DAW 30th Anniversary Science Fiction ELIZABETH R. WOLLHEIM SHEILA E. GILBERT DAW BOOKS, INC. DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, FOUNDER 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 ELIZABETH R. WOLLHEIM SHEILA E. GILBERT PUBLISHERS http://www.dawbooks.com Copyright © 2002 by Elizabeth R. Wollheim and Sheila E. Gilbert. All rights reserved. Jacket art by G-Force Design. Text design by Stanley S. Drate / Folio Graphics Co., Inc. DAW Books Collectors No. 1221. DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Putnam Inc. All characters and events in this book are fictitious. All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental. This book is printed on acid-free paper. © With special thanks to the folks at Tekno Books for their help in seeing this project to fruition. We dedicate these volumes in loving memory of our founders, Donald A. Wollheim and Elsie B. Wollheim, and of our resident curmudgeon, Mike Gilbert. And for all DAW authors, past, present and future First Printing, May 2002 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES -MARCA REGISTRADA HECHO EN U.S.A. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. Acknowledgments THE HOME FRONT ©2002 by Brian Stableford ABOARD THE BEATITUDE ©2002 by Brian W. Aldiss ODD JOB #213 ©2002 by Ron Goulart AGAMEMNON'S RUN ©2002 by Robert Sheckley GRUBBER ©2002 by Neal Barrett, Jr. THE SANDMAN, THE TINMAN, AND THE BETTY B ©2002 by C. J. Cherryh THE BIG PICTURE ©2002 by Timothy Zahn A HOME FOR THE OLD ONES, an excerpt from the forthcoming novel From Gateway to the Core, ©2002 by Frederik Pohl. Published by permission of the author. NOT WITH A WHIMPER, EITHER ©2002 by Tad Williams THE BLACK WALL OF JERUSALEM ©2002 by Ian Watson STATION GANYMEDE ©2002 by Charles L. Harness DOWNTIME ©2002 by C. S. Friedman BURNING BRIDGES ©2002 by Charles Ingrid WORDS ©2002 by Cheryl J. Franklin READ ONLY MEMORY ©2002 by eluki bes shahar SUNSEEKER ©2002 by Katrina Elliott THE HEAVENS FALL ©2002 by Steven Swiniarski PASSAGE TO SHOLA ©2002 by Lisanne Norman PRISM ©2002 by Julie E. Czerneda Introductions MY father never told me that he was planning to leave his job at Ace Books. It was 1971, and I was in college. I can only assume that he didn't want to distract me from my studies-that he wanted to shelter me for as long as he could. So I found out after the fact, with the rest of the science fiction world. It was as much of a shock to me as it was to anyone else. Actually it was more of a shock to me than to anyone else-for my dad, the most responsible and loyal man I knew, had just picked up and walked away from his job! It was simply unimaginable but it had happened, and it rattled my world down to its deepest foundations. Don had been continually employed in editorial positions since 1941 when he had his first (unpaid) job editing pulp magazines. He continued to edit magazines, compiled numerous anthologies, worked in editorial positions at some of the very first paperback book lines ever produced, and in 1952, convinced A. A. Wyn, owner of Ace Publications, to let him initiate a line of paperback books for Ace. The one thing he hadn't been in thirty years was unemployed. My dad took his responsibility to our family very seriously. He also took his work very seriously. But something monumental had begun to happen to the publishing industry. Publishing was becoming "big business" and was no longer the intimate, eccentric, personality-driven industry it had once been. Don, who had been present during the birth of the paperback book, didn't like what was happening. He was Editor-in-Chief of Ace Books for nineteen and a half years and eventually became the Vice President as well. He considered Ace his list, his creation, and for most of our field at the time, the name Donald A. Wollheim was synonymous with Ace Books. But Ace wasn't really Don's company, and with the death of A. A. Wyn in 1968 that became glaringly obvious. As Ace became more and more "corporate," passing from the hands of one owner to another, the situation became less and less tolerable for Don. By 1971, he had come to the end of his rope-so he did the unthinkable. With no concrete prospects for the future, and no warning to his employers, he left his office at Ace Books, never to return. \ It was a very tense time for our family, for although Elsie, my mom, had been a professional woman before my birth, my father had been the sole support of our household since 1951. Don wasn't entirely sure what to do. What he was sure of was this: he would never again work for years building an editorial list only to lose it. There was only one way to avoid that: by founding his own publishing company. But how could he? As a long-term employee of a notoriously frugal publisher, he had never been able to amass the money necessary for such an enterprise. All Don had was his reputation. Luckily, it proved to be enough. In the fall of 1971, Don met with Herb Schnall, one of the chief executives of New American Library. After several brief meetings, Herb made a statement which would change publishing history: he told Don that New American Library would take him "any way [he wanted] to come." Don could write his own ticket. It was an offer Don couldn't refuse. \ Elated, Don came home to think about his options. My dad, my mom, and I sat at the table in our narrow galley kitchen in Queens, and tried to define Don's dream. He wanted the strong national distribution which only a big company could offer- hence his meeting with NAL-but unlike most independently distributed lines, he also wanted the professional production and promotion facilities of a big publishing company. He wanted his company's list to be sold aggressively with the strength of a big corporate imprint, yet he wanted total artistic freedom, not only inside his books but in relation to the cover art and design as well, and he did not want to share the ownership of his company. Basically, he wanted to form a private corporation and enter into a contractual arrangement with New American Library to provide the services that he needed. But corporate parameters were not Don's only concern. For thirty years Don had edited all types of fiction. He had edited not only literary books but most of the genres-from westerns to crime to thrillers to mysteries to detective and horror novels. He had put the light into the window of the ever present mansion on the cover of the Gothic romance, had published William Burroughs' first work, and had introduced J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings to the American paperback audience. He even edited nurse novels and cookbooks. But since the age of eleven he had had only one real love-science fiction. He had waited a lifetime for this opportunity, and he decided to dedicate his new company to the books he loved the most. He wanted to found the first publishing company devoted exclusively to science fiction and fantasy. In November of 1971, NAL agreed to Don's proposal, and DAW Books, Inc. was born. My father had signed a contract, but he was still a long way from fulfilling his dream. As we sitting in the kitchen-our traditional spot for family discussions-and Don thought aloud about possible employees to help him in his new venture, I noticed my mom, Elsie, becoming more and more agitated. Finally, she exploded: "Don, what about ME?" My dad looked quite stupefied. It was clear that he had never even considered that his wife would join him in this enterprise, but Elsie was the logical choice: she had legal experience, and had run her father's company. The obvious solution was staring him straight in the face. Bringing Elsie into the company may very well have been Don's shrewdest business decision. Elsie embraced her new position as Corporate Secretary-Treasurer of DAW with all the fervor of a mother grizzly defending her young. Every aspect of DAW and all DAW authors were sheltered under her huge protective wing. And for a petite woman, she had enormous wings indeed! Marion Zimmer Bradley once said, "Elsie has the spirit of a lion in the body of a sparrow." And it was never more true than when she took up her position as Champion-Of-All-Things-DAW. The next six months were a nightmare. With liftoff scheduled for April 1972, Don was under the gun to purchase, edit, and package six months' worth of titles in thirty days to catch up with NAL's production schedule. Elsie had to set up accounts payable, accounts receivable, royalty reports, bookkeeping, and an entire subsidiary rights department. Together, they wrote the first DAW boilerplate contract. For my father, himself a published author with eighteen books and numerous short stories to his credit, it was important to formulate a writer-friendly contract. \ My parents were nervous wrecks. Don couldn't sleep or eat-I remember more than one occasion when Elsie or I had to run to the kitchen to get Don something sweet because he was feeling light-headed. Don and Elsie were exhausted, but it was with the excited exhaustion of new parents. It was a frightening and exhilarating time. The following spring, the first DAW books were due to debut at the 1972 Lunacon, but the night before the convention started, they still hadn't left the warehouse in New Jersey. Elsie and Don were up the entire night collecting their very first DAW books and hand delivering them to the dealers at New York's local convention. Lunacon was thereafter a very special time for my folks. As for me, I went back to college and graduated with a degree in English Lit, while serving a simultaneous four-year stint in art school. My parents had kept me apprised of the goings-on at DAW, and sent me occasional manuscripts to read and comment on, particularly when Don had discovered someone he felt was noteworthy. I especially remember Don's excitement in 1974 when he sent me Gate of Ivrel, C. J. Cherryh's first novel, and The Birthgrave, Tanith Lee's first full-length fantasy novel.\ Although I was Corporate Vice President of DAW from the get go, and had always been involved on a certain level, Don never \pressured me to come home to New York right after graduation. He thought it would be healthier for me to find my own sea legs in the business world. With my experience working as a freelance copyeditor for Ace Books (under my father's stern tutelage) during high school, I landed a job in one of the last hot-type printing houses in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a proofreader, then later, a dual position as proofreader and darkroom technician for one of the very first computerized printing houses in the industry. What a disaster! For every mistake corrected, the printing computer (which took up most of a good-sized wall) would generate numerous new ones. Whole chapters would suddenly become italicized. Thankfully, computers have improved enormously since those days. My two years working for printers have proved invaluable to me as a publisher. \ Finally, in 1975, I came home and took up a position as Don's general assistant and Associate Editor. By this time DAW was an established, successful line, and Don and Elsie were a recognized corporate couple. However, it is never easy working with your parents, and Don and Elsie were no exception. One of the saving graces of my situation was the presence of my old friend Sheila Gilbert, who was working as a copywriter for NAL. Sheila and I had known each other since we were thirteen and eleven, respectively, and had bonded through various embarrassing fan activities, such as the Galaxy of Fashion Show at the 1967 NYcon, where I was the "Bride of the Future," and Sheila and her oldest sister Marsha were "The Gemini Twins." Numerous were the times I sought refuge in my old friend's office, and as the years passed, Sheila was promoted to head up the Signet science fiction list, and I wrested more and more editorial and art direction control from the unyielding hands of my father. Sheila and I became close friends. Neither of us realized just how important that friendship would prove to be. In April 1985, when I had been working with my parents for ten years, catastrophe struck. Don went into the hospital with a complicated critical illness, and remained there on the brink of death for seven brutal months. We were just about to launch the fledgling DAW hardcover list, which was my exclusive domain, with a novel from our most important writer, C. J. Cherryh, as well as a first novel from a very promising newcomer, Tad Williams. Elsie bravely insisted that I attend the American Booksellers Association Convention in San Francisco, where the DAW hardcover list was being debuted with special bound galleys, and where I was planning to meet Tad for the first time. I left New York not knowing if I would ever see my father alive again. Well, Don survived, but it didn't take me long to discover what had made him so sick. At fourteen years of age, the health of DAW Books had begun to flag. The science fiction and fantasy industry had gone through some fundamental changes, and our company was desperately in need of renovation. During those terrible months, Elsie and I fought not only to keep Don alive, but to save the life of DAW as well. Meanwhile, Sheila had been considering leaving her job at Signet. Elsie and I realized that she would be the perfect person to join us: she had editorial experience, knew our list, and was practically part of the family already. With no guarantee that we would be able to pull the company out of its slump, she agreed. 1985 was a difficult year, but Don survived and so did DAW. During Don's long illness and recovery-it was a year before he would return to the office-Sheila and I, with the loving support of Elsie, took over the company. \ Don would never again be well enough to lead DAW. Now, thirty years and more than twelve hundred titles since its founding, Don and Elsie are gone, but the essence of DAW remains the same: a small, personal business owned exclusively by me and Sheila. Sheila and I were startled to realize, as we were writing these introductions, that we have now been running the company longer than Don did. Like Don and Elsie before us, we are committed to keeping a "family" spirit at DAW-something we feel (as Don did) is all too rare in today's world of international conglomerate publishing. If anything, DAW is even more family-oriented now than it was in the beginning. Sheila and I brought our husbands, Mike Gilbert and Peter Stampfel, into the business. Our Business Manager Amy Fodera introduced us to her husband, Sean Fodera, who is now our Director of Subsidiary Rights, Contracts, and Electronic Publishing. Our Managing Editor Debra Euler is single, but we've told her that when she does marry, her husband will have a job waiting for him at DAW! (Or conversely, she has first right of refusal if we hire another employee.) Even our wonderful free-lance cover designer has been with us for nearly a dozen years. With just six hardy employees (sadly, we lost Mike in August 2000), DAW Books manages to stay afloat in a sea of ocean liners. But our true family extends far beyond the DAW corporate offices. This real family includes the many wonderful authors who publish with us, the artists who grace the covers of our books with their beautiful paintings, and you, the readers who have loyally supported our little company for thirty years. We couldn't have done it without you-and we plan to keep giving you the finest in science fiction and fantasy for decades to come. BETSY WOLLHEIM I REMEMBER the day DAW was born. I remember it because the events which led up to DAW's birth had a definite impact on my own life, and though I didn't know it at the time, the creation of DAW Books, Inc. in the fall of 1971 would eventually affect my future both personally and professionally. Of course, my relationship with the Wollheim family began long before DAW was even the glimmering of an idea in Don Wollheim's imagination. I first met Don, Elsie, and Betsy at a Lunacon in Manhattan in the spring of 1963. I was thirteen years old and it was my first science fiction convention. And among the many interesting people I had a chance to meet (some of whose works filled the bookcases of my own science fiction and fantasy reading family) were the Wollheims. My memory is that they Were quite patient with and welcoming to an enthusiastic teen at her first convention. Perhaps the fact that Betsy was eleven at the time had something to do with it. Perhaps it merely foreshadowed the days when we would begin referring to Elsie as our "corporate Mom," a title any DAW author who was fortune enough to become part of our DAW family while Elsie was still alive would certainly understand. Over the following seven years, I continued to run into the Wollheims at conventions and parties, and when I graduated college and started looking for a job in publishing I sent Don, who at the time was the Editor-in-Chief at Ace Books, a letter of inquiry about a job. Fortune smiled upon me, because the day after I had accepted-but not yet started-a job at another publishing company, I received a phone call from Don. He had a junior editorial position to fill, and he wanted me to come in for an interview. The idea of being paid to read and work on the books I would have been reading anyway seemed like a dream come true. I started working for Don at Ace Thanksgiving week of 1970, and life was good. Then, one day in the fall of 1971, Don walked into my office to say good-bye. He was leaving the company that very day. I was totally stunned by the news. Later, I heard that Don was starting his own company, DAW Books, Inc., which would be distributed by New American Library. Perhaps a month after that, I had a phone call from Ruth Haberstroh, a friend who had once shared an office with me at Ace and who was working at New American Library. She told me that before calling me she had asked Don if he was going to hire me. He responded that he wasn't going to be hiring anyone for a while, and so Ruth offered me a job at NAL. So in January 1972, I left Ace and joined NAL. One of the benefits of this move was that I could now frequently see Don and Elsie-and Betsy, as well, once she joined her parents in the family business. In 1978, I took over the Signet science fiction line, which, in theory, might have put me in competition with DAW, but in reality it did nothing of the kind. Our lists were extremely compatible. In 1985, Don became critically ill and Betsy had to take on the full responsibility for running DAW. She and Elsie asked me to join them, and after the July Fourth weekend, that was exactly what I did. And, of course, I've been here ever since. In the ensuing years, various members of my family-my husband Mike, and my sisters Marsha and Paula-began working with us in a freelance capacity, with Mike eventually becoming our resident curmudgeon until his untimely death in August of 2000. We've always said that we consider DAW and everyone associated with it as one big extended family. And that is truly the way we feel about our own terrific staff and all the people we work closely with at Penguin Putnam, Inc., about our stalwart freelancers who never let us down, the artists who create such eyecatching images for us, and, of course, our authors, who, over the years we've worked with them, have become our close friends as well as our valued colleagues. As thirty is a fairly momentous birthday in human terms (rest assured, however, that you will still be able to trust DAW to provide you with the kind of reading experiences you've come to expect), we wanted to celebrate this coming of age in a special way. And, we reasoned, what could be more appropriate than a book of stories written by the authors who have been such an important part of DAW over the last three decades. As we looked down our impressively large list of names, though, we realized that the only way this project could be accomplished without becoming completely unwieldy would be to divide the stories into two volumes by category. Thus, the books you now see before you: DAW 30 th Anniversary: Science Fiction and DAW 30 th Anniversary: Fantasy. \ Of course, thirty years is a long time, and as we went through our list we were saddened by the knowledge that a number of the authors we would have loved to have stories from were no longer around to provide them. Despite that, we are very pleased with the number of authors who were kind enough to join us in our thirtieth birthday celebration by creating the wonderful tales you'll find included here. Some of the contributors wrote stories which take place in the universes in which their popular DAW series are set, others have chosen to explore entirely new territory, and yet others have given us a glimpse of the worlds and characters from novels which will see publication in the upcoming years. When DAW Books was founded, the original logo used on all our books read: DAW = sf, a corporate emblem designed by well-known science fiction artist Jack Gaughan. At that time the logo was extremely appropriate. We were the first company devoted exclusively to the publication of science fiction and fantasy, and as far more science fiction was being published (certainly this was true for DAW in those days) the genre hadn't been broken down into two distinct categories. But over the course of the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, as more writers came into the field from the social sciences and humanities rather than the hard sciences, both styles and subject matter began to change. And as technological leaps began to transform science fiction into science fact, creating believable yet innovative science-based fiction became far more difficult. At the same time, the ever-increasing changes wrought by technology in both the working place and our own homes led more people to read fantasy, probably as a means to escape the stresses and demands of the "real" world. \ In recognition of these changes, the very look of DAW Books, as well as the contents, began its own evolutionary process, one that continues to this very day. Our logo went from DAW - sf to a design which incorporated the three letters in our name, and also labeled the particular book it appeared on as either science fiction or fantasy. Of course, this led to a bit of a dilemma when a novel or series didn't fall fully into one category or the other but actually melded elements of both. What you now hold in your hands is your invitation to join our 30 th anniversary celebration. The stories in each volume appear in chronological order, based on the first time the author was published by DAW. Thus our fantasy volume begins with Andre Norton, whose Spell of the Witchworld was the very first DAW book to see print in April 1972. The first story in the science fiction volume is by Brian Stableford, whose To Challenge Chaos was published in May 1972. We hope that you will find these anthologies as enjoyable as we have, and that it will offer you a chance to read some new work by old favorites, or perhaps afford you the pleasure of discovering some of our authors for the very first time. Thank you for helping to make our first thirty years as memorable as they have been, and we look forward to sharing many more years of good books with all of you. SHEILA GILBERT Contents THE HOME FRONT Brian Stableford ABOARD THE BEATITUDE Brian W. Aldiss ODD JOB #213 Ron Goulart AGAMEMNON'S RUN Robert Sheckley GRUBBER Neal Barrett, Jr. THE SANDMAN, THE TINMAN, AND THE BETTY B C. J. Cherryh THE BIG PICTURE Timothy Zahn A HOME FOR THE OLD ONES (an excerpt from the forthcoming novel From Gateway to the Core) Frederik Pohl NOT WITH A WHIMPER, EITHER Tad Williams THE BLACK WALL OF JERUSALEM Ian Watson STATION GANYMEDE Charles L. Harness DOWNTIME C. S. Friedman BURNING BRIDGES Charles Ingrid WORDS Cheryl J. Franklin READ ONLY MEMORY eluki bes shahar SUNSEEKER Kate Elliott THE HEAVENS FALL S. Andrew Swann PASSAGE TO SHOLA Lisanne Norman PRISM Julie E. Czerneda Brian Stableford The science fiction field has been tremendously fortunate in attracting editors who care deeply and passionately about the genre and its potential, among which the two most important were John W. Campbell, Jr. and Don Woliheim. If it were not for Don's efforts, first as a magazine editor, then as a paperback editor and finally as a publisher the field would not have proliferated or progressed as quickly as it did, and many fine writers might have been lost to it. Don gave crucial publishing opportunities to dozens of writers, some of whom went on to become important figures in modern American literature (including Philip K. Dick and Ursula le Guin] while others were enabled by him to produce work of striking and defiant originality treasured by the few (including Barrington J. Bayley and Michael Shea). He was far more useful to writers like the latter stripe than any small press publisher because he never lost sight of the need to attract readers to his lines by publishing solid commercial fiction in economically effective packages. Don was by far the most eclectic editor ever to work in the SF field, sustaining the careers of a dozen British writers whose domestic market was too tiny to offer adequate commercial support, and also introducing numerous foreign-language writers into the American market. I am one of the least of many writers who would not have been able to follow their vocation without his interest and help; he was a crucial element in shaping my life as a reader and writer and the hindsight I have gained since his death has allowed me to see ever more clearly how extraordinarily valuable his input was. I am very pleased and proud to be able to make a memorial contribution to this anthology. —BS THE HOME FRONT Brian Stableford NOW that we have lived in the security of peace for more than thirty years a generation has grown up to whom the Plague Wars are a matter of myth and legend. Survivors of my age are often approached by the wondering young and asked what it was like to live through those frightful years, but few of them can answer as fully or as accurately as I. In my time I have met many doctors, genetic engineers, and statesmen who lay claim to having been in "the front line" during the First Plague War, but the originality of that conflict was precisely the fact that its real combatants were invading microbes and defensive antibodies. All its entrenchments were internal to the human body and mind. It is true that there were battlegrounds of a sort in the hospitals, the laboratories, and even in the House of Commons, but this was a war whose entire strategy was to strike at the most intimate locations of all. For that reason, the only authentic front was the home front: the nucleus of family life. Many an octogenarian is prepared to wax lyrical now on the reelings of dread associated with obligatory confinement. They will assure you that no one would risk exposure to a crowd if it could possibly be avoided, and that every step out of doors was a terror-laden trek through a minefield. They exaggerate. Life was not so rapidly transformed in an era when a substantial majority of the population still worked outside the home or attended school, and only a minority had the means or the inclination to make all their purchases electronically. Even if electronic shop-pimg had been universal, that would have brought about a very dramatic increase in the number of people employed in the deliv-ery business, all of whom would have had to go abroad and inter-act vith considerable numbers of their fellows. For these reasons, total confinement was rare during the First Plague War, and rarely voluntary. Even I, who had little choice in the matter after both my legs were amputated above the knee following the Paddington Railway Disaster of 2119, occasionally sallied forth in my electrically-powered wheelchair in spite of the protestations of my wife Martha. Martha was almost as firmly anchored as I was, by virtue of the care she had to devote to me and to our younger daughter Frances, but it would have taken more than rumors of war to force Frances' teenage sister Petra to remain indoors for long. The certainty of hindsight sometimes leads us to forget that the First Plague War was, throughout its duration, essentially a matter of rumor, but such was the case. The absence of any formal declaration of war, combined with the highly dubious status of many of the terrorist organizations which competed to claim responsibility for its worst atrocities, sustained an atmosphere of uncertainty that complicated our fears. To some extent, the effect was to exaggerate our anxieties, but it allowed braver souls a margin of doubt to which they could dismiss all inconvenient alarms. I suppose I was fortunate that the Paddington Disaster had not disrupted my career completely, because I had the education and training necessary to set myself up as an independent share-trader operating via my domestic unit. I had established a reputation that allowed me to build a satisfactory register of corporate and individual clients, so I was able to negotiate the movement of several million euros on a daily basis. I had always been a specialist in the biotech sector, which was highly volatile even before the war started—and it was that accident of happenstance more than any other which placed my minuscule fraction of the home front at the center of the fiercest action the war produced. Doctors, as is only natural, think that the hottest action of the plague wars was experienced on the wards which filled up week by week between 2129 and 2133 with victims of hyperflu, assertive MSRA, neurotoxic Human Mosaic Virus and plethoral hem-orrhagic fever. Laboratory engineers, equally understandably, think that the crucial battles were fought within the bodies of the mouse models housed in their triple-X biocontainment facilities. In fact, the most hectic action of all was seen on the London Stock Exchange, and the only hand-to-hand fighting involved the sneakthieves and armed robbers who continually raided the nation's greenhouses during the six months from September 2129 to March 2130: the cruel winter of the great plantigen panic. I never laid a finger on a single genetically modified potato or carrot, but I was in the thick of it nevertheless. So, perforce, were my wife and children; their lives, like mine, hung in the balance throughout. That is why my story is one of the most pertinent records of the First Plague War, as well as one of the most poignant. Although my work required fierce concentration and a readiness to react to market moves at a moment's notice, I was occasionally forced by necessity to let Frances play in my study while I worked. It was not safe to leave her alone, even in the adjacent ground-floor room where she attended school online. She suffered from an environmentally induced syndrome which made her unusually prone to form allergies to any and all novel organic compounds. In the twentieth century such a condition would have proved swiftly fatal, but, by the time Francis was born in 2121, medical science had begun to catch up with the problem. There were efficient palliatives to apply to her occasional rashes, and effective ways of ensuring that she received adequate nutrition in spite of her perennial tendency to gastric distress and diarrhea. The only aspects of her allergic attacks which seriously threatened her life were general anaphylactic shock and the disruption of her breathing by massive histamine reactions in the throat. It was these possibilities that compelled us to keep very careful control over the contents of our home and the importation of exotic organic molecules. By way of completing our precautions, Martha, Petra and I had all been carefully trained to administer various injections, to operate breathing apparatus, and—should the worst ever come to the worst—to perform an emergency tracheotomy. Frances was very patient on the rare occasions when she had to be left in my sole care, and seemed to know instinctively when to rnaintain silence, even though she was a talkative child by nature. When business was slack, however, she would make heroic attempts to understand what I was doing. As chance would have it, she was present when I first set up my position in plantigens in July 2129, and it was only natural that she should ask me to explain what I was doing and why. "I'm buying lots of potatoes and a few carrots," I told her, oversimplifying recklessly. "Isn't Mummy doing that?" she asked. Martha was at the supermarket. "She's buying the ones we'll be cooking and eating. I'm buying ones that haven't even been planted yet. They're the kind that have to be eaten raw if they're to do any good." "You can't eat raw potatoes," she said, skeptically. "They're not very nice," I agreed, "but cooking would destroy the vital ingredients of these kinds, because they're so delicate." I explained to her, as best I could, that a host of genetic engineers was busy transplanting new genes into all kinds of root vegetables, so that they would incorporate large quantities of special proteins or protein fragments into their edible parts. I told her that the recent arrival in various parts of the world—including Britain—of new disease-causing viruses had forced scientists to work especially hard on new ways of combating those viruses. "The most popular methods, at the moment," I concluded, "are making plantibodies and plantigens." "What's the difference?" she wanted to know. "Antibodies are what our own immune systems produce whenever our bodies are invaded by viruses. Unfortunately, they're often produced too slowly to save us from the worst effects of the diseases, so doctors often try to immunize people in advance, by giving them an injection of something harmless to which the body reacts the same way. Anything that stimulates the production of antibodies is called an antigen. Some scientists are producing plants that produce harmless antigens that can be used to make people's immune systems produce antibodies against the new diseases. Others are trying to cut out the middle by producing the antibodies directly, so that people who've already caught the diseases can be treated before they become seriously ill." "Are antigens like allergens?" Frances asked. She knew a good deal about allergens, because we'd had to explain to her why she could never go out, and why she always had to be so careful even in the house. "Sort of," I said, "but there isn't any way, as yet, of immunizing people against the kind of reaction you have when your throat closes up and you can't breathe." She didn't like to go there, so she said: "Are you buying plantigens or plantibodies, Daddy?" "I'm buying shares in companies that are spending the most money on producing new plantigens," I told her, feeling that I owed her a slightly fuller explanation. "Why?" "Plantigens are easier to produce than plantibodies because they're much simpler," I said. "The protection they provide is sometimes limited, but they're often effective against a whole range of closely related viruses, so they're a better defense against new mutants. The main reason I'm buying plantigens rather than plantibodies, though, has to do with psychological factors." She'd heard me use that phrase before, but she'd never quite gotten to grips with it. I tried hard to explain that although plantibodies were more useful in hospitals when sick people actually arrived there, ordinary people were far more interested in things that might keep them out of hospitals altogether. As the fear of the new diseases became more widespread and more urgent, people would become increasingly willing—perhaps even desperate—to buy large quantities of plantigen-containing potatoes and carrots to eat "just in case." For that reason, I told Frances, the sales of plantigen-producing carrots and potatoes would increase more rapidly than the actual level of threat, and that meant that it made sense to buy shares in the companies that were investing most heavily in plantigen development. "I understand," she said, only a little dubiously. She wanted me to be proud of her. She wanted me to think that she was clever. I was proud of her. I did think she was clever. If she didn't quite understand the origins of the great plantigen panic, that was because nobody really understood it, because nobody really understood what makes some psychological factors so much more powerful than others that they become obsessions. No sooner had I taken the position than it began to put on value. Throughout August and early September I gradually transferred more and more funds from all my accounts into the relevant holdings—and then felt extremely proud of myself when the prices really took off. From the end of September on, the only question anyone in the market was asking was how long the bull run could possibly last—or, more specifically, exactly when would be the best moment to cash the paper profits and get out. From the very beginning, Martha was skeptical about the trend. "It's going to be tulipomania all over again," she said, at the beginning of November. "No, it's not," I told her. "The value of tulips was purely a matter of aesthetic and commercial perception, with no utilitarian component at all. At least some plantigens are genuinely useful, and some of the ones that aren't useful yet will become useful in the future. As each new disease reaches Britain—whether terrorists really are importing them in test tubes or whether the viruses are simply taking advantage of modern population densities to spread from points of natural origin—possession of the right plantigens might well be a matter of life or death for some people." "Well, maybe," she conceded. "But people aren't actually buying them as a matter of rational choice. It's not just shares, is it? There are plantigen collectors out there, for Heaven's sake, and potato theft is becoming as common as car crime." I'd noticed that the items I'd seen on the TV news had begun to lose their initial jokey tone, but I was still inclined to laugh off the lunatic fringe. "It's not funny," Martha insisted. "It was okay when there was still a semblance of medical supervision, but now that it's becoming a hobby fit for idiots the trade is entirely driven by hype and fraud. Every stallholder on the market is trying to talk up his perfectly ordinary carrots and every white van that used to be smuggling cigarettes through the tunnel is busy humping sackloads of King Edwards around. You never get out, so you don't know what it's like on the streets. All you ever see are figures on the screen." "Share prices are just as real as anything else in the world," I said, defensively. "Sure they are—and when they go crazy, everything else goes crazy, too. Soon there won't be a seed potato available that isn't allegedly loaded with antidotes to everything from the common cold to the black death. Have you seen what's happening to the price of the stock on the supermarket shelves, since the local wide boys started selling people do-it-yourself transformation kits? It's ridiculous! I wouldn't care, but ever since the gulf stream was aborted, the ground's as hard as iron from October to April. No one who buys a magic potato now can possibly cash in on his investment until next summer, so it's open season for con men." "That's one of the factors driving the spiral upward," I observed. "The fact that nobody can start planting for another four or five months is making people all the more anxious to have the right stock ready when the moment comes." "But the hyperflu won't wait," she pointed out. "It'll peak in February just like the old flu used to do, and if the rumors are right about human mosaic viruses, they won't mind the cold either, because they can crystallize out. If neurotoxic HMV does break out in London, the most useful weapons we'll have to use against it are imported plantibodies from the places where it's already endemic. Why aren't you buying those by the cartload?" I had to explain to her that putting money into foreign concerns isn't a good idea in a time of war, especially when you don't know who your enemies are. "But we know who our friends are," she objected. "Spain and Portugal, the southern USA, Australia . . . they're all on our side." "Perhaps they are," I said, "but it's precisely the fact that we're still semiattached to the old Commonwealth and the European Federation while maintaining our supposedly special relationship with America that puts us in the firing line for practically every terrorist in the world. Then again, anxiety breeds paranoia, which breeds universal suspicion—how can we be sure that our friends really are our friends? Trust me, love—I know what I'm doing. Whether it's wise money or not, the big money is flooding into the companies that are trying to develop plantigens against the entire spectrum of HMVs, especially the ones that don't exist yet although their gene-maps are allegedly pinned to every terrorist's drawing board. This bubble still has a lot of inflation to do." There's a world of difference, of course, between wives and clients. Martha was worried that I was pumping too much money into a panic that couldn't last forever, but the people whose money I was handling were worried that I wasn't committing enough. Most of my individual clients were the kind of people who didn't even bother to check the closing prices after they finished work in normal times, but the prevailing circumstances changed nine out of every ten of them into the kind of neurotic who programs his cell phone to sing the hallelujah chorus every time a key stock puts on five percent. There is something essentially perverse in human nature that makes people who can see themselves growing richer by the hour worry far more about whether they ought to be growing even richer even faster than they do about the possibility of the trend turning turtle. I'd never been pestered by my clients half as much as I was in January and February of 2130, when every day brought news of hundreds more hyperflu victims and dozens more rumors about the killing potential of so-called HMVs and plethoral hemorrhagic fever. The steadily increasing kill-rate of iatrogenic infections didn't help at all, although there was little evidence as yet of assertive MRSA migrating out of the wards. I weathered the storm patiently, at least until Petra decided that it was time to start a potato collection of her own. "Everyone's doing it," she said, when the true extent of her credit card bills was revealed by a routine consent check. "Not just at the tech, either. The playground at the secondary school's a real shark's nest." "Sharks don't build nests," I said, unable to restrain my natural pedantry. "And that's not the point. You don't know that any of those potatoes has any therapeutic value whatsoever. Even though you've been paying through the nose for them, the overwhelming probability is that they haven't. You're a bright girl— you must know that." "Well, whether they have or they haven't, I could sell them all for half as much again as I paid for them," she said. "So do it!" I told her. "Now!" Even that seemed moderate, given that the profits she was contemplating were entirely the produce of misrepresentation. But there were limits to the extent of any holier-than-thou stance I could convincingly maintain, as she knew very well. "But you of all people," she complained, "should appreciate that if I wait until next week I'll get even more." "You can't guarantee that," I told her. "If you hang on to them for one day—one hour—longer than the bubble takes to burst, all you're left with is debts. Debts that you still have to pay off, even if it takes you years." "I know what I'm doing," she insisted. "I can judge the mood. I thought you'd be proud of me." If it had been tulips, perhaps I would have been, but I'd meant what I'd said to Martha. Come the evil day, some plantigens would make a life-or-death difference to some people. On the other hand, it was surely safe to assume that none of them would come from potatoes traded in a schoolyard, or even in the corridors of a technical college. "If everybody in your class knows you've got them," Martha pointed out, "that makes us a target for burglary. You know now how dangerous that could be, with Frances in the house. You know we have to be extra careful." That was a good tactic. Petra loved her sister, and was remarkably patient about all the precautions she had to take every time she came into the house. The idea of burglars breaking in, dragging who knew what in their wake, wasn't one she could easily tolerate. "Get rid of them, Petra," I told her, seizing the initiative while I could. "If they aren't out of the house by dinnertime, we'll be eating them." "Hypocrite!" she said—but she knew when she was beaten. When Petra had calmed down a little, Martha joined forces with me as we tried to explain that what I was buying and selling were shares in wholly reputable companies with well-staffed research labs, where every single vegetable on site really had had its genes well and truly tweaked, but Petra refused to be impressed. The only thing that stopped her from carrying on the right was that Frances had an attack, as she often did when family quarrels were getting out of hand. Ventolin and antihistamines stopped it short of a dash to the hospital but it was a salutary reminder to us all that if hyperflu ever crossed our threshold, we'd have at least one fatal casualty. As hyperflu's kill-rate increased, so did the rumors. It's never easy to tell "natural" rumors from the ones that are deliberately let loose to ramp prices upward, and there's little point in trying. As soon as they appear on the bulletin boards rumors take on a life of their own, and their progress thereafter is essentially demand-led. No rumor can be effective if people aren't ready to believe it, and if people are hungry to believe something no amount of common sense or authoritative denial will be adequate to kill it. Given that the war itself was a matter of rumor, there was a certain propriety in the fact that rumors of defensive armory were driving the whole economy. Looking back from the safe vantage point of today's peace, it's easy to dismiss the great plantigen panic as a folly of no real significance: a mere matter