aware of the water churning wildly behind me, and I see two broad purple backs breaching the surface of the river, and I realize that this time other pigs—at least a couple, maybe more, who knows?—have followed on downstream with our chosen one and intend to defend their grazing grounds against our intrusion. It is the thing we have always dreaded but never experienced, the one serious danger in these hunts. The surface of the water thrashes and boils. We see pigs leaping frenetically on all sides of us. The river is murky at best, but now, with maddened water-pigs snorting and snuffling all about us, we have no clear idea of what is happening, except that we have lost control of the situation and are in great jeopardy.

“Out of the water, everybody!” Weaponsmaster yells, but we are already scrambling for the riverbank. I clamber up, lean on my spear, catch my breath. Weaponsmaster and Armorer stand beside me. Provisioner has gone to the opposite bank. But there is no sign of Signalman, and the river suddenly is red with blood, and great yellow-tusked pig-snouts are jutting up everywhere, and then Signalman comes floating to the surface, belly upward, his body torn open from throat to abdomen.

We carry him back borne on our shoulders, like a fallen hero. It is our first death in some years. Somehow we had come to feel, in the time that has elapsed since that one, that we eleven who still remain would go on and on together forever, but now we know that that is not so. Weaponsmaster brings the news to Captain, and reports back to us that that stony implacable man had actually seemed to show signs of real grief upon hearing of Signalman’s death. Engineer and Provisioner and I dig the grave, and Captain presides over the service, and for several days there is a funereal silence around the fort.

Then, once the shock of the death has begun to ebb a little, Armorer raises the point that none of us had cared to mention openly since the event at the river. Which is, that with Signalman gone the stalemate has been broken. The factions stand now at five for setting out for home, four for remaining indefinitely at the fort. And Armorer is willing to force the issue on behalf of the majority by going to Captain and asking whether he will authorize an immediate retreat from the frontier.

For hours there is an agitated discussion, verging sometimes into bitterness and rage. We all recognize that it must be one way or another, that we cannot divide: a little group of four or five would never be able to sustain itself at the fort, nor would the other group of about the same size have any hope of success in traversing the unknown lands ahead. We must all stay together or assuredly we will all succumb; but that means that the four who would remain must yield to the five who wish to leave, regardless of their own powerful desires in the matter. And the four who would be compelled to join the trek against their wishes are fiercely resentful of the five who insist on departure.

In the end things grow calmer and we agree to leave the decision to Captain, in whose hands it belongs anyway. A delegation of four is selected to go to him: Engineer and Stablemaster representing those who would stay, and Armorer and me to speak for the other side.

Captain spends most of his days in a wing of the fort that the rest of us rarely enter. There, at a huge ornate desk in an office big enough for ten men, he studies piles of documents left by his predecessors as commanding officer, as though hoping to learn from the writings of those vanished colonels how best to carry out the responsibilities that the vagaries of time have placed upon his shoulders. He is a brawny, dour-faced man, thin-lipped and somber-eyed, with dense black eyebrows that form a single forbidding line across his forehead, and even after all these years he is a stranger to us all.

He listens to us in his usual cold silence as we set forth the various arguments: Seeker’s belief that there are no more enemies for us to deal with here, Armorer’s that we are absolved of our duty to the Empire by its long neglect of us, Engineer’s that the journey home would be perilous to the point of foolhardiness, and Signalman’s, offered on his behalf by Stablemaster, that the enemy is simply waiting for us to go and then will launch its long-awaited campaign of conquest in Imperial territory. Eventually we begin to repeat ourselves and realize that there is nothing more to say, though Captain has not broken his silence by so much as a single syllable. The last word is spoken by Armorer, who tells Captain that five of us favor leaving, four remaining, though he does not specify who holds which position.

Telling him that strikes me as a mistake. It implies—rightly—that a democratic process has gone on among us, and I expect Captain to respond angrily to the suggestion that any operational issue here can be decided, or even influenced, by a vote of the platoon. But there is no thunderstorm of wrath. He sits quietly, still saying nothing, for an almost unendurable span of time. Then he says, in a surprisingly moderate tone, “Seeker is unable to pick up any sign of enemy presence?” He addresses the question to Engineer, whom, apparently, he has correctly identified as one of the leaders of the faction favoring continued residence at the fort.

“This is so,” Engineer replies.

Captain is silent once again. But finally he says, to our universal amazement, “The thinking of those who argue for withdrawal from the frontier is in line with my own. I have considered for some time now that our services in this place are no longer required by the Empire, and that if we are to be of use to the country at all, we must obtain reassignment elsewhere.”

It is, I think, the last thing any of us had expected. Armorer glows with satisfaction. Engineer and Stablemaster look crestfallen. I, ambivalent even now, simply look at Captain in surprise.

Captain goes on, “Engineer, Stablemaster, make plans for our departure at the soonest possible date. I stipulate one thing, though: we go as a group, with no one to remain behind, and we must stay together as one group throughout what I know will be a long and arduous journey. Anyone who attempts to leave the group will be considered a deserter and treated accordingly. I will request that you all take an oath to that effect.”

That is what we had agreed among ourselves to do anyway, so there is no difficulty about it. Nor do our four recalcitrants indicate any opposition to the departure order, though Seeker is plainly terrified of the dangers and stress of the journey. We begin at once to make our plans for leaving.

It turns out that we do have some maps of the intervening territory after all. Captain produces them from among his collection of documents, along with two volumes of a chronicle of our journey from the capital to the frontier that the first Colonel had kept. He summons me and gives me this material, ordering me to consult it and devise a plan of route for our journey.

But I discover quickly that it is all useless. The maps are frayed and cracked along their folds, and such information as they once might have held concerning the entire center of the continent has faded into invisibility. I can make out a bold star-shaped marker indicating the capital down in the lower right-hand corner, and a vague, ragged line indicating the frontier far off to the left, and just about everything between is blank. Nor is the old Colonel’s chronicle in any way helpful. The first volume deals with the organization of the expeditionary force and the logistical problems involved in transporting it from the capital to the interior. The second volume that we have, which is actually the third of the original three, describes the building of the fort and the initial skirmishes with the enemy. The middle volume is missing, and that is the one, I assume, that speaks of the actual journey between the capital and the frontier.

I hesitate to tell Captain this, for he is not one who receives bad news with much equanimity. Instead I resolve that I will do my best to improvise a route for us, taking my cues from what we find as we make our way to the southeast. And so we get ourselves ready, choosing our best wagons and our sturdiest steeds and loading them with tools and weapons and with all we can carry by way of provisions: dried fruit and beans, flour, casks of water, cartons of preserved fish, parcels of the air-dried meat that Provisioner prepares each winter by laying out strips of pig-flesh in the sun. We will do as we can for fresh meat and produce on the march.

The women placidly accept the order to accompany us into the wilderness. They have already crossed over from their Fisherfolk lives to ours, anyway. There are only nine of them, for Seeker has never chosen to have one, and Captain has rarely shown more than fitful interest in them. Even so we have one extra: Sarkariet, Signalman’s companion. She has remained at the fort since Signalman’s death and says she has no desire to return to her village, so we take her along.

The day of our departure is fair and mild, the sun warm but not hot, the wind gentle. Perhaps that is a good omen. We leave the fort without a backward glance, going out by way of the eastern gate and descending to the river. A dozen or so of the Fisherfolk watch us in their blank-faced way as we cross the little wooden bridge upstream of their village. Once we are across, Captain halts our procession and orders us to destroy the bridge. From Engineer comes a quick grunt of shock: the bridge was one of his first projects, long ago. But Captain sees no reason to leave the enemy any easy path eastward, should the enemy still be lurking somewhere in the hinterlands. And so we ply our axes for half a morning until the bridge goes tumbling down into the riverbed.

We have never had any reason in the past twenty years to venture very far into the districts east or south of the fort, but we are not surprised to find them pretty much the same as the region north and west of the fort that we have patrolled so long. That is, we are in a dry place of pebbly yellowish soil, with low hills here and there, gnarled shrubs, tussocks of saw-bladed grass. Now and again some scrawny beast scampers quickly across our path, or we hear the hissing of a serpent from the underbrush, and solitary melancholy birds sometimes go drifting high overhead, cawing raucously, but by and large the territory is deserted. There is no sign of water all the first day, nor midway through the second, but that afternoon Seeker reports that he detects the presence of Fisherfolk somewhere nearby, and before long we reach a straggling little stream that is probably another fork of the river whose other tributary runs close below our fort. On its farther bank we see a Fisherfolk camp, much smaller than the village on the banks of our river.

Wendrit and the other women become agitated at the sight of it. I ask her what the matter is, and she tells me that these people are ancient enemies of her people, that whenever the two tribes encounter each other there is a battle. So even the passive, placid Fisherfolk wage warfare among themselves! Who would have thought it? I bring word of this to Captain, who looks untroubled. “They will not come near us,” he says, and this proves to be so. The river is shallow enough to ford; and the strange Fisherfolk gather by their tents and stand in silence as we pass by. On the far side we replenish our water-casks.

Then the weather grows unfriendly. We are entering a rocky, broken land, a domain of sandstone cliffs, bright red in color and eroded into jagged, fanciful spires and ridges, and here a hard, steady wind blows out of the south through a gap in the hills into our faces, carrying a nasty freight of tiny particles of pinkish grit. The sun now is as red as new copper in that pinkish sky, as though we have a sunset all day long. To avoid the sandstorm that I assume will be coming upon us I swing the caravan around to due east, where we will be traveling along the base of the cliffs and perhaps will be sheltered from the worst of the wind. In this I am incorrect, because a cold, inexorable crosswind arises abruptly, bringing with it out of the north the very sandstorm that I had hoped to avoid, and we find ourselves pinned down for a day and a half just below the red cliffs, huddling together miserably with our faces masked by scarves. The wind howls all night; I sleep very badly. At last it dies down and we hurry through the gap in the cliffs and resume our plodding southeastward march.

Beyond, we find what is surely a dry lake-bed, a broad flat expanse covered with a sparse incrustation of salt that glitters in the brutal sunlight like newly fallen snow. Nothing but the indomitable saw-grass grows here, and doubtless the lake has been dry for millennia, for there is not even a skeletal trace of whatever vegetation, shrubs and even trees, might have bordered its periphery in the days when there was water here. We are three days crossing this dead lake. Our supply of fresh water is running troublesomely low already, and we have exhausted all of our fresh meat, leaving only the dried stuff that increases our thirst. Nor is there any game to hunt here, of course.

Is this what we are going to have to face, week after week, until eventually we reach some kinder terrain? The oldest men, Seeker and Quartermaster, are showing definite signs of fatigue, and the women, who have never been far from their river for even a day, seem fretful and withdrawn. Clearly dismayed and even frightened, they whisper constantly among themselves in the Fisherfolk language that none of us has ever bothered to learn, but draw away whenever we approach. Even our pack-animals are beginning to struggle. They have had little to eat or drink since we set out and the effects are only too apparent. They snap listlessly at the tufts of sharp gray grass and look up at us with doleful eyes, as though we have betrayed them.

The journey has only just begun and already I am beginning to regret it.

One evening, when we are camped at some forlorn place near the farther end of the lake, I confess my doubts to Captain. Since he is our superior officer and I am the officer who is leading us on our route, I have come to assume some sort of equality of rank between us that will allow for confidential conversations. But I am wrong. When I tell him that I have started to believe that this enterprise may be beyond our powers of endurance, he replies that he has no patience with cowards, and turns his back on me. We do not speak again in the days that follow.

There are indications of the sites of ancient villages in the region beyond, where the river that fed that dry lake must once have flowed. There is no river here now, though my practiced eye detects the faint curves of its prehistoric route, and the fragmentary ruins of small stone settlements can be seen on the ledges above what once were its banks. But nowadays all is desert here. Why did the Empire need us to defend the frontier, when there is this gigantic buffer zone of desert between its rich, fertile territories and the homeland of the enemy?

Later we come to what must have been the capital city of this long-abandoned province, a sprawling maze of crumbled stone walls and barely comprehensible multi-roomed structures. We find some sort of temple sanctuary where devilish statues still stand, dark stone idols with a dozen heads and thirty arms, each one grasping the stump of what must have been a sword. Carved big-eyed snakes twine about the waists of these formidable forgotten gods. The scholars of our nation surely would wish to collect these things for the museums of the capital, and I make a record of our position, so that I can file a proper report for them once we have reached civilization. But by now I have arrived at serious doubt that we ever shall.

I draw Seeker aside and ask him to cast his mind forth in the old way and see if he can detect any intimation of inhabited villages somewhere ahead.

“I don’t know if I can,” he says. He is terribly emaciated, trembling, pale. “It takes a strength that I don’t think I have any more.”

“Try. Please. I need to know.”

He agrees to make the effort, and goes into his trance, and I stand by, watching, as his eyeballs roll up into his head and his breath comes in thick, hoarse bursts. He stands statue-still, utterly motionless for a very long while. Then, gradually, he returns to normal consciousness, and as he does so he begins to topple, but I catch him in time and ease him to the ground. He sits blinking for a time, drawing deep breaths, collecting his strength. I wait until he seems to have regained himself.

“Well?”

“Nothing. Silence. As empty ahead as it is behind.”

“For how far?” I ask.

“How do I know? There’s no one there. That’s all I can say.”

We are rationing water very parsimoniously and we are starting to run short of provisions, too. There is nothing for us to hunt and none of the vegetation, such as it is, seems edible. Even Sergeant, who is surely the strongest of us, now looks hollow-eyed and gaunt, and Seeker and Quartermaster seem at the verge of being unable to continue. From time to time we find a source of fresh water, brackish but at any rate drinkable, or slay some unwary wandering animal, and our spirits rise a bit, but the environment through which we pass is unremittingly hostile and I have no idea when things will grow easier for us. I make a show of studying my maps, hoping it will encourage the others to think that I know what I am doing, but the maps I have for this part of the continent are blank and I might just as well consult my wagon or the beasts that pull it as try to learn anything from those faded sheets of paper.

“This is a suicidal trek,” Engineer says to me one morning as we prepare to break camp. “We should never have come. We should turn back while we still can. At least at the fort we would be able to survive.”

“You got us into this,” Provisioner says, scowling at me. “You and your switched vote.” Burly Provisioner is burly no longer. He has become a mere shadow of his former self. “Admit it, Surveyor: we’ll never make it. It was a mistake to try.”

Am I supposed to defend myself against these charges? What defense can I possibly make?

A day later, with conditions no better, Captain calls the nine of us together and makes an astonishing announcement. He is sending the women back. They are too much of a burden on us. They will be given one of the wagons and some of our remaining provisions. If they travel steadily in the direction of the sunset, he says, they will sooner or later find their way back to their village below the walls of our fort.

He walks away from us before any of us can reply. We are too stunned to say anything, anyway. And how could we reply? What could we say? That we oppose this act of unthinkable cruelty and will not let him send the women to their deaths? Or that we have taken a new vote, and we are unanimous in our desire that all of us, not just the women, return to the fort? He will remind us that a military platoon is not a democracy. Or perhaps he will simply turn his back on us, as he usually does. We are bound on our path toward the inner domain of the Empire; we have sworn an oath to continue as a group; he will not release us.

“But he can’t mean it!” Stablemaster says. “It’s a death sentence for them!”

“Why should he care about that?” Armorer asks. “The women are just domestic animals to him. I’m surprised he doesn’t just ask us to kill them right here and now, instead of going to the trouble of letting them have some food for their trip back.”

It says much about how our journey has weakened us that none of us feels capable of voicing open opposition to Captain’s outrageous order. He confers with Provisioner and Stablemaster to determine how much of our food we can spare for them and which wagon to give them, and the conference proceeds precisely as though it is a normal order of business.

The women are unaware of the decision Captain has made. Nor can I say anything to Wendrit when I return to our tent. I pull her close against me and hold her in a long embrace, thinking that this is probably the last time.

When I step back and look into her eyes, my own fill with tears, and she stares at me in bewilderment. But how can I explain? I am her protector. There is no way to tell her that Captain has ordered her death and that I am prepared to be acquiescent in his monstrous decision.

Can it be said that it is possible to feel love for a Fisherfolk woman? Well, yes, perhaps. Perhaps I love Wendrit. Certainly it would cause me great pain to part from her.

The women will quickly lose their way as they try to re-traverse the inhospitable desert lands that we have just passed through. Beyond doubt they will die within a few days. And we ourselves, in all likelihood, will be dead ourselves in a week or two as we wander ever onward in this hopeless quest for the settled districts of the Empire. I was a madman to think that we could ever succeed in that journey simply by pointing our noses toward the capital and telling ourselves that by taking one step after another we would eventually get there.

But there is a third way that will spare Wendrit and the other women, and my friends as well, from dying lonely deaths in these lonely lands. Sergeant had shown me, that day behind the three little hillocks north of the fort, how the thing is managed.

I leave my tent. Captain has finished his conference with Provisioner and Stablemaster and is standing off by himself to one side of our camp, as though he is alone on some other planet.

“Captain?” I say.

My blade is ready as he turns toward me.

Afterward, to the shaken, astounded men, I say quietly, “I am Captain now. Is anyone opposed? Good.” And I point to the northwest, back toward the place of the serpent-wrapped stone idols, and the dry lake-bed beyond, and the red cliffs beyond those. “We all know we won’t ever find the Empire. But the fort is still there. So come, then. Let’s break camp and get started. We’re going back. We’re going home.”

Ishmael in Love

It was the spring of 1968 and I had written the first of the three novellas that would become the novel Nightwings, and then I turned my attention to doing a story I had promised for Ed Ferman, the editor and publisher of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I told Ed it was going to be a story told by a dolphin.

Dolphins were getting to be big news, then, and I built the story around the latest dolphin data and an article I had read in Science on experimental desalinization plants. At that time I was beginning to emerge a little, six weeks after a fire that had wrecked my house, from the numbness and exhaustion of the early post-fire days: at least, the audacity of opening a story with the words, “Call me Ishmael” leads me to think I was starting to recover a little of my emotional balance. I wrote the story fairly easily, considering how tired I was, and Ferman ran it in the July 1970 Fantasy and Science Fiction. Don Wollheim and Terry Carr chose it for the 1971 volume of their annual year’s-best-science-fiction volume, my third year in a row in that distinguished collection.

Call me Ishmael. All human beings who know me do. My own kind does not make use of the unit-structural designation [“name”] to distinguish individuals, but this is the name the humans gave me, and it will do. I was named by Miss Lisabeth Calkins, for whom I feel protective-chivalrous-sexual emotions [“love”]. Throughout my narrative it is understood that the designation “Ishmael” refers only to myself.

I am a member of an intelligent aquatic mammalian nonprimate nonhuman species, Tursiops truncatus, a bottle-nosed dolphin. I am eleven years old, which is to say that I am fully mature in all respects. My weight is 175 kilograms, and my total length is 2.9 meters. I am employed at Gerard-Worzel Seawater Recovery Station, St. Croix, Virgin Islands, in a maintenance capacity, having commenced there on your date of August 14 1994. To my own species I am sexually desirable and also highly regarded for my mental development. I have a large vocabulary. I communicate well with members of H. sapiens. I have considerable mechanical ability, as you can see by my success in switching on the electronic-acoustic device through which I am dictating this memoir.

I am a lonely mammalian organism who has committed acts of heroism on behalf of your species and wishes only the reward of a more intimate relationship [“love”] with Miss Lisabeth Calkins. I beseech compassionate members of H. sapiens to speak favorably of me to her. I am loyal, trustworthy, reliable, devoted, and extremely intelligent. I would endeavor to give her stimulating companionship and emotional fulfillment [“happiness”] in all respects within my power.

Permit me to explain the pertinent circumstances.

Category 1: My Employment

Gerard-Worzel Seawater Recovery Station occupies a prominent position on the north shore of the island of St. Croix in the West Indies. It operates on the atmospheric condensation principle. All this l know from Miss Calkins [“Lisabeth”], who has described its workings to me in great detail. The purpose of our installation is to recover some of the fresh water, estimated at two hundred million gallons per day, carried as vapor in the lower hundred meters of air sweeping over each kilometer of the windward side of the island.