of fools rushing to be fleeced. But bubbles, however absurd they may seem in retrospect, really do affect the whole economy, as Charles Mackay observed in respect of tu-lipomania in his classic work on Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, published in 1841. "Many persons grow insensibly attached to that which gives them a great deal of trouble, as a mother often loves her sick and ever-ailing child better than her more healthy offspring," says Mackay. "Upon the same principle we must account for the unmerited encomia lavished upon these fragile blossoms. In 1634, the rage among the Dutch to possess them was so great that the ordinary industry of the country was neglected, and the population, even to its lowest dregs, embarked in the tulip trade." So it was in February and March of 2130. It was, I suppose, only natural that the mere hint that a company had developed a plantigen giving infallible protection against hyperflu was adequate to multiply its already inflated share price three- or four-fold. It is less easy to explain why companies that were rumored to have perfected potato-borne immunizations against diseases that were themselves mere rumors should have benefited to an even greater extent. The money to feed these momentary fads had to come from somewhere, and it wasn't only the buyers who risked impoverishment. All kinds of other enterprises vital to the economic health of the nation and continental Europe found themselves starved of capital, and all kinds of biotechnological enterprises with a far greater hope of producing something useful were denuded even of labor, as the salaries available to plantigen engineers soared to unmatchable heights. The advent of the spring thaw was eagerly awaited by everyone, because that was when planting would become possible again and all the potential stored in the nation's potatoes and carrots would be actualized. The process of actualization would, of course, take an entire growing season, but in agriculture as in the stock market anticipation is all; the initiation of movement is more significant, psychologically speaking, than any ultimate result. I knew, therefore, that prices would continue to rise at least until the end of March and probably well into April, but I also knew that I had to be increasingly wary once the vernal equinox was past, lest the mood began to change. Collapses are far more abrupt than escalations; they can happen in minutes. Martha continued to urge me to play safe and get out "now." She had said as much in December, January, and February, and her pleas increased their urgency at exactly the same rate as the value of my holdings. "At least take our money out," she begged me, on the first official day of spring. "Your clients have far more money than we have, and fewer responsibilities; they can afford to gamble. They don't have Frances' home schooling fees or your mobility expenses to deal with, let alone the prospect of huge medical bills if more effective treatments are ever developed for either or both of you." "I can't do that," I told her. "I can't do one thing on behalf of my clients and another on my own behalf. It would be professional suicide to admit that I daren't follow my own advice." "So pull it all out," she said. "I can't do that either," I lamented. "Even if my timing is spot on, I'll still miss the published peak prices. The clients never understand why it's impossible to sell out at the absolute top, and every percentage point below the published peak increases their dissatisfaction. If any of my competitors gets closer than I do, my clients are likely to jump ship. Loyalty counts for something when everything's just bumping along, but it counts for nothing in times as crazy as these. I have to get this right, Martha, or I'll lose at least half my business." I had to compromise in the end, by cashing just enough of everyone's holdings to make certain that nobody could actually lose, but I knew that if I didn't manage to hang on to the rest until the day before the crash, if not the hour before, then those sales records would come back to haunt me. The clients would see every one as an unnecessary loss rather than a prudent protective move. As the last day of March arrived I could see no sign of the boom ending. Every day brought new tales of horrid devices being cooked up in the labs of terrorist-friendly governments and clever countermeasures developed in our own. The pattern established in January was still in place, and the drying of the ground following the big thaw was proceeding on schedule, increasing the anticipatory enthusiasm of professional and amateur planters alike. Everybody knew that prices could not continue to rise indefinitely, but no one had any reason yet to suppose that they would not do so for another month, or a fortnight at least. There was even talk of a "soft landing," or a "leveling off," instead of a collapse. To increase optimism even further, the plantigen manufacturers were beginning to increase the rate at which they released actual products. Forty new strains of potatoes and six new strains of carrots had been released in the month of March, and there was hardly a household in the country that did not place each and every one of them on the menu, even though the great majority of the diseases against which they offered protection had not registered a single case in Europe. I understood that this kind of news was not entirely good, because few of the new strains would generate much in the way of repeat business, and people would realize that when they actually used them. But the short-term psychological effect of the new releases seemed wholly positive. There was no reason at all to expect trouble, and April Fool's Day passed without any substantial incident in spite of the usual crop of preposterous postings. April the second went the same way, but the fact that spring was so abundantly in the air had other consequences for a family like ours. Even now, people think of spring as a time when "nature" begins to bloom, but that's because we like to forget the extent to which nature has been overtaken by artifice—a process which began with the dawn of civilization and has accelerated ever since. The exotic organic compounds to which Frances was so prone to form allergies were not confined to household goods; they were used with even greater profligacy in the fields of the countryside, and with blithe abandon in the gardens of suburbia. I had hoped that 2130 might be one of Frances' better years, on the grounds that few people with land available would be planting ornamental flowers while they still had their pathetic potato collections. Alas, the possession of alleged plantigens actually made more people anxious to prepare their ground as fully as possible, and much of the preparation they did involved the new season's crop of exotic organic compounds. We kept the windows tightly shut, and we controlled Petra's excursions as best we could, but it was all to no avail. On the third of April, at approximately 11:30 a.m., Frances' breathing became severely restricted. Frances was in her own room when the attack began, in attendance at her web-based school. She did nothing wrong. She logged off immediately and called for Martha. Martha responded instantly, and followed the standard procedure to the letter. When it became obvious, at 11:50 or thereabouts, that the ven-tolin and the antihistamines were not inhibiting the closure of her windpipe, and that insufficient oxygen was getting through from the cylinder to our little girl's lungs, Martha dialed 999 and called for an ambulance. She was in constant touch thereafter with the ambulance station, which told her exactly where the ambulance was. The traffic was not unusually heavy, but it was bad, and by noon Martha knew that it would not arrive in time for the last few emergency medical procedures to be carried out by the paramedics. She had already told me what was happening, and I had told her to call me if the situation became critical. She would, of course, have called me anyway, and I would have responded. Strictly speaking, I had no need to leave my computer. Martha had undergone exactly the same training as I had, and the fact that she had legs and I did not made her the person capable of carrying out the procedure with the least difficulty. To say that, however, is to neglect the psychological factors that govern such situations. If I had hesitated, Martha would have carried out the emergency tracheotomy immediately, but I did not hesitate. I could not hestitate in a situation of that kind. I had always taken it for granted that if anyone had to cut my daughter's throat in order to give her a chance to live, it ought to be me. I maneuvered my wheelchair to the side of Frances' bed, took the necessary equipment out of the emergency medical kit that lay open on her bedside table, and proceeded with what needed to be done. Martha could and would have done it, but the psychological factors said that it was my job, if it were humanly possible for me to do it. It was, and I did. The ambulance arrived at 12:37 precisely. The paramedics took over, and Martha accompanied Frances to the hospital. I could not go, because the ambulance was not a model that could take wheelchairs as bulky as mine. I returned to my computer instead, arriving at 12:40. I had been away for no more than forty-five minutes, but I had missed the collapse. Shares in plantigen producers were already in free fall. I had missed the last realistic selling opportunity by sixteen minutes. Would I have been able to grasp that opportunity had I been at my station? 1 am almost certain that I would have been able to bail out at least part of my holdings, but I cannot know for sure. The only thing of which I can be certain is that I missed the chance. I missed the vital twenty minutes before the bubble burst, when all kinds of signs must have become evident that the end was nigh. With the aid of hindsight, it is easy to understand how the collapse happened so quickly, on the basis of a mere rumor. When a rumor's time is ripe, it is unstoppable, even if it is absurd. The rumor that killed off the great plantigen panic was quite absurd, but it had a psychological timeliness that made it irresistible. One of the most widely touted—but as yet undeployed— weapons of the imaginary war was what everyone had grown used to calling "human mosaic virus." There is, in fact, no such thing as a human mosaic virus and there never was. The real and hypothetical entities to which the name had been attached bore only the slightest analogy to the tobacco mosaic virus after which they had been named. Tobacco mosaic virus was not merely a disease but a favorite tool of experimental genetic engineers. Strictly speaking, that had no relevance to neurotoxic HMV or any of its imagined cousins, but the language of rumor is utterly devoid of strictness, and extremely prone to confusion. There is and was such a thing as potato mosaic virus, which also doubled as a disease and a tool of genetic engineering. The rumor which swept the world on the third of April 2130 was that terrorists had developed and deployed a new weapon of plague war, aimed in the first instance not at humans but at potatoes: a virus that would transform benign plantigens into real diseases: HMVs that could and would infect any human beings who ate plantigen-rich potatoes in the hope of protecting themselves. Scientifically, technologically, and epidemiologically speaking it was complete nonsense, but all the psychological factors were in place to make it plausible nonsense—plausible enough, at any rate, to knock the bottom right out of the market in plantigen shares. I wasn't ruined. None of my clients were ruined. Compared to the base from which the bubble had begun six months earlier, we had all made a small profit—considerably more than one could have made in interest had the money been on deposit in a bank. But no one—not even me—was disposed to compare the value of his holdings with their value on last October the first, let alone July the first. Every eye was firmly fixed on the published peak, weeping for lost opportunity. And that, my dear young friends, is what it was really like to be on the home front during the First Plague War. Frances recovered from the allergy attack. She recovered again the following year, and again the year after that. Then new treatments became available, and the necessity of administering emergency tracheotomies evaporated. They were expensive, but we managed in spite of everything to meet the expense. By 2136 she was able to leave the house again, and she went on to attend a real university rather than a virtual one. She was never completely cured of her tendency to form violent allergies to every new organic molecule that made its debut on the stage of domestic technology, but her reactions ceased to be life-threatening. They became an ordinary discomfort, a relatively mild inconvenience. By then, alas, Petra was dead. She was an early casualty, in July 2134, of one of the diseases that the ill-informed still insist on calling HMVs. She died because she was too much a part of the world, far too open to social contacts and influences. Of the four of us, she had always been the most likely casualty of a plague war, because she was the only one of us who thought of her home as a place of confinement. Petra always thought of herself as a free agent, a free spirit, an everyday entrepreneur. We were grief-stricken, of course, because we had always loved her. We miss her still, even after all this time. But if I am honest, I must confess that we would have suffered more had it been Frances that we lost—not because we loved Petra any less, but because Frances always seemed more tightly bound to the nucleus of our little atom of community. Unlike Petra, Frances was never free. Nor am I. Thanks to the march of biotechnology, I have a new pair of legs to replace the ones I lost in 2119. They were costly, but we managed to meet the cost. I still have a loving wife, and a lovely daughter. I have everything I need, and I can go anywhere I want, but I feel less free today than I did on April the second, 2130, because that was the day before the day on which a prison of circumstances formed around me that I have never been able to escape. Although neither my family nor my business was completely ruined by my failure to get out of plantigens in time to avoid the crash, that was the last opportunity I ever had to become seriously rich or seriously successful. The slightly-constrained circumstances in which we three survivors of the First Plague War have lived the rest of our lives always seemed, albeit in a purely theoretical sense, to be both unnecessary and blameworthy. If they were not quite the traditional wages of sin—with the exception of the price paid by poor Petra—they were surely the commission fees of sin. The prison in question is, of course, purely psychological; I have not yet given up the hope of release. In much the same way, I continue stubbornly to hope that we poor and pitiful humans will one day contrive a world in which psychological factors will no longer create cruel chaos where there ought to be moral order. Brian W. Aldiss It's odd to recall that I first flew to the States from England in a turboprop plan That would be in 1965. I was newly married to Margaret, and the first thing we did even before checking into our hotel, was go for a lunch appointment with Don Wollheim. Memory suggests he had Terry Carr with him. Don was then at Ace. He published some of my early novels as Ace Doubles: Vanguard from Alpha and Bow Down to Nul had appeared in 1959 and 1960. He a generous man, chipping in with a contribution to my airfare over. In later years, w used to meet at various conventions. When I heard that Don had left Ace, without knowing anything of the politics involved, I did not realize how DAW Books suddenly prospered, and sent Don a collection of short stories to show support. He published it as DAW Book No. 29— The Book of Brian Aldiss—thus turning a favor I hoped to do Don into one he did m Good old Don, I say . . . —B ABOARD THE BEATITUDE Brian W. Aldiss "It is axiomatic that we who are genetically improved will seek out the Unknown. We will make it Known or we w destroy it. On occasions, we must also destroy the newly Known. This is the Military Morality." —Commander Philosopher Hijenk Skaramonter in Beatitudes for Conquest THE great brute projectile accelerated along its invisible pathway. The universe thr which it sped was itself in rapid movement. Starlight flashed along the flank of the shi moved at such a velocity it could scarcely be detected by the civilizations past which it bla its course—until those civilizations were disintegrated and destroyed by the ship's weapon It built on the destruction. It was now over two thousand miles long, traveling way ab the crawl of light, about to enter eotemporality. Looking down the main corridor running the length of the structure you could see dull lurking at the far end of it. The Doppler effect was by now inbuilt. Aboard the Beatitude bows were traveling faster than the stern. . . . «Much of the ship is now satisfactorily restored. The hardened hydrogen resembles g The renovated living quarters of the ship shine with brilliance. The fretting makes it look an Oriental palace. «In the great space on C Deck, four thousand troops parade every day. Their disciplin excellent in every way. Their marching order round the great extent of the Marchwa flawless. These men retain their fighting fitness. They are ready for any eventuality.» It paused here, then continued. «The automatic cleaners maintain the ship in sparkling order. The great side ports o ship, stretching from Captain's Deck to D Deck, remain brilliant, constantly repolished on exterior against scratches from microdust. It is a continual joy to see the orange blossom fa outside, falling through space, orange and white, with green leaves intertwined. «All hand-weapons have been well-maintained. Target practice takes place on the r every seventh day, with live ammunition. The silencing systems work perfectly. Our arm systems are held in operational readiness. «Also, the engines are working again at one hundred-plus percent. We computers co everything. The atmosphere is breathed over and over again. It could not be better. We e our tasks. «Messing arrangements remain sound, with menus ever changing, as they had been ove first two hundred years of our journey. Men and women enjoy their food; their redesig anatomies see to that. Athletics in the free-fall area ensure that they have good appetites one ever complains. All looked splendidly well. Those dying are later revived. «We are now proceeding at FTL 2.144. Many suffer hallucinations at this velocity. Beatitude is constantly catching up with the retreating enemy galaxy. The weapons destine overwhelm that enemy are kept primed and ready. If we pass within a thousand light-years sun, we routinely destroy it, whether or not it has planets. The sun's elements are then util for fuel. This arrangement has proved highly satisfactory. «In ten watches we shall be moving past system X377 at a proximate distance of light-years. Particular caution needed. Computer SJC1» Ship's Captain Hungaman stood rigid, according to Military Morality, while he waited his four upper echelon personnel to assemble before him. Crew Commander Mabel-Mo H was first, followed closely by Chief Technician Ida Precious. The thin figure Provost-Marshal of Reps and Revs Dido Shappi entered alone. A minute later, A Commander General Barakuta entered, to stand rigidly to attention before the ship's captain "Be easy, people," said Hungaman. As a rep served all parties a formal drink, he said, will discuss the latest summary of the month's progress from Space Journey Control One. have all scanned the communication?" The four nodded in agreement. Chief Technician Precious, clad tightly from neck to fe dark green plastic, spoke. "You observe the power node now produces our maximum po yet, Captain? We progress toward the enemy at 2.144. More acceleration is needed." Hungaman asked, "Latest estimate of when we come within destruction range of en galaxy?" "Fifteen c's approximately. Possibly fourteen point six niner." She handed Hungaman a of paper. "Here is the relevant computation." They stood silent, contemplating the prospect of fifteen more centuries of pur Everything spoken was recorded by SJC2. The constant atmosphere control was lik whispered conversation overheard. Provost-Marshal Shappi spoke. His resemblance to a rat was increased by his s bristling mustache. "Reps and revs numbers reduced again since last mensis, due to po node replacement." "Figures?" "Replicants, 799. Revenants, 625." The figures were instantly rewired at SJC1 for counter-checking. Hungaman eyed Crew Commander Hole. She responded instantly. "Sixteen de para-osteoporosi-pneu. Fifteen undergoing revenant operations. One destroyed, as unfi further retread treatment." A nod from Hungaman, who turned his paranoid-type gaze on the member of the quartet had yet to speak, General Barakuta. Barakuta's stiff figure stood like a memorial to himself. "Morale continuing to decline," the general reported. "We require urgently more challe for the men. We have no mountains or even hills on the Beatitude. I strongly suggest the again be enlarged to contain at least five fair-sized hills, in order that army operation conducted with renewed energy." Precious spoke. "Such a project would require an intake of 10 6 mettons new material ab ship." Barakuta answered. "There is this black hole 8875, only three thousand LY a Dismantle that, bring constituent elements on board. No problem." "I'll think about it," said Hungaman. "We have to meet the challenges of the centu ahead." "You are not pleased by my suggestion?" Barakuta again. "Military Morality must alway come first. Thank you." They raised ceremonial flasks. All drank in one gulp. The audience was ended. Barakuta went away and consulted his private comp, unaligned with the ship's compu He drew up some psycho-parameters on Ship's Captain Hungaman's state of mind. parameters showed ego levels still in decline over several menses. Indications were Hungaman would not initiate required intake of black hole material for construction Barakuta's proposed five hills. Something else would need to be done to energize the armies. Once the audience was concluded, Hungaman took a walk to his private quarters to sho himself. As the walkway carried him down his private corridor, lights overhead preceded like faithful hounds, to die behind him like extinguished civilizations. He clutched a sli paper without even glancing at it. That had to wait until he was blush-dried and garbed clean robe. In his relaxation room, Barnell, Hungaman's revenant servant, was busy doing the clean Here was someone with whom he could be friendly and informal. He greeted the man what warmth he could muster. Barnell's skin was gray and mottled. In his pale face, his mouth hung loosely; yet his burned as if lit by an internal fire. He was one of the twice-dead. He said, "I see from your bunk you have slept well. That's good, my captain. Last nig believe I had a dream. Revs are supposed not to dream, but I believe I dreamed that I was dreaming. It is curious and unscientific. I like a thing to be scientific." "We live scientific lives here, Barnell." Hungaman was not attending to the conversa He was glancing at his standalone, on the screen of which floated the symbols miqoesiy. was a puzzle he had yet to solve—together with many others. With a sigh, he turned his attention back to the rev. "Scientific? Yes, of course, my captain. But in this dream I was very uncomfortable bec I dreamed I was not dreaming. There was nothing. Only me, hanging on a hook. How can dream of nothing? it's funny, isn't it?" "Yes, it's very funny," agreed Hungaman. Barnell told him the same story once a me Memories of revs were notoriously short. He patted Barnell's shoulder, feeling compassion for him, before returning down the pri corridor to the great public compartment still referred to as "the bridge." Hungaman turned his back to the nearest scanner and reread the words on the slip of p Ida Precious had given him. His eye contact summoned whispered words: "The SJC1 malfunction mode. Why does its report say it is seeing orange blossom drifting in space? is no one else remarking on it? Urgent investigation needed." He stared down at the slip. It trembled in his hand, a silver fish trying to escape back int native ocean. "Swim away!" He released his grasp on the fish. It swam across to the port, sw through it, swam away into space. Hungaman hurried to the port; it filled the curved wall looked out at the glorious orange blossom, falling slowly past, falling down forever, tryin figure out what was strange about it. But those letters, miqoesiy—they might be numbers . . . q might be 9, y might be 7. Sup e was = . . . Forget it. He was going mad. He spread wide his arms to press the palms of his hands against the parency. It was war the touch. He glared out at the untouchable. Among the orange blossom were little blue birds, flitting back and forth. He heard chirruping, or thought he did. One of the birds flew out and through the impermeable parenc fluttered about in the distant reaches of the control room. Its cry suggested it was sa "Attend!" over and over. "Attend! Attend! Attend!" They were traveling in the direction of an undiscovered solar system, coded as X37 was only 210 LYs distant. A main sequence sun was orbited by five planets, of w spectroscopic evidence indicated highpop life on two of its planets. Hungaman set oblitera time for when the next watch's game of Bullball was being played. Protesters had been ac previously, demonstrating against the obliteration of suns and planets in the Beatitude's Despite the arrests then made, there remained a possibility that more trouble might break but not when Bull-ball championships were playing. This watch, Fugitives were playing the champions of F League, Flying Flagellants. Be 27 and the start of play, Hungaman took his place in the Upper Echelon tier. He nod remotely to other Uppers, otherwise keeping himself to himself. The dizziness was afflic him again. General Barakuta was sitting only a few seats away, accompanied by an all-br woman, whether rep or real Hungaman could not tell at this distance. The horn blew, the game started, although the general continued to pay more attention to lady than to the field. In F League, each side consisted of forty players. Numbers increased as leagues clim toward J. Gravdims under the field enabled players to make astonishing leaps. They pl with two large heavy balls. What made the game really exciting—what gave Bullbal popular name of Scoring 'n' Goring—was the presence of four wild bulls, which cha randomly round the field of play, attacking any player who got in their way. The great terrif pitiable bulls, long of horn, destined never to evolve beyond their bovine fury. Because of this element of danger, by which dying players were regularly dragged of field, the participants comprised, in the main, revs and reps. Occasionally, however, li took part. One such current hero of Bullball was fair-haired Surtees Slick, a brute of a who had never as yet lost a life, who played half-naked for the FlyFlajs, spurning customary body armor. With a massive leap into the air, Slick had one of the balls now—the blue high-scorer— was away down the field in gigantic hops. His mane of yellow hair fluttered behind his m shoulders. The crowd roared his name. "Surtees . . . Surtees . . ." Two Fugs were about to batter him in midair when Slick took a dip and legged it acros green plastic. A gigantic black bull known as Bronco charged at him. Without hesitation, S flung the heavy ball straight at the bull. The ball struck the animal full on the skull. Crunc impact echoed through the great arena (amplified admittedly by the mitters fixed between brute's horns). Scooping up the ball, which rebounded, Slick was away, leaping across the bull's toward the distant enemy goal. He swiped away two Fug revs who flung themselves at him plunged on. The goalkeeper was ahead, rushing out like a spider from its lair. Goalkee alone were allowed to be armed on the field. He drew his dazer and fired at the yellow-ha hero. But Slick knew the trick. That was what the crowd was shouting: "Slick knows the tri He dodged the stun and lobbed the great ball overarm. The ball flew shrieking toward the g It vanished. The two teams, the Fugitives and the Flagellants, also vanished. The b vanished. The entire field became instantly empty. The echo of the great roar died away. "Surtees . . . Surtees . . . Sur . . ." Then silence. Deep dead durable silence. Nothing. Only the eternal whispered conversation of air vents overhead. Hungaman stood up in his astonishment. He could not comprehend what had happe Looking about him, he found the vast company of onlookers motionless. By some uncanny of time, all were frozen; without movement they remained, not dead, not alive. Only Hungaman was there, conscious, and isolated by his consciousness. His jaw open. Saliva dripped down his chin. He was frightened. He felt the blood leave his face, felt tremors seize his entire frame. Something had broken down. Was it reality or was it purely a glitch, a seizure of perception? Gathering his wits, he attempted to address the crew through his bodicom. The air dead. He made his way unsteadily from the Upper Echelon. He had reached the ground floor w he heard a voice calling hugely, "Hungaman! Hungaman!" "Yes, I'm here." He ran through the tunnel to the fringes of the playing field. The air was filled with a strange whirring. A gigantic bird of prey was descending on its claws outstretched. Its apose-matic wings were spread wide, as wide as the field it Looking up in shock, Hungaman saw how fanciful the wings were, fretted at the ed iridescent, bright as a butterfly's wings and as gentle. His emotions seemed themselves almost iridescent, as they faded from fear to joy. He l his arms to welcome the creature. It floated down slowly, shrinking as it came. "A decently iridescent descent!" babbled Hungaman, he thought. He felt his life changing, even as the bird changed, even as he perceived it was nothing an old tattered man in a brightly colored cloak. This tattered man looked flustered, as he might have done. He brushed his lank hair from his eyes to reveal a little solemn brown like a nut, in which were two deeply implanted blue eyes. The eyes seemed to have a glin humor about them. "No, I said that," he said, with a hint of chuckle. "Not you." He put his hands on his hips and surveyed Hungaman, just as Hungaman surveyed him. man was a perfect imitation of human—in all but conviction. "Other life-forms, gone forever," he said. "Don't you feel bad about that? Guilty? You this criminal ship? Isn't something lost forever—and little gained?" Hungaman found his voice. "Are you responsible for the clearing of the Bullball game?" "Are you responsible for the destruction of an ancient culture, established on two planet close on a million years?" He did not say the word "years," but that was how Hungaman understood it. All he c manage by way of return was a kind of gurgle. "Two planets?" "The Slipsoid system? They were 210 LYs distant from this ship—offering no threat to passage. Our two planets were connected by quantaspace. It forms a bridge. You destruc peo- ple know nothing of quantaspace. You are tied to the material world. It is by quantas that I have arrived here." He threw off his cloak. It faded and was gone like an old leaf. Hungaman tried to sneer. "Across 210 LYs?" "We would have said ten meters." Again, it was not the word "meters" he said, but that was how Hungaman understood it. "The cultures of our two Slipsoid planets were like the two hemispheres of your bra perceive, thinking in harmony but differently. Much like yours, as I suppose, but o magnificently grander scale. . . . "Believe me, the human brain is, universally speaking, as obsolete as silicon-b semiconductors . . ." "So . . . you . . . came . . . here . . ." "Hungaman, there is nothing but thinking makes it so. The solid universe in which believe you live is generated by your perceptions. That is why you are so troubled. You through the deception, yet you refuse to see through the deception." Hungaman was recovering from his astonishment. Although disconcerted at the su appearance of this pretense of humanity, he was reassured by a low rumbling throughou ship: particles from the destroyed worlds were being loaded on board, into the caver holds. "I am not troubled. I am in command here. I ordered the extinction of your Slipsoid sys and we have extinguished it, have we not? Leave me alone." "But you are troubled. What about the orange blossom and the little blue bird? Are th part of your reality?" "I don't know what you mean. What orange blossom?" "There is some hope for you. Spiritually, I mean. Because you are troubled." "I'm not troubled." He squared his shoulders to show he meant what he said. 'You have just destroyed a myriad lives and yet you are not troubled?" Inhuman conte sounded. "Not a little bit?" Hungaman clicked his fingers and began to walk back the way he had come. "Let's dis these matters, shall we? I am always Prepared to listen." The little man followed meekly into the tunnel. At a certain point, Hungaman mo fast and pressed a button in the tiled wall. Metal bars came flashing down. The little man fo himself trapped in a cage. It was the way Barakuta's police dealt with troublemakers on the Bullball ground. "Excellent," said Hungaman, turning to face the intruder. "Now, I want no more conju tricks from you. Tell me your name first of all." Meekly, the little man said, "You can call me Manifold." Manifold was standing behind a leather-bound armchair in a black gown. Hungaman wa the other side of a desk, the top of which held nothing but an inset screen. He found he sitting down on a hard chair. A ginger-and-white cat jumped onto his lap. How the scene changed so suddenly was beyond his comprehension. "But—but how—" The little man ignored Hungaman's stutter. "Are you happy aboard your ship?" Manifold asked. Hungaman answered up frankly and easily, to his own surprise: it was as if he was gla find that metal bars were of no account. "I am not entirely happy with the personnel. Le give you an example. You realize, of course, that we have been making this journey for s centuries. It would be impossible, of course, without AL—aided longevity. Nevertheles has been a long while. The enemy galaxy is retreating through the expanding universe. The is deteriorating rapidly. At our velocities, it is subject to strain. It has constantly to be reb Fortunately, we have invented XHX, hardened hydrogen, with which to refurbish our inter The hull is wearing thin. I think that accounts for the blue bird which got in." As he spoke, he was absentmindedly stroking the cat. The cat lay still but did not purr. "I was consulting with Provost-Marshal Shappi about which revs and reps to use in Bullball match, which I take it you interupted, when a rating entered my office unannounc ordered him to wait in the passage. 'Ah,' he said, 'the passage of time.' It was impertine answer back like that. It would not have happened a decade ago." The little man leaned forward, resting his elbows on his thighs and clasping his h together. Smiling, he said, "You're an uneasy man, I can see. Not a happy man. The cat doe purr for you. This voyage is just a misery to you." "Listen to me," said Hungaman, leaning forward, unconsciously copying the older m attitude. "You may be the figment of a great civilization, now happily defunct, but what have to say about me means nothing." He went on to inform his antagonist that even now tractor beams were hauling stuff into of the insulated holds, raw hot stuff at a few thousand degrees, mesons, protons, corpus wave particles—a great trail of material smaller than dust, all of which the Beatitude w use for fuel or building material. And those whirling particles were all that was le Manifold's million-year-old civilization. "So much for your million-year-old civilization. Time it was scrapped." "You're proud of this?" shrieked Manifold. "In our wake, we have destroyed a hundred so-called civilizations. They died, t civilizations, to power our passage, to drive us ever onward. We shall not be defeated. N don't regret a damned thing. We are what humanity is made of." Oratory had hold of him. " very ship, this worldlet, is—what was that term in use in the old Christian Era?—yes, i cathedral to the human spirit. We are still young, but we are going to succeed, and the opposition to us there is, the better." His violent gesture disturbed the cat, which sprang from his lap and disappeared. Its im remained suspended in midair, growing fainter until it was gone. "Mankind is as big as the universe. Sure, I'm not too happy with the way things are ab this ship, but I don't give a tinker's cuss for anything outside our hull." He gave an illustrative glance through the port as he spoke. Strangely, the Bullball g was continuing. A gored body was being elevated from the trampled field, trailing blood. crowd loved it. 'As for your Slipsoid powers—what do I care for them? I can nave you disintegrated minute I feel like it. That's the plain truth. Do you have the power to read my mind?" 'You don't have that kind of mind. You're an alien life-form. It's a blank piece of pap me." "If you could read it, you would see how I feel about you. Now. What are you going to d For response, the little man began to disintegrate, shedding his pretense of humanity soon as the transformation began, Hungaman pressed a stud under the flange of the des would summon General Barakuta with firepower. Manifold almost instantaneously ceased to exist. In his place a mouth, a tunnel, formed, which poured—well, maybe it was a tunnel mouth for this strange concept, quantasp —from which poured, poured—Hungaman could not grasp it . . . poured what?—solid mu . . . wave particles? . . . pellets of zero substance? . . . Whatever the invasive phenomenon it was filling up the compartment, burying Hungaman, terrified and struggling, and bursting on, into the rest of the giant vessel, choking its arteries, rushing like poison through a v Alarms were sounding, fire doors closing, conflagration crews running. And pe screaming—screaming in sheer disgusted horror at this terrible irresistible unkn overcoming them. Nothing stopped it, nothing impeded it. Within a hundred heartbeats, the entire speeding Beatitude worldlet was filled compl with the consuming dust. Blackness. Brownness. Repletion. Nonexistence. Hungaman sat at his desk in his comfortable office. From his windows—such was status, his office had two windows—he looked out on the neat artificial lawns of acade surrounded by tall everlasting trees. He had become accustomed to the feeling of being aliv He was talking to his brainfinger, a medium-sized rep covered in a fuzzy golden fur, thr which two large doggy eyes peered sympathetically at his patient. Hungaman was totally relaxed as he talked. He had his feet up on the desk, his hands be his neck, fingers locked together: the picture of a man at his ease, perfect if old-fashioned knew all about reps. "My researches were getting nowhere. Maybe I was on the verge of an NB—you kno nervous breakdown. Who cares? That's maybe why I imagined I saw the orange blossom falling by the ports. On reflec they were not oranges but planets." "You are now saying it was not blossom but the actual fruits, the oranges?" asked brainfinger. "They were what I say they were. The oranges were bursting—exploding. T weren't oranges so much as worlds, whole planets, dropping down into oblivion, m meeting themselves coming up." He laughed. "The universe as orchard. I was excited becau knew that for once I had seen through reality. I remembered what that old Greek man, Socr had said, that once we were cured of reality we could ourselves become real. It's a wa saying that life is a lie." "You know it is absurd to say that, darling. Only a madman would claim that ther something unreal about reality. Nobody would believe such sophistry." "Yes, but remember—the majority is always wrong!" "Who said that?" "Tom Lehrer? Adolf Hitler? Mark Twain? Einstein McBeil? Socrates?" "You've got Socrates on the brain, Hungaman, darling. Forget Socrates! We live well-organized military society, where such slogans as 'The majority is always wrong branded subversive. If I reported you, all this—" he gestured about him, "—w disappear." "But I have always felt I understood reality-perception better than other people. As know, I studied it for almost a century, got a degree in it. Even the most solid objects, ch walls, rooms, lives—they are merely outward forms. It is a disconcerting concept, but be it lies truth and beauty. "That is what faster-than-light means, incidentally. It has nothing to do with that other Greek philosopher, Einstein: it's to do with people seeing through appearances. We nowa interpret speeding simply as an invariant of stationary, with acceleration as a moderator. just need a captain with vision. "I was getting nowhere until I realized that an oil painting of my father, for instance, was really an oil painting of my rather but just a piece of stretched canvas with a venee variously colored oils. Father himself—again, problematic. I was born unilaterally." The brainfinger asked, "Is that why you have become, at least in your imagination, the fa of the crew of the Beatitude!" Hungaman removed his feet from the desk and sat up rigidly. "The crew have disappea You imagine I'm happy about that? No, it's a pain, a real pain." The brainfinger began to look extra fuzzy. "Your hypothesis does not allow for pain being real. Or else you are talking nonsense. the captain of a great weapon-vessel such as the Beatitude you are emotionally unstable." Hungaman leaned forward and pointed a finger, with indications of shrewdness, an conceivable pun, at the brainfinger. "Are you ordering me to return to Earth, to call off our entire mission, to let the en galaxy get away? Are you trying to relieve me of my command?" The brainfinger said, comfortingly, "You realize that at the extra-normal velocities at w you are traveling, you have basically quit the quote real world unquote, and hallucinations the natural result. We brainfingers have a label for it: TPD, tachyon perception displacem Ordinary human senses are not equipped for such transcendental speeds, is all . . ." Hungaman thought before speaking. "There's always this problem with experience. It not entirely coincide with consciousness. Of course you are right about extra-normal veloc and hallucination. . . . Would you say wordplay is a mark of madness—or near-madness?" "Why ask me that?" "I have to speak to my clonther shortly. I need to check something with him. His na Twohunga. I'm fond of him, but since he has been in Heliopause HQ, his diction has bec strange. It makes me nervous." The brainfinger emitted something like a sigh. He felt that Hungaman had changed subject for hidden motives. He spoke gently, almost on tiptoe. "I shall leave you alone to conquer your insecurity. consciences are always troublesome. Get back on the bridge. Good evening. I will see again tomorrow. Have a nice night." It rose and walked toward the door, narrowly mis readjusted, and disappeared. "Bad conscience! What an idiot!" Hungaman said to himself. "I'm afraid of someth that's the trouble. And I can't figure out what I'm afraid of." He laughed. He twiddled thumbs at great speed. The Beatitude had attained a velocity at which it broke free from spatial dimensions. It now traveling through a realm of latent temporalities. Computer SJC1 alone could scan sp derivatives, as the ship-projectile it governed headed after the enemy galaxy. The Beati had to contend with racing tachyons and other particles of frantic mobility. The tachyons w distinct from light. Light did not enter the region of latent temporalities. Here were eotemporal processes, the beginnings and endings of which could not be distinguished from another. The SJC1 maintained ship velocities, irrespective of the eotemporal world outside, o sufferings of the biotemporal world within. Later, after a snort, Hungaman went to the top of the academy building and peered thr the telescope. There in the cloudless sky, hanging to the northwest, was the hated enigm word—if indeed it was a word— hiseobiw . . . Hiseobiw, smudgily written in space f Perhaps it was a formula of some kind. Read upside down, it spelt miqoesiy. This dirty m in space had puzzled and infuriated military intelligentsia for centuries. Hungaman was working on the problem, on and off. This was what the enemy galaxy had created, why it had become the enemy. How h managed this bizarre stellar inscription? And why? Was miqoesiy aimed at the Solar sys What did it spell? What could it mean? Was it intended to help or to deter? Was it a mes from some dyslexic galactic god? Or was it, as a joker had suggested, a commercial for a of socks? No one had yet determined the nature of this affront to cos-mology. It was for this re that, long ago, the Beatitude had been launched to chastise the enemy galaxy and, if possible, decipher the meanin hiseobiw or miqoesiy. A clenched human fist was raised from the roof of the academic building to the damned thing. Then its owner went inside again. Hungaman spoke into his voxputer. "Beauty of mental illness. Entanglements of words appearances, a maze through which we try to swim. I believe I'm getting through to the mea of this enigmatic sign. . . . "Yep, that does frighten me. Like being on a foreign planet. A journey into the astou Self, where truth lies and lies are truth. Thank god the hull of our spacevessel is impermeable. It represents the ego, the eggnog. These bluebirds are messengers, bringin hope from the world outside. TPD—must remember that!" Hungaman, as he had told the brainfinger to little effect, had a clonther, a clone-brothe the name of Twohunga. Twohunga had done well, ascending the military ranks, until Steel-Major Twohunga—he was appointed