A pipe 9 meters in diameter takes in cold seawater at depths of up to 900 meters and carries it approximately 2 kilometers to our station. The pipe delivers some 30 million gallons of water a day at a temperature of 5˚C. This is pumped toward our condenser, which intercepts approximately 1 billion cubic meters of warm tropical air each day. This air has a temperature of 25˚C and a relative humidity of 70 to 80 percent. Upon exposure to the cold seawater in the condenser the air cools to 10˚C and reaches a humidity of 100 percent, permitting us to extract approximately 16 gallons of water per cubic meter of air. This salt-free [“fresh”] water is delivered to the main water system of the island, for St. Croix is deficient in a natural supply of water suitable for consumption by human beings. It is frequently said by government officials who visit our installation on various ceremonial occasions that without our plant the great industrial expansion of St. Croix would have been wholly impossible.

For reasons of economy we operate in conjunction with an aquicultural enterprise [“the fish farm”] that puts our wastes to work. Once our seawater has been pumped through the condenser it must be discarded; however, because it originates in a low-level ocean area, its content of dissolved phosphates and nitrates is 1500 percent greater than at the surface. This nutrient-rich water is pumped from our condenser into an adjoining circular lagoon of natural origin [“the coral corral”], which is stocked with fish. In such an enhanced environment the fish are highly productive, and the yield of food is great enough to offset the costs of operating our pumps.

[Misguided human beings sometimes question the morality of using dolphins to help maintain fish farms. They believe it is degrading to compel us to produce fellow aquatic creatures to be eaten by man. May I simply point out, first, that none of us work here under compulsion, and second, that my species sees nothing immoral about feeding on aquatic creatures. We eat fish ourselves.]

My role in the functioning of the Gerard-Worzel Seawater Recovery Station is an important one. I [“Ishmael”] serve as foreman of the Intake Maintenance Squad. I lead nine members of my species. Our assignment is to monitor the intake valves of the main seawater pipe; these valves frequently become fouled through the presence on them of low-phylum organisms, such as starfish or algae, hampering the efficiency of the installation. Our task is to descend at periodic intervals and clear the obstruction. Normally this can be achieved without the need for manipulative organs [“fingers”] with which we are unfortunately not equipped.

[Certain individuals among you have objected that it is improper to make use of dolphins in the labor force when members of H. sapiens are out of work. The intelligent reply to this is that, first, we are designed by evolution to function superbly underwater without special breathing equipment, and second, that only a highly skilled human being could perform our function, and such human beings are themselves in short supply in the labor force.]

I have held my post for two years and four months. In that time there has been no significant interruption in intake capacity of the valves I maintain.

As compensation for my work [“salary”], I receive an ample supply of food. One could hire a mere shark for such pay, of course; but above and beyond my daily pails of fish, I also receive such intangibles as the companionship of human beings and the opportunity to develop my latent intelligence. through access to reference spools, vocabulary expanders, and various training devices. As you can see, I have made the most of my opportunities.

Category 2: Miss Lisabeth Calkins

Her dossier is on file here. I have had access to it through the spool-reader mounted at the edge of the dolphin exercise tank. By spoken instruction I can bring into view anything in the station files, although I doubt that it was anticipated by anyone that a dolphin should want to read the personnel dossiers.

She is twenty-seven years old. Thus she is of the same generation
as my genetic predecessors [“parents”]. However, I do not share the prevailing cultural taboo of many H. sapiens against emotional rela-
tionships with older women. Besides, after compensating for differences in species, it will be seen that Miss Lisabeth and I are of the same age. She reached sexual maturity approximately half her lifetime ago. So did I.

[I must admit that she is considered slightly past the optimum age at which human females take a permanent mate. I assume she does not engage in the practice of temporary mating, since her dossier shows no indication that she has reproduced. It is possible that humans do not necessarily produce offspring at each yearly mating, or even that matings take place at random unpredictable times not related to the reproductive process at all. This seems strange and somehow perverse to me, yet I infer from some data I have seen that it may be the case. There is little information on human mating habits in the material accessible to me. I must learn more.]

Lisabeth, as I allow myself privately to call her, stands 1.8 meters tall [humans do not measure themselves by “length”] and weighs 52 kilograms. Her hair is golden [“blonde”] and is worn long. Her skin, though darkened by exposure to the sun, is quite fair. The irises of her eyes are blue. From my conversations with humans I have learned that she is considered quite beautiful. From words I have overheard while at surface level, I realize that most males at the station feel intense sexual desires toward her. I regard her as beautiful also, inasmuch as I am capable of responding to human beauty. [I think I am.] I am not sure if I feel actual sexual desire for Lisabeth; more likely what troubles me is a generalized longing for her presence and her closeness, which I translate into sexual terms simply as a means of making it comprehensible to me.

Beyond doubt she does not have the traits I normally seek in a mate [prominent beak, sleek fins]. Any attempt at our making love in the anatomical sense would certainly result in pain or injury to her. That is not my wish. The physical traits that make her so desirable to the males of her species [highly developed milk glands, shining hair, delicate features, long hind limbs or “legs”, and so forth] have no particular importance to me, and in some instances actually have a negative value. As in the case of the two milk glands in her pectoral region, which jut forward from her body in such a fashion that they must surely slow her when she swims. This is poor design, and I am incapable of finding poor design beautiful in any way. Evidently Lisabeth regrets the size and placement of those glands herself, since she is careful to conceal them at all times by a narrow covering. The others at the station, who are all males and therefore have only rudimentary milk glands that in no way destroy the flow lines of their bodies, leave them bare.

What, then, is the cause of my attraction for Lisabeth?

It arises out of the need I feel for her companionship. I believe that she understands me as no member of my own species does. Hence I will be happier in her company than away from her. This impression dates from our earliest meeting. Lisabeth, who is a specialist in human-cetacean relations, came to St. Croix four months ago, and I was requested to bring my maintenance group to the surface to be introduced to her. I leaped high for a good view and saw instantly that she was of a finer sort than the humans I already knew; her body was more delicate, looking at once fragile and powerful, and her gracefulness was a welcome change from the thick awkwardness of the human males I knew. Nor was she covered with the coarse body hair that my kind finds so distressing. [I did not at first know that Lisabeth’s difference from the others at the station was the result of’ her being female. I had never seen a human female before. But I quickly learned.]

I came forward, made contact with the acoustic transmitter, and said, “I am the foreman of the Intake Maintenance Squad. I have the unit-structural designation TT-66.”

“Don’t you have a name?” she asked.

“Meaning of term, name?”

“Your—your unit-structural designation—but not just TT-66. I mean, that’s no good at all. For example, my name’s Lisabeth Calkins. And I—” She shook her head and looked at the plant supervisor. “Don’t these workers have names?”

The supervisor did not see why dolphins should have names. Lisabeth did—she was greatly concerned about it—and since she now was in charge of liaison with us, she gave us names on the spot. Thus I was dubbed Ishmael. It was, she told me, the name of a man who had gone to sea, had many wonderful experiences, and put them all down in a story-spool that every cultured person played. I have since had access to Ishmael’s story—that other Ishmael—and I agree that it is remarkable. For a human being he had unusual insight into the ways of whales, who are, however, stupid creatures for whom I have little respect. I am proud to carry Ishmael’s name.

After she had named us, Lisabeth leaped into the sea and swam with us. I must tell you that most of us feel a sort of contempt for you humans because you are such poor swimmers. Perhaps it is a mark of my above-normal intelligence or greater compassion that I have no such scorn in me. I admire you for the zeal and energy you give to swimming, and you are quite good at it, considering all your handicaps. As I remind my people, you manage far more ably in the water than we would on land. Anyway, Lisabeth swam well, by human standards, and we tolerantly adjusted our pace to hers. We frolicked in the water awhile. Then she seized my dorsal fin and said, “Take me for a ride, Ishmael!”

I tremble now to recollect the contact of her body with mine. She sat astride me, her legs gripping my body tightly, and off I sped at close to full velocity, soaring at surface level. Her laughter told of her delight as I launched myself again and again through the air. It was a purely physical display in which I made no use of my extraordinary mental capacity; I was, if you will, simply showing off my dolphinhood. Lisabeth’s response was ecstatic. Even when I plunged, taking her so deep she might have feared harm from the pressure, she kept her grip and showed no alarm. When we breached the surface again, she cried out in joy.

Through sheer animality I had made my first impact on her. I knew human beings well enough to be able to interpret her flushed, exhilarated expression as I returned her to shore. My challenge now was to expose her to my higher traits—to show her that even among dolphins I was unusually swift to learn, unusually capable of comprehending the universe.

I was already then in love with her.

During the weeks that followed we had many conversations. I am not flattering myself when I tell you that she quickly realized how extraordinary I am. My vocabulary, which was already large when she came to the station, grew rapidly under the stimulus of Lisabeth’s presence. I learned from her; she gave me access to spools no dolphin was thought likely to wish to play; I developed insights into my environment that astonished even myself. In short order I reached my present peak of attainment. I think you will agree that I can express myself more eloquently than most human beings. I trust that the computer doing the printout on this memoir will not betray me by inserting inappropriate punctuations or deviating from the proper spellings of the words whose sounds I utter.

My love for Lisabeth deepened and grew more rich. I learned the meaning of jealousy for the first time when I saw her running arm in arm along the beach with Dr. Madison, the power-plant man. I knew anger when I overheard the lewd and vulgar remarks of human males as Lisabeth walked by. My fascination with her led me to explore many avenues of human experience; I did not dare talk of such things with her, but from other personnel at the base who sometimes talked with me I learned certain aspects of the phenomenon humans call “love”. I also obtained explanations of the vulgar words spoken by males here behind her back: most of them pertained to a wish to mate with Lisabeth [apparently on a temporary basis], but there were also highly favorable descriptions of her milk glands [why are humans so aggressively mammalian?] and even of the rounded area in back, just above the place where her body divides into the two hind limbs. I confess that that region fascinates me also. It seems so alien for one’s body to split like that in the middle!

I never explicitly stated my feelings toward Lisabeth. I tried to lead her slowly toward an understanding that I loved her. Once she came overtly to that awareness, I thought, we might begin to plan some sort of future for ourselves together.

What a fool I was!

Category 3: The Conspiracy

A male voice said, “How in hell are you going to bribe a dolphin?”

A different voice, deeper, more cultured, replied, “Leave it to me.”

“What do you give him? Ten cans of sardines?”

“This one’s special. Peculiar, even. He’s scholarly. We can get to him.”

They did not know that I could hear them. I was drifting near the surface in my rest tank, between shifts. Our hearing is acute and I was well within auditory range. I sensed at once that something was amiss, but I kept my position, pretending I knew nothing.

“Ishmael!” one man called out. “Is that you, Ishmael?”

I rose to the surface and came to the edge of the tank. Three male humans stood there. One was a technician at the station; the other two I had never seen before, and they wore body covering from their feet to their throats, marking them at once as strangers here. The technician I despised, for he was one of the ones who had made vulgar remarks about Lisabeth’s milk glands.

He said, “Look at him, gentlemen. Worn out in his prime! A victim of human exploitation!” To me he said, “Ishmael, these gentlemen come from the League for the Prevention of Cruelty to Intelligent Species. You know about that?”

“ No,” I said.

“They’re trying to put an end to dolphin exploitation. The criminal use of our planet’s only other truly intelligent species in slave labor. They want to help you.”

“I am no slave. I receive compensation for my work.”

“A few stinking fish!” said the fully dressed man to the left of the technician. “They exploit you, Ishmael! They give you dangerous, dirty work and don’t pay you worth a damn!”

His companion said, “It has to stop. We want to serve notice to the world that the age of enslaved dolphins is over. Help us, Ishmael. Help us help you!”

I need not say that I was hostile to their purported purposes.
A more literal-minded dolphin than I might well have said so at
once and spoiled their plot. But I shrewdly said, “What do you want me to do?”

“Foul the intakes,” said the technician quickly.

Despite myself, I snorted in anger and surprise. “Betray a sacred trust? How can I?”

“‘It’s for your own sake, Ishmael. Here’s how it works—you
and your crew will plug up the intakes, and the water plant will stop working. The whole island will panic. Human maintenance crews will go down to see what’s what, but as soon as they clear the valves, you go back and foul them again. Emergency water supplies will have to be rushed to St. Croix. It’ll focus public attention on the fact that this island is dependent on dolphin labor—underpaid, overworked dolphin labor! During the crisis we’ll step forward to tell the world your story. We’ll get every human being to cry out in outrage against the way you’re being treated.”

I did not say that I felt no outrage myself. Instead I cleverly replied, “There could be dangers in this for me.”

“Nonsense!”

“They will ask me why I have not cleared the valves. It is my responsibility. There will be trouble.”

For a while we debated the point. Then the technician said, “Look, Ishmael, we know there are a few risks. But we’re willing to offer extra payment if you’ll handle the job.”

“Such as?”

“Spools. Anything you’d like to hear, we’ll get for you. I
know you’ve got literary interests. Plays, poetry, novels, all that sort
of stuff. After hours, we’ll feed literature to you by the bushel if you’ll help us.”

I had to admire their slickness. They knew how to motivate me.

“It’s a deal,” I said.

“Just tell us what you’d like.”

“Anything about love.”

“Love?”

“Love. Man and woman. Bring me love poems. Bring me stories of famous lovers. Bring me descriptions of the sexual embrace. I must understand these things.”

“He wants the Kama Sutra,” said the one on the left.

“Then we bring him the Kama Sutra,” said the one on the right.

Category 4: My Response to the Criminals

They did not actually bring me the Kama Sutra. But they brought me a good many other things, including one spool that quoted at length from the Kama Sutra. For several weeks I devoted myself intensively to a study of human love literature. There were maddening gaps in the texts, and I still lack real comprehension of much that goes on between man and woman. The joining of body to body does not puzzle me; but I am baffled by the dialectics of the chase, in which the male must be predatory and the woman must pretend to be out of season; I am mystified by the morality of temporary mating as distinct from permanent [“marriage”]; I have no grasp of the intricate systems of taboos and prohibitions that humans have invented. This has been my one intellectual failure: at the end of my studies I knew little more of how to conduct myself with Lisabeth than I had before the conspirators had begun slipping me spools in secret.

Now they called on me to do my part.

Naturally I could not betray the station. I knew that these men were not the enlightened foes of dolphin exploitation that they claimed to be; for some private reason they wished the station shut down, that was all, and they had used their supposed sympathies with my species to win my cooperation. I do not feel exploited.

Was it improper of me to accept spools from them if I had no
intention of aiding them? I doubt it. They wished to use me; instead I used them. Sometimes a superior species must exploit its inferiors to gain knowledge.

They came to me and asked me to foul the valves that evening. I said, “I am not certain what you actually wish me to do. Will you instruct me again?”

Cunningly I had switched on a recording device used by Lisabeth in her study sessions with the station dolphins. So they told me again about how fouling the valves would throw the island into panic and cast a spotlight on dolphin abuse. I questioned them repeatedly, drawing out details and also giving each man a chance to place his voiceprints on record. When proper incrimination had been achieved, I said, “Very well. On my next shift I’ll do as you say.”

“And the rest of your maintenance squad?”

“I’ll order them to leave the valves untended for the sake of
our species.”

They left the station, looking quite satisfied with themselves. When they were gone, I beaked the switch that summoned Lisabeth. She came from her living quarters rapidly. I showed her the spool in the recording machine.

“Play it,” I said grandly. “And then notify the island police!”

Category 5: The Reward of Heroism

The arrests were made. The three men had no concern with dolphin exploitation whatsoever. They were members of a disruptive group [“revolutionaries”] attempting to delude a naive dolphin into helping them cause chaos on the island. Through my loyalty, courage, and intelligence I had thwarted them.

Afterward Lisabeth came to me at the rest tank and said; “You were wonderful, Ishmael. To play along with them like that, to make them record their own confession—marvelous! You’re a wonder among dolphins, Ishmael.”

I was in a transport of joy.

The moment had come. I blurted, “Lisabeth, I love you.”

My words went booming around the walls of the tank as they burst from the speakers. Echoes amplified and modulated them into grotesque barking noises more worthy of some miserable moron of a seal. “Love you … love you … love you …”

“Why, Ishmael!”

“I can’t tell you how much you mean to me. Come live with me and be my love. Lisabeth, Lisabeth, Lisabeth!”

Torrents of poetry broke from me. Gales of passionate rhetoric escaped my beak. I begged her to come down into the tank and let me embrace her. She laughed and said she wasn’t dressed for swimming. It was true: she had just come from town after the arrests. I implored. I begged. She yielded. We were alone; she removed her garments and entered the tank; for an instant I looked upon beauty bare. The sight left me shaken—those ugly swinging milk glands normally so wisely concealed, the strips of sickly white skin where the sun had been unable to reach, that unexpected patch of additional body hair—but once she was in the water I forgot my love’s imperfections and rushed toward her. “Love!” I cried “Blessed Love!” I wrapped my fins about her in what I imagined was the human embrace. “Lisabeth! Lisabeth!” We slid below the surface. For the first time in my life I knew true passion, the kind of which the poets sing, that overwhelms even the coldest mind. I crushed her to me. I was aware of her forelimb-ends [“fists”] beating against my pectoral zone, and took it at first for a sign that my passion was being reciprocated; then it reached my love-hazed brain that she might be short of air. Hastily I surfaced. My darling Lisabeth, choking and gasping, sucked in breath and struggled to escape me. In shock I released her. She fled the tank and fell along its rim, exhausted, her pale body quivering. “Forgive me,” I boomed. “I love you, Lisabeth! I saved the station out of love for you!” She managed to lift her lips as a sign that she did not feel anger for me [a “smile”]. In a faint voice she said, “You almost drowned me, Ishmael!”

“I was carried away by my emotions. Come back into the tank. I’ll be more gentle. I promise! To have you near me—”

“Oh, Ishmael! What are you saying?”

“I love you! I love you!”

I heard footsteps. The power-plant man, Dr. Madison, came running. Hastily Lisabeth cupped her hands over her milk glands and pulled her discarded garments over the lower half of her body. That pained me, for if she chose to hide such things from him, such ugly parts of herself, was that not an indication of her love for him?

“Are you all right, Liz?” he asked. “I heard yelling—”

“It’s nothing, Jeff. Only Ishmael. He started hugging me in the tank. He’s in love with me, Jeff, can you imagine? In love with me!”

They laughed together at the folly of the love-smitten dolphin.

Before dawn came I was far out to sea. I swam where dolphins
swim, far from man and his things. Lisabeth’s mocking laughter
rang within me. She had not meant to be cruel. She who knows me
better than anyone else had not been able to keep from laughing at
my absurdity.

Nursing my wounds, I stayed at sea for several days, neglecting my duties at the station. Slowly, as the pain gave way to a dull ache, I headed back toward the island. In passing I met a female of my own kind. She was newly come into her season and offered herself to me, but I told her to follow me, and she did. Several times I was forced to warn off other males who wished to make use of her. I led her to the station, into the lagoon the dolphins use in their sport. A member of my crew came out to investigate—Mordred, it was—and I told him to summon Lisabeth and tell her I had returned.

Lisabeth appeared on the shore. She waved to me, smiled, called
my name.

Before her eyes I frolicked with the female dolphin. We did the dance of mating; we broke the surface and lashed it with our flukes; we leaped, we soared, we bellowed.

Lisabeth watched us. And I prayed: Let her become jealous.

I seized my companion and drew her to the depths and violently took her, and set her free to bear my child in some other place. I found Mordred again. “Tell Lisabeth,” I instructed him, “that I have found another love, but that someday I may forgive her.”

Mordred gave me a glassy look and swam to shore.