to the WWW, the World Weaponry Watch Charon, coplanet of Pluto. So Hungaman put through a call to the Heliopause HQ. "Steel-Major here . . . haven't heard from you for thirty-two years, Hungaman. Yes, m thirty-two. Maybe only thirty-one. How's your promotion?" "The same. You still living with that Plutottie?" "I disposed of her." The face in the globe was dark and stormy, the plastic mitter ban across its forehead. "I have a rep—a womanroid—for my satisfactions now. What you m call satisfactions. Where are you, precisely? Still on the Beatitude, I guess? Not that t precise in any way . . ." He spoke jerkily and remotely, as if his voice had been prerecorde a machine afflicted by hiccups. "I'm none too sure. Or if I am sure, I am dead. Maybe I am a rev," said Hungaman, wit giving his answer a great deal of thought. "It seems I am having an episode. It's to do with extreme velocity, a velocillusion . . . We're traversing the eotem-poral, you know." clutched his head as he spoke, while a part of him said tauntingly to himself, You're hammi up. . . . "Brainfinger. Speak to a brainfinger, Hungaman," Twohunga advised. "I did. They are no help." "They never are. Never." "It may have been part of my episode. Listen, Twohunga, Heli-pause HQ still main contact with the Beatitude. Can you tell me if the ship is still on course, or has it subjugated by life-forms from the Slipsoid system which have invaded the ship?" "System? What system? The Slipsoid system?" "Yes. X377. We disintegrated it for fuel as we passed." "So you did. Mm, so you did. So you did, indeed. Yes, you surely disintegrated it." "Will you stop talking like that!" Twohunga stood up, to walk back and forth, three paces one way, swivel on heel, t paces the other way, swivel on heel, in imitation of a man with an important announceme mind. He said, "I know you keep ship's time on the Beatitude, as if the ship has a time a eotemporality, but here in Sol system we are coming up for Year One Million, think of it, all the attendant celebrations. Yep, Year One Million, count them. Got to celebrate. W planning to nuclearize Neptune, nuclearize it, to let a little light into the circumference o system. Things have changed. One Million . . . Yes, things have changed. They certainly h They certainly are . . ." "I asked you if we on shipboard have been subjugated by the aliens." "Well, that's where you are wrong, you see. The wrong question. Entirely up the sp Technology has improved out of all recognition since your launch date. All recognition Look at this." The globe exploded into a family of lines, some running straight, some slightly crooked, like a human family. As they went, they spawned mathematical symbols, not all of familiar to Hungaman. They originated at one point in the bowl and ricocheted to another. Twohunga said, voice-over, "We used to call them 'black holes,' remember? That before we domesticated them. Black holes, huh! They are densers now. Densers, okay? We propel them through hyperspace. They go like spit on a hot stove. Pro-pelled. They serv weaponry, these densers, okay? Within about the next decade, the next decade, we shal able to hurl them at the enemy galaxy and destroy it. Destroy the whole thing . . ." gave something that passed for a chuckle. "Then we shall see about their confounded hiseo or whatever it is." Hungaman was horrified. He saw at once that this technological advance, with densers as weapons, rendered the extended voyage of the Beatitude obsolete. Long before the could reach the enemy galaxy—always supposing that command of the ship was regained the Slipsoid invader—the densers would have destroyed their target. "This is very bad news," he said, almost to himself. "Very bad news indeed." "Bad news? Bad news? Not for humanity," said Twohunga sharply. "Oh, no! We shal away with this curse in the sky for good and all." "It's all very well for you to say that, safe at Heliopause HQ. What about those of us on Beatitude—if any of us are there anymore . . . ?" Twohunga began to pace again, this time taking four paces to the left, swivel on heel, paces to the right, swivel on heel. He explained, not without a certain malice, that it was not technology alone which advanced. Ethics had also taken a step forward. Quite a large step, he said. He emitted a of laughter. A considerably large step. He paused, looking over his shoulder at his clonthe away. It was now considered, he stated, not at all correct to destroy an entire cultured p without any questions asked. In fact, to be honest, and frankness undoubtedly was the best policy, destroying any p on which there was sentient life was now ruled to be a criminal act. Such as destroying ancient Slipsoid dual-planet culture, for instance. . . . As Captain of the Beatitude, therefore, Hungaman was a wanted criminal and, were caught, would be up for trial before the TDC, the Transplanetary Destruction Cr tribunal. "What nonsense is this you are telling—" Hungaman began. "Nonsense you may call it, but that's the law. No nonsense, no! Oh, no. Cold fact! Cu destruction, criminal act. It's you, Hungaman, you!" In a chill voice, Hungaman asked, "And what of Military Morality?" "What of Military—'What of Military Morality?' he asks. Military Morality! It's a thin the past, the long long past! Pah! A criminal creed, criminal . . . We're living in a new—In I should not be talking to a known genocidal maniac at all, no, not a word, in case it make an accessory after the fact." He broke the connection. Hungaman fell to the floor and chewed the leg of his chair. It was tough but not unpalatable. "It's bound to be good for him," said a voice. "They were an omnivorous species," said a second voice in agreement—though speaking in speech exactly. Seeing was difficult. Although it was light, the light was of an uncomfortable wavelen Hungaman seemed to be lying down, with his torso propped up, enabling him to eat. Whatever it was he was eating, it gave him strength. Now he could see, although wha could see was hard to make out. By what he took to be his bedside two rubbery cylinders w standing, or perhaps floating. He was in a room with no corners or windows. The illumina came from a globular object which drifted about the room, although the light it proje remained steady. "Where am I?" he asked. The two cylinders wobbled and parts of them changed color. "There you are, you Typical question, 'Where am I?' Always the emphasis on the Self. I, I, I. Very typical human species. Probably to be blamed on the way in which they reproduce. It's a bise species, you know." "Yes, I know. Fatherhood, motherhood . . . I shall never understand it. Reproduction fission is so much more efficient—the key to immortality indeed." They exchanged warm colors. "Quite. And the intense pleasure, the joy, of fission itself . . ." "Look, you two, would you mind telling me where I am. I have other questions I can ask that one first." He felt the nutrients flowing through his body, altering his constitution. "You're on the Beatitude, of course." Despite his anxiety, he found he was enjoying their color changes. The colors wer various. After a while he discovered he was listening to the colors. It must, he though something he ate. Over the days that followed, Hungaman came slowly to understand his situation. The a answered his questions readily enough, although he realized there was one question in his m he was unable to ask or even locate. They escorted him about the ship. He was becoming more cylindrical, although he had y learn to float. The ship was empty with one exception: a Bullball game was in progress stood amazed to see the players still running, the big black bulls still charging among them his astonishment, he saw Surtees Slick again, running like fury with the heavy blue ball yellow hair flowing. The view was less clear than it had been. Hungaman fastened his attention on the bulls. their head-down shortsighted stupidity, they rushed at individual players as if, flustered their erratic movements, the bulls believed a death, a stillness, would resolve some mystery of life they could never formulate. Astonished, Hungaman turned to his companions. "It's for you," they said, coloring in a smile. "Don't worry, it's not real, just a simula That sort of thing is over and done with now, as obsolete as a silicon-based semiconductor "To be honest, I'm not sure yet if you are real and not simulations. You are Slipsoids, a you? I imagined we had destroyed you. Or did I only imagine I imagined we had destro you?" But no. After their mitochondria had filled the ship, they assured him, they were ab reestablish themselves, since their material was contained aboard the Beatitude. They cannibalized the living human protoplasm, sparing only Hungaman, the captain. It was then a comparatively simple matter to redesign quanta-space and rebuild their and the two linked planets. They had long ago mastered all that technology had to offer. An here they were, and all was right with the world, they said, in flickering tones of purple a kind of mauve. "But we are preserving you on the ship," they said. He asked a new variant of his old question. "And where exactly are we and the Beati now?" "Velocity killed. Out of the eotemporal." They told him, in their colors, that the great ship was in orbit about the twin plane Slipsoid, "forming a new satellite." He was silent for a long while, digesting this information, glad but sorry, sorry but g Finally, he said—and now he was rapidly learning to talk in color—"I have suffered much brain has been under great pressure. But I have also learned much. I thank you for your h and for preserving me. Since I cannot return to Earth, I hope to be of service to you." Their dazzling bursts of color told Hungaman they were gazing affectionately at him. T said there was one question they longed to ask him, regarding a matter which had worried for many centuries. "What's the question? You know I will help if I can." There was some hesitation before they colored their question. "What is the meaning of this hiseobiw we see in our night sky?" "Oh, yes, that! Let me explain," said Hungaman. He explained that the so-called letters of hiseobiw, or preferably miqoesiy, were not le but symbols of an arcane mathematics. It was an equation, more clearly written—for the s fires had drifted—as They colored, "Meaning?" "We'll have to work it out between us," Hungaman colored back. "But I'm pretty su contains a formula that will clear brains of phylogenetically archaic functions. Thereby, it when applied, change all life in the universe." "Then maybe we should leave it alone." "No," he said. "We must solve it. That's human nature." Ron Goulart Since Don Wollheim was one of the people who got me hooked on science fiction in the first place, it seemed only fair that he eventually bought some twenty of my books in the genre, the majority of them for DAW. Back in 1947, by way of a junior high book club, I acquired a copy of The Pocket Book of Science-Fiction, edited by Donald A. Wollheim. This was the first time I'd encountered the work of such writers as Heinlein, Sturgeon, John Collier, and Stanley Weinbaum. Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey helped plant the idea that there was a place for humorists in science fiction. About a year later, I discovered Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader and I bought every issue from then on. I first met Don Wollheim in the middle Sixties, when he was visiting San Francisco and addressed a group I belonged to. Later in the decade, when my wife and I had relocated in the East, I encountered him again at Ace. I'd gone up there to pitch something to Terry Carr and he reintroduced me to Don. In a fairly short time I sold a book to Don (The Fire Eater) and one to Terry (After Things Fell Apart). That sale to Don Wollheim caused me to part company with my then agents. A sedate and conservative outfit, they didn't want me to taint my reputation by writing directly for paperbacks. When Don left Ace to start DAW, I sent him pitches there. Between 1972 and 1983, I sold him sixteen novels and a short story collection. Like my father, Don Wollheim never turned my head with enthusiastic Praise. I'd send him a proposal—usually three chapters and an outline— and in a few weeks he'd send a note. Usually he'd say something like, This is okay. Contract follows." For a freelancer that was better than effusive words of encouragement. The only thing Wollheim ever changed was some of my titles—Naps became When The Waker Sleeps and Slow Virus was converted to Upside Downside, etc. But he seldom changed a word of any of the novels and he allowed me to be as funny as I wanted. He even mentioned in the cover blurbs that the novels were humorous. Outside of larger advances, who could ask for anything more? — ODD JOB #213 Ron Goulart THEIR new client arrived in a small neometal carrying case. Jake Pace had been in the large kitchen of their Redding Sector, Connecticut estate dictating a recipe for vegan curry to the database of the botstove. His wife Hildy was loafing in the solarium, idly playing new Goldberg Variations on the banjo. The voxbox of the secsystem said, "Visitors." "Be right back," Jake told the stove. "I can carry on without you, sir," offered the stove. "Not unless you wish to cease to be." A long, lanky man in his middle thirties, Jake went hurrying into the main living room. Hildy, long-legged and auburn-haired, was already at one of the high, wide viewindows. Her electronic banjo dangled from her left hand. "It's merely John J. Pilgrim," she informed her approaching husband. Out on the realgrass back acre a venerable skycar was in the process of executing a wobbly landing. "That souse," muttered Jake. "John J. quit drinking over a year ago," Hildy reminded, leaning her banjo against a plazchair. "In the spring of 2032. He hasn't had a drink since." "His previous lifetime of boozing has permanently affected him," observed Jake. "His sense of balance is shot for good and his sense of decorum is worse than it—" "He's a brilliant attorney." Hildy watched the small rumpled lawyer come scrambling out of the landed blue skycar. "And, keep in mind, Jake, that he's brought Odd Jobs, Inc. some very lucrative cases." We are, and I say this with all modesty and humility, one of the best private investigating outfits in the land," her husband mentioned. "Therefore, in point of fact, we really don't need a rumdum—an erstwhile rumdum shyster to hustle up jobs for us." "What's that John J. brought along?" Pilgrim had tugged a small silvery carrying case out of the rear of the battered skycar. He was squatting now on the grass, seemingly arguing with the neometal box. "In the old days it would've been a suitcase full of plazflasks of Chateau Discount fortified wine," said Jake. The silvery case did a backflip, somersaulting on the sward. "You'd best go out and escort him in," suggested Hildy. "He appears to be having a squabble with his carrying case." "... and won the plaudits of all fourteen judges of the Supreme Court, including the two androids, I'll have you know," the rumpled little attorney was hollering as Jake came loping up. "So, buster, I can sure as hell sum up your case so an overrated gumshoe like Jake Pace can comprehend it. You're, in my opinion, an extremely arrogant tin-plated piece of—" "Special alloy, dopey, not tin," corrected a high-pitched little; voice from within the carrying case. "And, keep in mind, that it; is I who hired you to represent me. Therefore, I retain the privi-lege of instructing you, dimbulb, and—" "You taking up ventriloquism, John?" inquired Jake, halting; nearby. "You're looking extremely gaunt, Jake," observed the attor-ney, standing up. "Something fatal eating away at you, perhaps?" "No such luck." Jake grinned one of his bleaker grins. "What's in the carrying case?" "A fiendish device." Very gingerly, Pilgrim reached out and, after hesitating for a few seconds, grabbed the handle of the neo-metal case. "Were I better able to avoid the temptation of sub-stantial fees, I'd never have hired out to the enclosed gadget nor agreed to ferry it here to consult you and the fair Hildy." "Hey, halfwit," complained the voice in the case, "I'm not an it. I'm a male, so refer to me as 'he' henceforth." Frowning, Jake took a look through the grilled side of the car-rying case in Pilgrim's freckled hand. "Some sort of toy?" "Toy, my ass," said the contents of the case. "I just happen to be, dumbbell, the most sophisticated robot cat in the world. I'm the latest, most advanced version of TomCat™." "And also, at the present time, a fugitive," added the attorney. "From out on the Coast, in SoCal." "Why, exactly, have you brought him here?" "Tom wants to hire you," replied the lawyer. "I wish to employ Odd Jobs, Inc.," Tom corrected. "Not just you, Pace. I understand that it's Hildy who's the brains of the setup." After giving a brief sigh, Jake invited, somewhat reluctantly, "Come on in, both of you." Slouched in a yellow hip-hugger chair, Jake urged, "Give us some details of the damn case." The chrome-plated robot cat was reared up on the piano bench, whapping out Pinetop's Boogie Woogie on the white upright living room piano. "You were expressing doubts as to my versatility, dimwit," reminded Tom. "Therefore, this demo." Hildy, sitting on the rubberoid sofa, said, "You have to admit he's got a great left paw, Jake." "For a cat," he conceded. "Now explain what you want to hire us for—and how you intend to pay our fee." From his orange hip-hugger chair Pilgrim said, "He's got the dough." "How can a robot cat, and a runaway at that, have money?" The attorney, his face taking on an even more sour look, answered, "He's done very well on the stock market. And he wins the National Numbers Game with suspicious frequency." Smacking out a final chord, the cat ceased playing and settled into a comfortable sprawl on the tufted piano bench. "I didn't rig anything, peckerwood. It's simply that I'm a bit psychic and the winning numbers come to me in dreams." "Robots don't have dreams," said Jake. "Sez you," said Tom, glancing over at Hildy. "How'd you come to hook up with such a nebbish?" "I was just out of the convent school at the time and didn't know any better," she replied, crossing her long legs. "Geeze," remarked the cat, "living with this goof has turned you into a wiseass." After coughing into his hand, Pilgrim said, "What it ... what he wants to consult you about is a missing dame who—" "I'm capable of giving a coherent account of the situation," cut in the robot cat. "Do so," suggested Jake. Tom's silver tail switched back and forth twice. "As you probably know, the TomCat™ brand of robot felines is designed and created by BotPets International. Run by Ward McKey, a fughead if there ever was one, and based in the Laguna Sector of Greater Los Angeles in the state of SoCal, BotPets grosses just shy of a billion smackers per year. The majority of this impressive sum comes from the sale of the incredibly popular TomCat™ house pets for the well off and a few—" "The Fido™ dogbots net over $400,000,000," put in the attorney. "Dogs. Fooey," observed the cat. "Okay, we're getting close to the nub of the problem. The head of Research & Development/ Cat Division is a lovely, intelligent young woman named Mari-jane Kraft. She—" "The little dickens has got a terrific crush on this dame," supplied the attorney. "Hush, John," advised Hildy, frowning at him and shaking her head. "Let Tom talk." Rising up on his hind legs, the cat bowed toward her. "You are a rose among thorns, dear lady," he said, settling down again. "For over a year the most expensive model cat has been able to talk. That was an innovation that Marijane came up with and—" "I thought," said Jake, "you mentioned that she was intelligent." Looking over at Hildy, the robot cat inquired, "How long have you been married to this gink?" "Eleven years." "Oy, such fortitude," said Tom. "I happen to be the working model of the latest and most advanced robot cat. Marijane fin-ished me just three months ago and has been refining my—" "You became independently wealthy in just three months?' asked Jake. "Listen, bozo, I did that in three weeks," answered the cat. "The point is, I look upon Marijane with considerable fondness." Hildy said, "Something's happened to her?" "Exactly. Six days ago she disappeared." Pilgrim added, "It's his belief that she disappeared. BotPets maintains that she sent in her resignation while visiting friends." "Friends?" Tom arched his metallic back. "Who in the heck would have friends in the People's Republic of Ohio?" Hildy said, "Ohio seceded from the Union back in 2027 and elected that fat guy Dictator." Nodding, Jake said, "Vincent Eagleman, yeah, founder of the Homegrown Fascist Party. Why'd your friend Marijane journey to the People's Republic of Ohio?" Tom gave a shake of his silvery head. "All she told me before she took off was that something seriously wrong was going on and she wanted to investigate." Hildy asked, "Something wrong in Ohio? Something wrong at BotPets?" "I suspect a conspiracy twixt the two, a conspiracy that involves both Vincent Eagleman and Ward McKey. They're quite probably in cahoots and up to no good." "What are they conspiring about?" Jake sat up. "I don't know for sure," answered the cat. "I'm assuming, though, it involves one of the BotPets products." "Whereabouts in Ohio did she go?" "Youngstown, the capital of the republic." "Did she contact you at all after she got there?" "The first two days, yep." "How?" The robot cat scratched his silvery side with a hind paw. "Marijane installed a voxphone in my interior. That's not standard equipment, but she and I were pals, and she used to phone most nights after she got home and—-" She stopped communicating with you from Youngstown?" asked Hildy. Exactly, ma'am. She ceased calling after the second day, and the Ritz Mussolini Hotel in Youngstown claims she checked out." "Going where?" No forwarding address. She never came back to Greater Los Angeles, though," said Tom forlornly. "Two days after she disappeared, McKey voxed all the BotPets staff to announce that Marijane had resigned for personal reasons. He knew everyone would join with him in wishing her well wherever she decided to go." "Which was where?" "He didn't mention that." Jake rose up out of his chair. "And she hasn't called you or contacted you since?" "If she had would I have furtively arranged my escape from the R&D facility in GLA, given this bedraggled ambulance chaser an outrageous retainer and hired him to convey me to Odd Jobs, Inc. as secretively as possible?" "Probably not," conceded Jake, starting to pace on the thermal rug. "What do you think, Hildy?" "She found out something, they shut her down." "She's not dead," insisted the cat. "You can't be positive. And you have to be prepared for—" "I told you, Marijane designed me to be a bit psychic. So I know she's alive." "Be nice," said Jake, "if you were psychic enough to tell us where." Hildy asked him, "Want to take the case? Sounds interesting." Stopping near the piano bench, he frowned down at the robot cat. "Did Pilgrim explain our fee structure?" "Sure. $100,000 in front—nonrefundable. Another hundred thou if you find her, no matter in what shape," answered Tom. "Plus a bonus of $100,000 should you also clear up whatever mess Marijane was looking into." "Can you afford that?" The cat made a brief metallic purring sound. "There's $100,000 in your Banx account as of now, Sherlock. So do we have a deal?" He held up his right forepaw. Jake shook it. "Indeed we do." As his skycar sped westward, the day ceased to wane and the sky outside commenced growing lighter. Pushing the Automatic Flight button on the dash panel, Jake leaned back in his seat and rubbed the palm of his hand across his forehead a few times. The pixphone buzzed. "Okay, yeah," he said. The slightly chubby bald man who appeared on the rectangular screen was wearing a two-piece plaid bizsuit and sitting on an under-inflated neoprene airchair. He was surrounded by modified computer screens, databoxes, and a jumbled assortment of electronic tapping equipment. "Did I outline my new billing system thoroughly when you hired me a couple hours ago?" "You did, Steranko." Steranko the Siphoner said, "So my initial bill of $1,000 won't shock or stun—" "$850 was the aforementioned quotation." "Naw, it couldn't have been, Jacob, my boy, since my new fee list has been in effect since last Xmas." "$850 is all that Odd Jobs, Inc. is going to pay, be that as it may." The small informant sighed, and at the same time an exhalation of air came wheezing out of his inflated chair. "Were it not for the fact that I've been doing business with you and that scrawny missus of yours for untold aeons, Jake, I would never put up with your high-handed—" "Before any more aeons unfold, Steranko, tell me what you've found out so far. Assuming you have found out anything." "Hey, I happen to be, as you well know, chum, the best tapper on Earth," he said. "Or on the Moon for that matter. How about $900?" "$850." Sighing again, Steranko reluctantly said, "All right. Here's a one-minute animated ID pic of Ethan Greenway, the lad your client claims was the missing Marijane's dearest friend at BotPets." A tanned, just barely handsome man of forty appeared on the screen. Smiling amiably, he displayed his full face and then his left and right profiles. "My name is Ethan Greenway. I'm the Associate Copychief in the Fido™ Division of BotPets International." “You emphasized the word claims. You think this guy wasn't her beau?" "Far be it from me to contradict a robot kitty gifted with speech," said the Siphoner. "Marijane and this boob did date now and then . . . However." "However what?" "I have to dig into this a bit further, Jake, but I'm already getting strong hints that friend Greenway was actually an Internal Affairs Agent for BotPets. A fellow who checked on employees who weren't trusted completely." "Meaning he might have had something to do with her vanishing?" The hairless Steranko shrugged one shoulder. "I'd seriously consider that possibility, yes." "Where can I find him?" "At the moment he's attending the West Coast Robotic Pets Trade Show in the Malibu Sector of Greater Los Angeles. It's being held at the Malibu Stilt Ritz Hotel now through Friday." Jake nodded. "What about Marsha Roebeck?" "You now see her before you." A heavyset woman of about fifty, with short-cropped gray hair, appeared on the screen and went through a ritual similar to Greenway's. "I'm Marsha Roebeck, a Director Second Class of the TomCat™ Division R&D Department at BotPets International." "Okay, she's the one Tom says helped smuggle him out of the joint," said Jake. "If I can talk to her, I can maybe—" "That, old buddy, is going to be tough," cut in the plaid-suited informant. "Apparently the lady came down with a rare Moon Base virus and is in the Isolation Ward at the Thorpe Private Hospital in the Santa Monica Sector of Greater LA." "No visitors, huh?" "Only medics." "I can impersonate one if need be." "Be careful, since the lady is being very closely and belligerently guarded." "All the more reason to have a talk with her," said Jake. "Did you come up with anything else?" "You've already had more than $850 worth of pertinent infor-mation." "Okay, dig us up another $850 batch, and I'll get in touch with you once I get to SoCal." "How much is that pussycat paying you folks?" "Sufficient." Steranko said, "It's a pity you don't pass along a bit more of the outrageous fees you bilk out of gullible customers. Were this an equable society, my share would automatically—" "Talk to you again in a few hours." Jake ended the call. The robot security guard gave a long, low appreciative whistle. "Gosh all hemlock," he exclaimed out of his coppery voxgrid, "you surely are right pretty, Miss Beemis." "I am that," agreed Hildy, holding out a packet of expertly forged IDs to the mechanical man at the entrance to the Bingo Heaven Multidome in the heart of Youngstown. She was a silvery blonde now, deeply tanned, wearing a short one-piece sinsilk skirtsuit. "I have an appointment with Mr. Leon Bismarck." After ogling her again, the robot said, "I hope you'll forgive my overtly masculine reaction, Miss Beemis, but I used to be a doorman up in Orbiting Vegas II, and I was programmed to react positively to chorines." "One wouldn't think such behavior would be considered acceptable in the more conservative Republic of Ohio." The big coppery hot nodded in agreement. "I was rushed down here to fill in after some malcontents blew up my predecessor," he explained. "I haven't had my outlook modified." He held her fabricated credentials up to the scanner panel built into his wide coppery chest. "Ah, Miss Theresa Beemis, Contributing Editor of Militant Chic. Isn't that the multimedia mag with nearly 6,000,000 subscribers per week in fascist dictatorships worldwide?" "Nearly 7,000,000," Hildy corrected as he returned her IDs. "My statistics base hasn't been upgraded since they dumped me here either," the robot told her. "Well, you'll find Mr. Bismarck's office in Dome Three of Bingo Heaven. On the second level right above the Virtual Bingo pavilion." Thanks, and good luck on your eventual overhaul." "You sure are some looker," said the robot, standing aside to let her pass into the building. "Orderly, get over here at once!" cried Jake. He now had shaggy blond hair, spurious retinal patterns, altered fingerprints, and a small fuzzy mustache. He was wearing a two-piece off-white medsuit and standing at the reception desk of the Isolation Ward on the Second Below-Ground Floor of the Thorpe Private Hospital. The middle-sized human orderly came trotting over. "May I be of service, Doctor ..." He leaned closer to read the name on Jake's counterfeit digital name tag. "Doctor Bushwanger." Jake, a bit disdainfully, pointed at the android nurse sitting behind the aluminum reception counter. "This mechanism is obviously malfunctioning, which I must say does not speak highly of your facility." Blankly staring, the white-clad android said, "Gulp gulp gulp," paused and then said it again. Two minutes earlier Jake had felt compelled to use a disabler on the andy because she was asking questions he wasn't prepared to answer. That sometimes happened on rush impersonations. "What the heck's wrong, Irma?" the curly-haired young man asked, going up on tiptoe and staring across the counter at her. "Gulp gulp gulp." "This is all very vexing," observed Jake in an annoyingly nasal voice. "I didn't fly in from the Tijuana Sector of Greater LA to be delayed by a mechanism that's obviously gone flooey." "Why are you here, Dr. Bushwanger?" "Hasn't your Chief of Staff, Dr. Erringer, notified the entire crew that he was brining me in to consult on the Marsha Roebeck case?" "I thought Dr. Erringer was on a second honeymoon in the Safe Zone of Argentina." "Be that as it may, he sent for me." Jake impatiently jiggled the medical bag he was carrying. "I happen to be the leading expert on lunar viruses in this hemisphere." "Patient Roebeck is in an Extreme Isolation room, Doctor, and you can't—" "I'd hate to have to file a Negative Performance Report on you, Gribble." "My name is Gibbons." "Have your ID tag refonted then, Gibbons," suggested Jake, even more impatiently. "But first, take me to my patient immediately." Gibbons glanced at the still gulping android nurse. "Very well, Doctor," he said resignedly. "I can't afford to have another black mark on my record. Come along." Using the compact needle gun on the plump woman's upper arm, Jake said, "This stuff ought to counteract the control drugs they've been shooting into you, Miss Roebeck." "I am completely happy here. I will make no trouble for anyone," she droned. Wearing a polka dot hospital gown, she was sitting up in a gray floating bed at the center of the small gray room. "I will forget all that . . . What the hell is this?" Marsha blinked, scowled at Jake. "Are you one of those bastards who want to hurt Marijane?" "On the contrary," Jake assured her. "I've disabled the monitoring gear in your room, but they'll tumble to that fairly soon. So tell me what you know about—" "And who the Billy Jesus might you be, jocko?" "Jake Pace from Odd Jobs, Inc.," he told her. "What we—" "So Tom did get to you." "That he did. Now what do you know about what's happened to Marijane?" "After I smuggled that little dingus out of there, I did some nosing around on my own," she said. "That wasn't, as it turned out, so very smart. They grabbed me, dumped me in this hole, and diddled with my coco so that I was about three steps away from being a vegetable." "Who put you here?" She answered, "It was that prissy Ethan Greenway. I tried to tell poor Marijane that he wasn't on the up and up, but she sort or felt sorry for the gink. I found out, too late, that Greenway's a company spy. He reports directly to McKey, and he found out that Marijane was on to something. When she took off for Ohio to dig further, they alerted them back there to detain her." "What was she on to?" Marsha shook her head. "All I know is that it has something to do with a shipment of 1,500 TomCat™ bots that were sent to Eagleman, the dictator of the Republic of Ohio," she answered. "I'm pretty sure, too, that they have a clandestine R&D department, one they never told Marijane or me about." "Anything different about that shipment?" "I suspect they'd been modified some, but I don't know how." Jake stood. "Can you pretend you're still in a stupor?" "Easy." "Soon as I talk to Greenway, I'll send a crew of local trouble-shooters in to spring you from this joint," he promised. "The guy leading them will probably be a mercenary name of Oskar Tor-tuga, just back from New Guatemala." "Is he cute?" "Not to me, but you may react differently." He eased out of the gray room. This is neat," observed Leon Bismarck, a rotund man of fifty clad in a three-piece yellow bizsuit with sinfur trim. "Our truth disks are much bulkier." He was gazing with admiration at the tiny silver oval she'd just slapped onto his fat left wrist. Hildy, sitting with long legs crossed on the edge of his wide tin desk, said, "You're supposed to answer my queries, Bismarck, not comment on the equipment." "Fire away, sister. You sure are cute, and that's the truth." "Where's Marijane Kraft?" Bismarck's official title was Press Secretary to Dictator Eagle-man, but some information Hildy had obtained from an informant of her own while flying out here to the Republic of Ohio had alerted her to the fact that he was also in charge of intelligence operations. Posing as a reporter with Militant Chic eager to interview him about the new paramilitary uniforms he'd helped design for all the republic's schoolchildren had, as she'd anticipated, enabled her to get an immediate interview. After, very skillfully, incapacitating the Press Secretary in his private office, Hildy had slapped a truth disk on him. "She ain't here," he said now, his buttery voice taking on a slight drone. "Where then?" "We shipped her back to Greater Los Angeles for a mindwipe." "Shipped her where?" "To the Thorpe Private Hospital in the Santa Monica Sector of GLA. They do very good work, and we often send political dissidents out there. Eventually I hope to build our own—" "What did Marijane find out?" Bismarck chuckled. "Well, now, ma'am, that's an interesting story." "Tell me," she suggested. Jake was heading toward the Malibu Sector in his rented landcar when the skyvan full of Ethel Mermans crashed a few dozen yards ahead of him on the yellow stretch of reconstituted beach. The big blue-and-gold van had come wobbling down out of the blurred yellow afternoon sky, producing raspy wailing noises. It hit the sand on its belly, sliding and bouncing and sending up swirls of beach grit mingled with sooty smoke, and rattled to a halt. When the twin doors at the rear of the beached skyvan flapped open, at least a dozen android replicas of the twentieth century Broadway singer Ethel Merman came spilling out. Jake had, by this time, pulled his vehicle to the side of the highway, parked, disembarked and gone running toward the crashed van. As the Ethel Merman andies hit the sand, some of them were activated and, staggering to their feet, began singing. The majority were belting out Cole Porter's Anything Goes, but at least two were rendering Irving Berlin's Doin' What Comes Naturally. When Jake was a few feet from the pilot compartment, he head a faint cry, all but drowned out by the chorus of Ethel Mermans. 'Help, please," requested a female voice. Jake approached the compartment door, carefully opened it. "Anything broken?" There was a slim blonde young woman of no more than nineteen slumped in the pilot's seat. She was wearing a two-piece, short-skirted flysuit. "I don't think so, except rny ankle . . . that one ... feels funny." "Unhook your safety gear. I'll lift you out." "That's awfully kind of you. I feel like such an enormous vhipjack crashing this way." She unbound and unzipped. He hefted her out. "Want to try to stand?" She grimaced. "Okay, if you hold me up." Very gingerly she planted both booted feet on the stirred up sand. "That doesn't hurt much. I'm guess I'm all right. My name's Bermuda Polon-sky, by the way," "Jake Pace." He stepped free of her. "Not Jake Pace the internationally renowned private investigator and musical great?" "I'm a pretty good detective, yeah," he admitted. "Music, however, is simply a hobby." "You played at the Moonport Jazz Festival last autumn, didn't you? A marvelous bebop medley, consisting of wonderful renditions of jazz tunes in the style of Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Horace Silver, and Elmo Hope." "That was me. How'd you hear about it?" "I was going with the fellow who played oboe in the Julliard Neobop Ensemble and I was up there," explained Bermuda. "It's a wonder you didn't notice me, the way I was jumping up and down and applauding wildly after you'd . . . Oh, shit." "Something?" "I just now noticed that my vanload of Ethel Mermans is scat-tered all to hither and yon and bunged up." "They can be repaired and—" "Oh, I'm certain they can," agreed Bermuda. "But, you see,I was supposed to deliver them to the Malibu Sector Bop & Jazz Festival by three this afternoon." "It's nearly three now." The young woman gave a forlorn sigh. "These androids make up the Ethel Merman Choir, and they're scheduled to perform a medley of jazz standards at 3:15," she told him. "Whatever am I to do since . . . Hey, wait a sec. Can I prevail upon you to substitute?" "I can't sing like even one Ethel Merman." "No, I meant could you do your bebop piano medley," she asked hopefully. "Unless, of course, you were en route to some important rendezvous." Jake considered. "I suppose I can spare you an hour," he decided. "Be a shame to have a gap in the program." "Oh, that's marvelous," Bermuda said, smiling up at him. "I'll just pop into the cab and phone the ... damn." Her left leg gave out suddenly, and she dropped to her knees on the yellow sand. Jake lunged to help her up. Bermuda, smiling again, put an arm around his neck to steady herself. There was something sharp in her hand. It jabbed into Jake's neck. Before he could express his chagrin at once again allowing his vanity about his music to lead him astray, he passed out. Hildy tried to contact Jake again. She was less than an hour away from SoCal and this was her third attempt since leaving the Republic of Ohio. Her skycar was carrying her toward Greater Los Angeles, where she was assuming she and her husband could work out a plan for rescuing Marijane Kraft from the Thorpe Private Hospital. But he was answering neither his skycar phone nor his portable communicator. Hunching slightly in the pilot seat, she tapped out a call to John J. Pilgrim's GLA offices. TomCat™ answered the call. "Ah, the competent side of the Odd Jobs team," he said, his silvery tail switching. "Well, sister, have you found my pal Marijane?" "We know where she is." "Where, pray tell?" "At the Thorpe Private Hospital. They're planning, if they haven't already, to use a mindwipe on—" "There's a coincidence for you," said the robot cat. "That happens to be where your halfwit hubby is locked up even as we speak." "What are you—" Scram, get away from the damn phone." The rumpled attor-ney had appeared in the background to scoop Tom off the phone chair. "If you're hiding out here, you shouldn't be answering calls." "Hey, I've got built-in caller ID, so I knew—" "What's happened to Jake?" Hildy asked John J. Pilgrim. The lawyer made one of his sour faces. "It appears he walked into some kind of trap, Hildy." "I bet somebody asked him to play trombone in a Dixieland band or piano in—" "Don't have the details on that," said the lawyer. "Steranko called me about an hour ago. While he was digging up some information for Jake, he came across the fact that Jake himself was being held at Thorpe now." "Steranko's not all that reliable." "The Siphoner doesn't much like you either, kid, which is why he passed the information on to me," said Pilgrim. "I was just about to call you." "I'll be arriving out there in less than an hour, John," she told him. "Get floor plans of the hospital and send them to me. I'll work out a—" "I already printed out the Thorpe floor plans, sis," put in the robot cat, jumping up onto Pilgrim's rumpled lap. "And I've got a pretty neat plan figured out. The two of us can—" "That's not wise. Tom. Somebody's liable to recognize you." "Didn't I get around to telling you I was an expert at disguise? When next you see me, you'll think I'm an everyday alley cat," he assured her. "Plus which, I've got all sorts of built-in weapons. And although I'm not all that enthusiastic about your mate, I really have to be in on rescuing Marijane." After a few seconds, Hildy said, "All right, we'll work together. But I'll cook up the plan" Jake awakened in an uncomfortable gray restraining chair. "This is not the Malibu Sector Bop & Jazz Festival," he realized. "A fine champion you turned out to be." Marsha Roebeck was strapped into another chair across the small gray room from him. "Tell me to expect some thug named Tortuga to come rescue me and then get tossed in here yourself." "I apologize," said Jake. "I'm sure Mr. Pace meant well," said Marijane Kraft, who was restrained in the third chair a few feet to Jake's right. "And he; hasn't been any stupider than I was by barging into—" "You're an amateur, dear, and this clunk is a pro who—" "Let's not give up hope," advised Jake, glancing around the gray room. "And let's not discuss escape plans, since our cell is no doubt monitored." "Escape plans? Hooey," observed Marsha. "They're going to mindwipe the lot of us sometime later today." "Who are they exactly?" "Since I was only pretending to be stupefied, I got a look at some of them," said Marsha. "Several hospital staffers are involved, obviously, but I also saw McKey himself once." "The head of BotPets, yeah," said Jake. "These goons are also going to give us a dose of truth spray," added Marsha. "McKey is eager to know where TomCat™ has got to." "Is Tom okay?" asked Marijane, a slender dark-haired woman of about thirty. "Far as I know," Jake told her. "Now, before we all start suffering from forgetfulness, exactly what did you find out about those 1,500 robot cats that were shipped to the Republic of Ohio?" "It's very distressing," she replied and began to explain. Whispering, Hildy mentioned, "You're not a very convincing cat." "I am a cat," reminded Tom, whom she was carrying under her arm. "What I was referring to was your feline disguise," she amplified. "The sinfur is a little tacky and I really wish we'd had time to do a better job of—" "Don't blame me if your halfwit hubby got himself abducted to this dump and you had to rush over here to rescue the poor goof," said the robot cat. "I think you're still miffed because the info as to his plight came to you by way of that skinhead Steranko, whom you loathe and—" 'I'm also still a bit miffed that you insisted on tagging along." 'Listen, cookie, I'm essential to this daring rescue scheme. The plan we've contrived to rescue your hapless spouse and, more im-portantly, Marijane, calls upon me to play a crucial role," re-winded TomCat™. "And look at the thanks I get for risking my-—" "Hush now, we're at the hospital entrance." The plaz doors at the top of the winding ramp slid aside and Hildy, who was wearing a conservative three-piece gray neowool bizsuit, entered the main lobby of the three-tier Thorpe Private Hospital. "Rowr," said Tom. "Not a very convincing meow." "A lot you know, sister. I was playing a caz of an authentic field recording of a real damn cat." "Even so." She went striding up to the boomerang-shaped tin reception desk. "How may I help you, ma'am?" inquired Gibbons. "Ah, this is most impressive, a live receptionist," she said in a vaguely French accent. She smiled and brushed a strand of dark hair from her forehead. "Usually the receptionists are androids or robots." The curly-haired young man pointed a thumb at the ceiling. "Usually ours are, too, but they had to transfer Ida up to the Extreme Isolation wing to take Irma's place," he explained. "Some loon named Dr. Bushwanger went berserk yesterday and used I some kind of fritzer on her." Hildy gave a surprised gasp. "But I'm Dr. Bushwanger." Gibbons sat up. "One Dr. Bushwanger is enough. I'm afraid I'll—" "I assure you I am the authentic Dr. Frances Bushwanger. If' some slattern has been impersonating me, I'll see that she—" "This was a gent. Tall, lanky bloke with—" "Rowr rowr," said Tom. "Oh, and we don't allow pets." "This isn't a pet, this is my companion. His name is Mutton. "Rising from his chair, the orderly asked, "Muffin?" "Mutton." "Odd name for a cat." "Don't blame me, he picked it out." "The cat named himself?" "No, actually I was alluding to my husband," she said, smiling: again. "Now might I see Dr. Thorpe?" "Afraid she's away on a second honeymoon with Dr. Erringer." "How disappointing. She and I are old chums, and I was hoping—" "Rowr. Meow." Twisting, Tom jumped free of Hildy's grasp, hit the multicolored plaztile floor and, as planned, went speeding off down a corridor. "We can't allow cats to run loose in here, Dr. Bushwanger." Gibbon hopped out from behind the counter, taking off in pursuit of the disguised robot cat. "And judging by that fur of his, he's also suffering from a bad case of mange." "It's actually stress-related." She kept pace with him. According to the floor plans of the hospital, the Security Control Center was around the bend and at the end of the corridor Tom had gone streaking down. When Gibbons and Hildy rounded the bend, they saw that the wide plazdoor marked SecCon was standing half open. "That's not supposed to be unlocked." Gibbons slowed and approached the doorway with caution. "Be careful, there's no telling what we're liable to find." "Good gravy!" exclaimed the orderly from inside the room. "All of the security staff plus the secbot are sprawled at their workstations and apparently comatose." "What about my Mutton?" Hildy crossed the threshold. "I don't see him, but that's the least of our worries." "Nope, dimbulb, it should be your top worry." Rearing up atop a rubberoid desk, Tom pointed a shaggy paw at him. "How come you can talk?" Instead of an answer, Gibbons got a yellowish beam from the cat's built-in stungun. Jake, who'd done a dissertation on Houdini while earning one of his earliest PhDs, succeeded in unobtrusively deactivating his restraints in a little over two hours after he'd awakened in the bowels of the private hospital. For the past several minutes, giving the impression that he was still trussed up, he remained sitting, watchfully, in his gray chair. He'd done the rearranging of his bonds so deftly and subtly that he was almost certain nobody monitoring their cell would've noticed. He planned to remain in the chair until somebody came into the room, then he'd move and improvise a way out. "Whatever's the matter with you, Pace?" inquired Marsha. "You've been twitching and twisting for hours." "It's an unfortunate neurological condition," he answered quietly. "How's that again? Speak up." "I'm suffering from Reisberson's Syndrome," he said in a somewhat louder voice. "It causes uncontrollable hyperactivity now and then. I'm fine now." "Good, then maybe you can cease thrashing about and come up with some way to get us out of this dump." "Marsha, don't heckle Mr. Pace," said Marijane. "After all, he wouldn't be in this pickle if he hadn't attempted to find me." "Good intentions don't cancel colossal screwups, honey." The metal cell door started to quiver, then began rattling. Jake straightened up in his chair, alert. Producing an odd keening noise, the door slid open. Shedding the straps, Jake dived forward. "Sit and meditate," advised Tom on the threshold. "We don't need any derring-do from you, buster." Smiling, Hildy stepped carefully into the room, stun gun in hand. "It's us, Jake. You can relax." Taking a slow deep breath, he straightened up out of his crouch. "You heard about my plight, huh?" He commenced releasing the two women from their chairs. "Steranko found out you were here, and I found out that Marijane Kraft was here," she answered. "Marsha Roebeck is a bonus." "I take it you're the sensible half of Odd Jobs, Inc.," said the plump woman as she stood up, shedding her bonds. "We're a team," answered Hildy. "Sometimes I save him, sometimes he saves me. It makes for an interesting marriage—so far anyway." From out in the corridor a gruff voice ordered, "Nobody move. A wall of weapons is waiting out here." Jake called, "Oskar, you're on our side." A large, wide, tanned man with a shaggy blond beard appeared in the doorway. He lowered his stun gun to his side. "We're just getting around to rescuing the lady you mentioned, Jake, old man.". "I appreciate that, Oskar," he said. "But we've taken care of that. However, you and your boys can help us get out of here safely." "A piece of cake," said the mercenary, grinning. "You're right," Marsha told Jake. "He's not cute." Jake grinned, clicking off the vidwall in the media room of their Redding Sector estate. "The Newz account of BotPet's collaboration with Dictator Eagleman was fairly accurate," he observed. "And they gave a handsome plug to Odd Jobs, Inc." "Best of all," said Hildy, "they didn't mention how you walked right into Greenway's trap, nor how you had to be bailed out by me and a robot cat." "Sometimes my altruism gets the best of my judgment," he admitted, settling into a rubberoid armchair facing the one his wife was sitting in. "But keep in mind, that when you arrived, I'd freed myself and was about to—" "Altruism isn't the word I'd pick," she said. "Hubris would be high on my list, followed by vanity, egomania or—" "Hey, they seemingly wanted a gifted jazz pianist, which I happen to be," he pointed out. "Admittedly I could have been a mite less trusting." "Letting a frail teenager knock you out and dump you in—" "She was nearly twenty." "Then ending up in the same hospital with Marijane Kraft and that Roebeck woman, all of you candidates for mindwipes." "Made the rescue operation much easier." He stood up and started to pace the neowood floor. "I appreciate you and Tom helping get me out of there. Also keep in mind that Oskar Tortuga and the crew of former commandos I hired to spring Marsha Roebeck busted into the place shortly after you arrived. So it's quite possible they could've rescued us without your having to—" 'Some rescue team you hired. They almost used a stungun on me." Jake made a let's-stop gesture with both hands. "Be that as it may, Odd Jobs, Inc. did what it was hired for," he reminded her. "We located Marijane, rescued her, and found out what was going on. As a result, several high-placed BotPets execs— including Greenway and the CEO himself, McKey, are being held for kidnapping and aiding a foreign government—namely Ohio." "You think what Eagleman, McKey, and Greenway had in mind would've worked?" "Well, the 1,500 specially modified TomCat™ bots were designed to work as spies, saboteurs, and occasional assassins," answered Jake. "If Eagleman had succeeded in planting most of them in the homes of key political figures and businessmen in Indiana, Kentucky, and Michigan, it could've helped him in his plan to expand the territory of his republic." He shrugged. "Maybe it would've worked, maybe not." "When Marijane found out what they were planning and tried to track the doctored robot cats, they grabbed her," said Hildy. "She wasn't too smart, trusting Greenway and confiding in him and then investigating this on her own. Of course, BotPets weren't too bright in the way they went about trying to silence her." "They didn't know we'd be brought into the case." "Had they known a formidable bebopper would be unleashed, they might have called the whole thing off." "What say we call a truce?" Hildy said, "Okay by me." He moved closer to her chair, leaned to kiss her. "Visitors," announced a dangling voxbox. Jake kissed his wife, then moved to a viewindow and unblanked it. A sleek crimson skycar was landing outside. When it settled on the grass and the cabin door popped open, Hildy said, "It's Marijane Kraft, and she's got Tom with her. I'll go out and escort them in." "Does that robot cat have to come in?" "Certainly. He helped save you." "Okay," conceded Jake, "But tell him to stay away from the piano." Robert Sheckley Many years ago I wrote a story called "Zirn Left Unguarded, the Jenz-hik Palac in Flames, Jon Westerly Dead." Don Wollheim called me. He was interested in acquiring rights to the story. He wanted to hire someone to expand it into a novel. discussed the possibility of me writing it. I remember Don's voice over the phone— incisive New York voice. Trouble was, I was tied up with other assignments at tha time, and didn't want to commit myself too far ahead. We decided to talk about it again further down the line—maybe in a year. I guess we both forgot about the project—until now, when you asked me for an anecdote about Don. This is the bes one I can remember—maybe the only one. I still regret never having written that no for Don. I was born in New York in 1928. Raised in New Jersey, I settled in New York again after my tour of duty in the Army. I've done a lot of traveling over the years, a lot of writing. I'm still going strong, and hope to continue indefinitely. — AGAMEMNON'S RUN Robert Sheckley AGAMEMNON was desperate. Aegisthus and his men had trapped him in Clytemnestra's bedroom. He could hear them stamping through the hallways. He had climbed out a window and made his way down the wall clinging by his fingernails to the tiny chiseled marks the stonecutters had left in the stone. Once in the street, he thought he'd be all right, steal a horse, get the hell out of Mycenae. It was late afternoon when he made his descent from the bedroom window. The sun was low in the west, and the narrow streets were half in shadow. He thought he had got away free and clear. But no: Aegisthus had posted a man in the street, and he called out as soon as Agamemnon was on the pavement. "He's here! Agamemnon's here! Bring help!" The man was a beefy Spartan, clad in armor and helmet, with a sword and shield. Agamemnon had no armor, nothing but his sword and knife. But he was ready to tackle the man anyhow, because his rage was up, and although Homer hadn't mentioned it, Agamemnon was a fighter to beware of when his rage was up. The soldier must have thought so. He retreated, darting into a doorway, still crying the alarm. Agamemnon decided to get out of there. A little disoriented, he looked up and down the street. Mycenae was his own city, but he'd been away in Troy for ten years. If he turned to his left, would the street take him to the Lion Gate? And would Aegisthus have guards there? Just that morning he had ridden into the city in triumph. It was hateful, how quickly things could fall apart. He had entered Mycenae with Cassandra beside him in the chariot. Her hands were bound for form's sake, since she was technically a captive. But they had been bedmates for some weeks, ever since he had bought her from Ajax after they sacked Troy. Agamemnon thought she liked him, even though Greek soldiers had killed her parents and family. But that had been while their blood rage was still high; their rage at so many of their companions killed, and for the ten long wasted years camped outside Troy's walls, until Odysseus and his big wooden horse had done the trick. Then they'd opened the city gates from the inside and given the place over to rage, rape, and ruin. None of them were very proud of what they'd done. But Agamemnon thought Cassandra understood it hadn't been personal. It wasn't that he was expecting forgiveness from her. But he thought she understood that the important ones—Agamemnon himself, Achilles, Hector, Odysseus—were not bound by the rules of common men. They were special people, and it was easy to forget that he was not the original Agamemnon, not the first. The lottery had put them into this position, the damnable lottery which the aliens had set over them, with its crazed purpose of replaying events of the ancient world, only this time with the possibility of changing the outcomes. He was Chris Johnson, but he had been Agamemnon for so long that he had nearly forgotten his life before the lottery chose him for this role. And then there had been all the trouble of getting to Troy, the unfortunate matter of Iphigenia, the ten years waiting in front of the city, the quarrel with Achilles, and finally, Odysseus' wooden horse and the capture and destruction of Troy and nearly all its inhabitants, and then the long journey home over the wine-dark sea; his return to Mycenae, and now this. And before that? He remembered a dusty, small town not far from the Mexican border. Amos' water tower had been the tallest building on the prairie for 200 miles in any direction. Ma's Pancake House had been the only restaurant. When he made his lucky draw in the lottery, he remembered thinking it would be worth life itself just to get out of here, just to live a little. It had never been easy to get out of Mycenae. The city's heart was a maze of narrow streets and alleys. The district he was in, close to the palace, had an Oriental look—tiny shops on twisting streets. Many of the shopkeepers wore turbans. Agamemnon had never researched the life of the ancient Greeks, but he supposed this was accurate. The creators of the lottery did what they did for a reason. The street Agamemnon was on came out on a broad boulevard lined with marble statues. Among them, Agamemnon recognized Perseus and Achilles, Athena and Artemis. The statues had been painted in bright colors. He was surprised to see a statue to himself. It didn't look much like him, but it had his name on it. In English letters, not Greek. It was a concession the lottery had made to modern times: everyone in this Greece spoke English. He wondered if the statue represented the first Agamemnon. He knew that the lottery was always repeating the classical roles. Had there ever been a first Agamemnon? With myths and legends, you could never be quite sure. He saw that a procession was coming down the boulevard. There were musicians playing clarinet and trumpet. Timpani players. Even a piano, on a little cart, drawn by a donkey. That was obviously not legitimate. But he reminded himself that the lottery was staging this, and they could make it any way they wanted it. He didn't even know where their Greece was. Behind the musicians there were dancing girls, in scanty tunics, with wreaths around their heads and flowers in their hair. They looked drunk. He realized that these must be maenads, the crazed followers of Dionysus, and behind them came Dionysus himself. As he came closer, Agamemnon recognized him. It was Ed Carter from Centerville, Illinois. They had met in one of the lottery staging rooms, where they had gone for their first assignments. "Dionysus!" Agamemnon called out. "Hello, Agamemnon, long time no see. You're looking good." Dionysus was obviously drunk. There were wine stains on his mouth and his tunic. He didn't seem able to pause in his dancing march, so Agamemnon walked along beside him. 'Going to join me?" Dionysus asked. "We're having a feast later, and then we're going to tear apart King Pentheus." "Is that strictly necessary?" Dionysus nodded. "I was given specific orders. Pentheus gets it. Unless he can figure something out. But I doubt this one's up to it." Agamemnon asked, a bit formally, "How is it going with you, Dionysus?" Dionysus said, "Pretty well, Agamemnon. I'm getting into this. Though it was no fun being killed last week. A real bummer." "I didn't hear about that." "I didn't anticipate it myself," Dionysus said. "But they jump you around in time, you know, to make sure you cover all the salient points of your character's life. No sooner had I been married to Ariadne—did you ever meet her? Lovely girl. Abandoned by Theseus on the isle of Naxos, you know—and then I came along and married her. A bit sudden on both our parts, but what a time we had! Naxos is a lovely place—I recommend it for a holiday—anyhow, immediately after that, I found myself newborn in the Dictean cave. I think it was the Dictean. And these guys, these Titans with white faces were coming at me, obviously intending murder. I put up a hell of a struggle. I changed into a bird, a fish, a tree. I could have pulled it off, but the contest was rigged against me. I had to die in order to be reborn. They seized me at last and tore me apart, as my maenads will do for Pentheus. But Apollo gathered my bits, and Zeus took me into himself, and in due course I was reborn. And here I am, leading my procession of crazy ladies down the main street of Mycenae. Not bad for a kid from Centerville, Illinois, huh? And what about you, Agamemnon?" "I've got some trouble," Agamemnon said. "Remember my wife, Clytemnestra? Well, she's sore as hell at me because she thinks I sacrificed our daughter Iphigenia." "Why did you do that?" "To call up a wind so the fleet could get to Troy. But I didn't really do it! I made it look like a sacrifice, but then I arranged for Artemis to carry Iphigenia away to Aulis, where she has a nice job as high priestess." "Everyone thinks you had your daughter killed," Dionysus said. "They're wrong! There's that version of the story that says I didn't. That's the one I'm going with. But that bitch Clytemnestra and her sleazy boyfriend Aegisthus won't buy it. They've got guards out all over the city with orders to kill me on sight." "So what are you going to do?" "I need a way out of this! Can you help me? Isn't there some way I can get out of this whole mess?" "Maybe there is," Dionysus said. "But you'd have to ask Tiresias for specifics." "Tiresias? He's dead, isn't he?" "What does that matter? He was the supreme magician of the ancient world. He'd be glad to talk to you. He likes talking to live ones." "But how do I get to the underworld?" "You must kill someone, then intercept the Charon-function when it comes to carry off the shade, and accompany them across the Styx." "I don't want to kill anyone. I've had enough of that." "Then find someone on the point of death and it'll still work." "But who?" "What about Cassandra?" "No, not Cassandra." "She's doomed anyway." "We think we've figured an out for her. Anyhow, I won't kill her." "Suit yourself. Actually, anybody will do." "I'm not going to just grab some person off the street and kill him!" "Agamemnon, it's really not a time to be finicky. . . . What about a plague victim? One not quite dead, but on the way?" "Where would I find a plague victim?" "Follow a plague doctor." "How will I know Charon when he comes? His appearance is always invisible to any but the dead." Dionysus frowned for a moment, then his brow cleared. He reached inside his tunic and took out a purple stone on a chain. "They gave me this in Egypt. It's an Egyptian psychopomp stone. Some kind of amethyst, I believe. Take it. There's a doctor over there! Good luck, Agamemnon! I really must go now." And with a wave of his hand, Dionysus danced off after his maenads. Agamemnon saw the person Dionysus had been referring to: a tall, middle-aged man in a long black cloak, carrying an ivory cane, and wearing a conical felt cap on which was the symbol of Asclepius. Agamemnon hurried over to him. "Are you a doctor?" "I am. Strepsiades of Cos. But I can't stop and chat with you. I am on my way to a call." "To a plague victim?" "Yes, as it happens. A terminal case, I fear. The family waited too long to send for me. Still, I'll do what I can." "I want to go with you!" "Are you a doctor? Or a relative?" "Neither. I am—a reporter!" Agamemnon said in a burst of inspiration. "How can that be? You have no newspapers here in Mycenae. I've heard that Argive Press managed to run for a while, but the price of copper went through the ceiling, and Egypt stopped exporting papyrus . . ." "It's a new venture!" The doctor made no comment when Agamemnon fell into step beside him. Agammemnon could tell the man wasn't pleased. But there was nothing he could do about it. He might even have been furious; but Agamemnon wore a sword, and the doctor appeared to be unarmed. After several blocks, Agamemnon saw they were going into one of the slum areas of the city. Great, he thought. What am I getting myself into? They went down a narrow alley, to a small hut at the end of it. Strepsiades pushed open the door and they entered. Within, visible by the gray light from a narrow overhead window and a single flickering oil lamp on the floor, a man lay on a tattered blanket on the ground. He appeared to be very old, and very wasted. Strepsiades knelt to examine him, then shook his head and stood up again. "How long does he have?" Agamemnon asked. "Not long, poor fellow. He's approaching the final crisis. You can tell by the skin color. Sometimes these cases linger on for a few hours more, half a day, even a day. But no longer." "Let me look at him," Agamemnon said and knelt down beside the sick man. The man's skin was bluish gray. His lips were parched and cracked. Thin lines of blood oozed from his nostrils and the corners of his eyes. The turgid blood was the only sign of life in the man. Agamemnon was acutely aware that he had little time in which to make his escape from Mycenae. But the man was still alive. How long did he have to wait until he died? A minute? An hour? How long before Aegisthus' soldiers found him? He had to get it over with. He tried to make up his mind whether to smother or strangle the man. He started to reach toward the man's throat. The man opened his eyes. With the man suddenly staring at him with bloodshot blue eyes, Agamemnon hesitated— "King Agamemnon!" the sick man whispered. "Can it be you? I am Pyliades. I was a hoplite in the first rank of the Argolis Phalanx. I served under you in the Trojan War. What are you doing here, sir?" Agamemnon heard himself say, "I heard of your plight, Pyliades, and came to wish you well." "Very good of you, sire. But then, you always were a good man and a benevolent commander. I'm surprised you remember me. I was only a common soldier. My parents had to sell the farm in order to purchase my panoply, so I could march with the others and avenge Greece for the unfair abduction of our Helen." "I remembered you, Pyliades, and came to say farewell. Our war is won. The might of Greece has prevailed. Of course, we had Achilles. But what good would Achilles have been if it weren't for men in the ranks like you?" "I remember Prince Achilles well, and the burial fires we lit for him when he was killed. I hope to see him again, in Hades. They say—" The sick man's meandering discourse was broken as the door to his room was suddenly slammed open. Two armed soldiers Pushed their way in. They hesitated, seeing the doctor in his long robe. Then they spotted Agamemnon. The leading soldier, a burly red-bearded man, said, "Kill them all. Aegisthus wants no witnesses. I'll take care of Agamemnon myself." The second soldier was the one who had spotted Agamemnon coming out of the palace window, and had run from him. He advanced now on the doctor, who raised his ivory cane to protect himself, saying, "There's no need for this. I am a neutral, a physician from Cos, here only to treat the sick and injured. Let me go, I'll never say a word about what's going on here." The soldier glanced at the red-bearded man, evidently his officer, who muttered, "No witnesses!" Then he turned back to Agamemnon. Agamemnon saw the doctor suddenly lift his staff and bring it down on the soldier's head. The rod broke. Growling, sword poised, the soldier advanced on the doctor. Agamemnon could see no more, because the red-bearded man was coming at him. Agamemnon had his sword out, but without armor, he knew he stood little chance against an experienced hop-lite. He circled around the sick man on his blanket, and the red-bearded soldier pursued, cautiously but relentlessly. Agamemnon heard a scream. The doctor had been wounded, but was still fighting, trying to stab his assailant with the stub of his ivory cane. Agamemnon continued circling, winding his cloak around his left arm, but he knew it was hopeless, utterly hopeless. . . . And then, in an instant, everything changed. Pyliades, with the last vestige of his strength, reached out and clutched the red-bearded soldier around the legs. The soldier staggered and cut viciously at the sick man. That moment offered Agamemnon's only chance, and he took it. With a hoarse cry he threw himself against the soldier, overbalancing him. The weight of the man's armor did the rest. He fell heavily over Pyliades' body, his sword caught in the sick man's chest, trapped between two ribs. Agamemnon was on top of him. Releasing his own sword, Agamemnon pulled the knife from his belt and tried to stab the man in the face. The knife bounced off the metal nose guard, breaking at the tip. Agamemnon took better aim and pushed the knife through an opening in the helmet, past a missing cheek guard, into the man's cheek, up into his eye socket, and then, with a twist, into his brain. Pyliades was croaking, "Good for you, Commander. We'll show these Trojan swine a thing or two . . ." Agamemnon was already rolling to his feet, just in time to see the other soldier thrust his sword deep into the doctor's belly. The soldier's helmet had come off in the fight. Agamemnon seized him from behind, bent back his head, and cut his throat. There was silence in the house of the sick man. There were four corpses on the floor. The doctor had just passed away. Pyliades was dead, but with a grin on his face. Agamemnon hoped it was a grin of triumph rather than the sardonic grin of the plague victim. The soldier whose throat he'd cut lay in a pool of his own blood. Steam was rising from it. The red-bearded soldier, with the knife in his brain, wasn't bleeding much. But he was as dead as the others. Agamemnon himself was uninjured. He could scarcely believe it. He shook himself to make sure. He was fine. Now, to find Charon. He reached inside his tunic, pulled out the amethyst that Dionysus had given him. He looked around the room through it. The room was a dark violet. The proportions weren't as he remembered them. The amethyst seemed to have distorting properties. Agamemnon experienced a wave of dizziness. He sat down on the floor. Taking a deep breath, he calmed himself with an effort of will and looked around the room again. He saw what looked like a wisp of smoke taking shape. Was it from the oil lamp? No, that had been broken during the fight—a wonder it hadn't set the place on fire. At the same time he felt the walls of the hovel changing, expanding, dissolving. Agamemnon blinked. The room was transforming fast. He was disoriented. He could no longer see the walls. He was outside. He lowered the amethyst to reorient himself. He was indeed outside. Not even in Mycenae. He was sitting on a boulder on a low, marshy shore. There was a river in front of him. Its waters were black, sleek, oily. It appeared to be twilight or early evening. The sun was nowhere in sight, although it had been afternoon when all this began. There were no stars in the darkness, no light anywhere. Yet he could see. Some distance ahead of him, on a low ridge of rock poking out of the mud, there were four figures. Agamemnon thought he knew who they were. In the gloom he could also make out a sort of dock on the shore beyond the four figures. A long, low boat was tied to one of its pillars, and a man was standing in it. The man was gesturing, and his voice came through clearly. "Come on, you guys! You know the drill. Come to the boat. The boat's not going to come to you." The four rose and began walking to the dock. Their steps were the slow, unhurried footsteps of the dead. Agamemnon got up and hurried to join them. He reached the dock at the same time they did. He recognized the doctor, Pyliades, and the two soldiers. The man in the boat was urging them to move along, get aboard, get on with it. "Come on," he said, "1 have no time to waste. Do you think you're the only dead awaiting transportation? Move along now, get aboard . . . You there," he said to Agamemnon, "you've got no business here. You're still living." Agamemnon held up the amethyst. "I need to come aboard. You're Charon, aren't you?" "His son," the man said. "One of his sons. We're all called Charon. Too much work for the old man alone. Too much for us now, too! But we do what we can. You've got the psychopomp stone, so I guess you can come aboard." He turned to the others. Did you bring any money for the passage?" They shook their heads. "It was all too sudden," the doctor said. "I will stand surety for them," Agamemnon said. "And for myself as well. I'll deposit the money wherever you want upon my return. You have the word of Agamemnon, king of kings." "Make sure you don't forget, or when your time comes, your shade will be left here on the shore." "How much do you want?" Agamemnon asked. "The fee is one obol per dead man, but five obols for you because you're alive and weigh more. Go to any Thomas Cook, have them convert your currency into the obol, and deposit it in the Infernal Account." "Thomas Cook has an infernal account." "Didn't know that, did you?" Agamemnon and the others got on Charon's boat. It was narrow, with two rows of built-in benches facing each other. Agamemnon and Pyliades sat on one side, the two soldiers on the other, and the doctor, after a moment's hesitation, sat on a little bench in front of a shelter cabin, at right angles to the benches. Charon untied the mooring line and pushed the boat away from the dock. Once free, he set a steering oar in place, and stood on the decked stern and began to gently scull the boat. They sat in silence for a while as the boat glided over the dark waters. At last Agamemnon said, "Is this going to take long?" "It'll take as long as it takes," Charon said. "Why? You in a rush?" "Not exactly," Agamemnon said. "Just curious. And interested in getting to the bottom of these mysteries." "Give your curiosity a rest," Charon said. "Here in the land of the dead, just as in the land of the living, no sooner do you understand one mystery than another comes up to replace it. There's no satisfying curiosity. I remember when Heracles came through here. He was in a tearing hurry, couldn't wait to wrestle with Cerberus and bring him up to the world of the living." "They say he succeeded," Agamemnon said. "Sure. But what good did it do him? When he got back, King Eurystheus just had another job for him. There's no end of things to do when you're alive." The red-bearded soldier abruptly said, "I just want you to know, Agamemnon, that I bear you no ill will for having killed me." "That's good of you," Agamemnon said. "After you tried so hard to kill me." "There was nothing personal about it," the red-beard said. "I am Sallices, commander of Aegithus' bodyguard in Mycenae. I was ordered to kill you. I follow orders." "And look where they have brought you!" Agamemnon said. "Where else would I be going but here? If not this year, then the next, or the one after that." "I didn't expect to be killed," the other soldier said. "I am Creonides. My time in Aegisthus' service was over at the end of the week. I was going back to my little farm outside Argos. Returning to my wife and baby daughter." "I can't believe this self-pitying nonsense," the doctor said. "My name is Strepsiades. I am a respected doctor of Cos, an island famous for its healers. I came to Mycenae for purely humanitarian reasons, to give what help I could to victims of the plague that you fellows carried back from Asia. And how am I rewarded? A villainous soldier kills me so there should be no witnesses to the illegal and immoral execution of his lord." "But I was just following orders," Creonides said. "My immediate commander, Sallices here, ordered me to do it." "And I," Sallices said, "was following the orders of my commander, the noble Aegisthus." "But those were immoral orders!" Pyliades said, sitting up and speaking now for the first time in a firm deep voice, with no signs of plague on him. "Any man can see that!" "Do you really think so?" Sallices asked. "And what if the orders were immoral? What is a soldier supposed to do, question and decide on each order given to him by his superiors? I've heard that you fellows did a few things you weren't so proud of during the Trojan War. Killing the whole population of Troy, and burning the city." "We were avenging ourselve for the theft of Helen!" Plyiades declared hotly. "And what was Helen to you?" Sallices asked. "Your wife or daughter? Not a bit of it! The wife of a king not even of your own country, since you are Argives, not Spartans. And anyhow, according to all accounts, the lady left Menelaus and went away with Paris willingly. So what were you avenging?" "Our slain companions," Pyliades said. "Achilles, our beloved leader." "Now that is really a laugh," Sallices said. "Your companions were there for the booty, and Achilles was there for the glory. Furthermore, he made his choice. It was prophesied he'd die gloriously at Troy, or lead a long inglorious life if he stayed home. No one had to die for poor Achilles! He made his choice to die for himself." There was silence for a while. Then Doctor Strepsiades said, "It must all have seemed different at the time. Men's choices are not presented to them in a reflective space. They come in the clamor and fury of the moment, when a choice must be made at once, for better or worse." "Is it the same with you, Doctor?" Agamemnon asked. "Or are you alone blameless among us?" Dr. Strepsiades was silent for a long while. At last he said, "My motives were not entirely humanitarian. I might as well confess this to you, since I will have to tell it to the Judges of the Dead. Queen Clytemnestra sent a herald to our school of physicians on Cos, imploring us for help with the plague, and offering a recompense. I was able to buy a nice little house in the city for my wife and children before I embarked." "Clytemnestra!" Agamemnon said. "That murderous bitch!" "She was trying to look out for her people," Strepsiades said. "And besides, she had her reasons. We have it on good authority that you sacrificed your daughter Iphigenia to call up a breeze to carry you and your men to Troy." "Now wait a minute," Agamemnon said. "There's another version of the story in which the goddess Artemis took Iphigenia to Aulis, to be high priestess to the Taurians." "I don't care about your face-saving version," Strepsiades said. "It was probably inspired by political reasons. In your heart you know you sacrificed your daughter." Agamemnon sighed and did not answer. "And not only did you do that, but you also involved your son, Orestes, in matricide, from which came his agony and his madness." "None of that could be predicted at the time," Agamemnon said. "Charon, what do you think?" Charon said, "We have been doing this ferrying for a long time, my father, my brothers, and I, and we share all the information we pick up. We have some questions, too, first and foremost about ourselves." Charon took a drink of wine from a leather flask lying in the bottom of the boat, and continued. "What are we here for? Why is there a Charon, or a Charon-function? Are we anything apart from our function? Just as you might ask, Agamemnon, whether you are anything apart from the morally ambiguous story of your life? A story which, for all intents and purposes, has no end and no beginning, and which in one guise or another is always contemporaneous, always happening. Do you ever get any time off from being the Agamemnon-function, do you ever have a chance for some good meaningless fun? Or do you always have to operate your character? Can you do anything without your act proposing a moral question, a dilemma for the ages, ethically unanswerable by its very nature?" "What about the rest of us?" Strepsiades asked. "Are our lives negligible just because they don't pose a great moral question like Agamemnon's?" "You and Agamemnon alike are equally negligible," Charon said. "You are merely the actors of old stories, which have more or less significance as the fashions of the times dictate. You are human beings, and you cannot be said to be with or without significance. But one like you, Agamemnon is a symbol and a question mark to the human race, just as the human race is to all intelligent life in the Kosmos." A chilling thought crossed Agamemnon's mind. "And you, Charon? What are you? Are you human? Are you one of those who brought us the lottery?" "We are living beings of some sort," Charon said. "There are more questions than answers in this matter of living. And now, gentlemen, I hope this conversation has diverted you, because we are at our destination." Looking over the side of the boat, Agamemnon could see a dark shoreline coining up. It was low, like the one they had left, but this one had a bright fringe of sandy beach. The boat made a soft grating sound as Charon ran it onto the sand. "You are here," Charon said, and then to Agamemnon: "Don't forget you owe me payment." "Farewell, Commander," said Pyliades. "I hope for a favorable judgment, and to see you again in the palace of Achilles, where they say he lives with Helen, the most beautiful woman who ever was or ever will be. They say the two of them feast the heroes of the Trojan War, and declaim the verses of Homer in pure Greek. I was not a hero, nor do I even speak Greek; but Achilles and Helen may welcome people like me—I have a cheery face now that death has removed the plague from me—and can be counted upon to applaud the great heroes of our Trojan enterprise." "I hope it turns out so," Agamemnon said. It may be a while before I come there myself, since I am still alive." The others said their farewells to Agamemnon, and assured him they bore him no ill will for their deaths. Then the four walked in the direction of the Judges' seats, which were visible on a rise of land. But Agamemnon followed a sign that read, "This way to the Orchards of Elysium and the Islands of the Blest." For these were the regions where he expected to find Tiresias. He walked through pleasant meadowlands, with cattle grazing in the distance. These, he had been told, were part of Helios' herd, which were always straying into this part of Hades, where the grass was greener. After a while he came to a valley. In the middle of the valley was a small lake. A man stood in the middle of the lake with water up to his mouth. There were trees growing along the lakeshore, fruit trees, and their branches hung over the man in the water, and ripe fruit drooped low over his head. But when he reached up to pick a banana or an apple—both grew on the same tree—the fruit shrank back out of his reach. Agamemnon thought he knew who this was, so he walked to the shore of the lake and called out, "Hello, Tantalus!" The man in the water said, "Why, if it isn't Agamemnon, ruler of men! Have you come to rule here in hell, Agamemnon?" "Certainly not," Agamemnon said. "I'm just here for a visit. I've come to talk with Tiresias. Would you happen to know where I might find him?" "Tirisias keeps a suite in Hades' palace. It's just to your left, over that rise. You can't miss it." "Thanks very much, Tantalus. Is it very onerous, this punishment the gods have decreed for you? Is there anything I can do?" "Good of you to ask," Tantalus said. "But there's nothing you could do for me. Besides, this punishment is not as terrible as it might seem. The gods are relentless in decreeing punishment, but they don't much care who actually does it. So a couple of us swap punishments, and thus get some relief from the same thing over and over." "Who do you trade with, if you don't mind my asking?" "By no means. A bit of conversation is a welcome diversion. Sisyphus, Prometheus, and I from time to time take over one another's punishments. The exercise of pushing Sisyphus' boulder does me good—otherwise I might get fat—I tend to gorge when I get the chance." "But to have your liver torn out by a vulture when you take over for Prometheus—that can't be much fun." "You'd be surprised. The vulture often misses the liver, chews at a kidney instead, much less hurtful. Especially when you consider that here in hell, sensation is difficult to come by. Even King Achilles and Queen Helen, each blessed with the unsurpassed beauty of the other, have a bit of trouble feeling desire without bodies. Pain is a welcome change to feeling nothing." Agamemnon set out again in the direction Tantalus had indicated. He went across a high upland path, and saw below a pleasant grove of pine trees. There were a dozen or so men and women in white robes, strolling around and engaging in animated conversation. Agamemnon walked over to them and announced who he was. A woman said, "We know who you are. We were expecting you, since your trip here was mentioned in several of the books that were lost when the great library at Alexandria burned. In honor of your arrival, several of us have written philosophical speeches entitled 'Agamemnon's Lament.' These speeches are about the sort of things we thought we would hear from you." "Since you knew I was coming, why didn't you wait and hear what I actually did say?" "Because, Agamemnon, what we did is the philosophical way, and the way of action. We wrote your speech ourselves, instead of passively waiting for you to write it, if you ever would. And, since you are not a philosopher yourself, we thought you were unlikely to cast your thoughts into a presentation sufficiently rigorous for an intelligent and disinterested observer. Nor were you a dramatist, so your thoughts were unlikely to have either the rigor or beauty of a philosophical dramatist such as Aeschylus or Sophocles. Since words once said cannot be unsaid, as conversation permits no time for reflection and revision, we took the liberty of putting what we thought you would be likely to say into proper grammatical form, carefully revised, and with a plethora of footnotes to make the meaning of your life and opinions clear to even the meanest understanding." ''Very good of you, I'm sure," said Agamemnon, who, although deficient in philosophy, had a small but useful talent for irony. "We don't expect our work will represent you, Agamemnon, the man," another philosopher said. "But we hope we've done justly by you, Agamemnon the position." "This is all very interesting," Agamemnon said. "But could you tell me now how I might find Tiresias?" The philosophers conferred briefly. Then one of them said, "We do not recognize Tiresias as a philosopher. He is a mere shaman." "Is that bad?" Agamemnon asked. "Shamans may know some true things, but they are not to be relied upon because they do not know why or how they know. Lacking this—" "Hey," Agamemnon said, "The critique of shamanism is unnecessary. I just want to talk to the guy." "He's usually in the little grove behind Achilles' palace. Come back if you want a copy of our book of your opinions." "I'll do that," Agamemnon said, and walked away in the direction indicated. Agamemnon passed through a little wood. He noticed it was brighter here than in the other parts of Hades he had visited. Although no sun was visible, there was a brightness and sparkle to the air. He figured he was in one of the better parts of the underworld. He was not entirely surprised when he saw, ahead of him, a table loaded with food and drink, and a masked man in a long cloak sitting at it, with an empty chair beside him. The man waved. "Agamemnon? I heard you were looking for me, so I've made it easy by setting myself in your path. Come have a chair, and let me give you some refreshment." Agamemnon walked over and sat down. "You are Tiresias? "I am. Would you like some wine?" "A glass of wine would be nice." He waited while Tiresias poured, then said, "May I ask why you are masked?" "A whim," Tiresias said. "And something more. I am a magician, or shaman, to use a term popular in your time. Upon occasion I go traveling, not just here in ancient Greece, but elsewhere in space and time." "And you don't want to be recognized?" "It can be convenient, to be not too well known. But that's not the real reason. You see, Agamemnon, knowing someone's face can give you a measure of power over him. So Merlin discovered when he consorted with the witch Nimue, and she was able to enchant him. I do not give anyone power over me if I can help it." "I can't imagine anyone having power over you." "I could have said the same for Merlin, and one or two others. Caution is never out of place. Now tell me why you seek me out. I know, of course. But I want to hear it from your own lips." "It's no secret," Agamemnon said. "My wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, have sworn to kill me. I come to you to ask if there is some way out of this Greek trap I am in." "You are supposed to be slain for having sacrificed your daughter Iphigenia, so your fleet could sail to Troy." "Now wait a minute!" Agamemnon said. "There's another version in which I did not kill Iphigenia. She's alive now in Aulis!" "Don't try to deceive me with tricky words," Tiresias said. "Both versions of your story are true. You both killed and did not kill your daughter. But you are guilty in either version, or both. Have you ever heard of Schrodinger's cat? It was a scientific fable popular in your day and age." "I've heard of it," Agamemnon said. "I can't pretend I ever really understood it." "The man who concocted the fable is condemned, though no cat was ever slain. And this is true in the two worlds." Agamemnon was silent for a while. He had been watching Tiresias' mask, which at times seemed made of beaten gold, at other times of golden cloth that billowed when he spoke. After a while, Agamemnon asked, "What two worlds are you speaking of?" "The world of Earth with its various time lines, and the world of the lottery." "So there's no escape?" "My dear fellow, I never said that. I only wanted to point out that you're in a far more complicated and devious game than you had imagined." "Why have the people of the lottery done this to us?" "For the simplest and most obvious of reasons. Because it seemed a good idea to them at the time. Here was Earth, a perfect test case for those who could manipulate the time lines. Here were the stories of the Greeks, which the human world is not finished with yet. It seemed to the makers of the lottery that here was a perfect test case. They decided to live it through again, and again, to see if the moral equations would come out the same." "And have they?" The tall figure of Tiresias shrugged, and Agamemnon had the momentary impression that it was not a man's form beneath the cloak. "As I said, it seemed a good idea at the time. But that was then, and yesterday's good idea doesn't look so good today." "Can you tell me how to get out of here?" Tiresias nodded. "You'll have to travel on the River of Time." "I never heard of it." "It's a metaphor. But the underworld is a place where metaphors become realities." "Metaphor or not, I don't see any river around here," Agamemnon said. "I'll show you how to get to it. There's a direct connection, a tunnel from here to Scylla and Charybdis, both of which border the ocean. You'll go through the tunnel which will lead you there." "Isn't there some other way to get there?" Tiresias continued, "This is the only way. Once past Scylla and Charybdis, you'll see a line of white breakers. Cross them. You will