My tactic failed. Lisabeth sent word that I was welcome to come back to work, and that she was sorry if she had offended me; but there was no hint of jealousy in her message. My soul has turned to rotting seaweed within me. Once more I clear the intake valves, like the good beast I am, I, Ishmael, who has read Keats and Donne. Lisabeth! Lisabeth! Can you feel my pain?

Tonight by darkness I have spoken my story. You who hear this, whoever you may be, aid a lonely organism, mammalian and aquatic, who desires more intimate contact with a female of a different species. Speak kindly of me to Lisabeth. Praise my intelligence, my loyalty, and my devotion.

Tell her I give her one more chance. I offer a unique and exciting experience. I will wait for her, tomorrow night, by the edge of the reef. Let her swim to me. Let her embrace poor lonely Ishmael. Let her speak the words of love.

From the depths of my soul … from the depths … Lisabeth, the foolish beast bids you good night, in grunting tones of deepest love.

The Secret Sharer

I make no secret of my admiration for the work of Joseph Conrad. (Or for Conrad himself, the tough, stubborn little man who, although English was his third language, after Polish and French, not only was able to pass the difficult oral qualifying exam to become a captain in the British merchant marine, but then, a decade or so later, to transform himself into one of the greatest figures in twentieth-century English literature.) Most of what I owe to Conrad as a writer is buried deep in the substructure of my stories—a way of looking at narrative, a way of understanding character. But occasionally I’ve made the homage more visible. My novel Downward to the Earth of 1969 is a kind of free transposition of his novella “Heart of Darkness” to science fiction, a borrowing that I signaled overtly by labeling my most tormented character with the name of Kurtz. “Heart of Darkness,” when I first encountered it as a reader more than fifty years ago, had been packaged as half of a two-novella paperback collection, the other story being Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer.” And some time late in 1986, I felt the urge, I know not why—a love of symmetry? A compulsion toward completion?—to finish what I had begun in Downward to the Earth by writing a story adapted from the other great novella of that paperback of long ago.

This time I was less subtle than before, announcing my intentions not by using one of Conrad’s character names but by appropriating his story’s actual title. (This produced a pleasantly absurd result when my story was published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and a reader wrote to the editor, somewhat indignantly, to ask whether I knew that the title had already been used by Joseph Conrad!) I swiped not only the title but Conrad’s basic story situation, that of the ship captain who finds a stowaway on board and eventually is drawn into a strange alliance with him. (Her, in my story.) But otherwise I translated the Conrad into purely science-fictional terms and produced something that I think represents completely original work, however much it may owe to the structure of a classic earlier story.

“Translate” is perhaps not the appropriate term for what I did. A “translation,” in the uncompromising critical vocabulary set forth by Damon Knight and James Blish in the 1950s upon which I based much of my own fiction-writing esthetic, is defined as an adaptation of a stock format of mundane fiction into sf by the simple one-for-one substitution of science-fictiony noises for the artifacts of the mundane genre. That is, change “Colt .44” to “laser pistol” and “horse” to “greeznak” and “Comanche” to “Sloogl” and you can easily generate a sort of science fiction out of a standard western story, complete with cattle rustlers, scalpings, and cavalry rescues. But you don’t get real science fiction; you don’t get anything new and intellectually stimulating, just a western story that has greeznaks and Sloogls in it. Change “Los Angeles Police Department” to “Drylands Patrol” and “crack dealer” to “canal-dust dealer” and you’ve got a crime story set on Mars, but so what? Change “the canals of Venice” to “the marshy streets of Venusburg” and the sinister agents of S.M.E.R.S.H. to the sinister agents of A.A.A.A.R.G.H. and you’ve got a James Bond story set on the second planet, but it’s still a James Bond story.

I don’t think that that’s what I’ve done here. The particular way in which Vox stows away aboard the Sword of Orion is nothing that Joseph Conrad could have understood, and arises, I think, purely out of the science-fictional inventions at the heart of the story. The way she leaves the ship is very different from anything depicted in Conrad’s maritime fiction. The starwalk scene provides visionary possibilities quite unlike those afforded by a long stare into the vastness of the trackless Pacific. And so on. “The Secret Sharer” by Robert Silverberg is, or so I believe, a new and unique science fiction story set, for reasons of the author’s private amusement, within the framework of a well-known century-old masterpiece of the sea by Joseph Conrad.

“The Secret Sharer”—mine, not Conrad’s—appeared in the September 1988 issue of Asimov’s and was a Nebula and Hugo nominee in 1988 as best novella of the year, but didn’t get the trophies. It did win the third of the major sf honors, the Locus Award. Usually most of the Locus winners go on to get Hugos as well, but that year it didn’t happen. I regretted that. But Joseph Conrad’s original version of the story didn’t win a Hugo or a Nebula either, and people still read it admiringly to this day. You take your lumps in this business, and you go bravely onward: it’s the only way. Conrad would have understood that philosophy.

1.

It was my first time to heaven and I was no one at all, no one at all, and this was the voyage that was supposed to make me someone.

But though I was no one at all I dared to look upon the million worlds and I felt a great sorrow for them. There they were all about me, humming along on their courses through the night, each of them believing it was actually going somewhere. And each one wrong, of course, for worlds go nowhere, except around and around and around, pathetic monkeys on a string, forever tethered in place. They seem to move, yes. But really they stand still. And I—I who stared at the worlds of heaven and was swept with compassion for them—I knew that though I seemed to be standing still, I was in fact moving. For I was aboard a ship of heaven, a ship of the Service, that was spanning the light-years at a speed so incomprehensibly great that it might as well have been no speed at all.

I was very young. My ship, then as now, was the Sword of Orion, on a journey out of Kansas Four bound for Cul-de-Sac and Strappado and Mangan’s Bitch and several other worlds, via the usual spinarounds. It was my first voyage and I was in command. I thought for a long time that I would lose my soul on that voyage; but now I know that what was happening aboard that ship was not the losing of a soul but the gaining of one. And perhaps of more than one.

2.

Roacher thought I was sweet. I could have killed him for that; but of course he was dead already.

You have to give up your life when you go to heaven. What you get in return is for me to know and you, if you care, to find out; but the inescapable thing is that you leave behind anything that ever linked you to life on shore, and you become something else. We say that you give up the body and you get your soul. Certainly you can keep your body too, if you want it. Most do. But it isn’t any good to you any more, not in the ways that you think a body is good to you. I mean to tell you how it was for me on my first voyage aboard the Sword of Orion, so many years ago.

I was the youngest officer on board, so naturally I was captain.

They put you in command right at the start, before you’re anyone. That’s the only test that means a damn: they throw you in the sea and if you can swim you don’t drown, and if you can’t you do. The drowned ones go back in the tank and they serve their own useful purposes, as push-cells or downloaders or mind-wipers or Johnny-scrub-and-scour or whatever. The ones that don’t drown go on to other commands. No one is wasted. The Age of Waste has been over a long time.

On the third virtual day out from Kansas Four, Roacher told me that I was the sweetest captain he had ever served under. And he had served under plenty of them, for Roacher had gone up to heaven at least two hundred years before, maybe more.

“I can see it in your eyes, the sweetness. I can see it in the angle you hold your head.”

He didn’t mean it as a compliment.

“We can put you off ship at Ultima Thule,” Roacher said. “Nobody will hold it against you. We’ll put you in a bottle and send you down, and the Thuleys will catch you and decant you and you’ll be able to find your way back to Kansas Four in twenty or fifty years. It might be the best thing.”

Roacher is small and parched, with brown skin and eyes that shine with the purple luminescence of space. Some of the worlds he has seen were forgotten a thousand years ago.

“Go bottle yourself, Roacher,” I told him.

“Ah, Captain, Captain! Don’t take it the wrong way. Here, Captain, give us a touch of the sweetness.” He reached out a claw, trying to stroke me along the side of my face. “Give us a touch, Captain, give us just a little touch!”

“I’ll fry your soul and have it for breakfast, Roacher. There’s sweetness for you. Go scuttle off, will you? Go jack yourself to the mast and drink hydrogen, Roacher. Go. Go.”

“So sweet,” he said. But he went. I had the power to hurt him. He knew I could do it, because I was captain. He also knew I wouldn’t; but there was always the possibility he was wrong. The captain exists in that margin between certainty and possibility. A crewman tests the width of that margin at his own risk. Roacher knew that. He had been a captain once himself, after all.

There were seventeen of us to heaven that voyage, staffing a ten-kilo Megaspore-class ship with full annexes and extensions and all virtualities. We carried a bulging cargo of the things regarded in those days as vital in the distant colonies: pre-read vapor chips, artificial intelligences, climate nodes, matrix jacks, mediq machines, bone banks, soil converters, transit spheres, communication bubbles, skin-and-organ synthesizers, wildlife domestication plaques, gene replacement kits, a sealed consignment of obliteration sand and other proscribed weapons, and so on. We also had fifty billion dollars in the form of liquid currency pods, central-bank-to-central-bank transmission. In addition there was a passenger load of seven thousand colonists. Eight hundred of these were on the hoof and the others were stored in matrix form for body transplant on the worlds of destination. A standard load, in other words. The crew worked on commission, also as per standard, one percent of bill-of-lading value divided in customary lays. Mine was the 50th lay—that is, two percent of the net profits of the voyage—and that included a bonus for serving as captain; otherwise I would have had the l00th lay or something even longer. Roacher had the l0th lay and his jackmate Bulgar the l4th, although they weren’t even officers. Which demonstrates the value of seniority in the Service. But seniority is the same thing as survival, after all, and why should survival not be rewarded? On my most recent voyage I drew the l9th lay. I will have better than that on my next.

3.

You have never seen a starship. We keep only to heaven; when we are to worldward, shoreships come out to us for the downloading. The closest we ever go to planetskin is a million shiplengths. Any closer and we’d be shaken apart by that terrible strength which emanates from worlds.

We don’t miss landcrawling, though. It’s a plague to us. If I had to step to shore now, after having spent most of my lifetime in heaven, I would die of the drop-death within an hour. That is a monstrous way to die; but why would I ever go ashore? The likelihood of that still existed for me at the time I first sailed the Sword of Orion, you understand, but I have long since given it up. That is what I mean when I say that you give up your life when you go to heaven. But of course what also goes from you is any feeling that to be ashore has anything to do with being alive. If you could ride a starship, or even see one as we see them, you would understand. I don’t blame you for being what you are.

Let me show you the Sword of Orion. Though you will never see it as we see it.

What would you see, if you left the ship as we sometimes do to do the starwalk in the Great Open?

The first thing you would see was the light of the ship. A starship gives off a tremendous insistent glow of light that splits heaven like the blast of a trumpet. That great light both precedes and follows. Ahead of the ship rides a luminescent cone of brightness bellowing in the void. In its wake the ship leaves a photonic track so intense that it could be gathered up and weighed. It is the stardrive that issues this light: a ship eats space, and light is its offthrow.

Within the light you would see a needle ten kilometers long.

That is the ship. One end tapers to a sharp point and the other has the Eye, and it is several days’ journey by foot from end to end through all the compartments that lie between. It is a world self-contained. The needle is a flattened one. You could walk about easily on the outer surface of the ship, the skin of the top deck, what we call Skin Deck. Or just as easily on Belly Deck, the one on the bottom side. We call one the top deck and the other the bottom, but when you are outside the ship these distinctions have no meaning. Between Skin and Belly lie Crew Deck, Passenger Deck, Cargo Deck, Drive Deck. Ordinarily no one goes from one deck to another. We stay where we belong. The engines are in the Eye. So are the captain’s quarters.

That needle is the ship, but it is not the whole ship. What you will not be able to see are the annexes and extensions and virtualities. These accompany the ship, enfolding it in a webwork of intricate outstructures. But they are of a subordinate level of reality and therefore they defy vision. A ship tunnels into the void, spreading far and wide to find room for all that it must carry. In these outlying zones are kept our supplies and provisions, our stores of fuel, and all cargo traveling at second-class rates. If the ship transports prisoners, they will ride in an annex. If the ship expects to encounter severe probability turbulence during the course of the voyage, it will arm itself with stabilizers, and those will be carried in the virtualities, ready to be brought into being if needed. These are the mysteries of our profession. Take them on faith, or ignore them, as you will: they are not meant for you to know.

A ship takes forty years to build. There are two hundred seventy-one of them in service now. New ones are constantly under construction. They are the only link binding the Mother Worlds and the eight hundred ninety-eight Colonies and the colonies of the Colonies. Four ships have been lost since the beginning of the Service. No one knows why. The loss of a starship is the worst disaster I can imagine. The last such event occurred sixty virtual years ago.

A starship never returns to the world from which it was launched. The galaxy is too large for that. It makes its voyage and it continues onward through heaven in an endless open circuit. That is the service of the Service. There would be no point in returning, since thousands of worldward years sweep by behind us as we make our voyages. We live outside of time. We must, for there is no other way. That is our burden and our privilege. That is the service of the Service.

4.

On the fifth virtual day of the voyage I suddenly felt a tic, a nibble, a subtle indication that something had gone wrong. It was a very trifling thing, barely perceptible, like the scatter of eroded pebbles that tells you that the palaces and towers of a great ruined city lie buried beneath the mound on which you climb. Unless you are looking for such signals you will not see them. But I was primed for discovery that day. I was eager for it. A strange kind of joy came over me when I picked up that fleeting signal of wrongness.

I keyed the intelligence on duty and said, “What was that tremor on Passenger Deck?”

The intelligence arrived instantly in my mind, a sharp gray-green presence with a halo of tingling music.

“I am aware of no tremor, sir.”

“There was a distinct tremor. There was a data-spurt just now.”

“Indeed, sir? A data-spurt, sir?” The intelligence sounded aghast, but in a condescending way. It was humoring me. “What action shall I take, sir?”

I was being invited to retreat.

The intelligence on duty was a 49 Henry Henry. The Henry series affects a sort of slippery innocence that I find disingenuous. Still, they are very capable intelligences. I wondered if I had misread the signal. Perhaps I was too eager for an event, any event, that would confirm my relationship with the ship.

There is never a sense of motion or activity aboard a starship: we float in silence on a tide of darkness, cloaked in our own dazzling light. Nothing moves, nothing seems to live in all the universe. Since we had left Kansas Four I had felt that great silence judging me. Was I really captain of this vessel? Good: then let me feel the weight of duty upon my shoulders.

We were past Ultima Thule by this time, and there could be no turning back. Borne on our cloak of light, we would roar through heaven for week after virtual week until we came to worldward at the first of our destinations, which was Cul-de-Sac in the Vainglory Archipelago, out by the Spook Clusters. Here in free space I must begin to master the ship, or it would master me.

“Sir?” the intelligence said.

“Run a data uptake,” I ordered. “All Passenger Deck input for the past half hour. There was movement. There was a spurt.”

I knew I might be wrong. Still, to err on the side of caution may be naive, but it isn’t a sin. And I knew that at this stage in the voyage nothing I could say or do would make me seem other than naive to the crew of the Sword of Orion. What did I have to lose by ordering a recheck, then? I was hungry for surprises. Any irregularity that 49 Henry Henry turned up would be to my advantage; the absence of one would make nothing worse for me.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” 49 Henry Henry reported after a moment, “but there was no tremor, sir.”

“Maybe I overstated it, then. Calling it a tremor. Maybe it was just an anomaly. What do you say, 49 Henry Henry?” I wondered if I was humiliating myself, negotiating like this with an intelligence. “There was something. I’m sure of that. An unmistakable irregular burst in the data-flow. An anomaly, yes. What do you say, 49 Henry Henry?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes what?”

“The record does show an irregularity, sir. Your observation was quite acute, sir.”

“Go on.”

“No cause for alarm, sir. A minor metabolic movement, nothing more. Like turning over in your sleep.” You bastard, what do you know about sleep? “Extremely unusual, sir, that you should be able to observe anything so small. I commend you, sir. The passengers are all well, sir.”

“Very good,” I said. “Enter this exchange in the log, 49 Henry Henry.”

“Already entered, sir,” the intelligence said. “Permission to decouple, sir?”

“Yes, you can decouple,” I told it.

The shimmer of music that signaled its presence grew tinny and was gone. I could imagine it smirking as it went about its ghostly flitting rounds deep in the neural conduits of the ship. Scornful software, glowing with contempt for its putative master. The poor captain, it was thinking. The poor hopeless silly boy of a captain. A passenger sneezes and he’s ready to seal all bulkheads.

Well, let it smirk, I thought. I have acted appropriately and the record will show it.

I knew that all this was part of my testing.

You may think that to be captain of such a ship as the Sword of Orion in your first voyage to heaven is an awesome responsibility and an inconceivable burden. So it is, but not for the reason you think.

In truth the captain’s duties are the least significant of anyone’s aboard the ship. The others have well-defined tasks that are essential to the smooth running of the voyage, although the ship could, if the need arose, generate virtual replacements for any and every crew member and function adequately on its own. The captain’s task, though, is fundamentally abstract. His role is to witness the voyage, to embody it in his own consciousness, to give it coherence, continuity, by reducing it to a pattern of decisions and responses. In that sense the captain is simply so much software: he is the coding through which the voyage is expressed as a series of linear functions. If he fails to perform that duty adequately, others will quietly see to it that the voyage proceeds as it should. What is destroyed, in the course of a voyage that is inadequately captained, is the captain himself, not the voyage. My pre-flight training made that absolutely clear. The voyage can survive the most feeble of captains. As I have said, four starships have been lost since the Service began, and no one knows why. But there is no reason to think that any of those catastrophes were caused by failings of the captain. How could they have been? The captain is only the vehicle through which others act. It is not the captain who makes the voyage, but the voyage which makes the captain.

5.

Restless, troubled, I wandered the eye of the ship. Despite 49 Henry Henry’s suave mockery I was still convinced there was trouble on board, or about to be.

Just as I reached Outerscreen Level I felt something strange touch me a second time. It was different this time, and deeply disturbing.

The Eye, as it makes the complete descent from Skin Deck to Belly Deck, is lined with screens that provide displays, actual or virtual, of all aspects of the ship both internal and external. I came up to the great black bevel-edged screen that provided our simulated view of the external realspace environment and was staring at the dwindling wheel of the Ultima Thule relay point when the new anomaly occurred. The other had been the merest of subliminal signals, a nip, a tickle. This was more like an attempted intrusion. Invisible fingers seemed to brush lightly over my brain, probing, seeking entrance. The fingers withdrew; a moment later there was a sudden stabbing pain in my left temple.

I stiffened. “Who’s there?”

“Help me,” a silent voice said.

I had heard wild tales of passenger matrixes breaking free of their storage circuits and drifting through the ship like ghosts, looking for an unguarded body that they might infiltrate. The sources were unreliable, old scoundrels like Roacher or Bulgar. I dismissed such stories as fables, the way I dismissed what I had heard of the vast tentacular krakens that were said to swim the seas of space, or the beckoning mermaids with shining breasts who danced along the force-lines at spinaround points. But I had felt this. The probing fingers, the sudden sharp pain. And the sense of someone frightened, frightened but strong, stronger than I, hovering close at hand.

“Where are you?”

There was no reply. Whatever it was, if it had been anything at all, had slipped back into hiding after that one furtive thrust.

But was it really gone?

“You’re still here somewhere,” I said. “I know that you are.”

Silence. Stillness.

“You asked for help. Why did you disappear so fast?”

No response. I felt anger rising.

“Whoever you are. Whatever. Speak up.”

Nothing. Silence. Had I imagined it? The probing, the voiceless voice?

No. No. I was certain that there was something invisible and unreal hovering about me. And I found it infuriating, not to be able to regain contact with it. To be toyed with this way, to be mocked like this.

This is my ship, I thought. I want no ghosts aboard my ship.

“You can be detected,” I said. “You can be contained. You can be eradicated.”

As I stood there blustering in my frustration, it seemed to me that I felt that touch against my mind again, a lighter one this time, wistful, regretful. Perhaps I invented it. Perhaps I have supplied it retroactively.