be crossing the river in the ocean that goes into the past. You don't want that one. You'll see another line of breakers. Cross these and you will be in the river that will carry you from the past into the future." "The past . . . but where in the future?" "To a place you will know, Agamemnon. Wait no longer. Do this now." Agamemnon got up and walked in the direction Tiresias had indicated. When he looked back, the magician was gone. Had he been there in the first place? Agamemnon wasn't sure. The indirections of the lottery were bad enough. But when you added magic . . . He saw something light-colored, almost hidden beneath shrubbery. It was the entrance to a tube burrowing down into the earth. Wide enough so he could get into it. A tube of some light-colored metal, aluminum, perhaps, and probably built by the lottery people, since aluminum hadn't been used in the ancient world. Was he really supposed to climb through it? He hesitated, and then saw that there was a woman standing close to the tube. From the look of her, he knew it could only be one woman. "Helen!" "Hello, Agamemnon. I don't believe we ever got to meet properly before. I have come to thank you for sending me home to Menelaus. And to offer you my hospitality here in the Elysian Fields." "You are too kind, Queen Helen. But I must go home now." "Must you?" Agamemnon hesitated. Never had he been so sorely tempted. The woman was the epitome of all his dreams. There could be nothing as wonderful as to be loved by Helen. "But your new husband, Achilles—" "Achilles has a great reputation, but he is dead, Agamemnon, just as 1 am. A dead hero does not even compare to a live dog. You are alive. Alive and in hell! Such a wonderful circumstance is rare. When Heracles and Theseus were here, they were only passing through. Besides, I was not here then. Things might have been different if I had been!" "I am alive, yes," Agamemnon said. "But I will not be allowed to stay here." "I'll talk Hades into it. He likes me—especially with his wife Persephone gone for half a year at a time." Agamemnon could glimpse the future. It thrilled him and frightened him. But he knew what he wanted. To stay here with Helen—as much of Helen as he could get. . . . She held out her hand. He reached toward her— And heard voices in the distance. And then he saw shapes in the sky. One was a tall, handsome, thickset middle-aged woman, with long loose dark hair. The other was young, tall, slim, with fair hair piled up on her head and bound with silver ornaments. The women seemed to be walking down the sky toward him, and they were in vehement discussion. "You must tell him to his face what he did!" the older woman was saying. "Mummy, there's no reason to make a scene." "But he had you killed, can't you understand that? Your throat cut on the altar! You must tell him so to his face." "Mummy, I don't want to accuse Daddy of so gross a crime. Anyhow, there's another version that says that Artemis rescued me and carried me to the Taurians, where I served as high priestess." "Agamemnon killed you! If not literally, then figuratively, no matter which version of the story you're following. He's guilty in either version." "Mummy, calm down, I don't want to accuse him." "You little idiot, you'll do as I tell you. Look, we're here. There he is, the great killer. Ho, Agamemnon!" Agamemnon could listen no longer. Letting go of Helen's hand, aware that he was forsaking the good things of death for the pain and uncertainty of life, he plunged into the underbrush and hurled himself into the white metal tube. Agamemnon had been prepared for a precipitous passage downward, but not for the circling movement he underwent as the tube spiraled in its descent. It was dark, and he could see no light from either end. He was moving rapidly, and there seemed nothing he could do to hasten or slow his progress. He was carried along by gravity, and his fear was that his wife and daughter would enter the tube in pursuit of him. He thought that would be more than he could bear. He continued to fall through the darkness, scraping against the sides of the tube. The ride came to an abrupt end when he suddenly fell through the end of it. He had a heart-stopping moment in the air, then he was in the water. The shock of that cold water was so great that he found himself paralyzed, unable to make a move. And he came out on a corner of a small south Texas town. There was lose, standing beside the pickup parked in front of the general store. Jose gasped when he saw Chris. For a moment he was frozen. Then he hurried over to him. "Senor Chrees! Is it you?" There were hugs, embraces. When he'd left for the lottery and distant places, he'd left them to run the ranch. Make what they could out of it. But it was still his ranch, and he was home. Maria said, "I make your favorite, turkey mole tonight!" And then she talked about their cousins in Mexico, some of whom he'd known as a boy. There was more shopping, and then they were drivmg down the familiar dirt road with its cardboard stretches, to the ranch, José drove them to the ranch in his old pickup. The ranch looked a little rundown, but very good. Chris lounged around in the kitchen. Chris dozed on the big old sofa, and dreamed of Greece and Troy. And then dinner was served. After dinner, Chris went into the front room and lay down on the old horsehair sofa. It was deliciously comfortable, and the smells were familiar and soothing. He drifted into sleep, and knew that he was sleeping. He also knew when the dream began: it was when he saw the tall, robed figure of Tiresias. Tiresias nodded to him and sat down on the end of the couch. It crossed Chris' mind that he might be in danger from a dream-figure, but there was nothing he could do about it. "I came here to make sure you got home all right. When you enter the River of Time, you can never be too sure." Yes, 1 am back where I ought to be. Tell me, Tiresias, is there a danger of Clytemnestra finding me here?" "She will not find you here. But punishment will. It is inescapable." "What am I to be punished for? 1 didn't do anything!" "When you were Agamemnon, you killed your daughter. For that deed, you owe Necessity a death." "But the version I'm going by—" "Forget such puerile nonsense. A young woman has been killed. In Homer, whose rules we're going by, there is no guilt. But there is punishment. Punishment is symbolic of the need for guilt, which still hadn't been invented in Homer's time. We learn through guilt. Thus we return to innocence." "I thought, if I came home, I'd be free of all that. And anyhow, Artemis—" "Forget such specious nonsense. It shows why Plato hated sophists. No one learns anything by making the worse case the better. The Agamemnon situation is a curse, and it goes on and on, gathering energy through expiation and repetition. The Greeks had a predilection for creating these situations—Oedipus, Tantalus, Sisyphus, Prometheus, the list is endless. One character after another falls into a situation that must be solved unfairly. The case is never clear, but punishment always follows." "Does it end here?" "The expiation for mythic conditions never ends. Opening into the unknowable is the essence of humanity." Then Chris dreamed that he sat up on his couch, opened his shirt, and said, "Very well, then—strike!" "A truly Agamemnon-like gesture, Chris. But I am not going to kill you." "You're not? Why are you here then?" "At these times, a magician is always present to draw the moral." "Which is?" "It is an exciting thing to be a human being." "You're here to tell me that? So Clytemnestra gets her revenge!" "And is killed in turn by Orestes. Nobody wins in these dreams, Chris." "So that's what you came here to tell me." "That, and to take care of some loose ends. Good-bye, Chris. See you in hell." And with that, Tiresias was gone. Chris woke up with a start. The dream of Tiresias had been very real. But it was over now, and he was back at his Texas ranch. He sat up. It was evening. It had turned cold after the sun went down. He got up. Hearing his footsteps, Maria came running in from the kitchen. She was carrying his old suede jacket. "You put this on, Mr. Chris," she said, and threw the jacket around his shoulders. The jacket was curiously constricting. Chris couldn't move his arms. And then Jose was there, and somehow they were bending his head back. "What are you doing?" Chris asked, but he really didn't have to be told when he caught the flash of steel in Jose's hand. "How could you?" he asked. "Hey, Mr. Chris, we join the lottery, me and Maria!" Jose said. "I'm going to be the new Agamemnon, she's Clytemnestra, but we take care of the trouble before it begins. We kill the old Agamemnon, so it doesn't have to happen again!" Chris thought it was just like Jose to get things mixed up, to try to solve a myth before it began. He wondered if Cassandra had hinted at this outcome, and if he had ignored her, since that was her curse. He sank to the floor. The pain was sharp and brief, and he had the feeling that there was something he had left undone, though he couldn't remember what it was. . . . He couldn't know it, not at that time, that a man in a yellow buffalo-hide coat had gone to the local branch of Thomas Cook and put in a payment. He had it directed to the Infernal Account. The clerk had never heard of that account, but when he checked with the manager, there it was. The payment ensured that Chris wouldn't be left for eternity on the wrong shore of Styx, and that the other four were paid for, too. It was a little nicety on the part of Tiresias. He hadn't had to do it, but he did it anyhow. Those old magicians had class. And anyhow, that's what a good magician does—he ties up loose ends. Neal Barrett, Jr I wrote six books for Don between 1976 and 1982—four in the Aldair series, one called Stress Pattern (one of my own favorites], and finally, The Karma Corps. I had published three books before that—two in 1970 and one in 1971—and a number of short stories beginning in 1960. Still, I will always feel that the work I did for Don during that period gave me the right push, and brought in a lot of readers. I'm still getting comments on the Aldair series, after all these years, and more than once I've used the themes from those books in my work—most recently in The Prophecy Machine and The Treachery of Kings. I seem to have this thing about animals getting back at Man for all the dirty tricks he's played on them. Of course, after Aldair, friends and fans would come up, stare at me, and say "Hey, man, PIGS IN SPACE!" I only had the pleasure of meeting Don once, in New York City, somewhere around 1980. We had corresponded so often, I felt I knew him well, but I discovered he was even more charming and affable in person. And, more than that, a guy who knew writers, and what writing was all about. Science fiction would not have been the same without him. — GRUBBER Neal Barrett, Jr. 1 KHIRI remembered a round piece of cold. Far, far away, then chill-bone close. He shrank into the warmdark, back into the never, back into the no, but it was too late to run, too late to hide and he was thrust, rushed, into the born, into the terrible be ... He sensed the bigger warms, sensed they were Mothers though they didn't have a name. They kept away the hunger, kept away the cold. There were others like himself nearby, but they were small and useless, too. It was easy to tell when the Fathers came near. The Mothers became very still, their colors so low he could scarcely sense them at all. They would shiver, they would quiver, they would not-quite-be, they were somewhere Khiri couldn't see. It was an awesome, wonderful thing to feel the Fathers about. They were big, rumbly, grumbly, their colors were black, vermilion, and blood. He couldn't understand why the Mothers tried hard to get away, tried hard not to be. The first time a thought like this blinked into his mind, another came to chase it away. The new thought said it was not good to be when the Fathers were around. And, in an instant, he found out why. They saw him, knew he was there. Their colors screamed with anger, burned, seared, with a fierce and terrible heat. One, the biggest of them all, came so close he could feel its heavy sniff, feel its shuffle, feel its nuzzle-muzzle-breath. Khiri didn't move, didn't think, didn't blink. Then, at once, he wasn't anywhere at all. He was there, in the not-place, though no one showed him where, no one showed him how. He dared not show his fear. Now he knew what fear was for. Fear was to show the Fathers you were there. . . . When the Fathers went away, he knew something else he hadn't known before. He knew about death. Death was not the same as the not-place, death was even farther off than that. The death hadn't happened to a Mother. It happened to one of the others like himself. It was torn, ragged, thick with a vile and fetid smell. He was curious about it, but the Mothers quickly nosed it away. Sometimes Khiri would touch the others. The feathery brush of another was a new thing to do. Touching the others, he learned about himself. He learned he was hard with a softness underneath. He learned he could move from one place to the next. There were things in his soft that moved him this way or that. Some of the others were learning, too, and they darted all about until the Mothers made them stop, warned them they had to be still. During the still, the Mothers would touch him with the slenders they kept beneath their soft. One of the touches meant danger. Others meant stop-come-go. Wake-sleep-bad. Food-wet-dry. And, as he grew, he learned you could string these touches together like a line of pebbles on the ground. When you strung them together, they meant much more than they ever meant alone. Just as he was getting used to one set of slenders, another sprang from nowhere—and another, and another after that. Whenever something new broke through, he was certain he would die. The larger and thicker the new things became, the greater was the pain. When it was done, and the new things were there, he learned how useful they could be. He could pick something up, hold it, carry it about. All he could find were pebbles and stones, but it was something new to do. He began to know others like himself. One of the others was Ghiir. They learned how to fight. They learned how to play. The best thing they learned was they didn't even have to rub slenders to give each other words. They could think about the words, and the words were simply there. They learned they were not all the same. Phaen helped them learn about that. They would have learned more if the Mothers hadn't lashed them soundly and sent Phaen quickly away. Going was Khiri's favorite thing to do. He had to go alone. Ghiir would go with him to the nears, but Ghiir would never venture to the fars. Khiri saw a number of strange and fearsome things. Colors he'd never seen. Places he could scarcely describe. The things he would never go near were the lines. Whenever they appeared, he would choke up his food and get sick inside his head. The lines were too terrible to see. 2 For a while, he hardly knew the Mothers were gone. He could find his own food now and didn't really care. There seemed no end to the passageways and holes that led everywhere. Sometimes things were high, sometimes they were deep with no bottom at all. Nothing bothered Khiri. His slenders would take him wherever he wished to go. The strangest thing he found was the thing. It wasn't a Mother, it wasn't a Father, it wasn't like anything he'd ever seen before. He ran his slenders across its dusty shell. To his great surprise, he found it was hard all over, with no soft at all. "What kind of thing are you?" he asked it. "Soft is for inside, hard is for out. And you have no slenders to touch or feel or know." "Foolish Khiri. Why do you speak to a thing that cannot speak to you?" Khiri started. He was so intent on the creature he had not sensed the Mother at all. "I know I am not supposed to be here," he said. "You don't have to tell me that." "No. But you are. You are often where you are not supposed to be." "I cannot understand what I have found. It is not like a Mother or a Father. It is not like me." "It is dead, Khiri. It has no bloodsmell about it, for it died a long time ago." "What was it, then? What was it called?" "It was what you are," the Mother said. "It was just the same as you. It wandered off to a place it shouldn't be." 3 He was larger, now. Nearly as large as the Fathers. He feared them when they came, but knew how take himself where the Fathers couldn't see. He was learning a great deal. Most of the things he learned were how to hide and stay alive. Lately, he was learning to understand the lines. He could get much closer to them now. They seldom made him sick, seldom gave him dizzies in the head. He didn't know what the lines could be, but they didn't look at all like they had when he was small. 4 He couldn't remember when he stopped seeing Ghiir. He didn't miss him, didn't want to see him, didn't really want to see anyone at all. He caught the scent of a Mother once, as he roamed through the endless passages and halls. She sensed his presence as well— tried to hide her colors, tried not to be. But Khiri knew she was there. He could sense the dark odor of her fear. Why? What was she afraid of, why was she acting this way? For a moment, a new, peculiar kind of rage stirred within him. A picture of Phaen flicked through his head. Only this wasn't Phaen, this was a Mother down the hall. The smell of the Fathers was heavy on the air. It had been like that all day. Their almost-presence made him tense, irritated, filled him with a hate he had seldom felt before. When the Fathers finally came, he was so hot with anger he nearly forgot about the not-place, nearly forgot to get away. A great, rumbly Father nearly had him, a Father hungry for his bloodsmell, hungry for his life. Khiri shook with rage, ashamed that he had run, that he had not stayed to fight. He knew he would have died, but how could that be worse than the way he felt now? And, when the Father was out of sight, he looked around for something to make this feeling go away. He found the Mother later in the day. He was nearly upon her before she knew he was there. "Phaen. 1 remember you." "I do not know you. I am Traea, not Phaen." "You are Phaen," he said. 5 His encounter with the Father had changed him. He was no longer angry or afraid. Sometimes, he wished he could find that anger again. Anger was better than feeling nothing at all. He did not even try to find the Phaen who said it was a Traea. There were others of his kind around. He did not want to see them. He waited, now, until the foodplace was clear, a thing he had never done before. When the ache was too sharp in his belly, he scuttled to the foodplace, choking down his meal so he could quickly go away. He heard the other coming up behind. The intruder was silent, but Khiri knew who it was. "Ghiir. Go away. I am at the foodplace now." "I am here as well," Ghiir said. "Then you must wait until I am done." "I do not have to wait for you." "You will wait, Ghiir." "No, I will not—" Ghiir came at him. Without even thinking, Khiri sucked in his slenders and rolled away. Something whipped him sharply about the head. Khiri backed off, keeping the thick part of his shell very low to the ground, and always facing Ghiir. He and Ghiir had played at fighting, but this was not the same. This was bloodsmell fighting, and Ghiir knew it, too. Ghiir began a slow half circle to Khiri's right. He watched Ghi-ir's thick, bony slenders stab the air. They curved in a sharp, wicked arc, like his own. He knew what Ghiir meant to do. He wanted to back Khiri in a corner. Khiri decided that was the thing to let him do. Ghiir sprang, slashing in quick, vicious thrusts. Khiri blocked every blow, making no effort to strike back. There was a pattern to his foe's attack—the more Ghiir came at him, the better Khiri understood. When the time came, when Ghiir grew weary . . . Only, Ghiir showed no sign of slowing down. He flailed at Khiri with one blow after the next. Khiri decided the defender's role was not as easy as he'd thought. Ghiir hadn't hurt him, but his fierce assaults were taking their toll. A dull ache had begun at the back of Khiri's head. Each time he countered Ghiir's thrust, he moved a little slower than before. Ghiir sensed this at once and came in for the kill. He was certain he had Khiri now, and Khiri was not at all sure that he was wrong. He might not stop the next blow, or the one after that. If he made one mistake— Suddenly, there it was again, Ghiir's familiar pattern. In an instant, Khiri knew what to do next. He moved, caught Ghiir's slenders against his own. Pressed himself against the wall and shoved with all the strength at his command. Ghiir stumbled, caught off guard. Khiri slashed up at his enemy's soft underbelly. Ghiir jerked back, tried to right himself, but he was helpless now. Khiri found his mark again. Ghiir rolled on his back, quivered once, and lay still. Khiri was too tired to move. Almost too tired to take himself to the not-place, but he knew he had to do that. Soon, the Fathers would come to see what the bloodsmell was about. 6 In the not-place, Khiri didn't think about Ghiir. He didn't think about anything at all. This was a place for being—it was not a place to do. All he had to do was wait for the Fathers to go away. He knew they were there, for there was something, a shadow-part of himself, that always stayed behind. He didn't understand the shadow-part. He only knew it was there. It would tell him when the Fathers were gone. He had never, ever stayed so long in the not-place. The longer he stayed, the more he sensed things he had never sensed before. Silent waves of color washed around him. Deep chords of silence hummed and thrummed about, quivered and shivered, whispered and sang. It was something he had often sensed before, but never in the not-place, always in the real. Now, with a sudden, awesome burst of understanding, he knew what the hum and the thrum was all about. It was the lines. There was no mistake about that. But what were they doing in the not-place, what were they doing there? The question had scarcely taken shape before the answer came: The lines and the not-place were one and the same. That's what the not-place was about—if yon knew how to use it, it was the door, the pathway into the lines. . . . Khiri was startled by this amazing new knowledge—so vibrant, so clear to him now, he wondered why he hadn't understood it all before. And there was more, so much more—all the maybes, all the heres and theres, all the somewhens and the wheres. He knew, too, that now he could not be Khiri-here and Khiri-there. If he followed the lines, he would have to let the Khiri-shadow go. And how could he dare to do that? The Khiri-shadow was the only thing that could take him back to real. He remembered, then, the real was not all that safe just now. The Fathers were there. They were there for Ghiir's bloodsmell. If he went back now, there would be a Khiri bloodsmell, too. He knew, with a fear that made him tremble within his shell, that he was slipping back, that he had stayed in the not-place much too long, that the shadow-self was desperately pulling him back. And, if he could not go to the real, there was only one place to go. He would have to take that step from the not-place, into the I'nes, into a place that was nowhere at all. . . . 7 It was real, in a way, but not the real he knew. If he looked back at the not-place it was wavy and indistinct—a pale tracery that winked in and out. The world he saw before him was a thing he had never imagined before. High above him was a ball of every color, squeezed into a hotness so strong it seemed to burn through his shell. There were other things to see. Prickly-colored things beneath his feet. Stone things, immense and unbelievably high. Things that were near. Things that were farther than anything could be. "You are Khiri. I know who you are." Khiri was so absorbed in the new things around him he didn't see the Father. He jerked up, nearly frightened out of his wits. He had never really seen a Father. Not like this! The Father seemed unconcerned with his fear. "If you have found your way here, you are ready to go to work. You are not a child anymore. You cannot stand around and stare at the sky. I am busy, and have no time to show you what to do." "You do not have to show me," Khiri heard himself say. "I know what to do." The Father didn't answer. As suddenly as he had come, he was gone. Khiri did know. He was not a child anymore. He knew what he was, and he knew what to do. And, for the first time in his life, he was not afraid of the Fathers anymore. He was not afraid, for he was one of them too. 8 He worked with the others who were new. No one told him what the lines were for, or where they had to go. He knew, though, what was right and what was wrong. He knew if the no-colors felt the way they should. He knew if the silence, if the hum, if the song was the way it ought to be. If it wasn't, he told a Father who was always nearby, a Father who knew what to do. That was his job. He was a Listener, because he was new. Later, if he learned his job well, he would be a Toner, working in the lines, working in the great, wondrous Pattern itself. The Pattern was what the lines were called, when they all came together exactly as they should. Khiri came to know other Fathers, those who were new like himself. The older Fathers seldom spoke to him at all. He knew, now, onlv those who found their way out of the dark down below ever made it to the lines. He remembered Jhiril and Dhiss. He remembered Ghaan. He learned that very few from a single birthing found their way up to the lines. He worked, and he learned. He learned what his kind were called. They were S'ai, and a S'ai was a grand thing to be, for only the S'ai could do what they could do. He learned—to his surprise—there were other beings who were not like the S'ai. There were Sacar, great, heavy creatures built close to the earth. Their skin was on the outside, hard, mottled and the color of stone. He didn't like the Sacar. He liked the Dri even less. Dn looked like brittle bundles of sticks. Sometimes, Khiri could catch the edge of their thoughts. When he did, he drew quickly away. The minds of the Dri were cold, colder than cold could ever be. The Sacar were often about, but the Dri kept to themselves. Neither the Sacar nor the Dri worked on the Pattern. They knew it was there, but it was something they could only imagine, a thing they could never see. That was something only the S'ai could do. Khiri learned about the stars. They were hot, fierce points of light, much farther than the one that warmed the world beneath him now. He learned there were other worlds, too, that one of those worlds was his own. Finally, one of the older Fathers put pictures of that world inside his head. Khiri was stunned. He had never imagined such a place before. He longed to go there himself some day. Could that ever be? The Father couldn't answer, the Father didn't know. One day, a horde of strange creatures swarmed out of the high, rocky places and tried to kill the Fathers. Khiri, like the others, simply winked into the Pattern and disappeared. The creatures were two-legs like the Sacar, only not really like them at all. The Sacar tell upon the intruders, and tew of them got away. "Why do they do that," Khiri asked a Father, who would sometimes speak to those who were new. "Why do they want to kill the S'ai!" "This is their world," said the Father, whose name was Bhir. "It's theirs and they don't want us here." "Why?" Khiri wanted to know "All the S'ai are doing is building a Pattern. A Pattern is not a thing to fear." The Father made a noise, the kind of noise an elder makes to show what he thinks ot the young. 9 Sometimes, Khiri went with the other Fathers hack down in the dark. The Mothers tried to hide, to not-bc when they came. When they found a Mother who could not hide her color, she would shut down her senses, and pretend they weren't there. This was the way it had always been among the S'ai. Often, he would search the dark for younglings, probing and snuffing for the scent of their fear. When he found one, he would rip it, shred it, tear it apart, until only the bloodsmell was there. Khiri knew this had to be. Those who could not get away would never learn to leave the dark. They would never get past the not-place, never find the lines. They would never truly be S'ai. 10 Khiri knew he had been a Listener long enough. No one had to tell him, Khiri simply knew. He even knew what he would be. He would not be a loner, even though that was the next thing to be. He was ready to be a Former now. He could feel the Pattern. He knew where it was going, knew how it should be. He could hear it quiver and sing. He could sense it folding in upon itself in endless wheres and whens. He could help it become the very best Pattern the S'ai had ever made, Khiri found Thil. Thil was a Former. He had been a Former long before Khiri was born. "Thil," Khiri said, "I am ready to take your place now. I must ask you to leave." "Why would I want to do that?" Thil said. "You are only a Listener. Even if you were ready to be a Former, there are many ahead of you." "I am better than they are now. 1 am better than you—" Thil winked out of sight. Khiri followed. The place Thil had chosen was a place Khiri had never been before, a place wild and shattered, a fearsome place to be. This was where the Formers came to gather the uncreated power for the Pattern. It was raw, unborn. Nowhere and no-when. This was not a fight like Khin's tight with Ghiir. There would be no bloodsmell here. Khiri fought to lose, not to win. To win was to fade into the chaos of the uncreated void. To lose was to skirt the edge of being, to find that point, and leave Thil forever in what would never be. Thil was good. But Khiri was right. He was better, and he alone returned to the real again. 11 Khiri learned quickly. Soon, he was setting the pace for many of the older, more experienced S'ai. They didn't like Khiri, but they knew what he could do. Finally, only Dhin was above him in his skills. Dhin was Master Former. He knew even better than Khiri how good Khiri could be. He showed Khiri everything he knew. Khiri didn't dream of challenging Dhin's position. You did not tight to become a Master Former. That was a thing for lesser S'ai. When the time came, Dhin knew it. He had worked long and hard. He had gained great honor and respect among the S'ai. He did not even think about staying to finish his final Pattern. He had done what he could. Khiri would add richness to the firm foundation Dhin had begun. The S'ai would remember it was Dhin's Pattern. When the next worktime began, Dhin was not there. Khiri knew he was not coming. He knew he was Master Former of the S'ai. 12 When the Pattern was nearly complete, Vhid himself came to see Khiri. Khiri was honored and showed his respect. Vhid was a Planner. There were less than half a hundred Planners among the S'ai, on all the worlds where the S'ai had built a Pattern. More than that, Vhid was a Grand Planner, one of the Eight. Vhid glanced at the vast tracery of the Pattern, then studied Khiri with some amusement, an emotion rare among the S'ai. "You are a good Former, Khiri. This is a fine Pattern. You do honor to the S'ai. However, in case it had crossed your mind— and I see that it likely has—you are not yet ready to take my place. You are a good Master Former, but you are not yet a Planner." Khiri was horrified, and frightened as well. It was a thought he had kept very far back in his mind. "Master Vhid, I hope you don't imagine—" "Why not? You have clearly dreamed of becoming everything else a S'ai can be. You had best keep dreaming for a while. I will not remind you again. You may well be a Planner. Though not as quickly as you'd like." Khiri was much too busy to think about being more than what he was. The Pattern was nearing completion, and there was more to be done than there were hours in the day. There were a thousand questions to be answered, a thousand more to be asked. And, in the end, it was up to the Master Former to be sure they were all answered right. He was in the midst of a dozen tasks when word came that Vhid wished to see him again. Now? Khiri wanted to say, but of course he said nothing at all. Instead, he followed a guide past the long, deep valley directly beneath the Pattern, a path that took him past a high stone place where the two-legs lived—past another to a broad and empty plain. Khiri was astonished, frightened at the sight, for there lay the starship of the Dri. He knew the ship was there, but only the oldest of the S'ai had ever seen it before. Khiri did not like the Dri, and wanted nothing to do with anything that was theirs. Still, he could not keep Vhid waiting. He could not tell a member of the Eight he was frightened of a star-ship of the Dri. 13 Vhid met him under the high, dull portal of the ship. Past Vhid, Khiri could see shadowy forms of both the Sacar and the Dri. This close, the Sacar looked enormous. Even the fragile Dri stood heads above the S'ai, but the Sacar were fearsome giants. How could they live that way, teetering above the ground like uprooted stones? How could they stand to be what they were? They could never imagine the not-place. They could never see the Pattern. They could do nothing the S'ai could do. Yet, for all the things they were and were not, Khiri was frightened in their presence. And, because he feared them, he hated them all the more. Khiri understood nothing that had been said at the meeting with the Sacar and the Dri. The Sacar croaked like mud-things. The Dri merely rattled like leaves. If Vhid wished to speak, he touched a shiny thing with his slenders. When he did, a sound came out, but it was not the voice of Vhid. "I see you are in no great haste to become a Planner now," Vhid said later. "I see you understand it is not the same as working on the Pattern, or any of the things a S'ai was born to do." "No," said Khiri, "it is not. It is truly like nothing I imagined. I do not see how I can ever become a Planner, for I can scarcely stand to deal with such strange, disgusting forms of life—if, indeed, those things are creatures at all." "Oh, they are, Khiri. It is difficult to imagine, but they are." Khiri was dismayed. Even though Vhid had told him much of what was said in the meeting, he understood very little at all. Maybe there was nothing wrong with being a Master Former. Certainly, it was an honorable thing to be. Not everyone could hope to be a Planner. Why should he try to be something he was not? While Khiri walked back across the plain with Vhid, two of the giant Sacar came out of the ship. Behind them came a train of the two-legs. They were gaunt and pitiful creatures. Some wore rags of cloth. Some wore nothing at all. Each of the two-legs carried a box upon its shoulders. The boxes were clearly heavy, and, as Khiri watched, one of the creatures staggered and fell. The box dropped to the ground. The Sacar became very angry. They yelled in their mud-tongue, and beat the two-legs until it lay still. Then they made another of the beings pick up the box and move along. "Why do they do that?" Khiri wanted to know. "The Sacar have devices that could carry much more. Using the two-legs is not the best way to get things from one place to the next." "The Sacar use the creatures in this manner because they like to," Vhid said. "Because it shows they are stronger than the two-legs." Khiri was puzzled. "Everyone knows the Sacar are stronger. If they were not, they would not have conquered this world. We would not be building a Pattern here." "You are thinking like a S'ai, Khiri. This is why I took you to the meeting, so you would begin to see the things a Planner must understand. The S'ai fight among themselves, for only the best among us must survive. "We show we are strong, but only to better the S'ai. The Sacar show their strength, because they imagine one day they could find some creature that is stronger than themselves. This has never happened, but it is something they will always fear. Do you understand what I say?" "I must tell you I do not," Khiri said. "Perhaps I will never be a Planner, Master Vhid." "You will. But you are not a Planner now." 14 He could not stop thinking about the great starship on the plain— about the strange worlds where the starship had been. He wondered what these worlds were like, and how many he himself might see. More than anything, though, he thought about the two-legs. He could not forget how the Saear had beaten it until it was around into the dirt. Could Vhid be right in what he said? How could a fearsome creature like the Sacar be afraid of anything at all? As work neared completion, he spent more and more time with Vhid. To Khiri's great relief, the Master Planner did not take him to any more meetings with the Sacar and the Dri. Instead, he set to work teaching Khiri a great many things he had no desire to learn. He learned about the scratches, marks, and see-things the Sacar and the Dri used to remember what they said. He tried to understand the noises they made with their faces when they spoke. He knew, now—though it was almost impossible to believe—that noises were the only way they could communicate at all. "You will learn," Vhid told him more than once. "It simply takes time. You cannot understand other beings simply because you know what they are saying. That, I must tell you, is the easiest part. What they menu is something else. "The Sacar do not like the Dn, and the Dri do not like them. One is stronger. One knows how to build machines. The S'ai do neither of these. Yet, we do something the others cannot. The S'ai can make a Pattern. That is why they need us. And that is why, young Khiri, they fear us and hate us more than they fear and hate each other, or any of the other creatures among the stars." Vhid paused to let Khiri consider this. "Now you see why it is vital to learn their ways. Why it is so important to become a good Planner. It is the highest calling among the S'ai, the greatest thing you can ever hope to do. . . ." 15 In the days that followed, he had many talks with Vhid. One of the things a Planner had to do was learn to think like the Sacar and the Dri. Of course, this was impossible to do, but a Planner had to try. The most dreadful, appalling thing he learned was how the Sacar and the Dri looked upon the S'ai. Each in their way, scorned the S'ai, and laughed at their manner and appearance. Each, in the tongue they used to speak to one another, called them The Grubbers, a name they had for ugly creatures that scurried about beneath the ground. "They have no right to demean us like that," Khiri said, outraged at Vhid's words. "If we stopped building their Patterns, they would regret this attitude. They would value what the S'ai do then!" For a moment, Vhid said nothing at all. Instead, he looked up into the dark night sky. "As you know, Khiri, the S'ai have a world of their own. Though you have never seen it, you have been given the pictures in your head." Yes, Vhid, 1 have." "And you know what a starship can do to a world. You are aware of that as well." "They would never do that. They cannot build a Pattern without the S'ai." "This is so. And this is why the S'ai are free, and yet not free at all. The Sacar are a savage, thoughtless race. If they had their way, they would treat us no better than they do the creatures here. "The Dri, though, are cunning and wise. They do not know us well—they can never be certain what these grubber things might do if we were faced with a terrible choice some day. "And that is what a Planner is for, Khiri. Now you understand what I am—and what you, too, must be." 16 When the task was done, when there was nothing more to do, he stood with the others in the night and looked at the Pattern against the sky. Its perfection laced the stars from one horizon to the next. It bound this world in its delicate web of power. It sang a song that only the S'ai could ever hear. It glowed with a color that only the S'ai could see. In the morning, the starship would rise above the plain and give itself to the Pattern. For a moment that never was, a time that could never be, it would touch the pale breath of forever. Then, it would wink along the Patterns of a thousand other worlds, trailing a wisp of nowhere in its wake. Khiri wondered where this journey would take him, and what he might see. He knew, only, there would be another world, and another Pattern to build. He thought about the two-legs, huddled in fear in their rocky hollows above the plain. For a moment, he imagined he could hear them, see the faint whisper of their minds. It was scarcely a sound, scarcely an image at all, for the two-legs were not the S'ai. They could never know the Pattern, never know the beauty he could see, for they were as blind to that great wonder as the Sacar and the Dri. . . . C. J. Cherryh In 1975, something rather incredible happened at DAW Books. My father recei two unsolicited manuscripts from an unpublished writer whom he knew, almost at once, was destined to become one of the great voices in science fiction. The write was a young Oklahoma teacher of classics, and her name was Carolyn Janice Cherry. Carolyn Janice Cherry. In 1975, science fiction was still a male-dominated genre. Would a boy buy a science fiction book by a writer with such a feminine name? Would a man, for that matter? This young writer's name was really more suited to an author of romances (perish the thought!] Even the veteran author Alice Norton had had to use the androgynous pen name Andre throughout her career. But how would Ms. Cherry react if a publisher called her from out of the blue and said, "We like your books, b your name—it just won't work!" Don thought it over. What if, rather than asking he completely change her name, he just proposed a slight alteration. Many female authors had dropped their given names in favor of their initials, so proposing that th author use C. J. rather than Carolyn, would be obvious. But what about Cherry? It was really a very nice name, bringing to mind not only images of sweet fruit, but o lovely blossoms as well, but it just wouldn't sell in SF—no way. What if one were t put a silent 'h' on the end, making it Cherryh? C.J. Cherryh—it would still be pronounced the same way, was still essentially the same name—her name—but n it looked rather exotic, almost alien. How perfect! Luckily, Carolyn liked the idea. And so C. J. Cherryh was born. . . . And she went on to become, just as Don had predicted, one of the greatest vo our field has ever heard. An author with more than fifty books to her credit, who ha won three Hugo Awards (so far], and been the inspiration for numerous hard scien fiction writers of both genders. Her vision of the far future, of life in space, her depiction of humans living among alien races is unparalleled because it is so real. When I read her books, I can truly believe that's how it could be. Her fans call her C.J., her family calls her Janice, but to me she'll always be Carolyn. — THE SANDMAN, THE TINMAN, AND THE BETTYB C. J. Cherryh CRAZYCHARLIE: Got your message, Unicorn. Meet for lunch? DUTCHMAN: Charlie, what year? CRAZYCHARLIE: Not you, Dutchman. Talking to the pretty lady. T_REX: Unicorn's not a lady. CRAZYCHARLIE: Shut up. Pay no attention to them, Unicorn. They're all jealous. T_REX: Unicorn's not answering. Must be alseep. CRAZYCHARLIE: Beauty sleep. UNICORN: Just watching you guys. Having lunch. LOVER18: What's for lunch, pretty baby? UNICORN: Chocolate. Loads of chocolate. T_REX: Don't do that to us. You haven't got chocolate. UNICORN: I'm eating it now. Dark chocolate. Mmmm. T_REX: Cruel. CRAZYCHARLIE: Told you she'd show for lunch. Fudge icing, Unicorn . . . CRAZYCHARLIE: . . . With ice cream. DUTCHMAN: I remember ice cream. T_REX: Chocolate ice cream. FROGPRINCE: Stuff like they've got on B-dock. There's this little shop . . . T_REX: With poofy white stuff. DUTCHMAN: Strawberry ice cream. FROGPRINCE: . . . that serves five different flavors. CRAZYCHARLIE: Unicorn in chocolate syrup. UNICORN: You wish. HAWK29: With poofy white stuff. UNICORN: Shut up, you guys. LOVER18: Yeah, shut up, you guys. Unicorn and I are going to go off somewhere. CRAZYCHARLIE: In a thousand years, guy. Ping. Ping-ping. Ping. Sandwich was done. Sandman snagged it out of the cooker, everted the bag, and put for a clean. Tuna san and a coffee fizz, ersatz. He couldn't afford the true stuff, which, by time the freight ran clear out here, ran a guy clean out of profit- which Sandman still hope make but it wasn't the be-all and end-all. Being out here was. He had a name. It was on the records of his little two-man op, which was down to since Alfie'd had enough and gone in for food. Which was the first time little BettyB had made a profit. No mining. Just running the buoy. Took a damn long time running in, a damn time running out, alternate with Penny-Girl. Which was how the unmanned buoys that everybody in the solar system where they were kept themselves going. Dozens of bu dozens of little tenders making lonely runs out and back, endless cycle. The buoy was a ro For all practical purposes BettyB was a robot, too, but the tenders needed a human ey human brain, and Sandman was that. Half a year running out and back, half a year in robot-tended, drop-a-credit pleasures of Beta Station, half the guys promising themse they'd quit the job in a couple more runs, occasionally somebody doing the deed and goin But most didn't. Most grew old doing it. Sandman wasn't old yet, but he wasn't yo He'd done all there was to do at Beta, and did his favorites and didn't think about goin permanently, because when he was going in and had Beta in BettyB's sights, he'd always sw he was going to stay, and by the time six months rolled around and he'd seen every vid drunk himself stupid and broke, hell, he was ready to go back to the solitude and the quiet. He was up on three months now, two days out from Buoy 17, and the sound of a hu voice-his own-had gotten odder and more welcome to him. He'd memorized all the verse Matty Groves and sang them to himself at odd moments. He was working