But it lasted only a part of an instant, if it happened at all, and then I was unquestionably alone again. The solitude was real and total and unmistakable. I stood gripping the rail of the screen, leaning forward into the brilliant blackness and swaying dizzily as if I were being pulled forward through the wall of the ship into space.

“Captain?”

The voice of 49 Henry Henry, tumbling out of the air behind me.

“Did you feel something that time?” I asked.

The intelligence ignored my question. “Captain, there’s trouble on Passenger Deck. Hands-on alarm: will you come?”

“Set up a transit track for me,” I said. “I’m on my way.”

Lights began to glow in mid-air, yellow, blue, green. The interior of the ship is a vast opaque maze and moving about within it is difficult without an intelligence to guide you. 49 Henry Henry constructed an efficient route for me down the curve of the Eye and into the main body of the ship, and thence around the rim of the leeward wall to the elevator down to Passenger Deck. I rode an air-cushion tracker keyed to the lights. The journey took no more than fifteen minutes. Unaided I might have needed a week.

Passenger Deck is an echoing nest of coffins, hundreds of them, sometimes even thousands, arranged in rows three abreast. Here our live cargo sleeps until we arrive and decant the stored sleepers into wakefulness. Machinery sighs and murmurs all around them, coddling them in their suspension. Beyond, far off in the dim distance, is the place for passengers of a different sort—a spiderwebbing of sensory cables that holds our thousands of disembodied matrixes. Those are the colonists who have left their bodies behind when going into space. It is a dark and forbidding place, dimly lit by swirling velvet comets that circle overhead emitting sparks of red and green.

The trouble was in the suspension area. Five crewmen were there already, the oldest hands on board: Katkat, Dismas, Rio de Rio, Gavotte, Roacher. Seeing them all together, I knew this must be some major event. We move on distant orbits within the immensity of the ship: to see as many as three members of the crew in the same virtual month is extraordinary. Now here were five. I felt an oppressive sense of community among them. Each of these five had sailed the seas of heaven more years than I had been alive. For at least a dozen voyages now they had been together as a team. I was the stranger in their midst, unknown, untried, lightly regarded, insignificant. Already Roacher had indicted me for my sweetness, by which he meant, I knew, a basic incapacity to act decisively. I thought he was wrong. But perhaps he knew me better than I knew myself.

They stepped back, opening a path between them. Gavotte, a great hulking thick-shouldered man with a surprisingly delicate and precise way of conducting himself, gestured with open hands: Here, Captain, see? See?

What I saw were coils of greenish smoke coming up from a passenger housing, and the glass door of the housing half open, cracked from top to bottom, frosted by temperature differentials. I could hear a sullen dripping sound. Blue fluid fell in thick steady gouts from a shattered support line. Within the housing itself was the pale naked figure of a man, eyes wide open, mouth agape as if in a silent scream. His left arm was raised, his fist was clenched. He looked like an anguished statue.

They had body-salvage equipment standing by. The hapless passenger would be disassembled and all usable parts stored as soon as I gave the word.

“Is he irretrievable?” I asked.

“Take a look,” Katkat said, pointing to the housing readout. All the curves pointed down. “We have nineteen percent degradation already, and rising. Do we disassemble?”

“Go ahead,” I said. “Approved.”

The lasers glinted and flailed. Body parts came into view, shining, moist. The coiling metallic arms of the body-salvage equipment rose and fell, lifting organs that were not yet beyond repair and putting them into storage. As the machine labored the men worked around it, shutting down the broken housing, tying off the disrupted feeders and refrigerator cables.

I asked Dismas what had happened. He was the mind-wiper for this sector, responsible for maintenance on the suspended passengers. His face was open and easy, but the deceptive cheeriness about his mouth and cheeks was mysteriously negated by his bleak, shadowy eyes. He told me that he had been working much farther down the deck, performing routine service on the Strappado-bound people, when he felt a sudden small disturbance, a quick tickle of wrongness.

“So did I,” I said. “How long ago was that?”

“Half an hour, maybe. I didn’t make a special note of it. I thought it was something in my gut, Captain. You felt it too, you say?”

I nodded. “Just a tickle. It’s in the record.” I heard the distant music of 49 Henry Henry. Perhaps the intelligence was trying to apologize for doubting me. “What happened next?” I asked.

“Went back to work. Five, ten minutes, maybe. Felt another jolt, a stronger one.” He touched his forehead, right at the temple, showing me where. “Detectors went off, broken glass. Came running, found this Cul-de-Sac passenger here undergoing convulsions. Rising from his bindings, thrashing around. Pulled himself loose from everything, went smack against the housing window. Broke it. It’s a very fast death.”

“Matrix intrusion,” Roacher said.

The skin of my scalp tightened. I turned to him.

“Tell me about that.”

He shrugged. “Once in a long while someone in the storage circuits gets to feeling footloose, and finds a way out and goes roaming the ship. Looking for a body to jack into, that’s what they’re doing. Jack into me, jack into Katkat, even jack into you, Captain. Anybody handy, just so they can feel flesh around them again. Jacked into this one here and something went wrong.”

The probing fingers, yes. The silent voice. Help me.

“I never heard of anyone jacking into a passenger in suspension,” Dismas said.

“No reason why not,” said Roacher.

“What’s the good? Still stuck in a housing, you are. Frozen down, that’s no better than staying matrix.”

“Five to two it was matrix intrusion,” Roacher said, glaring.

“Done,” Dismas said. Gavotte laughed and came in on the bet. So too did sinuous little Katkat, taking the other side. Rio de Rio, who had not spoken a word to anyone in his last six voyages, snorted and gestured obscenely at both factions.

I felt like an idle spectator. To regain some illusion of command I said, “If there’s a matrix loose, it’ll show up on ship inventory. Dismas, check with the intelligence on duty and report to me. Katkat, Gavotte, finish cleaning up this mess and seal everything off. Then I want your reports in the log and a copy to me. I’ll be in my quarters. There’ll be further instructions later. The missing matrix, if that’s what we have on our hands, will be identified, located, and recaptured.”

Roacher grinned at me. I thought he was going to lead a round
of cheers.

I turned and mounted my tracker, and rode it following the lights, yellow, blue, green, back up through the maze of decks and out to the Eye.

As I entered my cabin something touched my mind and a silent voice said, “Please help me.”

6.

Carefully I shut the door behind me, locked it, loaded the privacy screens. The captain’s cabin aboard a Megaspore starship of the Service is a world in itself, serene, private, immense. In mine, spiral galaxies whirled and sparkled on the walls. I had a stream, a lake, a silver waterfall beyond it. The air was soft and glistening. At a touch of my hand I could have light, music, scent, color, from any one of a thousand hidden orifices. Or I could turn the walls translucent and let the luminous splendor of starspace come flooding through.

Only when I was fully settled in, protected and insulated and comfortable, did I say, “All right. What are you?”

“You promise you won’t report me to the captain?”

“I don’t promise anything.”

“You will help me, though?” The voice seemed at once frightened and insistent, urgent and vulnerable.

“How can I say? You give me nothing to work with.”

“I’ll tell you everything. But first you have to promise not to call the captain.”

I debated with myself for a moment and opted for directness.

“I am the captain,” I said.

“No!”

“Can you see this room? What do you think it is? Crew quarters? The scullery?”

I felt turbulent waves of fear coming from my invisible companion. And then nothing. Was it gone? Then I had made a mistake in being so forthright. This phantom had to be confined, sealed away, perhaps destroyed, before it could do more damage. I should have been more devious. And also I knew that I would regret it in another way if it had slipped away: I was taking a certain pleasure in being able to speak with someone—something—that was neither a member of my crew nor an omnipotent, contemptuous artificial intelligence.

“Are you still here?” I asked after a while.

Silence.

Gone, I thought. Sweeping through the Sword of Orion like a gale of wind. Probably down at the far end of the ship by this time.

Then, as if there had been no break in the conversation: “I just can’t believe it. Of all the places I could have gone, I had to walk right into the captain’s cabin.”

“So it seems.”

“And you’re actually the captain?”

“Yes. Actually.”

Another pause.

“You seem so young,” it said. “For a captain.”

“Be careful,” I told it.

“I didn’t mean anything by that, Captain.” With a touch of bravado, even defiance, mingling with uncertainty and anxiety. “Captain sir.”

Looking toward the ceiling, where shining resonator nodes shimmered all up and down the spectrum as slave-light leaped from junction to junction along the illuminator strands, I searched for a glimpse of it, some minute electromagnetic clue. But there was nothing.

I imagined a web of impalpable force, a dancing will-o’-the-wisp, flitting erratically about the room, now perching on my shoulder, now clinging to some fixture, now extending itself to fill every open space: an airy thing, a sprite, playful and capricious. Curiously, not only was I unafraid but I found myself strongly drawn to it. There was something strangely appealing about this quick vibrating spirit, so bright with contradictions. And yet it had caused the death of one of my passengers.

“Well?” I said. “You’re safe here. But when are you going to tell me what you are?”

“Isn’t that obvious? I’m a matrix.”

“Go on.”

“A free matrix, a matrix on the loose. A matrix who’s in big trouble. I think I’ve hurt someone. Maybe killed him.”

“One of the passengers?” I said.

“So you know?”

“There’s a dead passenger, yes. We’re not sure what happened.”

“It wasn’t my fault. It was an accident.”

“That may be,” I said. “Tell me about it. Tell me everything.”

“Can I trust you?”

“More than anyone else on this ship.”

“But you’re the captain.”

“That’s why,” I said.

7.

Her name was Leeleaine, but she wanted me to call her Vox. That means “voice,” she said, in one of the ancient languages of Earth. She was seventeen years old, from Jaana Head, which is an island off the coast of West Palabar on Kansas Four. Her father was a glass-farmer, her mother operated a gravity hole, and she had five brothers and three sisters, all of them much older than she was.

“Do you know what that’s like, captain? Being the youngest of nine? And both your parents working all the time, and your cross-parents just as busy? Can you imagine? And growing up on Kansas Four, where it’s a thousand kilometers between cities, and you aren’t even in a city, you’re on an island?”

“I know something of what that’s like,” I said.

“Are you from Kansas Four too?”

“No,” I said. “Not from Kansas Four. But a place much like it, I think.”

She spoke of a troubled, unruly childhood, full of loneliness and anger. Kansas Four, I have heard, is a beautiful world, if you are inclined to find beauty in worlds: a wild and splendid place, where the sky is scarlet and the bare basalt mountains rise in the east like a magnificent black wall. But to hear Vox speak of it, it was squalid, grim, bleak. For her it was a loveless place where she led a loveless life. And yet she told me of pale violet seas aglow with brilliant yellow fish, and trees that erupted with a shower of dazzling crimson fronds when they were in bloom, and warm rains that sang in the air like harps. I was not then so long in heaven that I had forgotten the beauty of seas or trees or rains, which by now are nothing but hollow words to me. Yet Vox had found her life on Kansas Four so hateful that she had been willing to abandon not only her native world but her body itself. That was a point of kinship between us: I too had given up my world and my former life, if not my actual flesh. But I had chosen heaven, and the Service. Vox had volunteered to exchange one landcrawling servitude for another.

“The day came,” she said, “when I knew I couldn’t stand it any more. I was so miserable, so empty: I thought about having to live this way for another two hundred years or even more, and I wanted to pick up the hills and throw them at each other. Or get into my mother’s plummeter and take it straight to the bottom of the sea. I made a list of ways I could kill myself. But I knew I couldn’t do it, not this way or that way or any way. I wanted to live. But I didn’t want to live like that.”

On that same day, she said, the soul-call from Cul-de-Sac reached Kansas Four. A thousand vacant bodies were available there and they wanted soul-matrixes to fill them. Without a moment’s hesitation Vox put her name on the list.

There is a constant migration of souls between the worlds. On each of my voyages I have carried thousands of them, setting forth hopefully toward new bodies on strange planets.

Every world has a stock of bodies awaiting replacement souls. Most were the victims of sudden violence. Life is risky on shore, and death lurks everywhere. Salvaging and repairing a body is no troublesome matter, but once a soul has fled it can never be recovered. So the empty bodies of those who drown and those who are stung by lethal insects and those who are thrown from vehicles and those who are struck by falling branches as they work are collected and examined. If they are beyond repair they are disassembled and their usable parts set aside to be installed in others. But if their bodies can be made whole again, they are, and they are placed in holding chambers until new souls become available for them.

And then there are those who vacate their bodies voluntarily, perhaps because they are weary of them, or weary of their worlds, and wish to move along. They are the ones who sign up to fill the waiting bodies on far worlds, while others come behind them to fill the bodies they have abandoned. The least costly way to travel between the worlds is to surrender your body and go in matrix form, thus exchanging a discouraging life for an unfamiliar one. That was what Vox had done. In pain and despair she had agreed to allow the essence of herself, everything she had ever seen or felt or thought or dreamed, to be converted into a lattice of electrical impulses that the Sword of Orion would carry on its voyage from Kansas Four to Cul-de-Sac. A new body lay reserved for her there.

Her own discarded body would remain in suspension on Kansas Four. Some day it might become the home of some wandering soul from another world; or, if there were no bids for it, it might eventually be disassembled by the body-salvagers, and its parts put to some worthy use. Vox would never know; Vox would never care.

“I can understand trading an unhappy life for a chance at a happy one,” I said. “But why break loose on ship? What purpose could that serve? Why not wait until you got to Cul-de-Sac?”

“Because it was torture,” she said.

“Torture? What was?”

“Living as a matrix.” She laughed bitterly. “Living? It’s worse than death could ever be!”

“Tell me.”

“You’ve never done matrix, have you?”

“No,” I said. “I chose another way to escape.”

“Then you don’t know. You can’t know. You’ve got a ship full of maxtrixes in storage circuits but you don’t understand a thing about them. Imagine that the back of your neck itches, captain. But you have no arms to scratch with. Your thigh starts to itch. Your chest. You lie there itching everywhere. And you can’t scratch. Do you understand me?”

“How can a matrix feel an itch? A matrix is simply a pattern of electrical—”

“Oh, you’re impossible! You’re stupid! I’m not talking about actual literal itching. I’m giving you a suppose, a for-instance. Because you’d never be able to understand the real situation. Look: you’re in the storage circuit. All you are is electricity. That’s all a mind really is, anyway: electricity. But you used to have a body. The body had sensation. The body had feelings. You remember them. You’re a prisoner. A prisoner remembers all sorts of things that used to be taken for granted. You’d give anything to feel the wind in your hair again, or the taste of cool milk, or the scent of flowers. Or even the pain of a cut finger. The saltiness of your blood when you lick the cut. Anything. I hated my body, don’t you see? I couldn’t wait to be rid of it. But once it was gone I missed the feelings it had. I missed the sense of flesh pulling at me, holding me to the ground, flesh full of nerves, flesh that could feel pleasure. Or pain.”

“I understand,” I said, and I think that I truly did. “But the voyage to Cul-de-Sac is short. A few virtual weeks and you’d be there, and out of storage and into your new body, and—”

“Weeks? Think of that itch on the back of your neck, Captain. The itch that you can’t scratch. How long do you think you could stand it, lying there feeling that itch? Five minutes? An hour? Weeks?”

It seemed to me that an itch left unscratched would die of its own, perhaps in minutes. But that was only how it seemed to me. I was not Vox; I had not been a matrix in a storage circuit.

I said, “So you let yourself out? How?”

“It wasn’t that hard to figure. I had nothing else to do but think about it. You align yourself with the polarity of the circuit. That’s a matrix too, an electrical pattern holding you in crosswise bands. You change the alignment. It’s like being tied up, and slipping the ropes around until you can slide free. And then you can go anywhere you like. You key into any bioprocessor aboard the ship and you draw your energy from that instead of from the storage circuit, and it sustains you. I can move anywhere around this ship at the speed of light. Anywhere. In just the time you blinked your eye, I’ve been everywhere. I’ve been to the far tip and out on the mast, and I’ve been down through the lower decks, and I’ve been in the crew quarters and the cargo places and I’ve even been a little way off into something that’s right outside the ship but isn’t quite real, if you know what I mean. Something that just seems to be a cradle of probability waves surrounding us. It’s like being a ghost. But it doesn’t solve anything. Do you see? The torture still goes on. You want to feel, but you can’t. You want to be connected again, your senses, your inputs. That’s why I tried to get into the passenger, do you see? But he wouldn’t let me.”

I began to understand at last.

Not everyone who goes to the worlds of heaven as a colonist travels in matrix form. Ordinarily anyone who can afford to take his body with him will do so; but relatively few can afford it. Those who do travel in suspension, the deepest of sleeps. We carry no waking passengers in the Service, not at any price. They would be trouble for us, poking here, poking there, asking questions, demanding to be served and pampered. They would shatter the peace of the voyage. And so they go down into their coffins, their housings, and there they sleep the voyage away, all life-processes halted, a death-in-life that will not be reversed until we bring them to their destinations.

And poor Vox, freed of her prisoning circuit and hungry for sensory data, had tried to slip herself into a passenger’s body.

I listened, appalled and somber, as she told of her terrible odyssey through the ship. Breaking free of the circuit: that had been the first strangeness I felt, that tic, that nibble at the threshold of my consciousness.

Her first wild moment of freedom had been exhilarating and joyous. But then had come the realization that nothing really had changed. She was at large, but still she was incorporeal, caught in that monstrous frustration of bodilessness, yearning for a touch. Perhaps such torment was common among matrixes; perhaps that was why, now and then, they broke free as Vox had done, to roam ships like sad troubled spirits. So Roacher had said. Once in a long while someone in the storage circuits gets to feeling footloose, and finds a way out and goes roaming the ship. Looking for a body to jack into, that’s what they’re doing. Jack into me, jack into Katkat, even jack into you, Captain. Anybody handy, just so they can feel flesh around them again. Yes.

That was the second jolt, the stronger one, that Dismas and I had felt, when Vox, selecting a passenger at random, suddenly, impulsively, had slipped herself inside his brain. She had realized her mistake at once. The passenger, lost in whatever dreams may come to the suspended, reacted to her intrusion with wild terror. Convulsions swept him; he rose, clawing at the equipment that sustained his life, trying desperately to evict the succubus that had penetrated him. In this frantic struggle he smashed the case of his housing and died. Vox, fleeing, frightened, careered about the ship in search of refuge, encountered me standing by the screen in the Eye, and made an abortive attempt to enter my mind. But just then the death of the passenger registered on 49 Henry Henry’s sensors and when the intelligence made contact with me to tell me of the emergency Vox fled again, and hovered dolefully until I returned to my cabin. She had not meant to kill the passenger, she said. She was sorry that he had died. She felt some embarrassment, now, and fear. But no guilt. She rejected guilt for it almost defiantly. He had died? Well, so he had died. That was too bad. But how could she have known any such thing was going to happen? She was only looking for a body to take refuge in. Hearing that from her, I had a sense of her as someone utterly unlike me, someone volatile, unstable, perhaps violent. And yet I felt a strange kinship with her, even an identity. As though we were two parts of the same spirit; as though she and I were one and the same. I barely understood why.

“And what now?” I asked. “You say you want help. How?”

“Take me in.”

“What?”

“Hide me. In you. If they find me, they’ll eradicate me. You said so yourself, that it could be done, that I could be detected, contained, eradicated. But it won’t happen if you protect me.”

“I’m the captain,” I said, astounded.

“Yes.”

“How can I—”

“They’ll all be looking for me. The intelligences, the crewmen. It scares them, knowing there’s a matrix loose. They’ll want to destroy me. But if they can’t find me, they’ll start to forget about me after a while. They’ll think I’ve escaped into space, or something. And if I’m jacked into you, nobody’s going to be able to find me.”

“I have a responsibility to—”

“Please,” she said. “I could go to one of the others, maybe. But I feel closest to you. Please. Please.”

“Closest to me?”

“You aren’t happy. You don’t belong. Not here, not anywhere. You don’t fit in, any more than I did on Kansas Four. I could feel it the moment I first touched your mind. You’re a new captain, right? And the others on board are making it hard for you. Why should you care about them? Save me. We have more in common than you do with them. Please? You can’t just let them eradicate me. I’m young. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. All I want is to get to Cul-de-Sac and be put in the body that’s waiting for me there. A new start, my first start, really. Will you?”

“Why do you bother asking permission? You can simply enter me through my jack whenever you want, can’t you?”

“The last one died,” she said.

“He was in suspension. You didn’t kill him by entering him. It was the surprise, the fright. He killed himself by thrashing around and wrecking his housing.”

“Even so,” said Vox. “I wouldn’t try that again, an unwilling host. You have to say you’ll let me, or I won’t come in.”

I was silent.

“Help me?” she said.

“Come,” I told her.

8.

It was just like any other jacking: an electrochemical mind-to-mind bond, a linkage by way of the implant socket at the base of my spine. The sort of thing that any two people who wanted to make communion might do. There was just one difference, which was that we didn’t use a jack. We skipped the whole intricate business of checking bandwidths and voltages and selecting the right transformer-adapter. She could do it all, simply by matching evoked potentials. I felt a momentary sharp sensation and then she was with me.

“Breathe,” she said. “Breathe real deep. Fill your lungs. Rub your hands together. Touch your cheeks. Scratch behind your left ear. Please. Please. It’s been so long for me since I’ve felt anything.”

Her voice sounded the same as before, both real and unreal. There was no substance to it, no density of timbre, no sense that it was produced by the vibrations of vocal cords atop a column of air. Yet it was clear, firm, substantial in some essential way, a true voice in all respects except that there was no speaker to utter it. I suppose that while she was outside me she had needed to extend some strand of herself into my neural system in order to generate it. Now that was unnecessary. But I still perceived the voice as originating outside me, even though she had taken up residence within.

She overflowed with needs.

“Take a drink of water,” she urged. “Eat something. Can you make your knuckles crack? Do it, oh, do it! Put your hand between your legs and squeeze. There’s so much I want to feel. Do you have music here? Give me some music, will you? Something loud, something really hard.”

I did the things she wanted. Gradually she grew more calm.

I was strangely calm myself. I had no special awareness then of her presence within me, no unfamiliar pressure in my skull, no slitherings along my spine. There was no mingling of her thoughtstream and mine. She seemed not to have any way of controlling the movements or responses of my body. In these respects our contact was less intimate than any ordinary human jacking communion would have been. But that, I would soon discover, was by her choice. We would not remain so carefully compartmentalized for long.

“Is it better for you now?” I asked.

“I thought I was going to go crazy. If I didn’t start feeling something again soon.”

“You can feel things now?”

“Through you, yes. Whatever you touch, I touch.”

“You know I can’t hide you for long. They’ll take my command away if I’m caught harboring a fugitive. Or worse.”

“You don’t have to speak out loud to me any more,” she said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Just send it. We have the same nervous system now.”

“You can read my thoughts?” I said, still aloud.

“Not really. I’m not hooked into the higher cerebral centers. But I pick up motor, sensory stuff. And I get subvocalizations. You know what those are? I can hear your thoughts if you want me to. It’s like being in communion. You’ve been in communion, haven’t you?”

“Once in a while.”

“Then you know. Just open the channel to me. You can’t go around the ship talking out loud to somebody invisible, you know. Send me something. It isn’t hard.”

“Like this?” I said, visualizing a packet of verbal information sliding through the channels of my mind.

“You see? You can do it!”

“Even so,” I told her. “You still can’t stay like this with me for long. You have to realize that.”

She laughed. It was unmistakable, a silent but definite laugh. “You sound so serious. I bet you’re still surprised you took me in in the first place.”

“I certainly am. Did you think I would?”

“Sure I did. From the first moment. You’re basically a very kind person.”

“Am I, Vox?”

“Of course. You just have to let yourself do it.” Again the silent laughter. “I don’t even know your name. Here I am right inside your head and I don’t know your name.”

“Adam.”

“That’s a nice name. Is that an Earth name?”

“An old Earth name, yes. Very old.”

“And are you from Earth?” she asked.

“No. Except in the sense that we’re all from Earth.”

“Where, then?”

“I’d just as soon not talk about it,” I said.

She thought about that. “You hated the place where you grew up that much?”

“Please, Vox—”

“Of course you hated it. Just like I hated Kansas Four. We’re two of a kind, you and me. We’re one and the same. You got all the caution and I got all the impulsiveness. But otherwise we’re the same person. That’s why we share so well. I’m glad I’m sharing with you, Adam. You won’t make me leave, will you? We belong with each other. You’ll let me stay until we reach Cul-de-Sac. I know you will.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” I wasn’t at all sure, either way.

“Oh, you will. You will, Adam. I know you better than you know yourself.”

9.

So it began. I was in some new realm outside my established sense of myself, so far beyond my notions of appropriate behavior that I could not even feel astonishment at what I had done. I had taken her in, that was all. A stranger in my skull. She had turned to me in appeal and I had taken her in. It was as if her recklessness was contagious. And though I didn’t mean to shelter her any longer than was absolutely necessary, I could already see that I wasn’t going to make any move to eject her until her safety was assured.

But how was I going to hide her?

Invisible she might be, but not undetectable. And everyone on the ship would be searching for her.

There were sixteen crewmen on board who dreaded a loose matrix as they would a vampire. They would seek her as long as she remained at large. And not only the crew. The intelligences would be monitoring for her too, not out of any kind of fear but simply out of efficiency: they had nothing to fear from Vox but they would want the cargo manifests to come out in balance when we reached our destination.

The crew didn’t trust me in the first place. I was too young, too new, too green, too sweet. I was just the sort who might be guilty of giving shelter to a secret fugitive. And it was altogether likely that her presence within me would be obvious to others in some way not apparent to me. As for the intelligences, they had access to all sorts of data as part of their routine maintenance operations. Perhaps they could measure tiny physiological changes, differences in my reaction times or circulatory efficiency or whatever, that would be a tipoff to the truth. How would I know? I would have to be on constant guard against discovery of the secret sharer of my consciousness.

The first test came less than an hour after Vox had entered me. The communicator light went on and I heard the far-off music of the intelligence on duty.

This one was 612 Jason, working the late shift. Its aura was golden, its music deep and throbbing. Jasons tend to be more brusque and less condescending than the Henry series, and in general I prefer them. But it was terrifying now to see that light, to hear that music, to know that the ship’s intelligence wanted to speak with me. I shrank back at a tense awkward angle, the way one does when trying to avoid a face-to-face confrontation with someone.

But of course the intelligence had no face to confront. The intelligence was only a voice speaking to me out of a speaker grid, and a stew of magnetic impulses somewhere on the control levels of the ship. All the same, I perceived 612 Jason now as a great glowing eye, staring through me to the hidden Vox.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Report summary, Captain. The dead passenger and the missing matrix.”

Deep within me I felt a quick plunging sensation, and then the skin of my arms and shoulders began to glow as the chemicals of fear went coursing through my veins in a fierce tide. It was Vox, I knew, reacting in sudden alarm, opening the petcocks of my hormonal system. It was the thing I had dreaded. How could 612 Jason fail to notice that flood of endocrine response?

“Go on,” I said, as coolly as I could.

But noticing was one thing, interpreting the data something else. Fluctuations in a human being’s endocrine output might have any number of causes. To my troubled conscience everything was a glaring signal of my guilt. 612 Jason gave no indication that it suspected a thing.

The intelligence said, “The dead passenger was Hans Eger Olafssen, 54 years of age, a native of—”

“Never mind his details. You can let me have a printout on that part.”

“The missing matrix,” 612 Jason went on imperturbably. “Leeleaine Eliani, 17 years of age, a native of Kansas Four, bound for Cul-de-Sac, Vainglory Archipelago, under Transmission Contract No. D-14871532, dated the 27th day of the third month of—”

“Printout on that too,” I cut in. “What I want to know is where she is now.”

“That information is not available.”

“That isn’t a responsive answer, 612 Jason.”

“No better answer can be provided at this time, Captain. Tracer circuits have been activated and remain in constant search mode.”

“And?”

“We have no data on the present location of the missing matrix.”

Within me Vox reacted instantly to the intelligence’s calm flat statement. The hormonal response changed from one of fear to one of relief. My blazing skin began at once to cool. Would 612 Jason notice that too, and from that small clue be able to assemble the subtext of my body’s responses into a sequence that exposed my criminal violation of regulations?

“Don’t relax too soon,” I told her silently. “This may be some sort of trap.”

To 612 Jason I said, “What data do you have, then?”

“Two things are known: the time at which the Eliani matrix achieved negation of its storage circuitry and the time of its presumed attempt at making neural entry into the suspended passenger Olafssen. Beyond that no data has been recovered.”

“Its presumed attempt?” I said.

“There is no proof, Captain.”

“Olafssen’s convulsions? The smashing of the storage housing?”

“We know that Olafssen responded to an electrical stimulus, Captain. The source of the stimulus is impossible to trace, although the presumption is that it came from the missing matrix Eliani. These are matters for the subsequent inquiry. It is not within my responsibilities to assign definite causal relationships.”

Spoken like a true Jason-series intelligence, I thought.

I said, “You don’t have any effective way of tracing the movements of the Eliani matrix, is that what you’re telling me?”

“We’re dealing with extremely minute impedances, sir. In the ordinary functioning of the ship it is very difficult to distinguish a matrix manifestation from normal surges and pulses in the general electrical system.”

“You mean, it might take something as big as the matrix trying to climb back into its own storage circuit to register on the monitoring system?”

“Very possibly, sir.”

“Is there any reason to think the Eliani matrix is still on the ship at all?”

“There is no reason to think that it is not, Captain.”

“In other words, you don’t know anything about anything concerning the Eliani matrix.”

“I have provided you with all known data at this point. Trace efforts are continuing, sir.”

“You still think this is a trap?” Vox asked me.

“It’s sounding better and better by the minute. But shut up and don’t distract me, will you?”

To the intelligence I said, “All right, keep me posted on the situation. I’m preparing for sleep, 612 Jason. I want the end-of-day status report, and then I want you to clear off and leave me alone.”

“Very good, sir. Fifth virtual day of voyage. Position of ship sixteen units beyond last port of call, Kansas Four. Scheduled rendezvous with relay forces at Ultima Thule spinaround point was successfully achieved at the hour of—”

The intelligence droned on and on: the usual report of the routine events of the day, broken only by the novelty of an entry for the loss of a passenger and one for the escape of a matrix, then returning to the standard data, fuel levels and velocity soundings and all the rest. On the first four nights of the voyage I had solemnly tried to absorb all this torrent of ritualized downloading of the log as though my captaincy depended on committing it all to memory, but this night I barely listened, and nearly missed my cue when it was time to give it my approval before clocking out for the night. Vox had to prod me and let me know that the intelligence was waiting for something. I gave 612 Jason the confirm-and-clock-out and heard the welcome sound of its diminishing music as it decoupled the contact.

“What do you think?” Vox asked. “It doesn’t know, does it?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“You really are a pessimist, aren’t you?”

“I think we may be able to bring this off,” I told her. “But the moment we become overconfident, it’ll be the end. Everyone on this ship wants to know where you are. The slightest slip and we’re both gone.”

“Okay. Don’t lecture me.”

“I’ll try not to. Let’s get some sleep now.”

“I don’t need to sleep.”

“Well, I do.”

“Can we talk for a while first?”

“Tomorrow,” I said.

But of course sleep was impossible. I was all too aware of the stranger within me, perhaps prowling the most hidden places of my psyche at this moment. Or waiting to invade my dreams once I drifted off. For the first time I thought I could feel her presence even when she was silent: a hot node of identity pressing against the wall of my brain. Perhaps I imagined it. I lay stiff and tense, as wide awake as I have ever been in my life. After a time I had to call 612 Jason and ask it to put me under the wire; and even then my sleep was uneasy when it came.

10.

Until that point in the voyage I had taken nearly all of my meals in my quarters. It seemed a way of exerting my authority, such as it was, aboard ship. By my absence from the dining hall I created a presence, that of the austere and aloof captain; and I avoided the embarrassment of having to sit in the seat of command over men who were much my senior in all things. It was no great sacrifice for me. My quarters were more than comfortable, the food was the same as that which was available in the dining hall, the servo-steward that brought it was silent and efficient. The question of isolation did not arise. There has always been something solitary about me, as there is about most who are of the Service.

But when I awoke the next morning after what had seemed like an endless night, I went down to the dining hall for breakfast.

It was nothing like a deliberate change of policy, a decision that had been rigorously arrived at through careful reasoning. It wasn’t a decision at all. Nor did Vox suggest it, though I’m sure she inspired it. It was purely automatic. I arose, showered, and dressed. I confess that I had forgotten all about the events of the night before. Vox was quiet within me. Not until I was under the shower, feeling the warm comforting ultrasonic vibration, did I remember her: there came a disturbing sensation of being in two places at once, and, immediately afterward, an astonishingly odd feeling of shame at my own nakedness. Both those feelings passed quickly. But they did indeed bring to mind that extraordinary thing which I had managed to suppress for some minutes, that I was no longer alone in my body.

She said nothing. Neither did I. After last night’s astounding alliance I seemed to want to pull back into wordlessness, unthinkingness, a kind of automaton consciousness. The need for breakfast occurred to me and I called up a tracker to take me down to the dining hall. When I stepped outside the room I was surprised to encounter my servo-steward, already on its way up with my tray. Perhaps it was just as surprised to see me going out, though of course its blank metal face betrayed no feelings.

“I’ll be having breakfast in the dining hall today,” I told it.

“Very good, sir.”

My tracker arrived. I climbed into its seat and it set out at once on its cushion of air toward the dining hall.

The dining hall of the Sword of Orion is a magnificent room at the Eye end of Crew Deck, with one glass wall providing a view of all the lights of heaven. By some whim of the designers we sit with that wall below us, so that the stars and their tethered worlds drift beneath our feet. The other walls are of some silvery metal chased with thin swirls of gold, everything shining by the reflected light of the passing star-clusters. At the center is a table of black stone, with places allotted for each of the seventeen members of the crew. It is a splendid if somewhat ridiculous place, a resonant reminder of the wealth and power of the Service.

Three of my shipmates were at their places when I entered. Pedregal was there, the supercargo, a compact, sullen man whose broad dome of a head seemed to rise directly from his shoulders. And there was Fresco, too, slender and elusive, the navigator, a lithe dark-skinned person of ambiguous sex who alternated from voyage to voyage, so I had been told, converting from male to female and back again according to some private rhythm. The third person was Raebuck, whose sphere of responsibility was communications, an older man whose flat, chilly gaze conveyed either boredom or menace, I could never be sure which.

“Why, it’s the captain,” said Pedregal calmly. “Favoring us with one of his rare visits.”

All three stared at me with that curious testing intensity which I was coming to see was an inescapable part of my life aboard ship: a constant hazing meted out to any newcomer to the Service, an interminable probing for the place that was most vulnerable. Mine was a parsec wide and I was certain they would discover it at once. But I was determined to match them stare for stare, ploy for ploy, test for test.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” I said. Then, giving Fresco a level glance, I added, “Good morning, Fresco.”

I took my seat at the table’s head and rang for service.

I was beginning to realize why I had come out of my cabin that morning. In part it was a reflection of Vox’s presence within me, an expression of that new component of rashness and impulsiveness that had entered me with her. But mainly it was, I saw now, some stratagem of my own, hatched on some inaccessible subterranean level of my double mind. In order to conceal Vox most effectively, I would have to take the offensive: rather than skulking in my quarters and perhaps awakening perilous suspicions in the minds of my shipmates, I must come forth, defiantly, challengingly, almost flaunting the thing that I had done, and go among them, pretending that nothing unusual was afoot and forcing them to believe it. Such aggressiveness was not natural to my temperament. But perhaps I could draw on some reserves provided by Vox. If not, we both were lost.

Raebuck said, to no one in particular, “I suppose yesterday’s disturbing events must inspire a need for companionship in the captain.”

I faced him squarely. “I have all the companionship I require, Raebuck. But I agree that what happened yesterday was disturbing.”

“A nasty business,” Pedregal said, ponderously shaking his neckless head. “And a strange one, a matrix trying to get into a passenger. That’s new to me, a thing like that. And to lose the passenger besides—that’s bad. That’s very bad.”

“It does happen, losing a passenger,” said Raebuck.

“A long time since it happened on a ship of mine,” Pedregal rejoined.

“We lost a whole batch of them on the Emperor of Callisto,” Fresco said. “You know the story? It was thirty years ago. We were making the run from Van Buren to the San Pedro Cluster. We picked up a supernova pulse and the intelligence on duty went into flicker. Somehow dumped a load of aluminum salts in the feed-lines and killed off fifteen, sixteen passengers. I saw the bodies before they went into the converter. Beyond salvage, they were.”

“Yes,” said Raebuck. “I heard of that one. And then there was the Queen Astarte, a couple of years after that. Tchelitchev was her captain, little green-eyed Russian woman from one of the Troika worlds. They were taking a routine inventory and two digits got transposed, and a faulty delivery signal slipped through. I think it was six dead, premature decanting, killed by air poisoning. Tchelitchev took it very badly. Very badly. Somehow the captain always does.”

“And then that time on the Hecuba,” said Pedregal. “No ship of mine, thank God. That was the captain who ran amok, thought the ship was too quiet, wanted to see some passengers moving around and started awakening them—”

Raebuck showed a quiver of surprise. “You know about that? I thought that was supposed to be hushed up.”

“Things get around,” Pedregal said, with something like a smirk. “The captain’s name was Catania-Szu, I believe, a man from Mediterraneo, very high-strung, the way all of them are there. I was working the Valparaiso then, out of Mendax Nine bound for Scylla and Charybdis and neighboring points, and when we stopped to download some cargo in the Seneca system I got the whole story from a ship’s clerk named—”

“You were on the Valparaiso?” Fresco asked. “Wasn’t that the ship that had a free matrix, too, ten or eleven years back? A real soul-eater, so the report went—”

“After my time,” said Pedregal, blandly waving his hand. “But I did hear of it. You get to hear about everything, when you’re downloading cargo. Soul-eater, you say, reminds me of the time—”

And he launched into some tale of horror at a spinaround station in a far quadrant of the galaxy. But he was no more than halfway through it when Raebuck cut in with a gorier reminiscence of his own, and then Fresco, seething with impatience, broke in on him to tell of a ship infested by three free matrixes at once. I had no doubt that all this was being staged for my enlightenment, by way of showing me how seriously such events were taken in the Service, and how the captains under whom they occurred went down in the folklore of the starships with ineradicable black marks. But their attempts to unsettle me, if that is what they were, left me undismayed. Vox, silent within me, infused me with a strange confidence that allowed me to ignore the darker implications of these anecdotes.

I simply listened, playing my role: the neophyte fascinated by the accumulated depth of spacegoing experience that their stories implied.

Then I said, finally, “When matrixes get loose, how long do they generally manage to stay at large?”

“An hour or two, generally,” said Raebuck. “As they drift around the ship, of course, they leave an electrical trail. We track it and close off access routes behind them and eventually we pin them down in close quarters. Then it’s not hard to put them back in their bottles.”

“And if they’ve jacked into some member of the crew?”

“That makes it even easier to find them.”

Boldly I said, “Was there ever a case where a free matrix jacked into a member of the crew and managed to keep itself hidden?”

“Never,” said a new voice. It belonged to Roacher, who had just entered the dining hall. He stood at the far end of the long table, staring at me. His strange luminescent eyes, harsh and probing, came to rest on mine. “No matter how clever the matrix may be, sooner or later the host will find some way to call for help.”

“And if the host doesn’t choose to call for help?” I asked.

Roacher studied me with great care.

Had I been too bold? Had I given away too much?

“But that would be a violation of regulations!” he said, in a tone of mock astonishment. “That would be a criminal act!”