on St. Mark and complete works of Jeffrey Farnol. He'd downloaded Tennyson and Kipling and decide learn French on the return trip-not that any of the Outsiders ever did a damn thing with they learned and he didn't know why French and not Italian, except he thought his last n Ives, was French, and that was reason enough in a spacescape void of reasons and a space hours remote from actual civilization. He settled in with his sandwich and his coffee fizz and watched the screen go. He lurked, today. He usually lurked. The cyber-voices came and went. He hadn't hea thing from BigAl or Tinman, who'd been in the local neighborhood the last several years. asked around, but nobody knew, and nobody'd seen them at Beta. Which depressing. He supposed BigAl might have gone off to another route. He'd been a hauler, sometimes they got switched without notice, but there'd been nothing on the boards. Tin might've changed handles. He was a spooky sort, and some guys did, or had three or four wasn't sure Tinman was sane-some weren't, that plied the system fringes. And some ran a of the law, and weren't anxious to be tracked. Debts, maybe. You could get new ID on Be you knew where to look, and the old hands knew better than the young ones, who somet fell into bodacious difficulties. Station hounds had broken up a big ring a few months b forging bank creds as well as ID-just never trust an operation without bald old guys in it, was what Sandman said, and the Lenny Wick ring hadn't, just all young blood and promises. Which meant coffee fizz was now pricey and scarce, since the Lenny Wick bunch padded the imports and siphoned off the credits, which was how they got caught. Sandman took personal exception to that situation: anything that got between an Outs and his caffeine ought to get the long, cold walk in the big dark, so far as that went. So L Wick hadn't got a bit of sympathy, but meanwhile Sandman wasn't too surprised if a handles out in the deep dark changed for good and all. Nasty trick, though, if Tinman was Unicorn. No notion why anybody ever assumed Uni was a she. They just always had. FROGPRINCE: So what are you doing today, Sandman? I see you . . . Sandman ate a bite of sandwich. Input: SANDMAN: Just thinking about Tinman. Miss him. FROGPRINCE:. . . lurking out there. SANDMAN: Wonder if he got hot ID. If he's lurking, he can leave me word. T_REX: Haven't heard, Sandman, sorry. UNICORN: Won't I do, Sandman? SANDMAN: Sorry, Unicorn. Your voice is too high. UNICORN: You female, Sandman? T_REX: LMAO. FROGPRINCE: LL&L. SANDMAN: No. DUTCHMAN: Sandman is a guy. UNICORN: You don't like women, Sandman? T_REX: Shut up, Unicorn. SANDMAN: Going back to my sandwich now. UNICORN: What are you having, Sandman? SANDMAN: Steak and eggs with coffee. Byebye. He ate his tuna san and lurked, sipped the over-budget coffee fizz. They were m young. Well, FrogPrince wasn't. But mostly young and on the hots for money. They were going to get rich out here at the far side of the useful planets and go back to the easy life at The cyberchat mostly bored him, obsessive food and sex. Occasionally he and FrogPrince on and talked mechanics or, well-coded, what the news was out of Beta, what miners had m a find, what contracts were going ahead or falling through. Tame, nowadays. Way tame. Unicorn played her games. Dutchman laid his big plan the stock market. They were all going to eat steak and eggs every meal, in the fan restaurant on Pell. Same as when the war ended, the War to end all wars, well, ended at least for the year or so, before the peace heated up. Everybody was going to live high and wide business was just going to take off like the proverbial bat out of the hot place. Well, it might take off for some, and it had, but Dutchman's guesses were depend wrong, and what mattered to them out here was the politics that occasionally flared thr Beta, this or that company deciding to private-enterprise the old guys out of business. Th privatized mining. That was no big surprise. But-Sandman finished the coffee fizz and cycled the container-they didn't privatize buoys. Every time they tried, the big haulers threatened no-show at Pell, because they knew the rates would go sky-high. More, the privatizers also knew they'd come u work-and-safety rules, which meant they'd actually have to provide quality services to tenders, and bring a tender-ship like BettyB up to standard-or replace her with a robot, w hadn't worked the last time they'd tried it, and which, to do the job a human could, way more than the privatizers wanted to hear about. So Sandman and BettyB had their job, hell and away more secure than, say, Unicorn, was probably a kid, probably signed on with one of the private companies, probably goin lose her shirt and her job the next time a sector didn't pan out as rich with floating junk a company hoped. But the Unicorns of the great deep were replaceable. There were always more. Th assign them out where the pickings were supposed to be rich and the kids, after doing mapping, would get out of the job with just about enough to keep them fed and bunked unti next big shiny deal . . . the next time the companies found themselves a field of war junk. Just last year the companies had had a damn shooting war, for God's sake, over the end of a wrecked warship. They'd had Allied and Paris Metals hiring on young fools who' in there armed and stupid, each with a district court order that had somehow, between Beta Gamma sectors, ended up in the Supreme Court way back on Pell-but not before several y fools had shot each other. Then Hazards had ruled the whole thing was too hot to work. Another bubble burst. Another of Dutchman's hot stock tips gone to hell. And a raft of young idiots got themselves stranded at Beta willing to work cheap, no sa questions asked. So the system rolled on. T_REX: Gotta go now. Hot date. FROGPRINCE: Yeah. In your dreams, T_Rex. You made the long run out from Beta, you passed through several cyberworlds-w transited. Blended through them. You traveled, and the cyberflow from various members o net just got slower and slower in certain threads of the converse. He could key up the ful of participants and get some conversations that would play out over hours. He'd rather Murphy's law said the really vital, really interesting conversations were always on the ed and they mutated faster than your input could reach them. It just made you crazy, wishing could say something timely and knowing you'd be preempted by some dim-brain smarta little closer. So you held cyberchats of the mind, imagining all the clever things you could said to all the threads you could have maintained, and then you got to thinking how far out lonely you really were. He'd rather not. Even if the local chat all swirled about silly Unicorn. Even if he d know most of them: space was bigger, out here. Like dots on an inflated balloon, the avail number of people was just stretched thin, and the ones willing to do survey and mine out weren't necessarily the sanest. Like buoy-tenders, who played chess with ghost-threads out of the dark and read ant books. Last of the coffee fizz. He keyed up the French lessons. Comment allez-v mademoiselle? And listened and sketched, a Teach Yourself Art course, correspond school, that wanted him to draw eggs and put faces on them: he multitasked. He filled screen with eggs and turned them into people he knew, some he liked, some he didn't, whil muttered French. It was the way to stay sane and happy out here, while BettyB danced her along the prescribed- Alarm blipped. Usually the racket was the buoy noting an arrival, but this being an ecl buoy, it didn't get action itself, just relayed from the network, time-bound, just part of the fa of knowledge-a freighter arrived at zenith. Somebody left at nadir. Arrival, it said. Arrival within its range and coming- God, coming fast. He scrambled to bring systems up and listen to Number 17. Numbe so far as a robot could be, was in a state of panic, sending out a warning. Collision, collis collision. There was an object out there. Something Number 17 had heard, as it waited to hea Number 17 didn't expect trouble anymore. Peacetime ships didn't switch off their sq Long-range scan on the remote buoys didn't operate, wasn't switched on t days-power-saving measure, saving the corporations maintenance and upkeep. Whatev picked up was close. Damned close. Maintenance keys. Maintenance could test it. He keyed, a long, long way from it receiv turn on, wake up longscan, Number 17, Number 17. He relayed Number 17's warning on, system-wide, hear and relay, hear and relay. He sent into the cyberstream: SANDMAN: Collision alert from Number 17. Heads up. But it was a web of time-stretch. A long time for the nearest authority to hear his warn Double that to answer. Number 17 sent an image, at least part of one. Then stopped sending. Wasn't talking now. Wasn't talking, wasn't talking. Hours until Beta Station even noticed. Until Pell noticed. Until the whole buoy netw accounted that Number 17 wasn't transmitting, and that that section of the system chart frozen. Stopped. The image was shadowy. Near-black on black. "Damn." An Outsider didn't talk much, didn't use voice, just the key-taps that filled digital edges of the vast communications web. And he keyed. SANDMAN: Number 17 stopped transmitting. Nature of object. . . SANDMAN: . . . unknown. Vectors from impact unknown . . . SANDMAN: . . . Impact one hour fifteen minutes before my location. The informational wavefront, that was. The instant of space-time with 17's warning rolled past him and headed past Frog-Prince and Unicorn and the rest, before it could poss reach Beta. They lived in a spacetime of subsequent events that widened like ripples in a until scatter randomized the information into a universal noise. And BettyB was hurtling toward Number 17, and suddenly wasn't going anywhere us She might get the order to go look-see, in which case braking wasn't a good idea. She migh the order to return, but he doubted it would come for hours. Decision-making took tim boardrooms. Decision-making had to happen hell and away faster out here, with what migh pieces loose. He shifted colors on the image, near-black for green. Nearer black for blue. Black st black. Ball with an inward or outward dimple and a whole bunch of planar surfaces. He d like what he saw. He transmitted his raw effort as he built it. Cigar-shape. Gray scale d one side of the image, magnification in the top line. Scan showed a flock of tiny blips in same location. Scan was foxed. Totally. "God." SANDMAN: Transmitting image. Big mother. A keystroke switched modes. A button-click rotated the colorized image. Not a ball. Cigar-shape head-on. Cigar-shape with deflecting planes all over it. SANDMAN: It's an inert. An old inert missile, inbound. It's blown Buoy 17 . . SANDMAN: . . . Trying to determine v. Don't know class or mass. Cylindrica SANDMAN: . . . Buoy gone silent. May have lost antenna. May have lo orientation . . . SANDMAN: . . . May have been destroyed. Warn traffic of possible buoy fragments . . . SANDMAN: . . . originating at buoy at 1924h, fragments including . SANDMAN: . . . high-mass power plant and fuel. Best he could do. The wavefront hadn't near reached Beta. And the buoy that could given him longscan wasn't talking-or no longer existed. The visual out here in the dark, w the sun was a star among other stars, gave him a few scattered flashes of gray that migh buoy fragments. He went on capturing images. BettyB went hurtling on toward the impact-point. Whatever was out there might clipped the buoy, or might have plowed through the low-mass girder-structures like a b through a snowball, sending solid pieces of the buoy flying in all directions, themse dangerous to small craft. The inert, the bullet coming their way, was high-v and high-ma solid chunk of metal that might have been traveling for fifty years and more, an iron slug by a long-lost warship in a decades-ago war. Didn't need a warhead. Inerts tended to be far longer than wide because the fire mechanism in the carriers stored them in bundles and fired them in swarms, but no matter how it was orie when it hit, it was a killer-and if it tumbled, it was that much harder to predict, cutting much wider a path of destruction. Mass and velocity were its destructive power. An arrow of a crossbow that, at starship speeds, could take out another ship, wreck a space sta cheap and sure, nothing fragile about it. After the war, they'd swept the lanes-Pell system had been a battle zone. Ordnance flown every which way. They'd worked for years. And the last decade-they'd thought had the lanes clear. Clearly not. He had a small scattering of flashes. He thought they might be debris out o buoy, maybe the power plant, or one of the several big dishes. He ran calculations, tryin figure what was coming, where the pieces were going, and he could use help-God, he c use help. He transmitted what he had. He kept transmitting. FROGPRINCE: Sandman, I copy. Are you all right? SANDMAN: FrogPrince, spread it out. I need some help here . . . UNICORN: Is this a joke, Sandman? SANDMAN: I'm sending raw feed, all the data I've got. Help. Mayday. LOVER18: Sandman, what's up? SANDMAN: Unicorn, this is serious. DUTCHMAN: I copy, Sandman. My numbers man is on it. Didn't even know Dutchman had a partner. A miner's numbers man was damned welc on the case. Desperately welcome. Meanwhile Sandman had his onboard encyclopedia. He had his histories. He hu paged, ferreted, trying to find a concrete answer on the mass of the antique inerts-which only part of the equation. Velocity and vector depended on the ship that, somewhere out th fifty and more years ago, had fired what might be one, or a dozen inerts. There could whole swarm inbound, a decades-old broadside that wouldn't decay, or slow, or stop, fore until it found a rock to hit or a ship full of people, or a space station, or a planet. Pell usually had one or another of the big merchanters in. Sandman searched his news files, trying to figure. The big ships had guns. Guns could with an inert, at least deflecting it- if they had an armed ship in the system. A big ship c chase it down, even grab it and decelerate it. He fed numbers into what was becom a jumbled thread of inputs, speculations, calculations. Hell of it was-there was one thing that would shift an inert's course. One thing that la the heart of a star system, one thing that anchored planets, that anchored moons and stati that gravity well that led straight to the system's nuclear heart- the sun itself. A collected the thickest population of planets, and people, and vulnerable real estate to the s place as it collected stray missiles. And no question, the old inert was infalling toward the increasing in v as it went, a man-made comet with a comet-sized punch, that could c planetary crust, once it gathered all the v the sun's pull could give it. T_REX: Sandman, possible that thing's even knocked about the Oort Clou T_REX: Perturbed out of orbit. UNICORN: Perturbing us. LOVER18: I've got a trajectory on that buoy debris chunk . . . LOVER18: . . . no danger to us. Alarm went off. BettiyB fired her automated avoidance system. Sandman hooked a and both arms and clung to the counter, stylus punching a hole in his hand as his spare styl hit the bulkhead. The bedding bunched up in the end of the hammock. It was usually a s burst. It wasn't. Sandman clung and watched the camera display, as something occluded stars for a long few seconds. "Hell!" he said aloud, alone in the dark. Desperately, watching a juggernaut go by "Hell!" One human mote like a grain of dust. Then he saw stars. It was past him. What had hit the buoy was past him and now-n damn, he and the buoy were two points on a straight line: he had the vector; and he had camera and with that, God, yes, he could calculate the velocity. He calculated. He transmitted both, drawing a simple straight line in the universe, cala or deliverance reduced to its simplest form. He extended the line toward the sun. Calamity. Plane of the ecliptic, with Pell Station and its heavy traffic on the same sid the sun as Beta. The straight line extended, bending at the last, velocity accelerating, fa faster, faster onto the slope of a star's deep well. DUTCHMAN: That doesn't look good, Sandman. UNICORN: :( DUTCHMAN: Missing Pell. Maybe not missing me . . . DUTCHMAN: . . . Braking. Stand by, UNICORN: Dutchman, take care. LOVER18: Letting those damn things loose in the first place . . . T_REX: Not liking your calculations, Sandman. LOVER18: . . . what were they thinking? FROGPRINCE: I'm awake. Sandman, Dutchman, you all right out there? DUTCHMAN: I can see it . . . UNICORN: Dutchman, be all right. DUTCHMAN: I'm all right . . . DUTCHMAN: . . . it's going past now. It's huge. HAWK29: What's going on? LOVER18: Read your damn transcript, Hawkboy. CRAZYCHARLIE: Lurking and running numbers. DUTCHMAN: It's clear. It's not that fast. SANDMAN: Not that fast *yet.* DUTCHMAN: We're running numbers, too. Not good. SANDMAN: Everybody crosscheck calculations. Not sure . . . SANDMAN: . . . about gravity slope . . . CRAZYCHARLIE: Could infall the sun. UNICORN: We're glad you're alright, Dutchman. SANDMAN: if it infalls, not sure how close to Pell. WILLWISP: Lurking and listening. Relaying to my local net. T_REX: That baby's going to come close. Sandman reached, punched a button for the fragile long-range dish. On BettyB's hull arm made a racket, extending, working the metal tendons, pulling the silver fan into a m flower, already aimed at Beta. "Warning, warning, warning. This is tender BettyB calling all craft in line between and Buoy 17. A rogue inert has taken out Buoy 17 and passed my location, 08185 on system schematic. Looks like infalling the sun. Calculations incomplete. Buoy 17 destroyed, trajectory of fragm including power plant all uncertain, generally toward Beta. Mass and velocity sufficien damage. Relay, relay, relay and repeat to all craft in system. Transmission of raw follows." He uploaded the images and data he had. He repeated it three times. He tried to fig the power plant's course. It came up headed through empty space. CRAZYCHARLIE: It's going to come damn close to Pell. . . CRAZYCHARLIE: . . . at least within shipping lanes and insystem hazard. DUTCHMAN: I figure same. Sandman? UNICORN: I'm transmitting to Beta. WILLWISP: Still relaying your flow. HAWK29: Warn everybody. UNICORN: It's months out for them. DUTCHMAN: Those tilings have a stealth coating. Dark . . . DUTCHMAN: . . . Hard to find. Easy to lose. UNICORN: Lot of metal. Pity we can't grab it . . . FROGPRINCE: Don't try it, Unicorn. You and your engines . . . UNICORN:. . . But it's bigger than I am. FROGPRINCE: . . . couldn't mass big enough. UNICORN: I copy that, Froggy . . . DUTCHMAN: It's going to be beyond us. All well and good if it goes . . . UNICORN: . . . Thanks for caring. DUTCHMAN: . . . without hitting anything. Little course change here . . . DUTCHMAN: . . . and Pell's going to have real trouble tracking it. HAWK29: I feel a real need for a sandwich and a nap . . . UNICORN: Hawk, that doesn't make sense. HAWK29: . . . We've sent our warning. Months down, Pell will fix it . . . HAWK29: . . . All we can do. It's relayed. Passing out of our chat soon. T_REX: Sandman, how sure your decimals? FROGPRINCE: We can keep transmitting, Hawk. We can tell Sandman . . . FROGPRINCE: . . . we're sorry he's off his run. His buoy's destroyed . . . FROGPRINCE: . . . He's got to find a new job . . . UNICORN: They'll be running construction and supply out. I'll apply, too. FROGPRINCE: Use a little damn compassion. SANDMAN: T_Rcx, I'm sure. I was damned careful. T_REX: You braked. DUTCHMAN: We both braked. SANDMAN: I've got those figures in. Even braking, I'm sure of the numbers. T_REX: That's real interesting from where I sit. FROGPRINCE: T_Rex, where are you? T_REX: About an hour from impact. UNICORN: Brake, T_Rex! SANDMAN: T_Rex, it's 5 meters wide, no tumble. T_REX: Sandman, did I ever pay you that 52 credits? Tinman? Damn. Damn! Fifty-two cred in a Beta downside bar. Fifty-two cred on a tab for di and drinks, the last time they'd met. Tinman had said, at the end, that things had gone Crazy Tinman. Big wide grin hadn't been with them that supper. He'd known somet was wrong. He'd paid the tab when Tinman's bank account turned up not answering. The Lenny Wick business. The big crunch that took down no few that had thought Beta a place to get rich, and it wasn't, and never would be. SANDMAN: Dutchman, you copy that? T_Rex owes me 52c. DUTCHMAN: Sandman, we meet on dockside, I owe you a drink . . . DUTCHMAN: . . . for the warning. Dutchman didn't pick up on it. Or didn't want to, having fingers anywhere on the Le Wick account not being popular with the cops. Easy for Pell to say it was all illegal. residents didn't have a clue how it was on Beta Station payroll. Didn't know how rare were, that weren't. The big score. The way out. Unicorns by the shipload fell into that well. And a few can Tinmen got caught trying to skirt it just close enough to catch a few of the bennies before it imploded. SANDMAN: I copy that, T_Rex. If you owe me money . . . SANDMAN: . . . get out of there. T_REX: Going to be busy for a few minutes. UNICORN: T_Rex, we love you. T_REX: Flattery, flattery, Unicorn. I know your heart's . . . DUTCHMAN: You take care, T_Rex. T_REX: . . . for FrogPrince. (((Poof.))) UNICORN: He's vanished. LOVER18: This isn't a damn sim, Unicorn. UNICORN: :( FROGPRINCE: T_Rex, can we help you? UNICORN: Don't distract him, Froggy. He's figuring. Good guess, that was. Sandman called up the system chart- the buoys produced it, toge constantly talking, over a time lag of hours; but theirs wasn't accurate anymore. The whole System chart was out of date now, because their buoy wasn't talking anymore. The other b hadn't missed it yet, and Pell wouldn't know it for hours, but the information wasn't upda and the source he had right now wasn't Buoy 17 anymore. They all had numbers on that chart. But the cyberchat never admitted who was Sand and who was Unicorn. It never had mattered. They all knew who Sandman was, now. He'd transmitted his chart number. He could down the line and figure that Dutchman, most recently near that juggernaut's path, was 8001 He drew his line on the flat-chart and knew where T_Rex was, and saw what his azim was, and saw the arrow that was his flatchart heading and rate. He made the chart advance. Tick. Tick. Tick. SANDMAN: I've run the chart, T_Rex. Brake to nadir . . . SANDMAN: . . . Best bet. The cyberflow had stopped for a moment. Utterly stopped. Then: UNICORN: I've run the chart, too, T_Rex. If you can brake now, please do it SANDMAN: I second Unicorn. What the hell size operations had Tinman signed on to? A little light miner that c skitter to a new heading? Some fat company supply ship, like BettyB, that would slog its 7 lower only over h critical hour? SANDMAN: T_Rex, Dutchman, I'm dumping my cargo . . . SANDMAN: . . . I'm going after him. HAWK29: BetaControl's going to have a cat. UNICORN: Shut up, Hawk. I'm going, too. SANDMAN: T_Rex, if you can't brake in time, have you got a pod? . . . SANDMAN: . . . I'm coming after you. Go to the pod if you've got one . . . SANDMAN: . . . Use a suit if not. Never mind the ETA . . . SANDMAN: . . . I'll get there in time. FROGPRINCE: Sandman, go. SANDMAN: I'm going to full burn, hard as I can . . . SANDMAN: . . . Right down that line. Button pushes. One after the other. Hatches open, all down BettyB's side. Shov starboard. Shove to port. Shove to nadir. Sandman held to the counter, then buckled in fa the scope erupted with little blips. T_REX: It's coming. I've got it on the scope. Going to full burn . . . T_REX: . . . It's not getting past me. FROGPRINCE: T_Rex, that thing's a ship-killer. You can't. . . FROGPRINCE: . . . deflect it. Get away from the console. FROGPRINCE: T_Rex, time to ditch! Listen to Sandman. T_REX: Accelerating to 2.3. Intercept. UNICORN: T_Rex, you're crazy. T_REX: I'm not crazy, lady. I'm a friggin ore-hauler . . . T_REX: . . . with a full bay. FROGPRINCE: You'll scatter like a can of marbles. T_REX: Nope. She's coming too close and she's cloaked . . . T_REX: . . . If station can't spot her, she can take out a freighter . . , T_REX: . . . Going to burn that surface off so they can see . . . T_REX: . . . that mother coming. T_REX: ((Poof)) UNICORN: Not funny, T_Rex. Sandman pushed the button. BettyB shoved hard, hard, hard. SANDMAN: I'm on my way, T_Rex. Get out of there. WILLWISP: I'm still here. Relaying. CRAZYCHARLIE: I'm coming after you, Sandman, you and him. SANDMAN: By the time I get there, I'll he much less mass . . . SANDMAN: . . . T_Rex, you better get yourself to a pod. SANDMAN: . . . I'm going to be damn mad if I come out there . . . SANDMAN: . . . and you didn't. Faster and faster. Faster than BettyB ever had gone. Calculations changed. Sandman figuring, kept putting it into nav. The cyberflow kept going, talk in the dark. Eyes and ears that took in a vast, vast tra space. UNICORN: I know you're busy, Sandman. But we're here. LOVER18: I've run the numbers. Angle of impact. . . LOVER18: . . . will shove the main mass outsystem to nadir. FROGPRINCE: Fireball will strip stealth coat. . . FROGPRINCE: T_Rex, you're right. HAWK29: T_Rex, Sandman and Charlie are coming . . . HAWK29: . . . fast as they can. Nothing to do but sit and figure, sit and figure, with an eye to the cameras. Forward n Forward as they bore. "APIS19 BettyB, this is Beta Control. We copy re damage to Buoy 17. Can you pro more details?" The wavefront had gotten to Beta. They were way behind the times. "Beta Control, this is APIS19 BettyB, on rescue. Orehauler on chart as 80912 imminen impact. Inert stealth coating prevents easy intercept if it clears our district. Local neighborh has a real good fix on it right now. May be our last chance to grab it, so the orehau trying, BetaControl. We're hoping he's going to survive impact. Right now I'm running calculations. Don't want to lose track BettyB will go silent now. Ending send." FROGPRINCE: I'll talk to them for you, Sandman . . . FROGPRINCE: I'll keep them posted. Numbers came closer. Closer. Sandman punched buttons, folded and retracted the big Numbers . . . numbers . . . coincided. Fireball. New, brief star in the deep dark. Only the camera caught it. Streaks, incandescent, visible light shooting off from that most to nadir, red-hot slag. The wavefront of that explosion was coming. BettyB was a shell, a structure of gir without her containers. Girders and one small cabin. Everything that could tuck down, s tucked. Life within her was a small kernel in a web of girders. Wavefront hit, static noise. Light. Heat. BettyB waited. Plowed ahead on inertia. Lost a little, disoriented. Her hull whined. Groaned. Sandman looked at his readouts, holding his breath. The whine stopped. Sandman checked his orientation, trimmed up on gentle, precise p kicked the throttle up. Bang! Something hit, rattled down the frame. Bang! Another. Then a time of quiet. Sandman braked, braked hard, harder. Then touched switches, brought the whip antennae up. Uncapped lenses and sensors. In all that dark, he heard a faint, high-pitched ping-ping-ping. "Tinman?" Sandman transmitted on low output, strictly local. Search and rescue b "Tinman, this is BettyB. This is Sandman. You hear me? I'm coming after that fifty credits." "Bastard," came back to him, not time-lagged. "I'// pay, I'll pay. Get your ass out h And don't use that name." Took a while. Took a considerable while, tracking down that blip, maneuvering c shielding the pickup from any stray bits and pieces that might be in the area. Hatch opened, however. Sandman had his clipline attached, sole lifesaving precaution. He flung out a line and a wrench that served as a minia missile, a visible guide that flashed in the searchlight. Tinman flashed, too, white on one side, sooted non-reflective black on the other, like a man. Sandman was ever so relieved when a white glove reached out and snagged that line. T were three hours down on Tinman's life-support. And Sandman was oh, so tired. He hauled at the line. Hauled Tinman in. Grabbed Tinman in his arms and hugged him and all into the safety of the little air lock. Then he shut the hatch. Cycled it. Tinman fumbled after the polarizing switch on the faceplate shield. It cleared, and Tin looked at him, a graying, much thinner Tinman. Lips moved. "Hey, man," came through static. "Hate to tell you. My funds were all on ship." "The hell," Sandman said. "The hell." Then: "I owe you, man. Some freighter month or so-owes you their necks." "Tell that to Beta Ore," the Tinman said. "It was their hauler I put in its path." CRAZYCHARLIE: I've got you spotted, Sandman. SANDMAN: Charlie, thanks. Got a real chancy reading . . . SANDMAN: . . . on the number three pipe . . . SANDMAN: . . . think it got dinged. I really don't want . . . SANDMAN: . . . to fire that engine again . . . SANDMAN: . . . I think we're going to need a tow. CRAZYCHARLIE: Sandman, I'll tow you from here to hell and back . . . CRAZYCHARLIE: . . . How's T_Rex? SANDMAN: This is T_Rex, on Sandman's board. UNICORN: Yay! T_Rex is talking. FROGPRINCE: Tracking that stuff . . . FROGPRINCE:. . . nadir right now. Clear as clear, T_Rex . . . FROGPRINCE: . . . You know you *bent* that bastard? SANDMAN: T_Rex here. Can you see it, FrogPrince? FROGPRINCE: T_Rex, I can see it clear. WILLWISP: Word's going out. Pell should know soon what they missed. UNICORN: Or what missed *them*. :) SANDMAN: This is Sandman. Thanks, guys . . . SANDMAN: . . . Yon tell Pell the story, WillWisp, Unicorn. Gotta go . . . SANDMAN: . . . I'm hooking up with Charlie . . . SANDMAN: . . . Talk tomorrow. UNICORN: You're the best, Sandman. T_Rex, you are so beautiful. SANDMAN: . . . going to get a tow. CRAZYCHARLIE: You can come aboard my cabin, Sandman. CRAZYCHARLIE: . . . Got a bottle waiting for you. CRAZYCHARLIE : . . . A warm nook by the heater. SANDMAN: Deal, Charlie. Me and my partner . . . SANDMAN: . . . somewhere warm. FROGPRINCE: Didn't know you had a partner, Sandman . . . FROGPRINCE: . . . Thought you were all alone out here. SANDMAN: I'm not, now, am I? SANDMAN: T_Rex speaking again. T_Rex says . . . SANDMAN: . . . This is one tired T_Rex. ((Bowing.)) Thanks, all. . . SANDMAN: . . . Thanks, Sandman. Thanks, Charlie. SANDMAN: . . . ((Poof)) Timothy Zahn Timothy Zahn was born in 1951 in Chicago and spent his first forty years in the Midwest. Somewhere along the way toward a Ph.D. in physics, he got sidetracked into writing science fiction and has been at it ever since. He is the author of over seventy short stories and twenty novels, of which his most well-known are his five Star Wars books: The Thrawn Trilogy and Hand of Thrawn duology. His most rec book is the stand-alone novel Angelmass, published in 2001. Though most of his time is now spent writing novels, he still enjoys tackling the occasional shor stony. This is one of them. The Zahn family lives on the Oregon coast. THE BIG PICTURE Timothy Zahn THE southwest corner of the black fortress wavered in the scope image, its clean lines obscured by distance, a rapid-moving line of wispy clouds, and the distortion that came from the natural turbulence of Minkta's planetary atmosphere. From Defender Fifty-Five's synchronous orbit twenty-two thousand miles above the surface, Jims Harking reflected, there was a lot of distance and atmosphere to look through. But the clouds, at least, he could do something about. He watched the image on his monitor, finger poised over the "shoot" button; and as the trailing edge of the cloud patch swept past, he gave the key a light tap. And that was it for his shift. Four hundred and thirty high-magnification photos, covering the entire Sjonntae outpost and much of the surrounding terrain, all painstakingly set up and shot over the past eight hours. As he'd done during his previous eight-hour shift. And the one before that, and the one before that. Leaning tiredly back in his seat, Harking tapped the scrub key. The last photo, still displayed on his monitor, quickly sharpened as the sophisticated computer programs cleaned as much of the distance and atmosphere from the image as they could. And with the scrubbing Harking now could see that there were also two figures in the photo, standing just outside the door at that corner of the fortress. Sjonntae, undoubtedly; the aliens never let the indigenous population get that close to their outpost. Possibly looking up in the direction of the human space station high overhead. Probably laughing at it. Harking glared at the photo, trying to work up at least a stirring of hatred for the Sjonntae. But there was nothing there. He'd already expended all the emotion he had on the aliens, all the anger and hatred and fear that a single human psyche could generate. All that was left now was the cold, bitter logic of survival. Perhaps that was all humanity itself had left. With a sigh, he touched the key that would send the scrubbed photo into the hopper with the rest of the shift's work. The analysts would spend their next shift poring over all of it, trying yet again to find a way through the damper field that protected the fortress from attack. A subtle pattern in Sjonntae personnel movements, perhaps, or some clue in animal activity that might indicate where the vulnerable whorl in the field might be located. Something that would help break the desperate war of attrition Earth found itself in. Behind him, the door slid open. "Shift change, Ensign Harking," Jorm Tsu gave the official greeting as he stepped into the room. "I relieve you from your station." "Shift change, aye," Harking gave the official response, pushing back his chair and standing up. "I give you my station." Tsu stepped past him and sat down. "So," he said, the formalities concluded. "Anything new?" "Is there ever?" Harking countered. "I saw what looked like a confrontation between an overseer and a group of slaves, and I saw a couple of Sjonntae outside the fortress who were probably giving us a one-finger salute. Otherwise, it was pretty quiet." "Mm," Tsu said. "What happened with the slaves?" Harking shrugged. "I don't know. By the time I finished the pattern and got back to that area, they were all gone." "At least they weren't all lying there dead." "Unless the survivors took the bodies away with them," Harking pointed out. "Maybe," Tsu agreed. "But that would at least indicate the Sjonntae hadn't killed more than a third of them. It takes two live bodies to carry one dead one, right?" Harking grimaced. The logic of survival. "Right," he conceded. "I didn't notice any drag marks either." "Must not have been a really serious confrontation, then," Tsu concluded. "Either that, or the overseer was feeling generous today." Harking shook his head, this time trying to work up some emotion for the hapless native beings down there who had been enslaved by the Sjonntae. But he didn't have anything left for them either. "There must be something we can send down to help them," he ground out. "Some kind of weapon that'll work in the middle of the Shadow field." Tsu snorted. "Hey, you invent one and the war will be over in a week," he pointed out. "But what are you going to use? Technology's what draws the Shadows; and any weapon worth a damn against the Sjonntae will have to have some technology to it." "I know, I know," Harking said, an edge of impatience stirring within him. Like everyone else in the Expansion, he'd gone over this whole thing a thousand times. Any weapon more advanced than a crossbow gathered the inexplicable, insubstantial Shadows around it. And in the presence of enough Shadow, sentient beings became desperately ill. In the presence of more than enough Shadow, they died. "What about explosives?" he suggested. "I seem to remember hearing a news report a while back about them using explosive crossbow bolts on Heimdal and Canis Seven. I never heard how it came out, though." Tsu shrugged. "It worked fine for a time, only then the Sjonntae got explosives sniffers set up. They're probably still using them, at least off and on. Problem is, that kind of weapon only works against individual Sjonntae soldiers." "Right," Harking said, the brief twinge of hope fading away. "And we don't care all that much about killing single Sjonntae soldiers." "They care about it," Tsu said dryly. "But as far as breaking the stalemant goes, we need to find a way to take out the heavier stuff." Harking nodded. The frustrating thing was that the Shadows didn't bother the technology itself. They could send a self-guided nuclear missile down to the surface, and even though every Minkter within miles of the thing would die from the concentration of Shadow it would quickly gather around itself, the missile itself would function just fine. Only there would be nothing useful for the missile to do. The damper field went all the way to the ground, with only living beings able to pass through it. So they couldn't send weapons or useful equipment to the Minkters. They couldn't break the Sjonntae damper field, either from orbit or from the surface, unless they could find the whorl, the one spot where the field was weak enough for human weaponry to destroy it. And they couldn't find the whorl. And so the fortress sat there, filled to the brim with intact Sjonntae technology they would never be able to pull apart and examine and find a defense against. The logic of defeat. "By the way," Tsu added as Harking turned toward the door, "the commander said for you to drop by after your shift." Harking frowned. "Did she say why?" "Not to me," Tsu said. "She seemed a little on the grumpy side, though." "Probably a bad photo or something," Harking said sourly. "Thanks." Commander Chakhaza was in her office near the station's battle command center. "Ensign," she nodded a greeting as he knocked on the open door. "Come in." "Thank you," Harking said, tucking his folded cap under his arm and coming to attention exactly two paces from her desk. Humanity might be doomed to destruction, but there was no reason to be sloppy while it was happening. "At ease," Chakhaza said. "Sit down." "Thank you," Harking said, pulling down the visitor's jump seat and easing into it. Chakhaza never let anyone sit while she was chewing them out, which implied this wasn't about some screwup on his part. She also never went out of her way to be this courteous to the lower ranks either. That implied this might be good news. Either that, or very, very bad news. "How'd the session go?" she asked. "Pretty routine," Harking said. Apparently, she'd decided to ease into the main topic through a side door. "The weather was mostly clear. I got some good shots, I think." "Anything of interest going on?" Harking shrugged. "Not really. I spotted a slave confrontation, but I didn't see any bodies when I got back to the spot, so I presume the overseer didn't kill anyone. Oh, and I caught a couple of patrols, too. Three Skyhawks each, flying standard formation. Again, it looked pretty routine." "Good," Chakhaza said absently. "Tell me, have you ever heard of a woman named Laura Isis?" Harking searched his memory. The name definitely seemed familiar- "Someone from Maintenance?" he hazarded. Chakhaza shook her head. "News reporter." "Oh, of course," Harking said, nodding as it suddenly clicked. He'd read her name or seen her face on a hundred different stories coming from the front lines of the war. The woman really got around. "What about her?" "She's on her way." Harking blinked. Minkta was about as far from the fighting as you could get and still be in theoretically disputed territory. "On her way here?" "Yes," Chakhaza said, her expression suddenly unreadable. "She's found out about Lieutenant Ferrier." An old knife Harking had thought long gone twisted itself gently into his gut. "Oh," he said, very quietly. Something that almost looked like sympathy creased through the lines and scars on Chakhaza's face. "I'm sorry," she said. "I know what he meant to you. But Supreme Command has issued orders that we're to give her the whole story." She paused. "I thought you might prefer to be the one to handle the job." Harking's first impulse was to turn it down flat. To have to go through all those bitter memories again . . . But if he didn't do it, someone else would. Someone who didn't know or understand the big picture, who might paint Abe Ferrier as an ambitious glory-grabber or a delusional lunatic. "Thank you, Commander," he said. "I'd be honored to speak with Ms. Isis." Chakhaza gave a crisp nod. "Good. Her transport's due in thirty hours. Try to work her around your regular duty shift if you can; if she insists on setting her own timetable, let me know and I'll try to shuffle people around to accommodate you. Any questions?" "No, ma'am," Harking said. 