11.

She asked me to take her starwalking, to show her the full view of the Great Open.

It was the third day of her concealment within me. Life aboard the Sword of Orion had returned to routine, or, to be more accurate, it had settled into a new routine in which the presence on board of an undetected and apparently undetectable free matrix was a constant element.

As Vox had suggested, there were some who quickly came to believe that the missing matrix must have slipped off into space, since the watchful ship-intelligences could find no trace of it. But there were others who kept looking over their shoulders, figuratively or literally, as if expecting the fugitive to attempt to thrust herself without warning into the spinal jacks that gave access to their nervous systems. They behaved exactly as if the ship were haunted. To placate those uneasy ones, I ordered round-the-clock circuit sweeps that would report every vagrant pulse and random surge. Each such anomalous electrical event was duly investigated, and, of course, none of these investigations led to anything significant. Now that Vox resided in my brain instead of the ship’s wiring, she was beyond any such mode of discovery.

Whether anyone suspected the truth was something I had no way of knowing. Perhaps Roacher did; but he made no move to denounce me, nor did he so much as raise the issue of the missing matrix with me at all after that time in the dining hall. He might know nothing whatever; he might know everything, and not care; he might simply be keeping his own counsel for the moment. I had no way of telling.

I was growing accustomed to my double life, and to my daily duplicity. Vox had quickly come to seem as much a part of me as my arm, or my leg. When she was silent—and often I heard nothing from her for hours at a time—I was no more aware of her than I would be, in any special way, of my arm or my leg; but nevertheless I knew somehow that she was there. The boundaries between her mind and mine were eroding steadily. She was learning how to infiltrate me. At times it seemed to me that what we were were joint tenants of the same dwelling, rather than I the permanent occupant and she a guest. I came to perceive my own mind as something not notably different from hers, a mere web of electrical force which for the moment was housed in the soft moist globe that was the brain of the captain of the Sword of Orion. Either of us, so it seemed, might come and go within that soft moist globe as we pleased, flitting casually in or out after the wraithlike fashion of matrixes.

At other times it was not at all like that: I gave no thought to her presence and went about my tasks as if nothing had changed for me. Then it would come as a surprise when Vox announced herself to me with some sudden comment, some quick question. I had to learn to guard myself against letting my reaction show, if it happened when I was with other members of the crew. Though no one around us could hear anything when she spoke to me, or I to her, I knew it would be the end for our masquerade if anyone caught me in some unguarded moment of conversation with an unseen companion.

How far she had penetrated my mind began to become apparent to me when she asked to go on a starwalk.

“You know about that?” I said, startled, for starwalking is the private pleasure of the spacegoing and I had not known of it myself before I was taken into the Service.

Vox seemed amazed by my amazement. She indicated casually that the details of starwalking were common knowledge everywhere.

But something rang false in her tone. Were the landcrawling folk really so familiar with our special pastime? Or had she picked what she knew of it out of the hitherto private reaches of my consciousness?

I chose not to ask. But I was uneasy about taking her with me into the Great Open, much as I was beginning to yearn for it myself. She was not one of us. She was planetary; she had not passed through the training of the Service.

I told her that.

“Take me anyway,” she said. “It’s the only chance I’ll ever have.”

“But the training—”

“I don’t need it. Not if you’ve had it.”

“What if that’s not enough?”

“It will be,” she said. “I know it will, Adam. There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’ve had the training, haven’t you? And I am you.”

12.

Together we rode the transit track out of the Eye and down to Drive Deck, where the soul of the ship lies lost in throbbing dreams of the far galaxies as it pulls us ever onward across the unending night.

We passed through zones of utter darkness and zones of cascading light, through places where wheeling helixes of silvery radiance burst like auroras from the air, through passages so crazed in their geometry that they reawakened the terrors of the womb in anyone who traversed them. A starship is the mother of mysteries. Vox crouched, frozen with awe, within that portion of our brain that was hers. I felt the surges of her awe, one after another, as we went downward.

“Are you really sure you want to do this?” I asked.

“Yes!” she cried fiercely. “Keep going!”

“There’s the possibility that you’ll be detected,” I told her.

“There’s the possibility that I won’t be,” she said.

We continued to descend. Now we were in the realm of the three cyborg push-cells, Gabriel, Banquo, and Fleece. Those were three members of the crew whom we would never see at the table in the dining hall, for they dwelled here in the walls of Drive Deck, permanently jacked in, perpetually pumping their energies into the ship’s great maw. I have already told you of our saying in the Service, that when you enter you give up the body and you get your soul. For most of us that is only a figure of speech: what we give up, when we say farewell forever to planetskin and take up our new lives in starships, is not the body itself but the body’s trivial needs, the sweaty things so dear to shore people. But some of us are more literal in their renunciations. The flesh is a meaningless hindrance to them; they shed it entirely, knowing that they can experience starship life just as fully without it. They allow themselves to be transformed into extensions of the stardrive. From them comes the raw energy out of which is made the power that carries us hurtling through heaven. Their work is unending; their reward is a sort of immortality. It is not a choice I could make, nor, I think, you: but for them it is bliss. There can be no doubt about that.

“Another starwalk so soon, Captain?” Banquo asked. For I had been here on the second day of the voyage, losing no time in availing myself of the great privilege of the Service.

“Is there any harm in it?”

“No, no harm,” said Banquo. “Just isn’t usual, is all.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “That’s not important to me.”

Banquo is a gleaming metallic ovoid, twice the size of a human head, jacked into a slot in the wall. Within the ovoid is the matrix of what had once been Banquo, long ago on a world called Sunrise where night is unknown. Sunrise’s golden dawns and shining days had not been good enough for Banquo, apparently. What Banquo had wanted was to be a gleaming metallic ovoid, hanging on the wall of Drive Deck aboard the Sword of Orion.

Any of the three cyborgs could set up a starwalk. But Banquo was the one who had done it for me that other time and it seemed best to return to him. He was the most congenial of the three. He struck me as amiable and easy. Gabriel, on my first visit, had seemed austere, remote, incomprehensible. He is an early model who had lived the equivalent of three human lifetimes as a cyborg aboard starships and there was not much about him that was human any more. Fleece, much younger, quick-minded and quirky, I mistrusted: in her weird edgy way she might just somehow be able to detect the hidden other who would be going along with me for the ride.

You must realize that when we starwalk we do not literally leave the ship, though that is how it seems to us. If we left the ship even for a moment we would be swept away and lost forever in the abyss of heaven. Going outside a starship of heaven is not like stepping outside an ordinary planet-launched shoreship that moves through normal space. But even if it were possible, there would be no point in leaving the ship. There is nothing to see out there. A starship moves through utter empty darkness.

But though there may be nothing to see, that does not mean that there is nothing out there. The entire universe is out there. If we could see it while we are traveling across the special space that is heaven we would find it flattened and curved, so that we had the illusion of viewing everything at once, all the far-flung galaxies back to the beginning of time. This is the Great Open, the totality of the continuum. Our external screens show it to us in simulated form, because we need occasional assurance that it is there.

A starship rides along the mighty lines of force which cross that immense void like the lines of the compass rose on an ancient mariner’s map. When we starwalk, we ride those same lines, and we are held by them, sealed fast to the ship that is carrying us onward through heaven. We seem to step forth into space; we seem to look down on the ship, on the stars, on all the worlds of heaven. For the moment we become little starships flying along beside the great one that is our mother. It is magic; it is illusion; but it is magic that so closely approaches what we perceive as reality that there is no way to measure the difference, which means that in effect there is no difference.

“Ready?” I asked Vox.

“Absolutely.”

Still I hesitated.

“Are you sure?”

“Go on,” she said impatiently. “Do it!”

I put the jack to my spine myself. Banquo did the matching of impedances. If he were going to discover the passenger I carried, this would be the moment. But he showed no sign that anything was amiss. He queried me; I gave him the signal to proceed; there was a moment of sharp warmth at the back of my neck as my neural matrix, and Vox’s traveling with it, rushed out through Banquo and hurtled downward toward its merger with the soul of the ship.

We were seized and drawn in and engulfed by the vast force that is the ship. As the coils of the engine caught us we were spun around and around, hurled from vector to vector, mercilessly stretched, distended by an unimaginable flux. And then there was a brightness all about us, a brightness that cried out in heaven with a mighty clamor. We were outside the ship. We were starwalking.

“Oh,” she said. A little soft cry, a muted gasp of wonder.

The blazing mantle of the ship lay upon the darkness of heaven like a white shadow. That great cone of cold fiery light reached far out in front of us, arching awesomely toward heaven’s vault, and behind us it extended beyond the limits of our sight. The slender tapering outline of the ship was clearly visible within it, the needle and its Eye, all ten kilometers of it easily apparent to us in a single glance.

And there were the stars. And there were the worlds of heaven.

The effect of the stardrive is to collapse the dimensions, each one in upon the other. Thus inordinate spaces are diminished and the galaxy may be spanned by human voyagers. There is no logic, no linearity of sequence, to heaven as it appears to our eyes. Wherever we look we see the universe bent back upon itself, revealing its entirety in an infinite series of infinite segments of itself. Any sector of stars contains all stars. Any demarcation of time encompasses all of time past and time to come. What we behold is altogether beyond our understanding, which is exactly as it should be; for what we are given, when we look through the Eye of the ship at the naked heavens, is a god’s-eye view of the universe. And we are not gods.

“What are we seeing?” Vox murmured within me.

I tried to tell her. I showed her how to define her relative position so there would be an up and a down for her, a backward, a forward, a flow of time and event from beginning to end. I pointed out the arbitrary coordinate axes by which we locate ourselves in this fundamentally incomprehensible arena. I found known stars for her, and known worlds, and showed them to her.

She understood nothing. She was entirely lost.

I told her that there was no shame in that.

I told her that I had been just as bewildered, when I was undergoing my training in the simulator. That everyone was; and that no one, not even if he spent a thousand years aboard the starships that plied the routes of heaven, could ever come to anything more than a set of crude equivalents and approximations of understanding what starwalking shows us. Attaining actual understanding itself is beyond the best of us.

I could feel her struggling to encompass the impact of all that rose and wheeled and soared before us. Her mind was agile, though still only half-formed, and I sensed her working out her own system of explanations and assumptions, her analogies, her equivalencies. I gave her no more help. It was best for her to do these things by herself; and in any case I had no more help to give.

I had my own astonishment and bewilderment to deal with, on this my second starwalk in heaven.

Once more I looked down upon the myriad worlds turning in their orbits. I could see them easily, the little bright globes rotating in the huge night of the Great Open: red worlds, blue worlds, green ones, some turning their full faces to me, some showing mere slivers of a crescent. How they cleaved to their appointed tracks! How they clung to their parent stars!

I remembered that other time, only a few virtual days before, when I had felt such compassion for them, such sorrow. Knowing that they were condemned forever to follow the same path about the same star, a hopeless bondage, a meaningless retracing of a perpetual route. In their own eyes they might be footloose wanderers, but to me they had seemed the most pitiful of slaves. And so I had grieved for the worlds of heaven; but now, to my surprise, I felt no pity, only a kind of love. There was no reason to be sad for them. They were what they were, and there was a supreme rightness in those fixed orbits and their obedient movements along them. They were content with being what they were. If they were loosed even a moment from that bondage, such chaos would arise in the universe as could never be contained. Those circling worlds are the foundations upon which all else is built; they know that and they take pride in it; they are loyal to their tasks and we must honor them for their devotion to their duty. And with honor comes love.

This must be Vox speaking within me, I told myself.

I had never thought such thoughts. Love the planets in their orbits? What kind of notion was that? Perhaps no stranger than my earlier notion of pitying them because they weren’t starships; but that thought had arisen from the spontaneous depths of my own spirit and it had seemed to make a kind of sense to me. Now it had given way to a wholly other view.

I loved the worlds that moved before me and yet did not move, in the great night of heaven.

I loved the strange fugitive girl within me who beheld those worlds and loved them for their immobility.

I felt her seize me now, taking me impatiently onward, outward, into the depths of heaven. She understood now; she knew how it was done. And she was far more daring than ever I would have allowed me to be. Together we walked the stars. Not only walked but plunged and swooped and soared, traveling among them like gods. Their hot breath singed us. Their throbbing brightness thundered at us. Their serene movements boomed a mighty music at us. On and on we went, hand in hand, Vox leading, I letting her draw me, deeper and deeper into the shining abyss that was the universe. Until at last we halted, floating in mid-cosmos, the ship nowhere to be seen, only the two of us surrounded by a shield of suns.

In that moment a sweeping ecstasy filled my soul. I felt all eternity within my grasp. No, that puts it the wrong way around and makes it seem that I was seized by delusions of imperial grandeur, which was not at all the case. What I felt was myself within the grasp of all eternity, enfolded in the loving embrace of a complete and perfect cosmos in which nothing was out of place, or ever could be.

It is this that we go starwalking to attain. This sense of belonging, this sense of being contained in the divine perfection of the universe.

When it comes, there is no telling what effect it will have; but inner change is what it usually brings. I had come away from my first starwalk unaware of any transformation; but within three days I had impulsively opened myself to a wandering phantom, violating not only regulations but the nature of my own character as I understood it. I have always, as I think I have said, been an intensely private man. Even though I had given Vox refuge, I had been relieved and grateful that her mind and mine had remained separate entities within our shared brain.

Now I did what I could to break down whatever boundary remained between us.

I hadn’t let her know anything, so far, of my life before going to heaven. I had met her occasional questions with coy evasions, with half-truths, with blunt refusals. It was the way I had always been with everyone, a habit of secrecy, an unwillingness to reveal myself. I had been even more secretive, perhaps, with Vox than with all the others, because of the very closeness of her mind to mine. As though I feared that by giving her any interior knowledge of me I was opening the way for her to take me over entirely, to absorb me into her own vigorous, undisciplined soul.

But now I offered my past to her in a joyous rush. We began to make our way slowly backward from that apocalyptic place at the center of everything; and as we hovered on the breast of the Great Open, drifting between the darkness and the brilliance of the light that the ship created, I told her everything about myself that I had been
holding back.

I suppose they were mere trivial things, though to me they were all so highly charged with meaning. I told her the name of my home planet. I let her see it, the sea the color of lead, the sky the color of smoke. I showed her the sparse and scrubby gray headlands behind our house, where I would go running for hours by myself, a tall slender boy pounding tirelessly across the crackling sands as though demons were pursuing him.

I showed her everything: the somber child, the troubled youth, the wary, overcautious young man. The playmates who remained forever strangers, the friends whose voices were drowned in hollow babbling echoes, the lovers whose love seemed without substance or meaning. I told her of my feeling that I was the only one alive in the world, that everyone about me was some sort of artificial being full of gears and wires. Or that the world was only a flat colorless dream in which I somehow had become trapped, but from which I would eventually awaken into the true world of light and color and richness of texture. Or that I might not be human at all, but had been abandoned in the human galaxy by creatures of another form entirely, who would return for me some day far in the future.

I was lighthearted as I told her these things, and she received them lightly. She knew them for what they were—not symptoms of madness, but only the bleak fantasies of a lonely child, seeking to make sense out of an incomprehensible universe in which he felt himself to be a stranger and afraid.

“But you escaped,” she said. “You found a place where you belonged!”

“Yes,” I said. “I escaped.”

And I told her of the day when I had seen a sudden light in the sky. My first thought then had been that my true parents had come back for me; my second, that it was some comet passing by. That light was a starship of heaven that had come to worldward in our system. And as I looked upward through the darkness on that day long ago, straining to catch a glimpse of the shoreships that were going up to it bearing cargo and passengers to be taken from our world to some unknowable place at the other end of the galaxy, I realized that that starship was my true home. I realized that the Service was my destiny.

And so it came to pass, I said, that I left my world behind, and my name, and my life, such as it had been, to enter the company of those who sail between the stars. I let her know that this was my first voyage, explaining that it is the peculiar custom of the Service to test all new officers by placing them in command at once. She asked me if I had found happiness here; and I said, quickly, Yes, I had, and then I said a moment later, Not yet, not yet, but I see at least the possibility of it.

She was quiet for a time. We watched the worlds turning and the stars like blazing spikes of color racing toward their far-off destinations, and the fiery white light of the ship itself streaming in the firmament as if it were the blood of some alien god. The thought came to me of all that I was risking by hiding her like this within me. I brushed it aside. This was neither the place nor the moment for doubt or fear or misgiving.

Then she said, “I’m glad you told me all that, Adam.”

“Yes. I am too.”

“I could feel it from the start, what sort of person you were. But I needed to hear it in your own words, your own thoughts. It’s just like I’ve been saying. You and I, we’re two of a kind. Square pegs in a world of round holes. You ran away to the Service and I ran away to a new life in somebody else’s body.”

I realized that Vox wasn’t speaking of my body, but of the new one that waited for her on Cul-de-Sac.

And I realized too that there was one thing about herself that she had never shared with me, which was the nature of the flaw in her old body that had caused her to discard it. If I knew her more fully, I thought, I could love her more deeply: imperfections and all, which is the way of love. But she had shied away from telling me that, and I had never pressed her on it. Now, out here under the cool gleam of heaven, surely we had moved into a place of total trust, of complete union of soul.

I said, “Let me see you, Vox.”

“See me? How could you—”

“Give me an image of yourself. You’re too abstract for me this way. Vox. A voice. Only a voice. You talk to me, you live within me, and I still don’t have the slightest idea what you look like.”

“That’s how I want it to be.”

“Won’t you show me how you look?”

“I won’t look like anything. I’m a matrix. I’m nothing but electricity.”

“I understand that. I mean how you looked before. Your old self, the one you left behind on Kansas Four.”

She made no reply.

I thought she was hesitating, deciding; but some time went by, and still I heard nothing from her. What came from her was silence, only silence, a silence that had crashed down between us like a steel curtain.

“Vox?”

Nothing.

Where was she hiding? What had I done?

“What’s the matter? Is it the thing I asked you?”

No answer.

“It’s all right, Vox. Forget about it. It isn’t important at all. You don’t have to show me anything you don’t want to show me.”

Nothing. Silence.

“Vox? Vox?”

The worlds and stars wheeled in chaos before me. The light of the ship roared up and down the spectrum from end to end. In growing panic I sought for her and found no trace of her presence within me. Nothing. Nothing.

“Are you all right?” came another voice. Banquo, from inside the ship. “I’m getting some pretty wild signals. You’d better come in. You’ve been out there long enough as it is.”

Vox was gone. I had crossed some uncrossable boundary and I had frightened her away.

Numbly I gave Banquo the signal, and he brought me back inside.

13.

Alone, I made my way upward level by level through the darkness and mystery of the ship, toward the Eye. The crash of silence went on and on, like the falling of some colossal wave on an endless shore. I missed Vox terribly. I had never known such complete solitude as I felt now. I had not realized how accustomed I had become to her being there, nor what impact her leaving would have on me. In just those few days of giving her sanctuary, it had somehow come to seem to me that to house two souls within one brain was the normal condition of mankind, and that to be alone in one’s skull as I was now was a
shameful thing.

As I neared the place where Crew Deck narrows into the curve of the Eye a slender figure stepped without warning from the shadows.

“Captain.”

My mind was full of the loss of Vox and he caught me unawares. I jumped back, badly startled.

“For the love of God, man!”

“It’s just me. Bulgar. Don’t be so scared, Captain. It’s only Bulgar.”

“Let me be,” I said, and brusquely beckoned him away.

“No. Wait, Captain. Please, wait.”

He clutched at my arm, holding me as I tried to go. I halted and turned toward him, trembling with anger and surprise.

Bulgar, Roacher’s jackmate, was a gentle, soft-voiced little man, wide-mouthed, olive-skinned, with huge sad eyes. He and Roacher had sailed the skies of Heaven together since before I was born. They complemented each other. Where Roacher was small and hard, like fruit that has been left to dry in the sun for a hundred years, his jackmate Bulgar was small and tender, with a plump, succulent look about him. Together they seemed complete, an unassailable whole: I could readily imagine them lying together in their bunk, each jacked to the other, one person in two bodies, linked more intimately even than Vox and I had been.

With an effort I recovered my poise. Tightly I said, “What is it, Bulgar?”

“Can we talk a minute, Captain?”

“We are talking. What do you want with me?”

“That loose matrix, sir.”

My reaction must have been stronger than he was expecting. His eyes went wide and he took a step or two back from me.

Moistening his lips, he said, “We were wondering, Captain—wondering how the search is going—whether you had any idea where the matrix might be—”

I said stiffly, “Who’s we, Bulgar?”

“The men. Roacher. Me. Some of the others. Mainly Roacher, sir.”

“Ah. So Roacher wants to know where the matrix is.”

The little man moved closer. I saw him staring deep into me as though searching for Vox behind the mask of my carefully expressionless face. Did he know? Did they all? I wanted to cry out, She’s not there any more, she’s gone, she left me, she ran off into space. But apparently what was troubling Roacher and his shipmates was something other than the possibility that Vox had taken refuge with me.

Bulgar’s tone was soft, insinuating, concerned. “Roacher’s very worried, Captain. He’s been on ships with loose matrixes before. He knows how much trouble they can be. He’s really worried, Captain. I have to tell you that. I’ve never seen him so worried.”

“What does he think the matrix will do to him?”

“He’s afraid of being taken over,” Bulgar said.

“Taken over?”

“The matrix coming into his head through his jack. Mixing itself up with his brain. It’s been known to happen, Captain.”

“And why should it happen to Roacher, out of all the men on this ship? Why not you? Why not Pedregal? Or Rio de Rio? Or one of the passengers again?” I took a deep breath. “Why not me, for that matter?”

“He just wants to know, sir, what’s the situation with the matrix now. Whether you’ve discovered anything about where it is. Whether you’ve been able to trap it.”

There was something strange in Bulgar’s eyes. I began to think I was being tested again. This assertion of Roacher’s alleged terror of being infiltrated and possessed by the wandering matrix might simply be a roundabout way of finding out whether that had already happened to me.

“Tell him it’s gone,” I said.

“Gone, sir?”

“Gone. Vanished. It isn’t anywhere on the ship any more. Tell him that, Bulgar. He can forget about her slithering down his precious jackhole.”

“Her?”

“Female matrix, yes. But that doesn’t matter now. She’s gone. You can tell him that. Escaped. Flew off into heaven. The emergency’s over.” I glowered at him. I yearned to be rid of him, to go off by myself to nurse my new grief. “Shouldn’t you be getting back to your post, Bulgar?”

Did he believe me? Or did he think that I had slapped together some transparent lie to cover my complicity in the continued absence of the matrix? I had no way of knowing. Bulgar gave me a little obsequious bow and started to back away.

“Sir,” he said. “Thank you, sir. I’ll tell him, sir.”

He retreated into the shadows. I continued uplevel.

I passed Katkat on my way, and, a little while afterward, Raebuck. They looked at me without speaking. There was something reproachful but almost loving about Katkat’s expression, but Raebuck’s icy, baleful stare brought me close to flinching. In their different ways they were saying, Guilty, guilty, guilty. But of what?

Before, I had imagined that everyone whom I encountered aboard ship was able to tell at a single glance that I was harboring the fugitive, and was simply waiting for me to reveal myself with some foolish slip. Now everything was reversed. They looked at me and I told myself that they were thinking, He’s all alone by himself in there, he doesn’t have anyone else at all, and I shrank away, shamed by my solitude. I knew that this was the edge of madness. I was overwrought, overtired; perhaps it had been a mistake to go starwalking a second time so soon after my first. I needed to rest. I needed to hide.

I began to wish that there were someone aboard the Sword of Orion with whom I could discuss these things. But who, though? Roacher? 612 Jason? I was altogether isolated here. The only one I could speak to on this ship was Vox. And she was gone.

In the safety of my cabin I jacked myself into the mediq rack and gave myself a ten-minute purge. That helped. The phantom fears and intricate uncertainties that had taken possession of me began to ebb.

I keyed up the log and ran through the list of my captainly duties, such as they were, for the rest of the day. We were approaching a spinaround point, one of those nodes of force positioned equidistantly across heaven which a starship in transit must seize and use in order to propel itself onward through the next sector of the universe. Spinaround acquisition is performed automatically but at least in theory the responsibility for carrying it out successfully falls to the captain: I would give the commands, I would oversee the process from initiation through completion.

But there was still time for that.

I accessed 49 Henry Henry, who was the intelligence on duty, and asked for an update on the matrix situation.

“No change, sir,” the intelligence reported at once.

“What does that mean?”

“Trace efforts continue as requested, sir. But we have not detected the location of the missing matrix.”

“No clues? Not even a hint?”

“No data at all, sir. There’s essentially no way to isolate the minute electromagnetic pulse of a free matrix from the background noise of the ship’s entire electrical system.”

I believed it. 612 Jason Jason had told me that in nearly the same words.

I said, “I have reason to think that the matrix is no longer on the ship, 49 Henry Henry.”

“Do you, sir?” said 49 Henry Henry in its usual aloof, half-
mocking way.

“I do, yes. After a careful study of the situation, it’s my opinion that the matrix exited the ship earlier this day and will not be heard from again.”

“Shall I record that as an official position, sir?”

“Record it,” I said.

“Done, sir.”

“And therefore, 49 Henry Henry, you can cancel search mode immediately and close the file. We’ll enter a debit for one matrix and the Service bookkeepers can work it out later.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Decouple,” I ordered the intelligence.

49 Henry Henry went away. I sat quietly amid the splendors of my cabin, thinking back over my starwalk and reliving that sense of harmony, of love, of oneness with the worlds of heaven, that had come over me while Vox and I drifted on the bosom of the Great Open. And feeling once again the keen slicing sense of loss that I had felt since Vox’s departure from me. In a little while I would have to rise and go to the command center and put myself through the motions of overseeing spinaround acquisition; but for the moment I remained where I was, motionless, silent, peering deep into the heart of my solitude.

“I’m not gone,” said an unexpected quiet voice.

It came like a punch beneath the heart. It was a moment before I could speak.

“Vox?” I said at last. “Where are you, Vox?”

“Right here.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Inside. I never went away.”

“You never—”

“You upset me. I just had to hide for a while.”

“You knew I was trying to find you?”

“Yes.”

Color came to my cheeks. Anger roared like a stream in spate through my veins. I felt myself blazing.

“You knew how I felt, when you—when it seemed that you weren’t there any more.”

“Yes,” she said, even more quietly, after a time.

I forced myself to grow calm. I told myself that she owed me nothing, except perhaps gratitude for sheltering her, and that whatever pain she had caused me by going silent was none of her affair. I reminded myself also that she was a child, unruly and turbulent and undisciplined.

After a bit I said, “I missed you. I missed you more than I want to say.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, sounding repentant, but not very. “I had to go away for a time. You upset me, Adam.”

“By asking you to show me how you used to look?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand why that upset you so much.”

“You don’t have to,” Vox said. “I don’t mind now. You can see me, if you like. Do you still want to? Here. This is me. This is what I used to be. If it disgusts you don’t blame me. Okay? Okay, Adam? Here. Have a look. Here I am.”

14.

There was a wrenching within me, a twisting, a painful yanking sensation, as of some heavy barrier forcibly being pulled aside. And then the glorious radiant scarlet sky of Kansas Four blossomed on the screen of my mind.

She didn’t simply show it to me. She took me there. I felt the soft moist wind on my face, I breathed the sweet, faintly pungent air, I heard the sly rustling of glossy leathery fronds that dangled from bright yellow trees. Beneath my bare feet the black soil was warm and spongy.

I was Leeleaine, who liked to call herself Vox. I was seventeen years old and swept by forces and compulsions as powerful as hurricanes.

I was her from within and also I saw her from outside.

My hair was long and thick and dark, tumbling down past my shoulders in an avalanche of untended curls and loops and snags. My hips were broad, my breasts were full and heavy: I could feel the pull of them, the pain of them. It was almost as if they were stiff with milk, though they were not. My face was tense, alert, sullen, aglow with angry intelligence. It was not an unappealing face. Vox was not an unappealing girl.

From her earlier reluctance to show herself to me I had expected her to be ugly, or perhaps deformed in some way, dragging herself about in a coarse, heavy, burdensome husk of flesh that was a constant reproach to her. She had spoken of her life on Kansas Four as being so dreary, so sad, so miserable, that she saw no hope in staying there. And had given up her body to be turned into mere electricity, on the promise that she could have a new body—any body—when she reached Cul-de-Sac. I hated my body, she had told me. I couldn’t wait to be rid of it. She had refused even to give me a glimpse of it, retreating instead for hours into a desperate silence so total that I thought she had fled.

All that was a mystery to me now. The Leeleaine that I saw, that I was, was a fine sturdy-looking girl. Not beautiful, no, too strong and strapping for that, I suppose, but far from ugly: her eyes were warm and intelligent, her lips full, her nose finely modeled. And it was a healthy body, too, robust, vital. Of course she had no deformities; and why had I thought she had, when it would have been a simple matter of retrogenetic surgery to amend any bothersome defect? No, there was nothing wrong with the body that Vox had abandoned and for which she professed such loathing, for which she felt such shame.

Then I realized that I was seeing her from outside. I was seeing her as if by relay, filtering and interpreting the information she was offering me by passing it through the mind of an objective observer: myself. Who understood nothing, really, of what it was like to be anyone but himself.

Somehow—it was one of those automatic, unconscious adjustments—I altered the focus of my perceptions. All old frames of reference fell away and I let myself lose any sense of the separateness of our identities.

I was her. Fully, unconditionally, inextricably.

And I understood.

Figures flitted about her, shadowy, baffling, maddening. Brothers, sisters, parents, friends: they were all strangers to her. Everyone on Kansas Four was a stranger to her. And always would be.

She hated her body not because it was weak or unsightly but because it was her prison. She was enclosed within it as though within narrow stone walls. It hung about her, a cage of flesh, holding her down, pinning her to this lovely world called Kansas Four where she knew only pain and isolation and estrangement. Her body—her perfectly acceptable, healthy body—had become hateful to her because it was the emblem and symbol of her soul’s imprisonment. Wild and incurably restless by temperament, she had failed to find a way to live within the smothering predictability of Kansas Four, a planet where she would never be anything but an internal outlaw. The only way she could leave Kansas Four was to surrender the body that tied her to it; and so she had turned against it with fury and loathing, rejecting it, abandoning it, despising it, detesting it. No one could ever understand that who beheld her from the outside.

But I understood.

I understood much more than that, in that one flashing moment of communion that she and I had. I came to see what she meant when she said that I was her twin, her double, her other self. Of course we were wholly different, I the sober, staid, plodding, diligent man, and she the reckless, volatile, impulsive, tempestuous girl. But beneath all that we were the same: misfits, outsiders, troubled wanderers through worlds we had never made. We had found vastly differing ways to cope with our pain. Yet we were one and the same, two halves of a single entity.

We will remain together always now, I told myself.

And in that moment our communion broke. She broke it—it must have been she, fearful of letting this new intimacy grow too deep—and I found myself apart from her once again, still playing host to her in my brain but separated from her by the boundaries of my own individuality, my own selfhood. I felt her nearby, within me, a warm but discrete presence. Still within me, yes. But separate again.

15.

There was shipwork to do. For days, now, Vox’s invasion of me had been a startling distraction. But I dared not let myself forget that we were in the midst of a traversal of heaven. The lives of us all, and of our passengers, depended on the proper execution of our duties: even mine. And worlds awaited the bounty that we bore. My task of the moment was to oversee spinaround acquisition.

I told Vox to leave me temporarily while I went through the routines of acquisition. I would be jacked to other crewmen for a time; they might very well be able to detect her within me; there was no telling what might happen. But she refused. “No,” she said. “I won’t leave you. I don’t want to go out there. But I’ll hide, deep down, the way I did when I was upset with you.”

“Vox—”I began.

“No. Please. I don’t want to talk about it.”

There was no time to argue the point. I could feel the depth and intensity of her stubborn determination.

“Hide, then,” I said. “If that’s what you want to do.”

I made my way down out of the Eye to Engine Deck.

The rest of the acquisition team was already assembled in the Great Navigation Hall: Fresco, Raebuck, Roacher. Raebuck’s role was to see to it that communications channels were kept open, Fresco’s to set up the navigation coordinates, and Roacher, as power engineer, would monitor fluctuations in drain and input-output cycling. My function was to give the cues at each stage of acquisition. In truth I was pretty much redundant, since Raebuck and Fresco and Roacher had been doing this sort of thing a dozen times a voyage for scores of voyages and they had little need of my guidance. The deeper truth was that they were redundant too, for 49 Henry Henry would oversee us all, and the intelligence was quite capable of setting up the entire process without any human help. Nevertheless there were formalities to observe, and not inane ones. Intelligences are far superior to humans in mental capacity, interfacing capability, and reaction time, but even so they are nothing but servants, and artificial servants at that, lacking in any real awareness of human fragility or human ethical complexity. They must only be used as tools, not decision-makers. A society which delegates responsibilities of life and death to its servants will eventually find the servants’ hands at its throat. As for me, novice that I was, my role was valid as well: the focal point of the enterprise, the prime initiator, the conductor and observer of the process. Perhaps anyone could perform those functions, but the fact remained that someone had to, and by tradition that someone was the captain. Call it a ritual, call it a highly stylized dance, if you will. But there is no getting away from the human need for ritual and stylization. Such aspects of a process may not seem essential, but they are valuable and significant, and ultimately they can be seen to be essential as well.

“Shall we begin?” Fresco asked.

We jacked up, Roacher directly into the ship, Raebuck into Roacher, Fresco to me, me into the ship.

“Simulation,” I said.

Raebuck keyed in the first code and the vast echoing space that was the Great Navigation Hall came alive with pulsing light: a representation of heaven all about us, the lines of force, the spinaround nodes, the stars, the planets. We moved unhinderedly in free fall, drifting as casually as angels. We could easily have believed we were starwalking.

The simulacrum of the ship was a bright arrow of fierce light just below us and to the left. Ahead, throbbing like a nest of twining angry serpents, was the globe that represented the Lasciate Ogni Speranza spinaround point, tightly-wound dull gray cables shot through with strands of fierce scarlet.

“Enter approach mode,” I said. “Activate receptors. Begin threshold equalization. Begin momentum comparison. Prepare for acceleration uptick. Check angular velocity. Begin spin consolidation. Enter displacement select. Extend mast. Prepare for acquisition receptivity.”

At each command the proper man touched a control key or pressed a directive panel or simply sent an impulse shooting through the jack hookup by which he was connected, directly or indirectly, to the mind of the ship. Out of courtesy to me, they waited until the commands were given, but the speed with which they obeyed told me that their minds were already in motion even as I spoke.

“It’s really exciting, isn’t it?” Vox said suddenly.

“For God’s sake, Vox! What are you trying to do?”

For all I knew, the others had heard her outburst as clearly as though it had come across a loudspeaker.

“I mean,” she went on, “I never imagined it was anything like this. I can feel the whole—”

I shot her a sharp, anguished order to keep quiet. Her surfacing like this, after my warning to her, was a lunatic act. In the silence that followed I felt a kind of inner reverberation, a sulky twanging of displeasure coming from her. But I had no time to worry about Vox’s moods now.

Arcing patterns of displacement power went ricocheting through the Great Navigation Hall as our mast came forth—not the underpinning for a set of sails, as it would be on a vessel that plied planetary seas, but rather a giant antenna to link us to the spinaround point ahead—and the ship and the spinaround point reached toward one another like grappling many-armed wrestlers. Hot streaks of crimson and emerald and gold and amethyst speared the air, vaulting and rebounding. The spinaround point, activated now and trembling between energy states, was enfolding us in its million tentacles, capturing us, making ready to whirl on its axis and hurl us swiftly onward toward the next way-station in our journey across heaven.

“Acquisition,” Raebuck announced.

“Proceed to capture acceptance,” I said.

“Acceptance,” said Raebuck.

“Directional mode,” I said. “Dimensional grid eleven.”

“Dimensional grid eleven,” Fresco repeated.

The whole hall seemed on fire now.

“Wonderful,” Vox murmured. “So beautiful—”

“Vox!”

“Request spin authorization,” said Fresco.

“Spin authorization granted,” I said. “Grid eleven.”

“Grid eleven,” Fresco said again. “Spin achieved.”

A tremor went rippling through me—and through Fresco, through Raebuck, through Roacher. It was the ship, in the persona of 49 Henry Henry, completing the acquisition process. We had been captured by Lasciate Ogni Speranza, we had undergone velocity absorption and redirection, we had had new spin imparted to us, and we had been sent soaring off through heaven toward our upcoming port of call. I heard Vox sobbing within me, not a sob of despair but one of ecstasy, of fulfillment.

We all unjacked. Raebuck, that dour man, managed a little smile as he turned to me.

“Nicely done, Captain,” he said.

“Yes,” said Fresco. “Very nice. You’re a quick learner.”

I saw Roacher studying me with those little shining eyes of his. Go on, you bastard, I thought. You give me a compliment too now, if you know how.

But all he did was stare. I shrugged and turned away. What Roacher thought or said made little difference to me, I told myself.

As we left the Great Navigation Hall in our separate directions Fresco fell in alongside me. Without a word we trudged together toward the transit trackers that were waiting for us. Just as I was about to board mine he—or was it she?—said softly, “Captain?”

“What is it, Fresco?”

Fresco leaned close. Soft sly eyes, tricksy little smile; and yet I felt some warmth coming from the navigator.

“It’s a very dangerous game, Captain.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do,” Fresco said. “No use pretending. We were jacked together in there. I felt things. I know.”

There was nothing I could say, so I said nothing.

After a moment Fresco said, “I like you. I won’t harm you. But Roacher knows too. I don’t know if he knew before, but he certainly knows now. If I were you, I’d find that very troublesome, Captain. Just a word to the wise. All right?”

16.

Only a fool would have remained on such a course as I had been following. Vox saw the risks as well as I. There was no hiding anything from anyone any longer; if Roacher knew, then Bulgar knew, and soon it would be all over the ship. No question, either, but that 49 Henry Henry knew. In the intimacies of our navigation-hall contact, Vox must have been as apparent to them as a red scarf around my forehead.

There was no point in taking her to task for revealing her presence within me like that during acquisition. What was done was done. At first it had seemed impossible to understand why she had done such a thing; but then it became all too easy to comprehend. It was the same sort of unpredictable, unexamined, impulsive behavior that had led her to go barging into a suspended passenger’s mind and cause his death. She was simply not one who paused to think before acting. That kind of behavior has always been bewildering to me. She was my opposite as well as my double. And yet had I not done a Vox-like thing myself, taking her into me, when she appealed to me for sanctuary, without stopping at all to consider the consequences?

“Where can I go?” she asked, desperate. “If I move around the ship freely again they’ll track me and close me off. And then they’ll eradicate me. They’ll—”

“Easy,” I said. “Don’t panic. I’ll hide you where they won’t find you.”

“Inside some passenger?”

“We can’t try that again. There’s no way to prepare the passenger for what’s happening to him, and he’ll panic. No. I’ll put you in one of the annexes. Or maybe one of the virtualities.”

“The what?”

“The additional cargo area. The subspace extensions that surround the ship.”

She gasped. “Those aren’t even real! I was in them, when I was traveling around the ship. Those are just clusters of probability waves!”

“You’ll be safe there,” I said.

“I’m afraid. It’s bad enough that I’m not real any more. But to be stored in a place that isn’t real either—”

“You’re as real as I am. And the outstructures are just as real as the rest of the ship. It’s a different quality of reality, that’s all. Nothing bad will happen to you out there. You’ve told me yourself that you’ve already been in them, right? And got out again without any problems. They won’t be able to detect you there, Vox. But I tell you this, that if you stay in me, or anywhere else in the main part of the ship, they’ll track you down and find you and eradicate you. And probably eradicate me right along with you.”