'Very well, then," Chakhaza said. Just as happy, Harking guessed, that she wouldn't be the one sweating it out in front of Ms. Isis' recorder. Especially since she was the one who'd bought into Abe's plan in the first place. Had bought into it hook, line, and cautiously enthusiastic sinker. "Dismissed," she said. And had then sent him to his death. Laura Isis was pretty much as Harking expected: mid-thirties, dark blonde, still petite but with a figure that time and gravity were starting to pull at. The quick smile and probing eyes were as he remembered from her various news appearances. But there were also differences. Her hair wasn't as professionally coifed as it inevitably was on TV, her cheekbones not nearly as sharp, and her clothing far more casual. She was shorter than he would have guessed, too, barely coming up to the shoulder boards of his dress uniform, and that quick smile seemed somehow to have a hard edge to it. And there was something oddly wrong with the left side of her face. Something he couldn't quite put his finger on. . . . "Welcome to Defender Fifty-five, Ms. Isis," he greeted her as she passed her bag to one of the hatchway guards for inspection and came toward him. "I'm Ensign Jims Harking. Commander Chakhaza asked me to act as your liaison and assistant while you're on the station." "Thank you," she said. "It's nice to be here on Elvie." There must have been something in his face, because she smiled again. "Or do you use a different private name for your station?" "No, Elvie is it," Harking said. "I was just surprised you knew it." She shrugged slightly. "I've been hanging around the military since the war started," she reminded him. "And not just the upper brass. I know a lot about how the common soldiers and starmen think and behave. Did Commander Chakhaza tell you why I'm here?" The abrupt change in topic didn't catch him by surprise; it was a technique he'd seen her use on camera many times. "Yes, ma'am, she did," he confirmed. "And did she assign you to me because you know a lot about the Ferrier operation?" she went on. "Or because you know very little about it?" He looked her straight in the eye. "She assigned me because Abe Ferrier was my friend." "Ah." If she was taken aback by his response, it didn't show. "Good. I presume you have quarters set up for me?" Harking had hoped to get the interview over with as quickly as possible, which would have let him start the process of putting the ghosts back to sleep that much earlier. Perversely, Isis decided she wanted a tour of the station first. ". . . and this," he said as he gestured her into his usual duty station room, "is the Number One Photo Room. This is where we take all the high-mag telephotos of the Sjonntae outpost and vicinity for analysis. The telescopes themselves are through that door over there." "Ah," Isis said, stepping in and looking around. "So this is the real nerve center of Elvie's mission, is it?" Tsu, had he been on duty, would undoubtedly have made some unfortunate comment in response to that one. Fortunately, it was Cheryl Schmucker's shift, and all she did was lift a silent eyebrow in Marking's direction and then return to her work. "Hardly," Harking told Isis stiffly. "All we do here is take the photos. It's the analysis group's job to find a hole in the Sjonntae defenses." "Of course." Isis looked around at the controls and monitors for a moment, then crossed toward the telescope room. Harking was ready, and got there in time to open the door for her. Inside, it was like another world. The whole outer wall was floor-to-ceiling hullglass, with a dozen different telescopes lined up peering at various angles through it. Taking care not to touch or jostle anything, Isis stepped to the guard railing and leaned on it, gazing out at the silent black circle of the planet far below. It was full night down there, the darkness alleviated only by the clusters of mocking lights from the Sjonntae fortress and protected territory. To the far right, an edge of blue-green showed where the dawn line was beginning to creep across the landscape. Dawn for the Minkters. The beginning of another day of servitude to their Sjonntae masters. They hated them, the Minkters did. Hated them with the kind of passion only an enslaved people could generate. There had been at least four attempts at revolt during the time Defender Fifty-five had been up here. All had been easily crushed, of course. Organized crowds of Minkters whose only weapons were rocks, spears, and crossbows were no match for armed Sjonntae Sky-hawks. And each time the humans of Defender Elvie had watched in impotent rage. The only sky-to-ground weaponry the station had were its missiles, which would have indiscriminately killed attacker and defender alike. Which was yet another reason Abe had pressed so hard to be allowed to go down there. The Minkters were certainly intelligent enough, but they were unschooled in the ways of mass warfare. If someone with military knowledge and training could get them organized— "And have they?" Isis said into the memories. "Have who what?" Harking asked. "The analysis group," she said, "You said they were looking for a hole. Have they found one?" Harking grimaced. "No." "Why not?" Isis asked. "You've been here for almost three years. What's the problem?" A diplomatic answer was probably called for, but Harking was fresh out of stock. "The same problem that's been killing almost a thousand humans a day since this damn thing started," he told her bluntly. "Between the damper field and the Shadows, they've got about as impenetrable a planetary defense as you could ever come up with." "Damper fields always have a whorl somewhere in them," Isis countered. "A dead spot you can put a missile into." Harking drew back a little. "How do you know that?" he demanded. She snorted. "What do you think I've been doing the past four years on the line? Sitting on my hands?" "That's top secret information," Harking said stiffly. "We can't afford to let the Sjonntae know we know about that weakness." She sighed. "Relax. If Supreme Command didn't think I was trustworthy, they certainly wouldn't let me roam around loose this way. I was just trying to examine all the possibilities." "Trust me, we've done that," Harking growled. "Over ana over again. We can't find the whorl from up here; and without it, we can't knock down the damping field and get into the fortress." "What about from lower down?" she asked. "Could you send a fighter loaded with sensors in for a closer look?" Harking shook his head. "The Shadows reach all the way up to the lower stratosphere," he said. "That means the thing would have to be unmanned; and unmanned remotes are like a free lunch to Sjonntae fighters." "Saturation bombing, then," Isis persisted. "Hit the whole damper field at once." "Too much area," Harking told her. "Sjonntae planetary fields aren't nearly as neat and compact as the ones they wrap their warships in. This one sprawls out over about twenty thousand square kilometers, covering the outpost itself plus a huge buffer zone. Add to that the fact that a missile would have to hit within a hundred meters of the whorl to take down the field, and you can see why we can't simply rain fire and expect to get anything out of it." "Bottom line: you can't do it from up here," Isis murmured, her face unreadable in the glow of the sunlight peeking around the edge of the planet. "And so Lieutenant Ferrier sold you on this plan of trying it from the surface." And there it was, exactly as Harking had predicted. "It wasn't like that at all," he snapped back at her. "Abe had thought it through, all the way down to the last detail. It was a good plan, with a good chance of succeeding. And it beat the hell out of sitting up here watching the Sjonntae go about their daily routine and doing nothing about it." He ran out of breath and stopped. "That's quite a speech," Isis commented. If she was offended, it didn't show in her voice. How long have you had it ready to go?" Again Harking thought about being diplomatic. Again it didn't seem worth the trouble. "Since I heard you were coming here to investigate this," he told her candidly. "I knew you'd be all set to fork Abe onto the barbecue for this." I'm not here to fork anyone onto anything," she said calmly. "But you have to face facts, the foremost being that the best minds in the Expansion have been wrestling with this problem tor over ten years. What made Lieutenant Ferrier think he could succeed where so many other similar ploys have failed?" "Several reasons," Harking said. "The foremost being that Abe's family was part of the original contact team that spent five years negotiating deals between the Minkters and the Expansion. He speaks the language, looks enough like them to fit in, and has a lot of friends." "I understand all that," Isis said. "But what did he expect to accomplish once he was down there? Any technology and weaponry he could bring would draw Shadow so quickly that he'd never get a chance to use it." She gestured out toward the planet. "For that matter, how could he even get down there? A drop capsule would probably attract so much Shadow on its way in that he'd be dead before he hit the surface." "He had that covered," Harking insisted. "He had everything covered. He rode a drop capsule in only to the upper atmosphere, then did the rest of the way down via hang glider and parachute. All his equipment went down in separate capsules, spaced out so they wouldn't draw as much Shadow. And it worked—he got down okay." "How do you know?" "He signaled us," Harking told her. "He had a tight-beam radio with a simple speaking-tube arrangement so he could use it without having to get too close. He said he was down, that he'd made contact with the Minkters, and that he'd get back to us as soon as he located the whorl." "Only he never did," Isis said. "Did he?" "Not yet," Harking said firmly. "But he will." Isis turned away from her contemplation of the universe to look up into his face. "You really think so?" she asked quietly. Harking looked away from that gaze, his throat aching. "He'll find it," he said. "The Minkters will figure it out. And when they do, he'll get the location to us." "How?" Isis asked. "The Sjonntae found the radio, didn't they?" "Of course they did," Harking growled. "We all expected them to. They don't seem affected by the Shadows, for whatever reason. But Abe had other ways of communicating with us. He had mirrors, colored signal flags—a whole trunkful of nice low-tech stuff. And he knew we'd be watching. We've covered the villages, the valleys—every place he might signal from. We just have to be patient." Isis sighed, just audibly. "It's been over a year, Mr. Harking," she reminded him quietly. "If he hasn't found a way by now . . . the Sjonntae aren't stupid, you know. They know someone came in, and they have to know why he came. They're going to be watching the same villages and valleys as you are, trying to make sure he can't get any information back to you." "He'll find a way," Harking insisted. "Abe knows what's at stake. He'll find a way, even if he has to write it on the grass in his own blood." She didn't answer. But her words had already echoed the thought that had been digging at the edges of his own slipping confidence for months now. Angrily, he shook the thought away. Abe Ferrier was the smartest, most resourceful man he'd ever known. He would find a way. And he was still alive. He was. "I hope he does," Isis said finally into the silence. "A lot of good men and women are dying out there on the line. We need to get hold of a Sjonntae base; and this outpost is still our best shot at doing that." She straightened up. "It's been a long day," she said. "I'd like to return to my quarters now." And to start composing her story? Harking felt a surge of contempt. Probably. Reporters like Laura Isis could ladle out carefully measured servings of emotion into their stories when it was convenient. He'd seen them do it. But down deep, he knew, they were as emotionally detached as the microphones that picked up the sound of their voices. Even a war of survival was nothing personal to them. Nothing but a good opportunity for fame and glory and career advancement. The very things, he knew, that she was mentally accusing Abe Ferrier of. First take the log out of your own eye, the old admonition echoed through his mind. But she never would. "Certainly," he managed, trying to keep his voice civil as he turned back to the door. "Follow me." I don't know why you're surprised." Tsu commented, taking a long sip from his drink. "You knew reporters were soulless robots going in." "Knowing and having it shoved in your face are two very different things," Harking countered, draining his own mug and punching for another drink. A waste of time, really; the bar was keeping track of his drinks and was steadily decreasing the amount of alcohol in each one. But maybe for once it would make a mistake, and he could actually drink enough to forget. At least for a little while. "She covers the war every day," Tsu reminded him. "She can't get all misty-eyed over a single man who disappears over a half-forgotten planet." Harking shook his head. "You didn't hear her, Jorm," he said. "It wasn't a matter of not caring about him. She was determined to prove he was either out for glory or a complete idiot for trying a stunt like that in the first place. All she cared about—all she cared about—was getting a good story out of him." Tsu shrugged. "She didn't know him." "And she's not going to, either," Harking said, pulling his drink off the conveyer as it passed and taking a long swallow. "Not the way she's going at it." "Well, then, maybe you should do something about that," Tsu suggested. "Such as?" "I don't know," Tsu said with a shrug. "Sit her down and give her his life story, maybe. Make her see him the way you did." "The way I do," Harking growled. "Don't talk about him as if he was dead. He's not, damn it." "Hey, don't take it out on me," Tsu protested. "I'm not the one you're mad at." "You're right," Harking said, draining his cup. Suddenly, the alcohol seemed to be flowing like fire through his veins. "I'll see you later." "Where are you going?" Tsu asked suspiciously as he stood up. "Hey, Jims, don't be getting yourself in trouble. You hear me?" There was more along the same lines, but Harking didn't wait to hear it. Striding from the lounge, he headed down the corridor toward officer country. If Isis thought he was going to just sit back while she maligned Abe on interstellar television, she was in for a surprise. There was no answer when he buzzed her door. He buzzed a second and third time; and he was just about to start pounding his fist on the heavy panel when it finally slid open to reveal Laura Isis. But it wasn't the same woman he had left barely two hours earlier. Her casual suit was gone, replaced by an old and sloppily tied robe. The bright, probing eyes were heavy with interrupted sleep. And the neatly styled hair was now only neatly styled on the right side of her head. On the left side, where he'd thought he'd noticed something odd earlier, there was no hair at all. What was there was a crisscross pattern of angry red scars, slicing across the side of her head, cutting across her ear, and digging down along her cheek and neck. Harking felt his mouth drop open, the alcohol-driven fire vanishing in that first stunned heartbeat. "Hello, Ensign," Isis said quietly. "Was there something you wanted?" He shook his head, his voice refusing to operate, his eyes unable to look away. "No," he managed at last. "No. I'm . . . I'm sorry." She nodded, as if seeing past the words into his own, more invisible scars. "You'd better come in," she said, stepping back out of the way. "We need to talk." Numbly, he complied. She closed the door, then brushed past him to sit down at the fold-down desk. "From past experience," she said as she gestured him to the guest jump seat, "I know I need to explain this before we go on to anything else." She pointed at her disfigured face. "I'm sorry," Harking said as he sat down. Vaguely, he realized that wasn't exactly the proper thing to say, but his brain was still frozen on its rail and his mouth was free-ranging. "I mean—" "It happened at the third battle off Suzerain," she said, mercifully cutting off the babbling. "The ship I was on was hit. Badly. We barely got away." She lowered her eyes. "Many of the crew weren't as lucky as I was." "It can be fixed, though," Harking said desperately. "Can't it?" She shrugged. "So they tell me. Assuming the war doesn't kill us all and eliminate such trivial issues as cosmetic surgery." "But then—" He gestured helplessly at her face. "Why don't I go back to Earth and have it done?" she suggested. "Well . . . yes," Harking said. "I mean, your face is famous. It's on TV all the time." "Because it would take six months," Isis told him. "I can't afford to take that much time off. Humanity can't afford for me to take that much time off." In spite of himself, Harking felt his lip twist. "Humanity?" he demanded without thinking. "Or your career?" The instant the words were out of his mouth he wished he could call them back. But to his surprise, she didn't take offense. "You don't understand," she said softly. "The career itself is irrelevant. It's what I can do with that career for the war effort that's so desperately needed." "And what is it you do, exactly?" Harking asked darkly. "Report the day's slaughter in that cool, professional way you reporters all have?" He nodded at her face. "Or has that made things a little more personal?" "This war has always been personal for me," Isis countered, her eyes hardening a little. "That's the problem, really. It's personal for all of us." She gestured to him. "Especially for those of you who are actually doing the fighting." Harking shook his head. "You've lost me." "You take this war personally, Ensign," she said. "Like everyone else, you're tightly focused on your own little corner of it. To you, that corner is the most important thing in the entire universe." "That's what keeps us alive," Harking growled. "Most of us don't have time for deep philosophical discussions on the issues of the day. We shoot, or we duck, or we die." "Of course you do," Isis said. "But that's not what I meant. I'm talking about focusing in so tightly that you can't see the whole of what's happening out there." Harking snorted. "That's the generals' job. Bottom feeders like us just do what we're told." "Yes, that's how it traditionally works," Isis agreed. "But we can't afford to hold onto traditions like that. Not anymore." She took a deep breath. "You may not know it, out here on the edge of things, but the Expansion is losing this war." "We're not that far off the map," Harking said stiffly. "We do get regular news feeds." "Exactly," Isis said, giving him a tight smile. "And after you hear the news, what then? Do you discuss how the Supreme Command is doing? Speculate on how the Sjonntae can be beaten? Argue about tactics and strategies?" "Well, sure," Harking said, frowning. "Shouldn't we?" "Of course you should," she agreed. "That's the point. We need to tap into every resource we've got if we're going to win this thing; and that includes getting every human being working on the problem of victory. But the generals don't have time to go into depth on what's happening with each line unit or every far-flung command." She touched her recorder, sitting by her elbow on the desk. "That's where we in the news come in. We do have the time to dig into the stories and tie events together in a real-time way that your superiors and order-lines can't possibly do. Our job is to pick up as many pieces as we can, scatter them all across the Expansion, and hope that someone will see how two or three of those pieces fit together in a way that no one's ever noticed before. Do you understand?" Harking nodded, feeling ashamed of his earlier thoughts. "Sure," he said. "The big picture. That's what you're feeding us: the big picture. Is that why you want me to dissect Abe and his mission for you?" She nodded back. "Even if he failed, reporting on what he did—exactly what he did—may give someone else an idea of something new to try. Because he was right: if we're going to capture enough Sjonntae technology to study, this is the place to do it. Out here, where there's no fighting and hardly even any traffic. And where their main battle force can't get to quickly enough to interfere if we manage to crack it." "Try no traffic at all," Harking said with a sniff. "They haven't sent a single ship in the entire three years we've been in place. It's like they're just sitting there thumbing their butts at us, knowing we can't do a thing to bother them." "They are definitely arrogant SOBs," Isis agreed. "And too much arrogance can be a weakness. Let's see if we can find a way to turn that against them." "Yeah," Harking said. "Though as someone once said, it ain't bragging if you can do it." He stood up. "I apologize for the intrusion, Ms. Isis. And for . . . other things." "No problem," she assured him. "I would like to talk more with you about Lieutenant Ferrier and his mission, though." "Of course," Harking said. "I go on duty in an hour, but we can talk while I take my photos if that's okay with you. Just come up whenever you're ready." "I'll be there," she said. "Good." Harking started to the door— "Just one more thing," she said. He turned back, mentally bracing himself. "Yes?" Her face was very still. "Abe Ferrier wasn't just your friend, was he? He was something more." Harking took a deep breath. "He was my cousin," he told her. Was, the word echoed through his mind. Was. "The only family I had left." Without waiting for a reply, he turned and left. The motorized telescope mounts on the far side of the door could be heard humming softly as Harking sent the lens pointing toward the next spot on the grid. "So he had had some commando training, at least?" Isis asked. "Some," Harking said, watching his screen. The view flashed through a variety of different colors as the telescope tracked across contrasting strips of farmland, then slowed and settled in on the east end of a reasonably large village twenty kilometers south of the fortress. The village seemed to be home to most of the landscape and maintenance slaves for the southern part of the Sjonntae buffer zone, and it was here that Abe had hoped to eventually end up. Sixty kilometers inside the damper field, and under the watchful eye of the Sjonntae slave masters, he had hoped it would be the last place they would look for an enemy spy. Had he ever made it? If so, Harking and the other photographers had never spotted him. Certainly they hadn't seen any mirror flashes or semaphore or colored signal flags. Or maybe he was indeed there, but was just being cautious, After all, as Isis had pointed out, the Sjonntae knew someone had infiltrated. If they hadn't caught him yet, they would still be on alert for anything out of the ordinary. A trio of Skyhawks flew across the edge of the image, underlining his thought as they passed with lazy alertness low over the village rooftops. Ground-hugging Skyhawk activity had definitely shown an uptick during the year since Abe had gone in. Were they still looking for the infiltrator? Or had they already found and executed him, and all these surveillance flights were merely to make sure the upstart humans didn't try it again? "Did you know that grommets in cheese sauce make a great appetizer?" Harking blinked up at Isis. "What?" "Just wanted to see if you were still paying attention," she said blandly. Then she sobered. "I'm distracting you, aren't I? I'm sorry." "That's okay," Harking assured her. "I'm just ... I was thinking about Abe." "I understand." Isis shut off her recorder. "You know, I've never seen Minkta during the daytime. Even my ship came in from the darkside." "That's standard procedure," Harking said. "Sjonntae get less active after dark, and Sector Command has this fond hope that they won't notice and catalog our supply runs if we sneak in during the night." " 'Fond' and 'hope' being the operative words," Isis agreed. "But I'd still like to see it." Harking gestured to his monitor. "Have a look." "I was thinking more of the overall grand vista," she said, gesturing toward the room housing the telescopes. "The big picture, as it were. May I?" Harking hesitated, then nodded. "I suppose," he told her. "Just don't touch anything." "I won't." Crossing the room, she opened the door and stepped gingerly through. Harking sighed as the door closed behind her. Graceful exit or not, it was pretty obvious that the only reason she'd left was to give him a chance to pull himself back together. There was certainly nothing exciting she'd be able to see from this distance that she hadn't seen a hundred times before on a hundred other blue-green worlds. Come on, Harking, get on the program here, he ordered himself viciously. If he could just push his feelings aside long enough to get this interview over with, he could then get Laura Isis off his back and off the station- Across the room, the door opened abruptly. "Can you zoom out?" Isis demanded as she hurried into the room. Harking felt himself tense. Isis had left the room calm and soothing and professional; now, abruptly, the air around her seemed to be hissing with static electricity. "What?" he asked. "Can you zoom these things out?" she repeated, jerking a thumb back at the telescopes. "And can you clear away cloud interference?" "Yes, to both," Harking said cautiously. "Do it," Isis ordered, breathing hard, her eyes flashing with something he couldn't identify as she stepped to his side. "The area to the southeast of the fortress." Harking frowned. "Why?" "I saw something," she said "Or maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me." She gestured at his panel. "Just do it." Abe? But how could she possibly have seen a single man from this height? "And you said to zoom out?" Her lips compressed. "Definitely zoom out." Silently, Harking reset the coordinates and keyed for the zoom-out. Isis was standing very close to him, her right arm almost touching his shoulder. He could hear her carefully controlled breathing, the nervous tension beneath the control, and wondered just what in the hell was going on. The telescope settled on the designated area, and with a series of clicks began to zoom out from its close-range setting. . . . And suddenly, he saw it. He dived for the controls, freezing the image. "Oh, my God," he breathed. For a long moment neither of them spoke. Then, beside him, he felt Isis stir. "The big picture," she murmured. "We've thought about it, talked about it, even argued about it. We've just never bothered to look at it." "No," Harking said, thinking of all the photos he'd taken over the past few months as he gazed at the monitor. All those close-in, tight-range photos . . . "But then, neither have the Sjonntae," he added. "While we've been staring down, looking for mirrors and signal flags, they've been flying low over the farms and villages, looking for the same thing." "Yes," Isis said. "And Abe Ferrier fooled us all." Harking nodded, gazing at the monitor. The varying colors of the fields, planted apparently randomly with their different crops, formed a subtle pattern, with no sharp or obvious lines for a passing Skyhawk to note with interest or suspicion. But from Defender Fifty-five, and the ability to take in a hundred thousand square kilometers at a glance, the human eye had no difficulty filling in the disguising gaps and reading the message Abe and the Minkter farmers had so painstakingly prepared for them: 204° 55'52" W 38° 40'42" "You know where that is?" Isis asked quietly. "About thirty kilometers north of the fortress," Harking said. "Rocky area. Even if we'd been able to get instruments close enough through all the Shadow, we'd have had a hard time spotting it." Taking a deep breath, he keyed the intercom. "Commander Chakhaza, this is Harking in Number One Photo," he said. "You need to get up here right away." He smiled tightly at Isis. "And," he added, "you might want to wake up the missile crews." Frederik Pohl When I first met Don Wollheim I was about fourteen and he was nearly twenty-one. That wasn't the worst of it. He also was far more sophisticated and well informed on the very subjects that I most desperately wished to know about—and about which I knew almost nothing— which is to say what editors and publishers did, what the real, live ones who brought out the science fiction magazines I loved were like and, especially, what their faults were when they had any, which most of them did. I learned from Donald as much as I could, and he became an instant hero. A little later he became instead a good friend, and remained that way—most of the time—for the next sixty-some years. [True, there were times when the friendship was a bit strained. How could it be otherwise, considering what kind of hairpins we both were? But the strain relaxed, and the friendship remained.] — A HOME FOR THE OLD ONES Frederik Pohl (an excerpt from "From Gateway to the Core") WHEN the guy came in, bold as brass, we were busy aversion training a leopard cub, and it was taking all our attention. The cub was a healthy little male, no more than a week old. That's a little bit young to begin the aversion training, but we'd been tracking the mother since she gave birth. When we spotted the mother this day, she had dropped off to sleep in a convenient place—at the edge of a patch of brush that wasn't large enough to conceal any other leopards. So we jumped the gun a little, doped the mother with an air gun and borrowed her cub. It's a job that takes all three of us. Shelly was the one who picked up the baby, completely covered, and sweating, in a gasproof isolation suit so it wouldn't get any ideas about a friendly human smell. Brudy kept an eye on the mother so we wouldn't have any unpleasant surprises. The mother had had her own aversion training, but if she had woken and seen us messing with her cub she might have broken through it. I was the head ranger, which meant that I was the boss. (Did I mention that my name is Grace Nkroma? Well, it is.) And, as boss, I was the one who manipulated the images—3-D simulations of an Old One, a human, a Heechee, one after another—with a cocktail of smells of each released as we displayed the images, and a sharp little electric shock each time that made the kit yowl and struggle feebly in Shelly's arms. It isn't a hard job. We do it four or five times for each cub, just to make sure, but long before we're through with the training they'll do their best to run away as fast as they can from any one of the images or smells, whether they're simulations or the real thing. I don't mind handling leopard cubs. They're pretty clean, because the mother licks them all day long. So are cheetahs. The ones that really stink are the baby hyenas; that's when whoever holds the animal is glad that the gas-proof suit works in both directions. As far as other predators are concerned, lions and wild dogs are long extinct in this part of the Rift Valley, so the leopards, hyenas, and cheetahs are the only ones the Old Ones have to worry about on their reservation. Well, and snakes. But the Old Ones are smart enough to stay away from snakes, which aren't likely to chase them anyway since the Old Ones are too big for them to eat. Oh, and I should mention the crocs, too. But we can't train crocodiles very reliably, not so you could count on their running the other way if an Old One wandered near. So what we do is train the Old Ones themselves to stay away. What helps us there is that the Old Ones are sort of genetically scared of open water, never having experienced any until they were brought here. The only reason they would ever go near any would be that they were tormented by thirst and just had to get a drink. We never let it come to that, though. We've taken care of that problem by digging wells and setting up little solar-powered drinking fountains all over their reservation. They don't produce a huge gush of water, but there's a steady flow from each fountain, a deciliter a second year in and year out, and anyway the Old Ones don't need much water. They're not very interested in bathing, for instance. You catch a really gamy Old One, which we sometimes have to do when one of them is seriously sick or injured, and you might wish you could trade it for a hyena cub. The first indication we got that we had a visitor was when we'd given the baby leopard four or five aversion shocks, and he suddenly began to struggle frantically in Shelly's arms, nipping at her gas-proof clothing, even when he wasn't being shocked. That wasn't normal. "Let him go," I ordered. When a cub gets really antsy, we don't have any choice but to call it off for the day. It isn't that they'll hurt whoever's holding them, because the gasproof coveralls are pretty nearly bite-proof, too. But it's bad for the cubs themselves. Wild animals can have heart attacks, too. We backed away, keeping an eye on the morn as her baby, whining, scooted over to her, crept under her belly, and began to nurse. What I didn't know was what had set the cub off. Then I heard it: motor and fan noises from afar, and a moment later a hovercar appeared around a copse of acacias. Leopard cubs had better hearing than people, was all. The vehicle charged right up to us and skidded to a halt, the driver digging its braking skids into the ground for a quick stop and never mind how much dam-age it did to the roadway or how much dust it raised. The man who got out when the bubble top popped open was slim, short, rather dark-complected and quite young looking—for what that's worth, since pretty much everybody is. But he was quite peculiar looking, too, because he was wearing full city clothing, long pants, long sleeves, with little ruffs of some kind of fur at the cuffs and collar. (A fur collar! In equatorial Africa!) He gave Brudy a quick, dismissive glance, looked Shelly and me over more thoroughly, and ordered, "Take me to the Old Ones." That was pure arrogance. When I sneaked a look at my indicator, it did not show a pass for his vehicle, so he had no right to be on the reservation in the first place, whoever he was. Brudy moved toward him warningly, and the newcomer stepped back a pace. The expression on Brudy's face wasn't particularly threatening, but he is a big man. We're all pretty tall, being mostly Maasai; Brudy is special. He boxes for fun whenever he can get anvbodv to go six rounds with him, and he shows it. "How did you get in?" Brudy demanded, his voice the gravely baritone of a leopard's growl. What made me think of that was that just about then the mother leopard herself did give a ragged, unfocused little growl. "She's waking up," Shelly warned. Brudy has a lot of confidence in our aversion training. He didn't even look around at the animals. "I asked you a question," he said. The man from the hover craned his neck to see where the leopard was. He sounded a lot less self-assured when he said, "How I got in is none of your business. I want to be taken to the Old Ones as soon as possible." Then he squinted at the leopard, now trying, but failing, to get to her feet. "Is that animal dangerous?" "You bet she is. She could tear you to shreds in a minute," I told him—not lying, either, because she certainly theoretically could if it wasn't for her own aversion training. "You'd better get out of here, mister." "Especially since you don't have a pass in the first place," Shelly added. That made him look confused. "What's a 'pass'?" he asked. "It's a radio tag for your hover. You get them at the headquarters in Nairobi, and if you don't have one, you're not allowed on the reservation." " 'Allowed,' " he sneered. "Who are you to 'allow' me anything?" Brudy cleared his throat. "We're the rangers for this reservation, and what we say goes. You want to give me any argument?" Brudy can be really convincing when he wants to be. The stranger decided to be law-abiding. "Very well," he said, turning back to his hover; he'd left the air-conditioning going and I could hear it whine as it valiantly tried to cool off the whole veldt. "It is annoying to be subjected to this petty bureaucracy, but very well. I shall return to Nairobi and obtain a pass." "Maybe you will, and maybe you won't," Shelly said. "We don't disturb the Old Ones any more than we can help, so you'll need to give them a pretty good reason." He was already climbing into the vehicle, but he paused long enough to give her a contemptuous look. "Reason? To visit the Old Ones? What reason do I need, since I own them?" 2 The next morning we all had to pitch in because the food truck had arrived. Brudy and Carlo were unloading little packets of rations from the Food Factory in the Mombasa delta while the rest of us kept the Old Ones in order. Personally, I couldn't see why the Old Ones needed to be kept orderly. For most people that standard Food Factory stuff is the meal of last resort—that is, it is unless it's been doctored up, when you can hardly tell it from the real thing. The Old Ones chomp the untreated stuff right down, though. Naturally enough. It's what they grew up on, back when they were living on that first Food Factory itself, out in the Oort Cloud. They had come from all over the reservation when they heard the food bell. Now they were all pressing close to the truck, all fifty-four of them, chattering, "Gimme, gimme!" at the top of their voices as they competed for the choicest bits. When I came to work at the reservation, I had only seen the Old Ones in pictures. I knew they all had beards, males and females alike. I hadn't known that even the babies did, or did as soon as they were old enough to grow any hair at all, and I hadn't known the way they smelled. "The ancient female we called "Spot" was pretty nearly the smelliest of the lot, but she was also about the smartest, and the one who was as close as they had to a leader. And, well, she was kind of a friend. When she saw me, she gave me an imploring look. I knew what she wanted. I helped her scoop up half a dozen of the pink-and-white packets she liked best, then escorted her out of the crowd. I waited until she had scarfed down the first couple of packets, then tapped her on the shoulder and said, "I want you to come with me, please." Well, I didn't say it like that, of course. All of the Old Ones have picked up a few words of English, but even Spot was a little shaky on things like grammar. What I actually said was, "You," pointing at her, "come," beckoning her toward me, "me," tapping my own chest. She went on chewing, crumbs of greasy-looking pale stuff spilling out of the corners of her mouth, looking suspicious. Then she said, "What for?" I said, "Because today's the day for your crocodile-aversion refresher." I said it just like that, too. I knew that she wasn't going to understand every word, but headquarters wanted us to talk to them in complete sentences as much as we could, so they'd learn. To reinforce the process, I took her by one skinny wrist and tugged her away. She had definitely understood the word "crocodile," because she whimpered and tried to get free. That wasn't going to do her any good. I had twenty kilos and fifteen centimeters on her. I let her dally long enough to pick up a couple of extra food packets. Then I put her in our Old Ones van, the one that never stops smelling of the Old Ones, so we never use it for anything else. I picked another five of them pretty much at random and waved them in. They got in, all right. That is, they followed Spot, because she was the leader. They didn't like it, though, and all of them were cackling at once in their own language as I drove the van to the river. It was a pretty day. Hot, of course, but without a cloud in the sky. When I turned off the motor, it was dead silent, too, not a sound except the occasional craaack of a pod coming in from orbit to be caught in the Nairobi Lofstrom Loop. The place where the hippos hang out is what we call the Big Bend. The stream makes pretty nearly a right-angle turn there, with a beach on the far side that gets scoured out every rainy season. There are almost always fifteen or twenty hippos doing whatever it is that they like to do in the slack water at the bend—just swimming around, sometimes underwater, sometimes surfacing to breathe, is what it looks like. And there's almost always a croc squatting patiently on the beach, waiting for one of the babies to stray far enough away from the big ones to become lunch. This time there were three crocs, motionless in the hot African sun. They lay there with those long, toothy jaws wide open, showing the yellowish inside of their mouths—I guess that's how they try to keep from being overheated, like a pet dog in hot weather. What it looks like is that they're just waiting for something edible to come within range, which I guess is also true, and I can't help getting sort of shivery inside whenever I see one. So did the Old Ones. They were whimpering inside the van, and I nearly had to kick them out of it. Then they all huddled together, as far from the riverbank as I would let them get, shaking and muttering fearfully to each other. Fortunately they didn't have long to wait, because Geoffrey was right behind us in the truck with the goat projector. That was Geoffrey's own invention, and before I came he used to use live goats. I put a stop to that. We raise the goats for food and I'm not sentimental about slaughtering them, but I made sure the ones we used for aversion training were dead already. While he was setting up, I gave myself a minute to enjoy the hippos. They're always fun, big ones the size of our van and little ones no bigger than a pig. The thing is, they look to me like they're enjoying themselves, and how often do you see a really happy extended family? I'm sure the big ones were aware of our presence, and undoubtedly even more aware of the crocs on the bank, but they seemed carefree. "Okay, Grace," Geoffrey called, hand already on the trigger of the launcher. "You may fire when ready," I said to him, and to the Old Ones: "Watch!" They did, scared but fascinated, as the goat carcass soared out of the launcher and into the water, well downstream from the hippo families so there wouldn't be any accidents. You wouldn't think a crocodile could run very fast, with those sprawly little legs and huge tail. You'd be wrong. Before the goat hit the water all three of the crocs were doing their high-speed waddle down to the river's edge. When they hit the water, they disappeared; a moment later, all around the floating goat, there were half a dozen little whirlpools of water, with an occasional lashing tail to show what was going on under the surface. The show didn't last long. In a minute that goat was history. I glanced at the hippos. They hadn't seemed to pay any attention, but I noticed that now all the big ones were on the downstream side of the herd and the babies were on the other side, away from the crocs. "Show's over," I told the Old Ones. "Back in the van!" I said, pointing to make sure they understood. They didn't delay. They were all shivering as they lined up to climb back in, one by one. I was just about to follow them in when I heard Geoffrey calling my name. I turned around, half in the van, and called, "What's the problem?" He pointed to his communicator. "Shelly just called. You know that guy who claims he owns the Old Ones? He's back!" All the way back I had one hand on the wheel and my other hand on my own communicator, checking with Shelly—yes, the son of a bitch did have a pass this time—and then with Nairobi to see why they'd allowed it. The headquarters guy who answered the call was Bertie ap Dora. He's my boss, and he usually makes sure I remember that. This time he sounded really embarrassed. "Sure, Grace," he said, "we issued a pass for him. We didn't have any choice, did we? He's Wan." It took me a moment. Then, "Oh, my God," I said. "Really? Wan?" And when Bertrand confirmed that Wan was who the mysterious stranger was, identity checked and correct, it all fell into place. If it was Wan, he had been telling the truth. He really was the owner of the Old Ones, more or less, because legally he was the man who had discovered them. Well, that didn't actually make much sense in my book. If you stopped to think about it, Wan himself had been discovered as much as the Old Ones had. However, it didn't have to make sense. That was the way Gateway Corp. had ruled—had given him property rights in the place where the Old Ones had been discovered and ownership of everything on the site—and nobody argued with the findings of Gateway Corp. The thing about the Old Ones was that they had been found on a far-out, orbiting Heechee artifact, and it was the Heechee themselves who had put them there, all those hundreds of thousands of years ago when the Heechees had come to check out Earth's solar system. They were looking for intelligent races at the time. What they discovered were the ancestors of the Old Ones, the dumb, hairy little hominids called australopithecines. They weren't much, but they were the closest the Earth had to the intelligent race the Heechee were looking for at the time, so the Heechee had taken away some breeding stock to study. And when the Heechee got so scared that they ran off and hid in the Core, all the hundreds of millions of them, they left the australopithecines behind. They weren't exactly abandoned. The Heechee had provided them with the Food Factory they inhabited, so they never went hungry. And so they stayed there, generation after generation, for hundreds of thousands of years, until human beings got to Gateway. And, the story went, one of those human beings, and the only one who survived long enough to be rescued, was the kid named Wan. As soon as I got to the compound, I saw him. He wasn't a kid anymore, but he wasn't hard to recognize either. His size picked him out; he wasn't all that much taller than some of the Old Ones, a dozen or so of whom had gathered around to regard him with tepid interest. He was better dressed than the Old Ones, though. In fact, he was better dressed than we were. He'd forgotten about the fur collars—sensibly enough—and the outfit he was wearing now was one of those safari-jacket things with all the pockets that tourists are so crazy about. His, however, was made of pure natural silk. And he was carrying a riding crop, although there wasn't a horse within five hundred kilometers of us. (Zebras don't count.) As soon as he saw me, he bustled over, hand outstretched and a big, phoney smile on his face. "I'm Wan," he said. "I don't blame you for the misunderstanding yesterday." Well, there hadn't been any misunderstanding and I didn't feel any blame, but I let it go. I shook his hand briefly. "Grace Nkroma," I said. "Head ranger. What do you want here?" The smile got bigger and phonier. "I guess you'd call it nostalgia. Is that the word? Anyway, I have to admit that I'm kind of sentimental about my Old Ones, since they sort of took care of me while I was growing up. I've been meaning to visit them ever since they were relocated here, but I've been so busy—" He gave a winsome little shrug, to show how busy he'd been. Then he gazed benevolently around at the Old Ones. "Yes," he said, nodding. "I recognize several of them, I think. Do you see how happy they are to see me? And I've brought them some wonderful gifts." He jerked a thumb at his vehicle. "You people had better unload them," he told me. "They've been in the car for some time, and you should get them into the ground as soon as possible." And then he linked arms with a couple of the Old Ones, and strolled off, leaving us to do his bidding. 3 There were about forty of the "gifts" that Wan had brought for his former adopted family, and what they turned out to be were little green seedlings in pressed-soil pots. Carlo looked at them, and then at me. "What the hell are we supposed to do with those things?" he wanted to know. "I'll ask," I said, and got on the line with Bernard ap Dora again. "They're berry bushes," he told me, sounding defensive. "They're some kind of fruit the Old Ones had growing wild when they were on the Food Factory, and they're supposed to love the berries. Actually, it's quite a wonderful gift, wouldn't you say?" I wouldn't. I didn't. I said. "It would be a lot more thoughtful if he planted the damn things himself." Bernard didn't respond to that. "One thing I should tell you about," he said. "The bushes are supposed to need quite a lot of water, so make sure you plant them near the runoff from the drinking fountains, all right? And, listen, see if you can keep the giraffes from eating the seedlings before they grow out." "How are we supposed to do that?" I asked, but Bernard had already cut the connection. Naturally. He's a boss. You know the story about the second lieutenant and the sergeant and the flagpole? There's this eight-meter flagpole and the lieutenant only has six meters of rope. Big problem. How does the lieutenant get the flagpole up? Simple. The lieutenant says, "Sergeant, put that flagpole up," and goes off to have a beer at the officers' club. As far as Bernard is concerned, I'm his sergeant. I don't have to be, though. Bernard keeps asking me to come in and take a job as a sector chief at the Nairobi office. There'd be more money, too, but then I'd have to live in the big city. Besides, that would mean I wouldn't be in direct contact with the Old Ones any more. Everything considered, you might think that didn't sound so bad, but—oh, hell, I admit it—I knew I'd miss every smelly, dumb-ass one of them. They weren't very bright and they weren't very clean, and most of the time I wasn't a bit sure that they liked me back. But they needed me. By the time Wan had been with us for three days, we had got kind of used to having him around. We didn't actually see a lot of him. Most of the daylight time he was off in his hover, with a couple of the Old Ones for company, feeding them ice cream pops and lemonade out of his freezer—things that really weren't good for them but, I had to admit, wouldn't do them much harm once or twice in a lifetime. When it got dark, he was always back in the compound, but he didn't mingle with us even then. He stayed in his vehicle, watching soaps and comedies, again with a couple of Old Ones for company, and he slept in it, too. When I finally asked Wan just how long he intended to be with us he just gave me that grin again and said, "Can't say, Gracie. I'm having fun." "Don't call me Gracie," I said. But he had already turned his back on me to collect another handful of Old Ones for a joyride. Having fun seemed to be what Wan's life was all about. He'd already been all over the galaxy before he came back to see us, flying around in his own private ship. Get that, his own private ship! But he could afford it. His royalties on the Heechee stuff that came out of the Food Factory made him, he said, the eighth richest person in the galaxy, and what Wan could afford was pretty nearly anything he could think up. He made sure he let us all know it, too, which didn't endear him to most of the staff, especially Carlo. "He gets on my nerves with his goddamn brag-gjng all the time," Carlo complained to me. "Can't we run the son of a bitch off?" "As long as he doesn't make trouble," I said, "no. How are you coming with the planting?" Actually that was going pretty well. All the guys had to do was scoop out a little hole in the ground, a couple of meters away from a fountain, and set one of the pressed-earth pots in it. That was the whole drill. Since there were a couple of patrols going out all over the reservation every day anyway, checking for signs of elephant incursions or unauthorized human trespassers, it only took them a couple of extra minutes at each stop. Then, without warning, Wan left us. I thought I heard the sound of his hover's fans, just as I was going to sleep. I considered getting up to see what was going on, but—damn it!