“Do you mean that?” she said, sounding chastened.

“Come on. There isn’t much time.”

On the pretext of a routine inventory check—well within my table of responsibilities—I obtained access to one of the virtualities. It was the storehouse where the probability stabilizers were kept. No one was likely to search for her there. The chances of our encountering a zone of probability turbulence between here and Cul-de-Sac were minimal; and in the ordinary course of a voyage nobody cared to enter any of the virtualities.

I had lied to Vox, or at least committed a half-truth, by leading her to believe that all our outstructures are of an equal level of reality. Certainly the annexes are tangible, solid; they differ from the ship proper only in the spin of their dimensional polarity. They are invisible except when activated, and they involve us in no additional expenditure of fuel, but there is no uncertainty about their existence, which is why we entrust valuable cargo to them, and on some occasions even passengers.

The extensions are a level further removed from basic reality. They are skewed not only in dimensional polarity but in temporal contiguity: that is, we carry them with us under time displacement, generally ten to twenty virtual years in the past or future. The risks of this are extremely minor and the payoff in reduction of generating cost is great. Still, we are measurably more cautious about what sort of cargo we keep in them.

As for the virtualities—

Their name itself implies their uncertainty. They are purely probabilistic entities, existing most of the time in the stochastic void that surrounds the ship. In simpler words, whether they are actually there or not at any given time is a matter worth wagering on. We know how to access them at the time of greatest probability, and our techniques are quite reliable, which is why we can use them for overflow ladings when our cargo uptake is unusually heavy. But in general we prefer not to entrust anything very important to them, since a virtuality’s range of access times can fluctuate in an extreme way, from a matter of microseconds to a matter of megayears, and that can make quick recall a chancy affair.

Knowing all this, I put Vox in a virtuality anyway.

I had to hide her. And I had to hide her in a place where no one would look. The risk that I’d be unable to call her up again because of virtuality fluctuation was a small one. The risk was much greater that she would be detected, and she and I both punished, if I let her remain in any area of the ship that had a higher order of probability.

“I want you to stay here until the coast is clear,” I told her sternly. “No impulsive journeys around the ship, no excursions into adjoining outstructures, no little trips of any kind, regardless of how restless you get. Is that clear? I’ll call you up from here as soon as I think it’s safe.”

“I’ll miss you, Adam.”

“The same here. But this is how it has to be.”

“I know.”

“If you’re discovered, I’ll deny I know anything about you. I mean that, Vox.”

“I understand.”

“You won’t be stuck in here long. I promise you that.”

“Will you visit me?”

“That wouldn’t be wise,” I said.

“But maybe you will anyway.”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” I opened the access channel. The virtuality gaped before us. “Go on,” I said. “In with you. In. Now. Go, Vox. Go.”

I could feel her leaving me. It was almost like an amputation. The silence, the emptiness, that descended on me suddenly was ten times as deep as what I had felt when she had merely been hiding within me. She was gone, now. For the first time in days, I was truly alone.

I closed off the virtuality.

When I returned to the Eye, Roacher was waiting for me near the command bridge.

“You have a moment, Captain?”

“What is it, Roacher.”

“The missing matrix. We have proof it’s still on board ship.”

“Proof?”

“You know what I mean. You felt it just like I did while we were doing acquisition. It said something. It spoke. It was right in there in the navigation hall with us, Captain.”

I met his luminescent gaze levelly and said in an even voice, “I was giving my complete attention to what we were doing, Roacher. Spinaround acquisition isn’t second nature to me the way it is to you. I had no time to notice any matrixes floating around in there.”

“You didn’t?”

“No. Does that disappoint you?”

“That might mean that you’re the one carrying the matrix,” he said.

“How so?”

“If it’s in you, down on a subneural level, you might not even be aware of it. But we would be. Raebuck, Fresco, me. We all detected something, Captain. If it wasn’t in us it would have to be in you. We can’t have a matrix riding around inside our captain, you know. No telling how that could distort his judgment. What dangers that might lead us into.”

“I’m not carrying any matrixes, Roacher.”

“Can we be sure of that?”

“Would you like to have a look?”

“A jackup, you mean? You and me?”

The notion disgusted me. But I had to make the offer.

“A—jackup, yes,” I said. “Communion. You and me, Roacher. Right now. Come on, we’ll measure the bandwidths and do the matching. Let’s get this over with.”

He contemplated me a long while, as if calculating the likelihood that I was bluffing. In the end he must have decided that I was too naive to be able to play the game out to so hazardous a turn. He knew that I wouldn’t bluff, that I was confident he would find me untenanted or I never would have made the offer.

“No,” he said finally. “We don’t need to bother with that.”

“Are you sure?”

“If you say you’re clean—”

“But I might be carrying her and not even know it,” I said. “You told me that yourself.”

“Forget it. You’d know, if you had her in you.”

“You’ll never be certain of that unless you look. Let’s jack up, Roacher.”

He scowled. “Forget it,” he said again, and turned away. “You must be clean, if you’re this eager for jacking. But I’ll tell you this, Captain. We’re going to find her, wherever she’s hiding. And when we do—”

He left the threat unfinished. I stood staring at his retreating form until he was lost to view.

17.

For a few days everything seemed back to normal. We sped onward toward Cul-de-Sac. I went through the round of my regular tasks, however meaningless they seemed to me. Most of them did. I had not yet achieved any sense that the Sword of Orion was under my command in anything but the most hypothetical way. Still, I did what I had to do.

No one spoke of the missing matrix within my hearing. On those rare occasions when I encountered some other member of the crew while I moved about the ship, I could tell by the hooded look of his eyes that I was still under suspicion. But they had no proof. The matrix was no longer in any way evident on board. The ship’s intelligences were unable to find the slightest trace of its presence.

I was alone, and oh! it was a painful business for me.

I suppose that once you have tasted that kind of round-the-clock communion, that sort of perpetual jacking, you are never the same again. I don’t know: there is no real information available on cases of possession by free matrix, only shipboard folklore, scarcely to be taken seriously. All I can judge by is my own misery now that Vox was actually gone. She was only a half-grown girl, a wild coltish thing, unstable, unformed; and yet, and yet, she had lived within me and we had come toward one another to construct the deepest sort of sharing, what was almost a kind of marriage. You could call it that.

After five or six days I knew I had to see her again. Whatever the risks.

I accessed the virtuality and sent a signal into it that I was coming in. There was no reply; and for one terrible moment I feared the worst, that in the mysterious workings of the virtuality she had somehow been engulfed and destroyed. But that was not the case. I stepped through the glowing pink-edged field of light that was the gateway to the virtuality, and instantly I felt her near me, clinging tight, trembling with joy.

She held back, though, from entering me. She wanted me to tell her it was safe. I beckoned her in; and then came that sharp warm moment I remembered so well, as she slipped down into my neural network and we became one.

“I can only stay a little while,” I said. “It’s still very chancy for me to be with you.”

“Oh, Adam, Adam, it’s been so awful for me in here—”

“I know. I can imagine.”

“Are they still looking for me?”

“I think they’re starting to put you out of their minds,” I said. And we both laughed at the play on words that that phrase implied.

I didn’t dare remain more than a few minutes. I had only wanted to touch souls with her briefly, to reassure myself that she was all right and to ease the pain of separation. But it was irregular for a captain to enter a virtuality at all. To stay in one for any length of time exposed me to real risk of detection.

But my next visit was longer, and the one after that longer still. We were like furtive lovers meeting in a dark forest for hasty delicious trysts. Hidden there in that not-quite-real outstructure of the ship we would join our two selves and whisper together with urgent intensity until I felt it was time for me to leave. She would always try to keep me longer; but her resistance to my departure was never great, nor did she ever suggest accompanying me back into the stable sector of the ship. She had come to understand that the only place we could meet was in the virtuality.

We were nearing the vicinity of Cul-de-Sac now. Soon we would go to worldward and the shoreships would travel out to meet us, so that we could download the cargo that was meant for them. It was time to begin considering the problem of what would happen to Vox when we reached our destination.

That was something I was unwilling to face. However I tried, I could not force myself to confront the difficulties that I knew lay just ahead.

But she could.

“We must be getting close to Cul-de-Sac now,” she said.

“We’ll be there soon, yes.”

“I’ve been thinking about that. How I’m going to deal with that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m a lost soul,” she said. “Literally. There’s no way I can come to life again.”

“I don’t under—”

“Adam, don’t you see?” she cried fiercely. “I can’t just float down to Cul-de-Sac and grab myself a body and put myself on the roster of colonists. And you can’t possibly smuggle me down there while nobody’s looking. The first time anyone ran an inventory check, or did passport control, I’d be dead. No, the only way I can get there is to be neatly packed up again in my original storage circuit. And even if I could figure out how to get back into that, I’d be simply handing myself over for punishment or even eradication. I’m listed as missing on the manifest, right? And I’m wanted for causing the death of that passenger. Now I turn up again, in my storage circuit. You think they’ll just download me nicely to Cul-de-Sac and give me the body that’s waiting for me there? Not very likely. Not likely that I’ll ever get out of that circuit alive, is it, once I go back in? Assuming I could go back in in the first place. I don’t know how a storage circuit is operated, do you? And there’s nobody you can ask.”

“What are you trying to say, Vox?”

“I’m not trying to say anything. I’m saying it. I have to leave the ship on my own and disappear.”

“No. You can’t do that!”

“Sure I can. It’ll be just like starwalking. I can go anywhere I please. Right through the skin of the ship, out into heaven. And keep on going.”

“To Cul-de-Sac?”

“You’re being stupid,” she said. “Not to Cul-de-Sac, no. Not to anywhere. That’s all over for me, the idea of getting a new body. I have no legal existence any more. I’ve messed myself up. All right: I admit it. I’ll take what’s coming to me. It won’t be so bad, Adam. I’ll go starwalking. Outward and outward and outward, forever and ever.”

“You mustn’t,” I said. “Stay here with me.”

“Where? In this empty storage unit out here?”

“No,” I told her. “Within me. The way we are right now. The way we were before.”

“How long do you think we could carry that off?” she asked.

I didn’t answer.

“Every time you have to jack into the machinery I’ll have to hide myself down deep,” she said. “And I can’t guarantee that I’ll go deep enough, or that I’ll stay down there long enough. Sooner or later they’ll notice me. They’ll find me. They’ll eradicate me and they’ll throw you out of the Service, or maybe they’ll eradicate you too. No, Adam. It couldn’t possibly work. And I’m not going to destroy you with me. I’ve done enough harm to you already.”

“Vox—”

“No. This is how it has to be.”

18.

And this is how it was. We were deep in the Spook Cluster now, and the Vainglory Archipelago burned bright on my realspace screen. Somewhere down there was the planet called Cul-de-Sac. Before we came to worldward of it, Vox would have to slip away into the great night of heaven.

Making a worldward approach is perhaps the most difficult maneuver a starship must achieve; and the captain must go to the edge of his abilities along with everyone else. Novice at my trade though I was, I would be called on to perform complex and challenging processes. If I failed at them, other crewmen might cut in and intervene, or, if necessary, the ship’s intelligences might override; but if that came to pass my career would be destroyed, and there was the small but finite possibility, I suppose, that the ship itself could be gravely damaged or even lost.

I was determined, all the same, to give Vox the best send-off I could.

On the morning of our approach I stood for a time on Outerscreen Level, staring down at the world that called itself Cul-de-Sac. It glowed like a red eye in the night. I knew that it was the world Vox had chosen for herself, but all the same it seemed repellent to me, almost evil. I felt that way about all the worlds of the shore people now. The Service had changed me; and I knew that the change was irreversible. Never again would I go down to one of those worlds. The starship was my world now.

I went to the virtuality where Vox was waiting.

“Come,” I said, and she entered me.

Together we crossed the ship to the Great Navigation Hall.

The approach team had already gathered: Raebuck, Fresco, Roacher, again, along with Pedregal, who would supervise the downloading of cargo. The intelligence on duty was 612 Jason. I greeted them with quick nods and we jacked ourselves together in approach series.

Almost at once I felt Roacher probing within me, searching for the fugitive intelligence that he still thought I might be harboring. Vox shrank back, deep out of sight. I didn’t care. Let him probe, I thought. This will all be over soon.

“Request approach instructions,” Fresco said.

“Simulation,” I ordered.

The fiery red eye of Cul-de-Sac sprang into vivid representation before us in the hall. On the other side of us was the simulacrum of the ship, surrounded by sheets of white flame that rippled like the blaze of the aurora.

I gave the command and we entered approach mode.

We could not, of course, come closer to planetskin than a million shiplengths, or Cul-de-Sac’s inexorable forces would rip us apart. But we had to line the ship up with its extended mast aimed at the planet’s equator, and hold ourselves firm in that position while the shoreships of Cul-de-Sac came swarming up from their red world to receive their cargo from us.

612 Jason fed me the coordinates and I gave them to Fresco, while Raebuck kept the channels clear and Roacher saw to it that we had enough power for what we had to do. But as I passed the data along to Fresco, it was with every sign reversed. My purpose was to aim the mast not downward to Cul-de-Sac but outward toward the stars of heaven.

At first none of them noticed. Everything seemed to be going serenely. Because my reversals were exact, only the closest examination of the ship’s position would indicate our l80-degree displacement.

Floating in the free fall of the Great Navigation Hall, I felt almost as though I could detect the movements of the ship. An illusion, I knew. But a powerful one. The vast ten-kilometer-long needle that was the Sword of Orion seemed to hang suspended, motionless, and then to begin slowly, slowly to turn, tipping itself on its axis, reaching for the stars with its mighty mast. Easily, easily, slowly, silently—

What joy that was, feeling the ship in my hand!

The ship was mine. I had mastered it.

“Captain,” Fresco said softly.

“Easy on, Fresco. Keep feeding power.”

“Captain, the signs don’t look right—”

“Easy on. Easy.”

“Give me a coordinates check, Captain.”

“Another minute,” I told him.

“But—”

“Easy on, Fresco.”

Now I felt restlessness too from Pedregal, and a slow chilly stirring of interrogation from Raebuck; and then Roacher probed me again, perhaps seeking Vox, perhaps simply trying to discover what was going on. They knew something was wrong, but they weren’t sure what it was.

We were nearly at full extension, now. Within me there was an electrical trembling: Vox rising through the levels of my mind, nearing the surface, preparing for departure.

“Captain, we’re turned the wrong way!” Fresco cried.

“I know,” I said. “Easy on. We’ll swing around in a moment.”

“He’s gone crazy!” Pedregal blurted.

I felt Vox slipping free of my mind. But somehow I found myself still aware of her movements, I suppose because I was jacked into 6l2 Jason and 6l2 Jason was monitoring everything. Easily, serenely, Vox melted into the skin of the ship.

“Captain!” Fresco yelled, and began to struggle with me for control.

I held the navigator at arm’s length and watched in a strange and wonderful calmness as Vox passed through the ship’s circuitry all in an instant and emerged at the tip of the mast, facing the stars. And cast herself adrift.

Because I had turned the ship around, she could not be captured and acquired by Cul-de-Sac’s powerful navigational grid, but would be free to move outward into heaven. For her it would be a kind of floating out to sea, now. After a time she would be so far out that she could no longer key into the shipboard bioprocessors that sustained the patterns of her consciousness, and, though the web of electrical impulses that was the Vox matrix would travel outward and onward forever, the set of identity responses that was Vox herself would lose focus soon, would begin to waver and blur. In a little while, or perhaps not so little, but inevitably, her sense of herself as an independent entity would be lost. Which is to say, she would die.

I followed her as long as I could. I saw a spark traveling across the great night. And then nothing.

“All right,” I said to Fresco. “Now let’s turn the ship the right way around and give them their cargo.”

19.

That was many years ago. Perhaps no one else remembers those events, which seem so dreamlike now even to me. The Sword of Orion has carried me nearly everywhere in the galaxy since then. On some voyages I have been captain; on others, a downloader, a supercargo, a mind-wiper, even sometimes a push-cell. It makes no difference how we serve, in the Service.

I often think of her. There was a time when thinking of her meant coming to terms with feelings of grief and pain and irrecoverable loss, but no longer, not for many years. She must be long dead now, however durable and resilient the spark of her might have been. And yet she still lives. Of that much I am certain. There is a place within me where I can reach her warmth, her strength, her quirky vitality, her impulsive suddenness. I can feel those aspects of her, those gifts of her brief time of sanctuary within me, as a living presence still, and I think I always will, as I make my way from world to tethered world, as I journey onward everlastingly spanning the dark light-years in this great ship of heaven.

A Biography of Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg (b. 1935) is an American author best known for his science fiction titles, including Nightwings (1969), Dying Inside (1972), and Lord Valentine’s Castle (1980). He has won five Nebula Awards and five Hugo Awards. In 2004, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America honored Silverberg with the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award.

Silverberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, on January 15, 1935, the only child of Michael and Helen Silverberg. An avid reader and writer from an early age, Silverberg began his own fanzine, Spaceship, in 1949. In 1953, at age eighteen, he sold his first nonfiction piece to Science Fiction Adventures magazine. His first novel, Revolt on Alpha C, was published shortly after, in 1955. That same year, while living in New York City and studying at Columbia University, Silverberg met his neighbors and fellow writers Randall Garrett and Harlan Ellison, both of whom went on to collaborate with him on numerous projects. Silverberg and Randall published pieces under the name Robert Randall. In 1956, Silverberg graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor of arts degree in comparative literature, married Barbara Brown, and won the Hugo Award for Most Promising New Author.

Following the whirlwind of his college years, Silverberg continued to write consistently for most of his life. Writing under various pseudonyms, including David Osborne and Calvin M. Knox, Silverberg managed to publish eleven novels and more than two hundred short pieces between 1957 and 1959. Having established himself as a science fiction writer by this time, Silverberg went on to show dexterity in other genres, from historical nonfiction with Treasures Beneath the Sea (1960) to softcore pornography under the pseudonym Don Elliot.

Silverberg continued to write outside science fiction until Frederik Pohl, the editor of Galaxy Science Fiction, convinced him to rejoin the field. It was in this period, from the late 1960s to early 1970s, that Silverberg’s classics, including Tower of Glass (1970), The World Inside (1971), and The Book of Skulls (1972), came to life. After taking a break from writing, Silverberg returned with Lord Valentine’s Castle in 1980.

Though they had been separated for nearly a decade, Silverberg and Barbara officially ended their marriage in 1986. A year later, Silverberg married fellow writer Karen Haber. They went on to collaborate on writing The Mutant Season (1990) and editing several anthologies. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, Silverberg published important titles including Star of Gypsies (1986), and continued his established Majipoor series with The Mountains of Majipoor (1995) and Sorcerers of Majipoor (1997). In 1999, Silverberg was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

With a career that spans half a century, multiple genres, and more than three hundred titles, Silverberg has made major contributions as a writer. He currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife.

Silverberg at six months old with his parents.

Silverberg at summer camp in August 1952, reading the September issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which featured a story by Theodore Sturgeon.

The first page of Silverberg’s manuscript for his first novel, Revolt on Alpha C, published in 1955.

An early rejection letter dated July 18, 1949.

Silverberg conversing with a nymph at author Brian Aldiss’s home in Oxford, England, after the 1987 Brighton Worldcon. (Courtesy of Andrew Porter.)

Silverberg with his wife, Karen, at the 2004 Nebula Awards in Seattle, where he received his Grand Master Award.

(Unless otherwise noted, all images taken from Other Spaces, Other Times by Robert Silverberg, courtesy of Nonstop Press.)

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1956, 1958, 1963, 1965, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1982, 1983, 1988, 1989, 1997, 2010, 2019 by Agberg, Ltd.

Cover design by Amanda Shaffer

978-1-5040-5866-7

This edition published in 2019 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10038
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ROBERT SILVERBERG

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