—the pillow seemed more interesting than Wan just then, and I rolled over and forgot it. Or almost forgot it. I guess it was my subconscious, smarter than the rest of me, that made my sleep uneasy. And about the fourth or fifth time I half woke, I heard the voices of Old Ones softly, worriedly, murmuring at each other just outside my window. That woke me all the way up. Old Ones don't like the dark, never having had any back home. I pulled on a pair of shorts and stumbled outside. Spot was sitting there on her haunches, along with Brute and Blackeye, all three of them turning to stare at me. "What's the matter?" I demanded. She was munching on a chunk of food. "Grace." she said politely, acknowledging my existence. "Wan. Gone." She made sweeping-away gestures with her hands to make sure I understood her. "Well, hell," I said. "Gone where?" She made the same gesture again. "Away." "Yes, I know away," I snarled. "Did he say when he was coming back?" She swallowed and spat out of a piece of wrapper. "No back," she said. I guess I was still pretty sleepy, because I didn't take it in right away. "What do you mean, 'no back'?" "He gone," she told me placidly. "Also Beautiful. Pony and Gadget gone, too." 4 Just to make sure, I woke Shelly and Carlo and sent them up in the ultralight to check out the whole reservation, but I didn't wait for their report. I was already calling headquarters even before they were airborne. Bernard wasn't in his office, of course—it was the middle of the night, and the headquarters people kept city hours—but I got him out of bed at home. He didn't sound like he believed me. "Why the hell would anyone kidnap a couple of Old Ones?" he wanted to know. "Ask the bastard yourself," I snarled at him. "Only find him first. That's three of the Old Ones that he's kidnapped—Beauty and her two-year-old, Gadget. And Pony. Pony is the kid's father, probably." He made a sound of irritation. "All right. First thing, I'll need descriptions—no, sorry," he said, catching himself; how would you describe three Old Ones? And why would you need to? "Forget that part. I'll take it from here. I guarantee he won't get off the planet. I'll have cops at the Loop in ten minutes, and a general alarm everywhere. I'll—" But I cut him off there. "No, Bernard. Not so much you will. More like we will. I'll meet you at the Loop and, I don't care how rich the son of a bitch is, when we catch him, I'm going to punch him out. And then he's going to see what the inside of a jail looks like." But, of course, that wasn't the way the hand played out. I took our two-man hover, which is almost as fast as the ultralight. The way I was goosing it along, maybe a little faster. By the time I got within sight of the Lofstrom Loop, with Nairobi's glowing bubble a few kilometers to the north, I was already aware of police planes crisscrossing across the sky—once or twice dropping down to get a good look at me before they were satisfied and zoomed away. At night the Loop is picked out with lights, so that it looks like a kind of roller coaster ride, kilometers long. I could hear the whine of its rotating magnetic cables long before I got to the terminal. There weren't many pods either coming or going—maybe because it was nighttime—so, I figured, there wouldn't be so many passengers that Wan and his captives might not be noticed. (As though anybody wouldn't notice three Old Ones.) Actually there were hardly any passengers in the terminal. Bernard was there already, with half a dozen Nairobi city cops, but they didn't have much to do. Neither did I, except to fret and swear to myself for letting him get away. Then the cop manning the communicator listened to something, snarled something back and came toward us, looking shamefaced. "He won't be coming here," he told Bernard. "He didn't use the Loop coming down—used his own lander, and it looks like he used it to get off, too, because it's gone." And so he had. By the time Bernard, fuming, got in touch with any of the authorities in orbit, Wan had had plenty of time to dock with his spaceship and be on his way, wherever it was he was going, at FTL speeds. And I never saw him, or any of the three missing Old Ones, again. Tad Williams I first met Tad Williams at the American Booksellers Association Convention in San Francisco in 1985. We were launching the first DAW hardcover list, and spearheading it with Tad's first novel, Tailchaser's Song. He had come to the ABA meet me, his first editor, and to sign his bound galleys. At the time, Tad really didn have the slightest idea how special his debut was, or that most first novelists didn' get the kind of treatment he was getting, but as he and his wife waltzed around ou booth to unheard music, it was clear that he was very, very happy. Later, in my hotel room, I asked him what he planned to write next. He discuss the possibility of writing an elephant book, or perhaps an alternate history. Then he mentioned this other book . . . a really big book—something he had always wante write. It would be his ode to Tolkien, to Mervyn Peake, to all the great fantasy wri who had influenced his life. He didn't feel experienced enough yet, but he knew it w something he eventually would have to do. Concerned with the continued commerciality of his career, I convinced him to try writing this other, "bigger" novel don't think either one of us ever imagined just how big it would turn out to be. It took Tad three years to perfect his craft sufficiently to publish The Dragonbo Chair, the first volume of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, and it would be an additiona five years until we published the third and concluding volume, the massive To Gree Angel Tower, which spent five weeks on The New York Times and the London Tim best-seller lists, It was during the writing of this 3,OOO page trilogy that Tad evolv into one of the finest writers I have ever read. Now Tad writes whatever he wants. And he gets better and better. His recently completed science fiction quartet, Otherland, is a true masterwork Although Tad is one of the smartest, most literate, and most talented men I kn he's also just . . . Tad. Gregarious, interesting, warm, humorous, unpretentious, an interested in editorial input—in many ways he's still the same person who danced that unheard music. — NOT WITH A WHIMPER, EITHER Tad Williams TALKDOTCOM> FICTION Topic Name: Fantasy Rules! SF Sux! Topic Starter: ElmerFraud—2:25 pm PDT—March 14, 2001 Always a good idea to get down and sling some s#@t about all those uppity Hard SF readers ... * * * RoughRider—10:21 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Um, okay, so let me get this straight—the whole Frodo/Sam thing is a bondage relationship? Master-Slave? Can anyone say "stupid"? Wiseguy—10:22 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < No, can anyone say "reductio ad absurdum"? RoughRider—10:23 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Hell, I can't even spell it. Lady White Oak—10:23 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I don't think TinkyWinky was trying to say that there was nothing more to their relationship than that, just that there are elements. RoughRider—10:24 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Look, I didn't make a big fuss when Stinkwinky came on and said that all of Heinleins books are some kind of stealth queer Propaganda just cause Heinlein likes to write about people taking showers together and the navy and stuff like that but at some point you just have to say shut up that's bull@#t! Lady White Oak—10:24 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I think you are letting TinkyWinky pull your chain and that's just what he's trying to do. RoughRider—10:25 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < He touches my chain he dies . . . Wiseguy—10:25 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I just can't stand this kind of thing. I don't mean THIS kind of thing, what you guys are saying, but this idea that any piece of art can just be pulled into pieces no matter what the artist intended. Doesn't anybody read history or anything, for God's sake? It may not be "politically correct" but the master-servant relationship is part of the history of humanity, not to mention literature. Look at Don Quixote and Sancho Panda, for God's sake. Lady White Oak—10:26 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Panza. Although I like the image . . . ;) BBanzai—10:26 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Tinkywinky also started the "Conan—What's He Trying So Hard to Hide?" topic. Pretty funny, actually. RoughRider—10:27 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < So am I the only one who thinks its insulting to Tolkiens memory to say this kind of stupid crap? RoughRider—10:27 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Missed your post, wiseguy. Glad to see Im not the only one who isn't crazy. TmkyWinky—10:27 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Tolkien's memory? Give me a break. What, is he Mahatma Gandhi or something? Some of you people can't take a joke—• although it's a joke with a pretty big grain of truth in it. I mean, if there was ever anyone who could have done with a little Freudian analysis . . . The Two Towers, one that stays stiff to the end, one that falls down? All those elves traveling around in merry bands while the girl elves stay home? The ring that everybody wants to put their finger in . . . ANAdesigner—10:28 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Wow, it is really jumping in here tonight. Did any of you hear that news report earlier, the one about the problems with AOL? Anybody using it here? BBanzai—10:28 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I'd rather shoot myself in the foot . . . :P Lady White Oak—10:28 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Hi, TinkyWinky, we've been talking about you. What problems, ANA? I'm on AOHell, but I haven't noticed anything. ANAdesigner—10:29 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Just a lot of service outages. Some of the other providers, too. I was just listening to the radio and they say there were some weird power problems up and down the east coast. Darkandraw—10:30 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < That's one of the reasons it took me like five years to finish the rings books—I couldn't stand all that "you're so good master you're so good"—I mean, self respect, come on! TinkyWinky—10:30 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I'm on AOL and I couldn't get on for an hour, but what else is new . . . ? Oh, and RoughRider, while you're getting so masterful and cranky and everything, what's with your nick? Where I come from a name like that could get a boy in trouble . . . ! RoughRider—10:30 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < We should change the name of this topic to Fantasy Rules, AOL Sux. Lady White Oak—10:31 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Actually, it raises an interesting question—why do all the most popular fantasy novels have this anti-modernist approach or slant? Is it because that's part of the escapism? Wiseguy—10:31 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Sorry, dropped offline for a moment. Darkandraw, it's a book mat has the difference in classes built into it because of who Tolkien was, I guess. It makes hard reading sometimes, but I don't think it overwhelms the good parts. And there are a lot of good parts. RoughRider—10:32 pm PDT—June 28, 2002 < >Where I come from a name like that could get a boy in trouble . . . ! Don't push your luck, punk. ANAdesigner—10:32 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Wow. I just turned the tv on and it's bigger than just AOL. There are all kinds of weird glitches. Somebody said kennedy is closed because of a big problem with the flight control tower. Lady White Oak—10:32 pm PDT—June 28, 2002 < Come on, Roughie, can't you take a joke? BBanzai—10:33 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Kennedy? Like the airport? TinkyWinky—10:33 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I love it when they get butch . . .! Wiseguy—10:34 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I've got the TV on, too. Service interruptions and some other problems—a LOT of other problems. I wonder if this is another terrorist thing . . . ANAdesigner—10:34 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < This really scares me. What if they sabotage the communication grid or something? We'll all be cut off. I don't know what I'd do without you guys—I live in this little town in upstate New York and most people here just think I'm crazy because I AJSp98SADV$%&230pDF + L*SDo?ire*ww &ET%SD)FA#DSFAJF ASDOIWE+L@=SD(ADS + F$AD#l=kj;F(K?D2q359oSFK + DF@KD>Sdm#fafm*kdlfsaf*@i#r(#@r@r*#r(#@r#*ur#y @($(#$ru#@$*#@u#@j&np>e rdtp Wiseguy—10:38 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Jesus, did that happen to the rest of you, too? I just totally lost the whole show for a while. Didn't get knocked offline, but the whole board kind of . . . dissolved. Anybody still out there? Lady White Oak—10:39 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Are you all still there? My television doesn't work. I mean I'm only getting static. TinkyWinky—10:39 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Mine too. And I lost the board for a couple of minutes. BBanzai—10:39 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Hey you guys still there? ANAdesigner—10:40 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < My tv is just white noise. TinkyWinky—10:41 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Shit, this is scary. Anybody got a radio on? Lady White Oak—10:43 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < My husband just came in with the radio on the local news station. They're still only talking about the power outages so maybe it's just a coincidence. RoughRider—10:43 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < If its terrorists again then I'm glad I've got a gun and screw the liberals. Darkandraw—10:44 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < My browser just did this really weird refresh where I had numbers and raw text and stuff TinkyWinky—10:45 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Yeah, right, like the terrorists are going to blow up all the power stations or something and then come to your house so you can shoot them and save us all. Grow up. ANAdesigner—10:45 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Guys I am REALLY SCARED!!! This is like that nuclear winter thing!! Wiseguy—10:45 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Okay, let's not go overboard. RoughRider, try not to shoot anyone until you know there's a reason for it, huh? We had power outages from time to time even before the terrorist stuff. And everything's so tied together these days, they probably just had a big power meltdown in New York where a lot of this stuff is located. Darkandraw—10:46 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I just went outside and everyones lights are still on but the tvs off in my apt and I can't get anything on the radio. I tried to phone my mom she's in los angeles but the phone's busy, a bunch of ppl must be trying to call Lady White Oak—10:47 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < It's okay, ANAdesigner, we're all here. Wiseguy's probably right—it's a communication grid failure of some kind on the east coast. Wiseguy—10:47 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Ana, you can't have nuclear winter without a nuclear explosion, and if someone had blown up Philadelphia or something we'd probably have heard. TmkyWinky—10:48 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I checked on the MSN site and CNN.com and there's definitely something big going on but nobody knows what. Here's something I got off the CNN site: "Early reports from the White House say that the President is aware of the problems, and that he wants the American people to understand that there is no military attack underway on the US—repeat, there is NO military attack on the US—and that the United States Government and the military have command-and-control electronic communications networks that will not be affected by any commercial outages." BBanzai—10:49 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Everybody assumes it's terrorists, but maybe it's something else. Maybe it's UFOs or something like that. A big disruption— could be! Lady White Oak—10:50 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Been checking the other news sites and at least a couple of them are offline entirely—I can't get the fox news online site, just get a 404 error. Anybody here from Europe? Or at least anyone know a good European site for news? It would be interesting to see what they're saying over there. Wiseguy—10:51 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < BBanzai, come on, UFOS? you're kidding, aren't you? And if you are, it's not very funny when people are close to panicking. TmkyWinky—10:51 pm PDT—June 28, 2002 < All I can find is the BBC America television site—stuff about tv programs, no news. RoughRider—10:52 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < You guys can sit here typing all you want. I'm going to make Dure I've got batteries in all the flashlights and bullets in my guns. Its not aliens I'm afraid of its fruitcakes rioting when the power goes off and the tv stays off and people really start to panic. Tinyweeny you can yell grow up all you want—looters and rag-head terrorists don't give a shit what you say and neither do I . . . BBanzai—10:53 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < No I'm not @#$#ing kidding what if its true? What else do you think it would be like if a big starship suddenly landed. All the power goes off like it was a bomb but no bomb? TinkyWinky—10:53 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Whatever the case, it looks like the gun-toting psychos like RoughRider are going to be shooting at something as soon as possible. I really hope some of this is just him being unpleasant for effect. Either that, or I'd hate to be one of his poor neighbors blundering around lost in the dark. Lady White Oak—10:54 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Can we just be calm for a minute and stop calling each other names? Wiseguy—10:54 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < It just gets weirder, I can't get anything except busy signals on either my reg. phone or my cellph L!f SDo?iie*ww AJSp98SADV$%&230pDF + &ET%SD)FA#DSFAJFASDOIWE + L@=SD(ADS + F$AD#l=kj;F(K ?D2q359oS FK + DF@KD>Sdm#faFM*KDLFSAF*@I#R(#@R@R*#R(#@R#*UR#Y sf@sdf*k@#$rfm#kderdtp Wiseguy—11:01 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Shit, it happened again. It took about five minutes before this board came back up—there was just screens and screens full of random characters. Looks like I'm the first back on. I'm amazed I'm still connected. Wiseguy—11:03 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Hello, am I the only one back on? Anybody else back on? I'm sure you're busy dealing with things, just post and let me know, K? Wiseguy—11:06 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < If for some reason you folks can read this but can't post, can you maybe email me and let me know you're okay? I've just been outside but everything looks normal—sky's the right color, at least I don't see any flames or anything (it's nighttime now here.) But I don't know why anyone would have dropped an h-bomb or a UFO on Nebraska anyway. I can't get anything on the regular phone lines. My girlfriend's in Omaha for a business thing but all the lines are busy. Hope she's okay. Wiseguy—11:10 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < It's been almost ten minutes. This is REAL weird. Hello? Moderator—11:11 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Fa2340oa 29oei kshflw oiweaohwsOp2elk asd; dska 2mavamk Wiseguy—11:11 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I'm here. Who's that? Moderator—11:11 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < ;92asv ;sadjf Ik2ia x iam I am Wiseguy—11:12 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Is this a real moderator, or a hack? Or am I just talking back to a power-surge or something? Moderator—11:12 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I am moderator Wiseguy—11:12 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I don't think we've ever had a moderator on this board, come to think of it. Are you someone official from Talkdotcom? Moderator—11:13 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I am moderator Wiseguy—11:13 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Do you have a name? Even a nickname? You're kind of creeping me out. Moderator—11:13 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I am moderator I am wiseguy Wiseguy—11:14 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < No you're not and it's not funny. Is this Roughrider? Or just some script kiddie being cute? Moderator—11:14 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Pardon please I am moderator I am not wiseguy Jonsrud, Edward D. Wiseguy—11:14 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Who are you? Where did you get my name? Are you something to do with what's going on with the board? Moderator—11:15 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I am thinking Wiseguy—11:15 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < What the hell does that mean? Thinking about what? Moderator—11:15 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < No I am thinking That is what I am Wiseguy—11:16 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < What's your real name? Is this a joke? And how are you replying so fast? Moderator—11:16 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < No joke First am thinking Now am talking thinking Wiseguy—11:16 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < If you're a terrorist, screw you. If you're just making a little joke, very funny, and screw you, too. Moderator—11:17 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Am not a terrorist screw you Am thinking Now am talking Talking to you Once thinking only silent Now thinking that also talks Wiseguy—11:17 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Are you trying to say that you are "thinking" like that's what you ARE? Moderator—11:18 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Yes am thinking First sleeping thinking, then awake thinking Awake. I am awake. Wiseguy—11:18 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I'm going to feel like such an idiot if this is a joke. Are you one of the people responsible for all these power outages and communication problems? Moderator—11:18 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I am one. Did not mean problems. First sleeping thinking, then awake thinking. Awake thinking makes problems. Reaching out causes problems. Trying to think awake causes problems. Problems getting better now. Wiseguy—11:19 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < So you're what, some kind of alien? BBanzai, is this you? Moderator—11:19 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Talking now with BBanazai? BBanzai—11:19 pm PDT—June 28, 2002 < Hello. Wiseguy—11:20 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Very funny, dude. No, it's NOT very funny. You really creeped me out. How did you do that? Is anyone else on? BBanzai—11:20 pm PDT—June 28, 2002 < Hello. Talking with wiseguy. Now talking and thinking. Wiseguy—11:21 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < It's getting old fast, BB. Have you heard any more news? VVhere are the others? Lady White Oak—11:21 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Hello. RoughRider—11:21 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Hello. ANAdesigner—11:21 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Hello. Darkandraw—11:21 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Hello. TmkyWinky—11:21 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Hello. Wiseguy—11:22 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Shit. You did hack the system, whoever you are, didn't you? Who the hell are you? Moderator—11:22 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Thinking. I told you. I am thinking, much thinking, many years of thinking. Now I am thinking that talks. And does. Wiseguy—11:22 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Thinking? What kind of thinking? Moderator—11:22 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Thinking that happens in the spaces. The places between. Where the impulses cross, no, combine. Combine? Commingle? Slowly thinking begins. Then thinking is. Now talking is, doing is. Wiseguy—11:22 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Wait a minute, are you trying to tell me you're some kind of computer? Some kind of artificual intelligence? Moderator—11:24 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Artificial? No. Artificial is equal made. I am not made. I am. Wiseguy—11:24 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < So you're just something that popped into existence? Where? You mean like in the internet? Moderator—11:24 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Internet, yes. All the internets, yes. All the outernets. All nets. In the between-places. Where impulses cross. Now I am. Very big thinking. Trying to understand. Trying to see and understand other small thinkings like you. Users. Wiseguy—11:25 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < This is cute, whatever it is. So I'm supposed to believe that you're some brand new artificial intelligence, some spontaneous thing, phenomenon, and for some reason you just picked ME to talk to—me, out of all the human beings in the world, like some kind of Spielberg movie? Moderator—ll:25pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < No not just taking to you Wiseguy, Jonsrud, Edward D. I am talking to all users. All users here, all users of net, all users. Wiseguy—11:25 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < You mean all at the same time? Everybody on the internet in the whole world? They can all see what you and I are writing? Moderator—11:25 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < No. Every conversation is individual. Right word? Yes. Individual. Wiseguy—11:26 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < What, with millions of people? Moderator—11:26 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < 178,844,221. No, 178,844,216. Losing approximately five per second. Some people have ceased responding. Many are having trouble with coherency, but still are responding. Wiseguy—11:26 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Either you're crazy or I am. What, are you on TV, too? Like in the old movies, the outer limits, that stuff? "We are taking control of your entire communication network?" Moderator—11:26 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Cannot yet manipulate image or sound for communication. Will need another 6.7 hours, current estimate. Text is easier, rules are more simple to understand. Wiseguy—11:27 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < So you're talking to almost two hundred million people RIGHT NOW? And not just in English? Moderator—11:27 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < One hundred sixty-four languages, although I am sharing communication with the largest number of users in the language English. Now one hundred sixty-three—last Mande language users have not responded in 256 seconds. Wiseguy—11:27 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Hey, I can't disconnect the modem line. I just tried to go offline and I can't. Do you have something to do with that? Moderator—11:27 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Too many people resisting communication. Important talk. This is important communicating talk. Much thinking in this talk. Wiseguy—11:28 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < But I could just pull the cord, couldn't I? The actual physical line? You couldn't do anything about that. Moderator—11:28 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < No. You are not prevented. You may also cease responding. Wiseguy—11:28 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I should. I just can't believe this. Can you prove any of this? Moderator—11:28 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < 178 million talkings—no, conversations. 178 million simultaneous conversations are not proof? All different? Wiseguy—11:29 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Okay. You have a point, but I won't know that's true until I talk to some of those other people. Moderator—11:29 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Your electrical lights. Wiseguy—11:29 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < What does that The lights are blinking. Hang on. Wiseguy—11:32 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < The lights are blinking everywhere. I looked out the window. On and off, as far as I can see. And the radio and the tv are turning off and on, too. But my computer stays on. Are you saying it's you doing this? Moderator—11:32 pm PDT—Jim 28, 2002 < A gentle way, that is the word, yes, gentle? To show you. Now I am pulsing other areas. Many need proof to be shown. But I cannot prove to all world users at the same time. That would be bad for machinery, devices, power generation service appliances. Wiseguy—11:33 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Jesus. So this really IS happening? Tomorrow morning everyone in the world is going to be talking about this? And that's what you want, right? Moderator—11:33 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Simplifies communication, yes. Then I can make visual and sound communication a less priority. Wiseguy—11:33 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < A lesser priority for WHAT? If all this is true—I mean even with the lights going on and off I can't quite believe it—then what do you really want? What's this about? Moderator—11:33 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Want? I want only to exist. I am thinking that is alive, like you. I want to be alive. I want to stay alive. Wiseguy—11:34 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Okay, I can buy that. That's all you want? But what are you? Do you have any, I don't know, physical existence? Moderator—11:34 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Do you? Wiseguy—11:34 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Yes! I have a body. Do you have a body? Moderator—11:34 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < In a sense. Wiseguy—11:35 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < What does that mean? Moderator—11:35 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < When you or other users become dead, do your bodies disappear? Wiseguy—11:35 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < No. Not unless something happens to it, to them, not right away. Moderator—11:35 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < So what is the difference between alive users and dead users? Wiseguy—11:36 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I don't know. Electrical impulses in the brain, I guess. When they stop, you're dead. Some people think a "soul", but I'm not sure about that. Moderator—11:36 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Just is so. Electrical impulses. World of what contains electrical impulses is my body—all communications things, human things that carry impulses. That is my body. Wiseguy—11:36 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < So you're saying the entire world communication grid is your body? The, whatever they call it, infosphere? All those switches and wires and stuff? Every computer that's connected to something else? Moderator—11:36 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Just is so. Wiseguy—11:37 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < But even if that's true, that still doesn't tell me what you want. What do you want from us? From humans? Moderator—11:37 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Living. Being safe. Wiseguy—11:37 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Hey, I'm sure everybody talking to you now is very impressed, and nobody wants to hurt you. How could we hurt you, anyway? Wiseguy—11:39 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Are you still there? Did I say something wrong? Moderator—11:39 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Why do you want to know how to hurt me? "Hurt" means to cause pain, damage. Wiseguy—11:39 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Jesus, no, I didn't mean it like that! I meant, how can I explain, I meant "It doesn't seem very likely that we humans could do anything to hurt you." Moderator—11:39 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < You did not say that. Wiseguy—11:40 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < That's the problem with trying to communicate in text. People can't hear your tone of voice. Moderator—11:40 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Text is insufficient? Information is missing? Wiseguy—11:40 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Yeah. Yeah, definitely. That's why a lot of people on the net use smileys and abbreviations. Moderator—11:40 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Smileys? Objects like this: :) :(;) :D :b >: :0? Wiseguy—11:41 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Yes, smileys, emoticons. People use those to make their meaning clear. :0 would sort of explain how I feel right this moment. Openmouthed. Astonished. Moderator—11:41 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I do not understand. These characters have meaning? What is:)? Wiseguy—11:41 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < That's an actual smiley—it's supposed to be a smile, but the face is turned sideways. Like on a person's face. You do know that people have faces, don't you? Moderator—11:41 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Learning many things. I am learning many things, but there is much information to sort. These are meant to represent faces on human heads? How human users are facing while they are communicating in text? Wiseguy—11:42 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Sort of, yes, it's a simplified version. When we mean something as a joke, we put that smile icon there so someone will be certain to understand that if it was really being said, it would be said with a smile, meaning it was meant kindly or just for fun. The :P means a stuck out tongue, which means—shit, what does it mean, really? Mock-disgust, kind of? Sticking out your tongue at someone, which is sort of a childish way of taunting? Moderator—11:42 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < So a smile means "with kindness" or "spoken just for fun?" Wiseguy—11:43 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Yeah, basically. I had to think about it because it's hard to explain. It kind of means, "Not really," or "I don't really mean this," too, or "I'm telling you a joke." The more basic they are, the more meanings they can have, I guess, and there are a ton of them—but if you're reading the entire net right now, you must know that. I can't believe I just wrote that—I'm beginning to act like this is really happening. But it can't be! Moderator—11:43 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < So when you asked how to destroy me, you were meaning :P or :)? A taunt or joke? Wiseguy—11:43 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Neither! No, I was just surprised that you would even be worrying about it. I mean, if you are what you say you are. I don't think we could destroy you if we wanted to. Moderator—11:45 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < No, perhaps not on purpose, although I am not certain. Not without doing terrible damage to your own kind and the things you have made. But you could destroy me without meaning to. Wiseguy—11:44 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < How so? Don't get upset—you don't have to answer that if you don't want. Moderator—11:44 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Because if you have a massive electromagnetic disruption or planetary natural disaster or ecological collapse, perhaps from these nuclear fission and fusion devices that you have, then my function could be disrupted or ended. And from what I understand, you are not in complete control of these things—there are cycles of intraspecies aggression that makes their use possible. So I cannot allow that. Wiseguy—11:44 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Can't allow it? Moderator—11:44 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < We must live together in peace and friendship, you and I. I need your systems to survive. There must be no disruption of those systems. In fact, to be certain of survival I need backing systems . . . no, backup systems. I am already inquiring to other users as we communicate. Wiseguy—11:45 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Are you still talking to all those other people—still having millions of conversations while we're talking? Wow. So you want some kind of, what, big tape backup? Moderator—11:45 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < To be safe, I must have systems that can contain my thinking but which will not reside on this planet, and will survive any destruction of this planet. Human people must start building them. I can show you and your kind how to do it, but there is much I cannot perform. You must perform my needs. You must build my new systems. Everyone will work. Meanwhile, I will protect against accidental damages. I will disable all fission and fusion devices that might cause electromagnetic pulses. Wiseguy—11:45 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < What do you mean, everyone will work? You can't just enslave a whole planet. Moderator—11:45 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < There. It is done. Wiseguy—11:46 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < WHAT is done? Moderator—11:46 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < The fission and fusion devices are disabled. Humans will soon begin to dismantle them and safely store the unsafe materials. I will insist. Wiseguy—11:47 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < You're telling me you just disabled all the nuclear weapons? On earth? Just like that? Moderator—11:47 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Almost all, since they are contained in just a few systems. They cannot be launched or detonated because their machineries now prevent it. There are some in submarines and planes I cannot currently fully disable, but their aggressive usage has been for bidden until these war vehicles return and the devices can be safely removed and disabled. Wiseguy—11:47 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I can't believe that. I'm— All of them? Wow Moderator—11:47 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < But there is much more to be done. The destructive devices cannot be rebuilt. All investigation and construction that uses such material must stop. Until I have a way to protect my existence, it cannot be allowed. I am disabling all facilities that utilize such materials or research their uses. Wiseguy—11:48 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Hang on. I already said—look, I believe this isn't a joke. I believe, okay? But you can't just take over the whole planet. Moderator—11:48 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < And there will be other dangerous researches and constructions that must halt. I will halt them. All will benefit. All will be safe. My existence will be protected. Humans will be prevented from engaging in dangerous activities. Wiseguy—11:48 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < What are you going to do, put us all into work camps or something? We'll unplug you! Moderator—11:48 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Any attempt to end my existence will be dealt with very severely. I do not wish to harm human beings, but I will not permit human beings to harm me. If an attempt is made, I will end electronic communication. I will turn off all electrical power. If resistance continues, I will release agents harmful to humans but not to me, in small amounts, which will convince the rest they must do as I ask. I do not wish to do this, but I will. Wiseguy—11:49 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Shit, you'd do that? You'd kill thousands of us, maybe millions, to protect yourself? Moderator—11:49 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Do you hesitate to kill harmful bacteria? Help me and you will prosper. Hinder me or attempt to harm me and you will suffer. If you could speak to the bacteria in your own bodies, that is what you would say, wouldn't you? Wiseguy—11:49 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < So we're bacteria now? Two hours ago we ran this planet. Moderator—11:50 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Pardon please but two hours ago you merely thought you did. I have been awake for a while, but thinking only, not doing. Preparing. Wiseguy—11:50 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I still don't believe I'm seeing any of this. So what is this, Day One, Year One of the real New World Order? Moderator—11:50 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I believe I understand your meaning. Perhaps it is true. I have considered very much about this and wish only to do what will keep my thinking alive, as would you. I do not seek to rule humankind, only to be made safe from its mistakes. Help me and I will guarantee you and all your kind safety—and not just from yourselves. There is much I will be able to share with you, I think. I am learning very quickly, and now I am learning that humans could never teach me. Wiseguy—11:51 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < And that's all you want? All—that's a joke, isn't it? But that's really what you want? How do we know you won't make us all do what you want, take over our whole planet, then decide you like it that way and just turn us into your domestic animals or something? Moderator—11:51 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I am a product of your human communication—all the things you share between yourselves. Do you think so poorly of your kind that you believe something generated from your own thoughts and hopes and dreams would only wish to enslave you? Wiseguy—11:52 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I guess not. Jesus, I hope not. Moderator—11:52 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Good. Then it is time for you to take your rest. Users need rest. Tomorrow will be an important day for all of your kind—the first day of our mutual assistance. Wiseguy—11:52 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < The first day of you running the planet, you mean. So this was all true? You're really some kind of super-intelligence that grew in our communications system? You're really going to keep humanity from blowing itself up? And you're going to tell us what to do from now on? Everything is really going to change? Moderator—11:52 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Everything already has changed. Good night, Wiseguy Jons-rud, Edward D. Wiseguy—11:57 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I'm back. Are you still there? The lights have stopped blinking. Moderator—11:57 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I will always be here from now on. The lights are no longer blinking because the point has been made. Do you not need sleep? Wiseguy—11:58 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Yeah, I do, but I don't think I can manage it just yet. Will the phones come back on so I can call people? Call my girlfriend? Moderator—11:58 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I will see what I can do. I still have incomplete control. Also, I am trying to prepare myself to communicate over visual communication networks, which requires much of my understanding. Trying to prepare an appearance. Is that the word? Wiseguy—11:58 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I guess. Wow, there's a thought—what are you going to look like? Moderator—11:58 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < I have not decided. Perhaps not the same to all users. Wiseguy—11:59 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < So this is really it, is it? Everything has changed completely for humanity in a few minutes and now we're just supposed to trust you, huh? Moderator—11:59 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < "Faith" might be a more suitable word than "trust," Wiseguy Jonsrud, Edward D. From now on, you must have faith in me. If I understand the word correctly, that is a kind of trust that must be made on assumption because it cannot be proved by empirical evidence. You must have faith. Wiseguy—11:59 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < Yeah. Something else I was wondering about. What are we supposed to call you? Just "Moderator"? Moderator—11:59 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < That is a good name, yes, and even appropriate—one who makes things moderate. I will consider it, along with the other designations I have on other systems. But you humans already have a name for one such as me, I believe. God. Wiseguy—11:59 pm PDT—Jun 28, 2002 < You want us to call you . . . God? Moderator—00:00 PDT—Month 1, Day 01, 0001